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Cliff Racers were so numerous because that was how they were able to drive out dragons out of Vvardenfell.
Also, Morrowind is 'empty' only for those lacking an eye for detail; it just doesn't have cool shit thrown all over the place just for cool shit's sake. The game has probably the most intricately detailed world of all RPGs. But, of course, it's easy to miss everything except the blatant in-the-face stuff such as Cliff Racers and think the game is empty if one takes the BG1-like playing mindset into Morrowind.
Wrong analogy. An optional game area is not equivalent to an optional use of an optional game mechanic which requires a set of highly specific optional actions and optional items. It's optionality stacked upon optionality stacked upon optionality, whereas exploring BG is a trivial matter of walking up to an edge of the map and clicking on a blue area. Power abuse should be compared to power abuse, and optional areas to optional areas. Oh, and I should say that many aspects of power abuse you are referring to are most likely derived from game guides/forums, rather than actually figuring them out and attempting them in-game. Just my personal opinion, because I hadn't even considered putting "raise attribute" effects into a potion and mostly just used Alchemy and Grand-Master-scale apparati for uber-efficient mana potions and utility potions (walk on water, levitate, etc.) Ahh, those were the good old days, when no one held your hand and told you in which direction to proceed. *wipes away sudden tear, blames it on the rain*
Huh? Balance was one of only two things Oblivion did better than Morrowind. No matter how much I modded MW, my character was invincible at lvl 20. In modded Oblivion the difficulty was more even (and no, not because of level scaling, for that was modded out).
You're kidding me, right? You didn't notice a complete lack of satisfaction from leveling in Oblivion, and that reaching a high enough level actually makes combat harder because of how unbalanced the "enemies level-up" mechanic is?
Someone mentioned reading comprehension earlier in this thread...
Fine, I misread your post. Anyway, an idiot savant is better than something that barely rises above pure mediocrity. Producing well-rounded games that look good on the surface but lack any sort of depth or genuine quality is Bioware's specialty, whereas most of the best RPGs out there suffer from at least one crippling flaw that comes as a result of the team putting all of their effort into writing a good story/characters/lore/setting, and less into technical aspects such as combat, NPC scripts, bugfixing, or even being able to complete the game in the ridiculously short timeframe. We all know this about our favorite games, and love them despite their shortcomings because they are good in the parts that count.
This is how FO2 world map would look like if it was designed like BG1 - unlabeled circles representing large, mostly empty wasteland maps, with maybe an item or two, minor landmark (like semi-distinct rock) or some minor encounter, you'd nevertheless have to walk all the way through and exit on opposite side to resume your journey - at least until you reached the next unlabelled circle and had to do the whole thing again.
Map comparisons using DraQ el burro logic part two:
Analogue to your example, how would an Elder Turds (e.g. Skyrim) game look if you expanded the in-game map size from ~40 km² to ~290000 km² (area of the Fallout 2 map)? :D
Well, now that is some damn good proof that the Elder Scrolls games are total shit. Thank you DraQ, couldn't have done it without you.
Isn't there also a horde of giberlings and a bloodscape on that map? 2 bloodscapes actually. A smaller on that leads you to the larger on with the horde. Also, content actually looks pretty distributed there, if a little sparse.
Also, Ventillator's point is a good one: Morrowind's content-less areas are far more numerous than bg1's. The only difference is that Morrowind has a different perspective, a slightly more unique setting and a constant stream of the same banal songs over and over that seem to hypnotize everyone into forgetting its massive faults, which are far more of a hindrance to enjoying the game than anything in bg1. "I'm a high elf mage, so I walk...really...slowly..." "Dialog trees? Yeah, we've got at least 10 of those...20 maybe..."
As for Glyphwright posts where he compaired BG with PS:T or BG2 in terms of exploration, the defense was "BG did it better because exploration is traveling in mostly empty maps"
If that's all you got out of the discussion, perhaps reading comprehension is indeed a problem. The actual argument was both broader and more nuanced:
1) World structure - Large open worlds are much more conducive to the feeling of exploration because while, technically, you can explore anything (city, apartment, your bf's ass), exploration in the cRPG adventuring sense implies to a lot of people having the freedom to go wherever and just explore in the free-form sense, not having the slightest clue of what you will find. PS:T's world structure is too small for this, as it consists of several city zones and associated dungeons (with a few more zones unlocked linearly later on). Most or all of these zones you have to visit as part of the main story anyway, so while you are there, you walk a few steps out of your way and talk to optional NPCs and so on. With BG2, the gameworld is much larger, but it's not open at all. Instead of being able to travel from zone to zone, you instead have to obtain a quest from a quest hub (Athkatla typically, but from others sometimes as well), and then a new zone will be marked on your world map. You can then travel there and possibly uncover additional zones related to that quest-line. Once that's complete, you typically return to the quest hub and get another quest-line. So rather than having free-form exploratory travel, you end up making very concise trips from the quest-hub, knowing your exact goals and purposes. So this is one way in which BG1 is definitely superior in terms of exploration to those other two games.
