Elder Scrolls The appeal of Skyrim

[Falksi]

The day of reckoning will come - I predict at some point in the early 2020s - when people on the Codex finally realise that Skyrim is basically just Morrowind with janky action combat instead of janky RPG combat, and no spellmaker. Other than those differences, both are games about walking around, getting ultra-linear quests, beating the shit out of 85% of individuals you meet, meeting boring NPCs, stuffing your inventory with relics and equipment you'll never use like the Gauntlets of Unending Wanking, and reading books. I like both games btw.

Eh, I don't enjoy any of the elder scrolls games, though Daggerfall was an okay time waster as a kid. But this is like saying Fallout: New Vegas is basically just Fallout 3 with better content. Trivially true because that "better content" goes a long way.

Sure, Morrowind shares most of Skyrim's flaws. People love it because they enjoy tooling around with the magic system and they like the setting, which is a hell of a lot more interesting than Oblivion or Skyrim. Skyrim is like a gigantic bowl of oatmeal and Morrowind is like a smaller bowl of oatmeal flavored with cinnamon and maybe some apples. Though, personally, I'd rather eat real food, some people who can't stand plain oatmeal will eat that shit up when you add a little flavor.

Don't agree, but like the analogy, very cool.

To me Morrowind was more like eating a delicious Chinese meal. Full of strange, alien tastes & flavours which kept surprising me with every mouthful, but just a bit fucking awkward at times with the combat like eating with chopsticks.

All the next TES has to be is Morrowind MK2, so probably an Italian or Indian selection of dishes, but with combat resembling knives & forks.

Oblivion was definitely a bag of chips wrapped in a newspaper, with 1 small plaggy fork.

 

[MWaser]

I thought Skyrim was kind of bland and boring. Does it do anything better than Oblivion?

way better porn mods

 

[zaper]

I remember when Skyrim first came out and I was having a blast during the release week, and then my computer went full bazinga and I spent almost two years without a way to play anything made after 2003. (granted, I did play a lot of good games, but that's not the point of this tale)

When I finally got a decent computer, I tried to get back to Skyrim, I tried to recapture that magic that I was feeling on the first time I played it, but it just didn't click anymore. Everything seemed boring, everything seemed bland. I don't know if it was me who changed or what, but every couple of years I try to play it again for a bit and I simply can't manage to have fun with it.

 

[anvi]

I thought Skyrim was kind of bland and boring. Does it do anything better than Oblivion?

I think Skyrim is shit but Oblivion was even worse. Morrowind is the only Elder Scrolls game that even came close being ok.

 

[Makabb]

with elder scrolls it's the other way around, the further you go back, the better they get.

you mean codex' philosophy on everything.

pretty much correct

 

[Bad Sector]

So, at a moment of weakness (i finished a Morrowind playthrough a couple of days ago and wanted more) and faced with a 7 euro sale of Skyrim Special Edition (which contains all the DLC and a seemingly better optimized engine - though largely i think the "optimizations" were to turn shadows off for most lightsources) i bought the game. I had played the base game around 2012 and with the exception of a few hours a couple of months ago which were mostly spent running around Whiterun and killing stuff (i wasn't that interested in actually playing the game, i wanted to check out some stuff in the TES Construction Set), i haven't played the game since 2012 and i remember pretty much nothing about its story outside having something to do with dragons (and a couple of glitches i faced at the time). Actually, i do not even remember if i finished the main quest :-P.

Anyway, i've only played 8 hours so far (according to Steam, though TBH i left it running for a while when talking on the phone and later eating lunch, so it is less in practice) but with having played Morrowind so recently i can already notice a lot of differences and similarities. There are things i'm not a fan of (e.g. less potential for breaking the game through alchemy, enchanting or whatever :-P) but i knew that going in.

 

[Falksi]

So I'm moving house, & whilst doing so some of the old games which I bought many moons ago have been unearthed. So I thought I'd have a blast on them & decide whether to keep them or not.

Originally I had Skyrim down as a shit game, which showed you all it's tricks in the first 20 hours and quickly became dull afterwards. That said I did have some fun in those first 20 odd hours.

Returning to it now and Jesus wept, I can't believe I was that kind to it. I mean it's truly fucking awful beyond belief. I couldn't believe how flat our fucking bored I was, and just how many basic things the game did badly.

But worst of all it was just SO empty. Literally nothing of note worth finding or exploring for. And the quests, I mean, I remember them being mundane but fuckledoody we're talking some real, real low end shit here.

