Judging from all the reviews and impressions I've read, which goes beyond saying shit like "omg NPCs sit and drink!", I'm having a hard time understanding this one thing;
Why did Beth not want to implement a half-assed mounted combat system? Wouldn't it fit perfectly with the rest of the game? Or did they not have a go at making one in the first place? ( which is very likely, since there are things which indicate this even if mildly)
On a side note, I'd like to mention two 10+ year old games with mounted combat, on air and on groud: Terminator: Future Shock (That was 1995!) and Terminator: SkyNET (1996). Both are Beth games. No, there was never a pre-defined path for the vehicles in the game. You could try driving up a mountain and get stuck there.
Also these two titles are probably the very first 3d non-racing games to feature combat with functioning vehicles in a very accomplished way, and even make them available to players in deathmatch in multiplayer!. Read: vehicular MP combat in 1995! Battlefield my ass.
The controls of the vehicles - A military jeep with an attached turret which fires laser and rockets, and one of those flying shits in Terminator movie (here; http://www.goingfaster.com/term2029/vtoltech.html) with more rapid laser and the same rockets - were incredible good and responsive, very smooth. Think of the dune buggy in HL2. The exact same thing ( even the wheels were rotating for real in relation to the speed and direction, unlike the pseudonym effect in the first NFS ).
You could hop on and off them in the game as you wished. And if you hopped off the flying thing in mid air (ah yes, you could do that! ), it would even land down on the ground itself in a simplistic manner. Quite some shit for a game in 1995 in my opinion.
Of course I'm sure there is a lot more to implementing a mounted combat system but still.. they had the important basics, the infrastructure back then. I can't believe how Beth games devolved through time.
I'm compelled to believe that the departure from their proprietary "Xngine" with all the years of experience and familiarity ( all of their games up to and including Redguard used that engine, except for ancient 2d platformers perhaps ) made them move around like headless chickens and in the end they got so mind-fucked, they just can't help screwing around now. That's where, I believe, they got lost.
Another indication of that; The animations of the robots and the players ( as all of them were nice 3d models) in multiplayer in those two Terminator titles were much smoother (even if fewer as one might expect ) than what we see now. Plus when you looked up/down in Morrowind, your avatar didn't even bend; he just stood still like a stick and you moved the camera angle. In both Terminator titles however, player models bend up/down in conjunction with how much you look up/down.
These two games are up in my Beth games list, right after #1 Daggerfall, and bfore #3 Arena.
This is not to say "graphics suck this sucks that sucks" or that graphics are everything, but to show how Beth degraded with time in skill and innovation.
Why did Beth not want to implement a half-assed mounted combat system? Wouldn't it fit perfectly with the rest of the game? Or did they not have a go at making one in the first place? ( which is very likely, since there are things which indicate this even if mildly)
On a side note, I'd like to mention two 10+ year old games with mounted combat, on air and on groud: Terminator: Future Shock (That was 1995!) and Terminator: SkyNET (1996). Both are Beth games. No, there was never a pre-defined path for the vehicles in the game. You could try driving up a mountain and get stuck there.
Also these two titles are probably the very first 3d non-racing games to feature combat with functioning vehicles in a very accomplished way, and even make them available to players in deathmatch in multiplayer!. Read: vehicular MP combat in 1995! Battlefield my ass.
The controls of the vehicles - A military jeep with an attached turret which fires laser and rockets, and one of those flying shits in Terminator movie (here; http://www.goingfaster.com/term2029/vtoltech.html) with more rapid laser and the same rockets - were incredible good and responsive, very smooth. Think of the dune buggy in HL2. The exact same thing ( even the wheels were rotating for real in relation to the speed and direction, unlike the pseudonym effect in the first NFS ).
You could hop on and off them in the game as you wished. And if you hopped off the flying thing in mid air (ah yes, you could do that! ), it would even land down on the ground itself in a simplistic manner. Quite some shit for a game in 1995 in my opinion.
Of course I'm sure there is a lot more to implementing a mounted combat system but still.. they had the important basics, the infrastructure back then. I can't believe how Beth games devolved through time.
I'm compelled to believe that the departure from their proprietary "Xngine" with all the years of experience and familiarity ( all of their games up to and including Redguard used that engine, except for ancient 2d platformers perhaps ) made them move around like headless chickens and in the end they got so mind-fucked, they just can't help screwing around now. That's where, I believe, they got lost.
Another indication of that; The animations of the robots and the players ( as all of them were nice 3d models) in multiplayer in those two Terminator titles were much smoother (even if fewer as one might expect ) than what we see now. Plus when you looked up/down in Morrowind, your avatar didn't even bend; he just stood still like a stick and you moved the camera angle. In both Terminator titles however, player models bend up/down in conjunction with how much you look up/down.
These two games are up in my Beth games list, right after #1 Daggerfall, and bfore #3 Arena.
This is not to say "graphics suck this sucks that sucks" or that graphics are everything, but to show how Beth degraded with time in skill and innovation.