2) Zone structure - In order for exploration to feel enjoyable, I would argue that you need a sense of contrast and unpredictability to it. If you find something of interest every two steps within a zone, that might very well improve certain aspects of your game, but it hurts exploration, because (as Grunker already mentioned) it doesn't feel special anymore. Do you get excited when you see another NPC in a PS:T zone? I don't because I already saw 20 others before him. The enjoyment I get out of PS:T NPCs comes from their dialogue and quests, and thus, to me, falls under the writing/dialogue/etc aspect of the game, sure as hell not under exploration. So in this sense, the sparse amount of content in most BG1 maps sets up the contrast between encounter and non-encounter phases of exploration and thus increases the enjoyment gotten out of actually discovering something. Likewise, unpredictability adds to the feeling of exploration. Most of the maps in BG1, you had no idea what you were going to discover, whereas in say BG2, once you headed to some zone outside of Athkatla, you already had a fairly good idea of what's awaiting you there, since it was part of a quest, and as soon as you hit the zone, you would typically run into some NPC related to the quest who would tell you how to proceed from there. It felt much more like a linear themepark experience rather than exploration.
Annd i disagree with him. I played BG2 before BG, and when i saw the World map in BG i was indeed "cool" But whan i traveled, i realized that it was half empty generic area after half empty generic area.
ITT people don't realise that although they look big on paper, the maps in BG1 are not that huge, because you can move over them pretty quickly. If you want to travel from Lena to the north edge of the map, it is about 30 seconds. The content is well distributed, if it was more crowded, you would stumble into something every 5 seconds. And people are complaining about that for BG2's Athlatka, which is overcrowded. Fuck youre exploration faggness!
1) World structure - Large open worlds are much more conducive to the feeling of exploration because while, technically, you can explore anything (city, apartment, your bf's ass), exploration in the cRPG adventuring sense implies to a lot of people having the freedom to go wherever and just explore in the free-form sense, not having the slightest clue of what you will find. PS:T's world structure is too small for this, as it consists of several city zones and associated dungeons (with a few more zones unlocked linearly later on). Most or all of these zones you have to visit as part of the main story anyway, so while you are there, you walk a few steps out of your way and talk to optional NPCs and so on. With BG2, the gameworld is much larger, but it's not open at all. Instead of being able to travel from zone to zone, you instead have to obtain a quest from a quest hub (Athkatla typically, but from others sometimes as well), and then a new zone will be marked on your world map. You can then travel there and possibly uncover additional zones related to that quest-line. Once that's complete, you typically return to the quest hub and get another quest-line. So rather than having free-form exploratory travel, you end up making very concise trips from the quest-hub, knowing your exact goals and purposes. So this is one way in which BG1 is definitely superior in terms of exploration to those other two games.
2) Zone structure - In order for exploration to feel enjoyable, I would argue that you need a sense of contrast and unpredictability to it. If you find something of interest every two steps within a zone, that might very well improve certain aspects of your game, but it hurts exploration, because (as Grunker already mentioned) it doesn't feel special anymore. Do you get excited when you see another NPC in a PS:T zone? I don't because I already saw 20 others before him. The enjoyment I get out of PS:T NPCs comes from their dialogue and quests, and thus, to me, falls under the writing/dialogue/etc aspect of the game, sure as hell not under exploration. So in this sense, the sparse amount of content in most BG1 maps sets up the contrast between encounter and non-encounter phases of exploration and thus increases the enjoyment gotten out of actually discovering something. Likewise, unpredictability adds to the feeling of exploration. Most of the maps in BG1, you had no idea what you were going to discover, whereas in say BG2, once you headed to some zone outside of Athkatla, you already had a fairly good idea of what's awaiting you there, since it was part of a quest, and as soon as you hit the zone, you would typically run into some NPC related to the quest who would tell you how to proceed from there. It felt much more like a linear themepark experience rather than exploration.