We all know it's wank, but I never had it down as painfully wank until now. Literally not even a game.

 

[Agame]

So I'm moving house, & whilst doing so some of the old games which I bought many moons ago have been unearthed. So I thought I'd have a blast on them & decide whether to keep them or not.

Originally I had Skyrim down as a shit game, which showed you all it's tricks in the first 20 hours and quickly became dull afterwards. That said I did have some fun in those first 20 odd hours.

Returning to it now and Jesus wept, I can't believe I was that kind to it. I mean it's truly fucking awful beyond belief. I couldn't believe how flat our fucking bored I was, and just how many basic things the game did badly.

But worst of all it was just SO empty. Literally nothing of note worth finding or exploring for. And the quests, I mean, I remember them being mundane but fuckledoody we're talking some real, real low end shit here.

We all know it's wank, but I never had it down as painfully wank until now. Literally not even a game.

Its better with mods...

 

[Bad Sector]

You reminded me i have Steam SE installed and haven't finished it yet. That message i wrote a few months ago right up here? I played a few more hours and then jumped to some other game - i didn't intent to drop it, just got distracted by something else and then never found the interest to go back and continue.

Well, i'll continue it. At some point.

 

[typical user]

Skyrim is great with one thing:
Once you finish the tutorial the whole world and all it's quests are open to play in any given order.

 

[Sigourn]

When I first played Skyrim I had my mind blown, but I think that is precisely why Skyrim was successful: those who had never played an open world RPG before, or a relatively busy RPG, were mesmerized by how much Skyrim had to offer. Once you've played games like Morrowind or Gothic this doesn't surprise you anymore, and you start seeing the cracks in the game.

 

[MWaser]

The first time I played Skyrim, my mind was blown - the UI was so fucking unreasonable I quit the game to install a mod before I could finish the tutorial.

 

[anvi]

I was blown away by how ugly the textures were! I looked at a wooden wall and it was like smeared shit. I saw better looking graphics 20 years ago. Then I saw the UI and then I saw the gameplay. And then I heard the stupid characters and dialogue. And then I went on a million 100 mile journeys to collect some contrived shit. It is all a matter of perspective, people think it is amazing because they were born in 2019.

 

[Machocruz]

Skyrim has no feeling or charm, nor does it have mechanical or systemic substance. The lack of one can be made up for by the other, but neither are at work here. I like the setting and it feels cozy at times. There is a whif of something compelling there, but I and most people here are too seasoned and advanced for that to be enough, like it is for the general vg audience today. We've seen better in every category.

Like the tin man, it has no heart, like the scarecrow, it has no brain. Maybe because, like the lion, Bethesda have no courage

 

[Ol' Willy]

Kek, didn't play

 

[Funposter]

I was blown away by how ugly the textures were! I looked at a wooden wall and it was like smeared shit.

This is actually because Bethesda can't UV map for shit. It's been a problem since Morrowind. Below I'll post the rather infamous wooden post, which still looked like total shit even after Bethesda released their high-resolution texture pack. Forts and walls are also a rather good example of their ineptitude, as can be seen in the UB Tweaks mod. I think a lot of this was fixed with the Special Edition, although I could be wrong.

The forts are arguably a stylistic choice since maybe Bethesda wanted the stones to look really big, but it has the effect of making the textures look really blurry. You can also see on the mod page that the seams for the textures on the forts don't match up in vanilla. It's a total mess.

 

[Bad Sector]

IIRC Skyrim had only a handful of artists for the world (and in general the team was small for AAA standards) and chances are they cut some (or actually, a lot) of corners (e.g. using automatic UVs instead of manually creating the uv maps) to make all the assets in the game.

Personally i wouldn't care (nor i actually do really) about Skyrim's look (aside from everything being *way* too desaturated), i just wanted it to be more like Morrowind.

 

[Caim]

Skyrim is like a pair of old comfortable pants. Sure, it's pretty threadbare, you have stuff that looks way better and you wouldn't want it to be public knowledge that you still engage with it, but sometimes you just want to sit back, relax and put on your comfortable pants.

The porn mods come in because of the hole in the crotch that shows off your balls.

 

[Tavernking]

Modding saved this game.

Get a modpack like Ultimate Skyrim by Belmont Boy (uses Skyrim Requiem). Turns it into as close as Skyrim can become to being a true RPG experience even most codexers would praise. Personally, I am going to wait for such a modpack before I even think about buying TES6. Skyrim had deep enough mechanics when I was 16, now they're laughable.