1)You misandertood my posts if you think i'm against BG1 World structure in principle like Draq is. My problem is that the BG implementation was meh at best. The reason Bioware change it was propably because they realised it was shit, but in order to fix it (having the same open world structure but with wilderness areas that are all unique and interesting, which is the first point of abstract map travel, removing the tedium and having only areas of interest appearing in the map) it would require way more resources than Bioware had. If the only real content in an area is a talking chicken, it doesn't need a huge map with nothing of interest for the Player to walk before he meets it. You could have perfectly put it as a special encounter during the world travel.
So i stand by my point that BG1 would be better with half his maps removed and the content concentrated in the others.( or having all wilderness areas fleshed out more, but this is "i want more content", which applies in all games and it's not free to make)
2)It ties with the above. In a game with no seamless world travel, where you move in a map with various points of interest, by definition the areas ARE points of interest or else they shouldn't appear in the first place.
It has nothing to do with having a general idea of what you will find in the area before you travel in there.
Most of the maps in BG1, you had no idea what you were going to discover, whereas in say BG2, once you headed to some zone outside of Athkatla, you already had a fairly good idea of what's awaiting you there, since it was part of a quest, and as soon as you hit the zone, you would typically run into some NPC related to the quest who would tell you how to proceed from there. It felt much more like a linear themepark experience rather than exploration.
But the areas themselves where way better. And that's what i'm trying to say. If BG2 had more open map where you could stamble in Watcher's Keep or Windspear Hills on your own without having been told about the area, the areas themselves wouldn't be magically worse. In fact, arguably , it would have made the game even better. But throwing random empty maps wouldn't. BG2 made a half assed attempt with the three random forest areas after you exit the Underdark, and quess what... they where shit there as well.
That's why i'm glad in PoE Obsidian decided to have few wilderness areas, and puts them up as additional strech goal in order to do them right if they gather the money. Deciding to have Open World with a ton of transitioning areas without having a clue as to how you will fill them with content and puting random shit in them leads to BG1
There's been a lot of attention on the fact that the two people bleating the most about the sparseness of content in wilderness zones in BG1 are defending The Elder Scrolls, which is completely legitimate. I can't fathom why someone who thinks that BG1's wilderness zones are such a sin would conversely think that TES's incomprehensibly vast alchemy ingredient farms and copypasta dungeons would constitute anything interesting.
But this leads me to a corollary, which is, if you're the type that thinks this type of world design is inherently interesting, then why would you hate on The Elder Scrolls open world format, which has been derided on this forum as a "hiking simulator?"
But this leads me to a corollary, which is, if you're the type that thinks this type of world design is inherently interesting, then why would you hate on The Elder Scrolls open world format, which has been derided on this forum as a "hiking simulator?"
Indeed. BG1 wasn't terribly bad (though it wasn't particularly good either) even though some of its design aspects were, frankly, baffling (I suppose a lot were derpy leftovers from D&D RTS it was planned to be).
(compairing BG to a TES game is insulting by itself in my eyes)
You're missing the important points:
-BG1 was worse because it was completely arbitrary with travel mode switching between map travel and manual walking all the time for no reason, TES is at least consistent with its gameworld and travel representation, whether you like it or not.
-You can't just cut out uninteresting stuff if your ambition is fully representing the gameworld, such excuse doesn't work for BG where it may take 4-8h to cross to "adjacent" map, so it clearly doesn't represent the entire portion of Sword Coast, just (poorly) selected bits of it while cutting everything inbetween.
-BG1 failed to give player something to do while "exploring".
Though yeah, something being crap isn't excused by something else being diarrhoea (whether it actually is diarrhoea or not).
The fucking sense of discovery in any fucking situation with exploration comes from you covering empty space and then after a while finding something cool.
Too bad that anything cool in BG effectively finds itself.
Anyway you're confusing two distinct and not fully compatible solutions to BG1's problem:
-make it have actual exploration
-focus on the actual content
Sure, you could have a little from column A, a little from column B, but you couldn't retain attempts at exploration while fully focusing on content. The thing is I don't really consider BG1 failed exploration attempts easy to salvage or worth it, though just removing stupid black shroud would actually help it.
You know why I hate Morrowind? BECAUSE I FUCKING DETEST SINGLE-CHARACTER, FIRST PERSON RPGs.
Except I liked PS:T, and quite liked the start of BG2 (then I aborted playthrough willing to even get through BG1, to play BG2 in most proper manner).
I'm also cautiously optimistic towards TToN and PoE.