 

[anvi]

I respect them for making it so moddable that the public can transform so many things and so well. But my problem is that none of the mods make the combat good, either because the modders don't know how to, or the game isn't moddable in that way. So the big combat mods are basically just adding lots of fun but overpowered stuff or nerfing everything to make it a survival type game, but still with crappy shallow combat. And to me it is inexcusable because this is a game about combat. The story is so secondary, so is the 'exploration' and everything else. It is a game about going into caves and blowing stuff up with fireballs or hacking it with swords. They had one job... and they couldn't even do that well.

If ES6 can either start with a better baseline combat to begin with, or make it so that is easier to mod and so that modders can change more, then I might end up a fan. But this left click right click shit needs to stop.

 

[Bad Sector]

So i decided to continue that Skyrim SE playthrough i started months ago and abandoned it and i was lucky enough to find an interesting quest in the first half hour or so while i was wandering in a ruin... well, not the quest itself exactly (it is just to find a few mcguffins) but how it was presented. I need to find a few pieces of some thing which are scattered across the land but instead of having a compass telling me where to go, i only have a rough sketch in a diary. Finding the first part actually took me long while, not only because of the rough sketch but also because the diary was vague enough to be a little misleading. Then while i was looking for the first part, i accidentally found another quest in which some mine was overtaken by baddies or something (it has been long enough since the last time i played the game that i do not remember much about the factions :-P). Again there wasn't any quest compass (...i checked, it wasn't broken or disabled :-P) and it wasn't even exactly a quest that was given to me: the guy didn't ask me to go and clean it up, he just mentioned it and i decided to go and take a look since i already knew where that mine was.

This is the sort of stuff i liked doing in Morrowind when it came to world exploration and what i missed from (the rest of) Skyrim (and Oblivion).

Of course the very next moment someone hands me a quest to give a sword to someone and they do not even bother to tell me where that is because the quest marker would handle that anyway.

 

[Caim]

Any form of automated mapping should be outlawed. Instead, you have to buy maps and intel from the locals to get a general idea of what's in the area. Hit up a bar or two, pay for the drinks of the locals to get a few pointers. Have traders give you some idea of what's in the area and which places to avoid. Pull a sneaky on the player by having one such trader set up a deal with a local bandit chief that in exchange for protection he'd throw an unwitting traveler or two in his direction. And even if you find an area have it just be labeled "mine" or "caves", then hit up the local bar to figure out what's in the area. This way you learn that Big John's Mine was named ironically because Big John was actually small and insecure about his height. Not to be confused with Little John's Mine who was actually small and didn't give a shit. Have the map itself be a puzzle that can be completed and show the player percentages of what they still have to find, this way there will be autists who want to map the entire thing out and shill your game as the best thing ever.

 

[Bad Sector]

Not having an automap at all is tedious, especially when it comes to larger worlds. Morrowind does it best: it automatically maps out the areas you visit but the rest are hidden until you visit them (and you can use this dark fog as an indicator of how much of the world you've visited). You can learn about places from other people, though most of the time you get instructions how to reach them from the main cities instead of exact locations (you do get exact locations for the main cities though). The examples you gave work perfectly fine with Morrowind's approach - in fact one of the first NPCs you talk with is a trader that tells you about the surrounding area and in some cities you can buy city guides with further details.

The only thing that is a bit off is knowing the name of places you visit by chance, but i think in practice it helps differentiate between the places since having 90% of them in your map be "cave, cave, cave, ruin, ruin, cave, ruin, ruin, ..." would be of little help - especially when you're already playing the game for several days and forgot most of the places you visited :-P.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Morrowind does it best: it automatically maps out the areas you visit but the rest are hidden until you visit them (and you can use this dark fog as an indicator of how much of the world you've visited).

Fog of war. Used in strategy games since times immemorial. Nothing wrong with it.

 

[Bad Sector]

Morrowind does it best: it automatically maps out the areas you visit but the rest are hidden until you visit them (and you can use this dark fog as an indicator of how much of the world you've visited).

Fog of war. Used in strategy games since times immemorial. Nothing wrong with it.

Yeah, exactly that, it just felt a bit weird to call it fog "of war" so i called it just "fog" :-P.

EDIT: though in strategy games (or at least RTSs) the fog often also has an additional element where it covers changes when things are "re-fogged" (often being grayed out or something) until you enter in range again. I'm not sure how that'd work in an RPG however since large changes in the world in RPGs that you're not around to notice are extremely rare.