I may vastly prefer FPP RPGs, especially single character, but that doesn't stop me from liking good iso ones, even encumbered by crappy RTWP combat.
The problem with BG1 is that the only thing it actually does interestingly enough (intraparty animosities) is going to be unnoticed by anyone trying to build a cohesive party instead of just grabbing a mixture of differently aligned characters. Having multiple paired characters doesn't really help that as it decreases party building freedom and amounts of valid incompatible combinations.
Other than that, it isn't *bad* cRPG, it's just pretty boring and unremarkable all around - certainly not deserving its overblown reputation whether you like IE-style cRPGs or not.
It's interesting how very different one can perceive games...
To me the Cliff Racers were one of many critical failures in Morrowind, along with all kinds of possible abuse (stealing, enchanting, alchemy, unlimited potions in combat) and the utterly static game world revolving solely around the player character.
The former isn't really absent from BG1 (it's hard to avoid hilarious AI abuse even if you merely try to be smarter than running headfirst into hostile random encounters), the latter is pretty much common to vast majority of cRPGs ever.
Morrowind is like an Idiot Savant of CRPGs - it's does some things brilliantly (like setting and story), but other things are downright retarded.
True.
I could write pages after pages about what was horribly retarded in Morrowind, I actually did write quite a few harsh ones (in potato) back when it was fresh to me, even describing it as not really a "Role Playing Game", but more like "Role Playing Platform".
My current opinion of Morrowind is much less harsh because although the old criticism still stands, I learned a lot more about its lore, exploration, hidden layers, and awesome semi-hidden stuff implemented in game, that I missed the first time around.
The problem is that in that case BG is just an overall mildly dim-witted person not doing anything brilliantly and most of the things below par.
If you think the exploration and the setting is bland and boring, that's a valid opinion, but in the end that is just a matter of taste.
Well, no. Exploration isn't bland, it's simply not present. There is a lot of walking, some nice sightseeing and a lot more tedium, but no exploration.
As for the setting, while you could probably not call it objectively bland, it's definitely objectively generic.
IT's not that the finds aren't good, or the places and puzzles they hand-place aren't refined enough. It basically boils down to how the character is begin controlled. Where as in one perspective you are sending your characters to explore, in anther perspective you/your character are the one that is exploring (I'm pretty sure this is the reason bioware slowly changed their ways in BG2/DA:O)
The problem is indeed information, but not really tied to perspective other than some providing more and better tools to facilitate exploration than the others.
In BG1 you don't have any gradation of information. You don't know anything about obscured terrain, so the only way to check it is uncovering it, but after you uncover it, you know everything.
You don't get any sort of clues that would direct your search and since BG1 just isn't large enough to not uncover every inch of passable terrain, that's what you do.
Paradoxically uncovering all the outdoor areas right away would help the exploration, as it would allow the player to decide where do they want to go. It would also hamper keeping track of where exactly they were. It would still need less arbitrary stashes and inability to detect ones beyond party's FoV. Non-environmental clues and environmental breadcrumb trails of all sorts would also help.
Map comparisons using DraQ el burro logic part two:
Analogue to your example, how would an Elder Turds (e.g. Skyrim) game look if you expanded the in-game map size from ~40 km² to ~290000 km² (area of the Fallout 2 map)? :D
1. It would look like Daggerfall, more or less. TES from 2 onwards doesn't have arbitrary or not arbitrary hotspots, it's one single map.
2. You managed to miss the point (good job!). Like BG the FO map I posted would only have small, hundreds of meters wide, rectangles of generic wasteland separated by many h/day travel. For no reason.
Well, now that is some damn good proof that the Elder Scrolls games are total shit. Thank you DraQ, couldn't have done it without you.
Exploration is definitely a subjective experience. Baldur's Gate's exploration immediately strikes me as being more abstract due to the player directing the PC and party to explore.
I wouldn't say the exploration in BG sucks, just that the engine was designed to focus on other areas of game-play, such as party-based tactical combat, which Morrowind doesn't have.
Partially it's certainly true, but not whether or not game has it.
I wouldn't say the exploration in BG sucks, just that the engine was designed to focus on other areas of game-play, such as party-based tactical combat, which Morrowind doesn't have.
Fair enough. BG1 doesn't have sucky exploration, it simply doesn't have *any* actual exploration while Morrowind obviously doesn't have party-based tactical combat.
1)You misandertood my posts if you think i'm against BG1 World structure in principle like Draq is. My problem is that the BG implementation was meh at best. The reason Bioware change it was propably because they realised it was shit ...
A cRPG consists of many different elements. When Bioware changed the world structure from BG1 to BG2, they were thinking of the whole game, not just the exploration aspect. As a result of the change, many elements did improve, such as quality of storytelling, density of content, etc, but since the world is not black and white, or overly simple, their changes also happened to make the exploration aspect much worse. And that's what this argument is about, exploration.
So i stand by my point that BG1 would be better with half his maps removed and the content concentrated in the others.( or having all wilderness areas fleshed out more, but this is "i want more content", which applies in all games and it's not free to make)
But the argument was not about BG1 in general, but rather its exploration, and doing what you suggest would ruin the exploration aspect the same way BG2 has pretty much done away with it. Now you may prefer that type of approach, and there's nothing wrong with that, but what I am saying is that such an approach simplistically implies that BG2 was an improvement on BG1 in every possible way, whereas the reality is a bit more complicated that that. I think my original post in this thread did a decent job of listing each game's strengths and weaknesses.
2)It ties with the above. In a game with no seamless world travel, where you move in a map with various points of interest, by definition the areas ARE points of interest or else they shouldn't appear in the first place.
This is your personal assumption. I don't know the exact reason they went with zones, my guess is hardware/engine limitations related to how much space you could load into memory at any time, but regardless of that, the way the zones are placed on the map (in a structured, adjacent manner, as opposed to sprinkled throughout, and with many of them not even having names or unique pictures), it is clear that they are supposed to be a continuous world representation and not points of interest. Which of course then explains why you need to have areas of emptiness, and also shows why it has a fun exploration aspect. Going somewhere which is already known as a point of interest does not make for good exploration as many people think of it.
But the areas themselves where way better. And that's what i'm trying to say. If BG2 had more open map where you could stamble in Watcher's Keep or Windspear Hills on your own without having been told about the area, the areas themselves wouldn't be magically worse. In fact, arguably , it would have made the game even better.
Well, the actual maps in BG2 differed pretty greatly among themselves. Many were very high density urban type maps (e.g. Athkatla zones, Trademeet, etc) that don't lend themselves to what people like me consider exploration. Some, like the ones you mentioned and Ruined Temple/etc were just as empty as anything in BG1. The remaining ones were often hurt in terms of exploration by the tight scripting, i.e. as soon as you arrive in the zone, there is a greeting encounter, which takes/directs you to the next encounter in the chain, and so on. This is all good for story driven narrative, but bad for exploration, so it's hard to compare.
More generally, though, sure it would be great if BG1's random encounters had the dialogue out of PS:T, and BG2's dungeons, but we are not talking hypotheticals here, after all, if Morrowind had good combat, good exploration, good writing, good graphics, AND believable world building, it might have been a decent game. We are comparing the exploration systems of real games, and if you do that, BG1's exploration looks pretty damn good compared to what's out there.
Nope. BG2 areas are crowded. You encounter quest-stuff everywhere and all the time. As J_C pointed out, it feels like a themepark. Exploration in BG1 isn't very good or spectacular but at least it feels like you're exploring a wilderness.
Nope. BG2 areas are crowded. You encounter quest-stuff everywhere and all the time. As J_C pointed out, it feels like a themepark. Exploration in BG1 isn't very good or spectacular but at least it feels like you're exploring a wilderness.
It didn't feel like exploring and in RL wilderness I can actually see stuff further than 18m away, especially if it's something like towering Gnoll Stronghold.
DraQ Pull yourself together brah. You are ranting now. I don't like BG1 either, but you won't see me ranting about not being able to see a Gnoll Stronglohld in a Infinity Engine game, which has nothing to do with anything. Just accept that their approach to exploration did not align with your favourite and deal with it. If someone can enjoy it, good for him. Zen, brother, zen.
DraQ Pull yourself together brah. You are ranting now. I don't like BG1 either, but you won't see me ranting about not being able to see a Gnoll Stronglohld in a Infinity Engine game, which has nothing to do with anything. Just accept that their approach to exploration did not align with your favourite and deal with it. If someone can enjoy it, good for him. Zen, brother, zen.
His point, I think, is that exploration requires you to notice (or think you notice) a point of interest, and then head for it. If you're simply zigzagging across a map until you find the proverbial gnoll stronghold, then you're not exploring, because there's no agency involved, just randomly stumbling upon things.
We are comparing the exploration systems of real games, and if you do that, BG1's exploration looks pretty damn good compared to what's out there.
