I haven't forgiven Oblivion for turning every non-human race into "human-wearing-a-furry/scaly-suit"
Also for taking away spears
tbh I'm expecting the next Elder Scrolls game to be "You are a human and you can modify your skin tone a bit, you have a sword and a shield. And, ugh, I guess you can maybe use magic to like, I dunno, heal something a bit? Look it's not really our problem, the modders will fix it."
Oh, so back to Arena interpretations of the races!
I appreciate Oblivion in a lot of ways for being a return to, well-- the more generic kinda high fantasy from Arena and Daggerfall. I also simultaneously love the fuck out of Morrowind but I don't think Oblivion turned the various races into anything they weren't already portrayed as.
The thought of Bethesda drowning in Microsoft money is the only copium I have.
Right now is the best chance they'll ever have to turn things around, as long as they understand they need to.
Given the ultra-mega-hit that Skyrim was, on multiple platforms, over multiple different re-releases, why would anyone think that they need to turn anything around?
The thought of Bethesda drowning in Microsoft money is the only copium I have.
Right now is the best chance they'll ever have to turn things around, as long as they understand they need to.
Given the ultra-mega-hit that Skyrim was, on multiple platforms, over multiple different re-releases, why would anyone think that they need to turn anything around?
Better to address problems before consumers become so fed up with them that they affect sales.
Bethesda knows this, on some level. They listen to feedback, to an extent. Starfield is ditching the voiced protagonist from Fallout 4. It has eighty skills, only a fifth of which are direct combat skills. It brings back classes in a way that doesn't make the player beholden to them throughout their entire playthrough. They've promised more handcrafted content than any previous game they've made. These are all responses to feedback they've gotten over their last few games, mostly Fallout 4.
Rumor has it that Bethesda is very aware their QA problem. Their previous owner, Zenimax, wouldn't give them funding for proper testing or post-release patching. If Skyrim was so popular despite its many problems, imagine what a fully developed Elder Scrolls game could achieve.
I remember being interested in exploring Morrowind, avoiding the kites, and the sweet taste of avenging slaughter as the Argonian Nerevarinr. The bug buses. The shroom houses, Vivec, and breaking the crafting system to have a ring of flight. The story was great.
I can't remember a thing about Oblivion except the brutal repetition of entering in to the "demon meat realm" as my wife called it, to do rote combat and collect some kind of McGuffin, again and again. Or crafting material? I'm not sure even my character gave a shit.
My observations over the years lead me to believe that ones memories of Oblivion hinges on whether they played a stealth character. The DB and Thieves Guild quest lines blow the Fighters and Mages Guild questlines out of the water to such a degree that I feel sorry for the latter's writers.
Even before I replayed the game, I still remembered most of the DB missions and a good chunk of the Thieves Guild missions clearly even after over a decade. They had so many details to them that other quests didn't. In the DB mansion quest, if it was down to two targets left, one of the two left didn't like the other, and you had persuaded or charmed that one enough they would assume the other remaining target is the murderer at which point the AI would look for the nearest weapon laying around and kill the second to last victim for you, something that was mindblowing to see back then. In the quest to kill a mother and her four adult children all over the world, if the mother was dead you could goad one of the children into attacking you by saying his mother died screaming and watch a guardsman jump in to help you. You could get extra/early confirmation of the DB's final antagonist if you looted his mother's head from his hidden lair and dropped it in front of the group of suspects: the antagonist understandably freaks out more than the others. These are all entirely optional things on top of the optional objectives that netted you a contract bonus. The analogous quests in Morrowind and Skyrim don't have the same level of detail though they're still great in their own right. They're just more straightforward assassination contracts/writs.
The Oblivion Thieves Guild quests weren't as well scripted (see previous mention of not acknowledging if you were the Archmage they asked you to steal from) but still lead up to a memorable grand heist. It's the first time in the series you get to see the Moth Priests and an actual Elder Scroll. Unusually for the game, it's also a quest that has stakes since you can fail: Get caught and arrested in the Imperial Palace and you won't be able to get back in via the hidden entrance you used.
Being a stealth character also has the benefit of being able to just sneak past most of the combat slog areas, notably the Oblivion Gates. Combat has always been a weak part of the series (and a big part of why I restarted Morrowind as a stealth character back in the day and have since stuck to that archetype) so speeding it up and minimizing it go a long way towards making the experience better. Of course, knowing that I can just skip most of the gates helps a lot as well. Those are easily one of the weakest parts of Oblivion's design.
We're talking about a series that infamously nudges or outright pushes people in the direction of "stealth archer" builds.
Sure, I could rush in and engage everything with melee or magic... or I could sneak around, find the quest target, and delete it with guaranteed (and sometimes poison-enhanced) crits.
I remember being interested in exploring Morrowind, avoiding the kites, and the sweet taste of avenging slaughter as the Argonian Nerevarinr. The bug buses. The shroom houses, Vivec, and breaking the crafting system to have a ring of flight. The story was great.
I can't remember a thing about Oblivion except the brutal repetition of entering in to the "demon meat realm" as my wife called it, to do rote combat and collect some kind of McGuffin, again and again. Or crafting material? I'm not sure even my character gave a shit.
My observations over the years lead me to believe that ones memories of Oblivion hinges on whether they played a stealth character. The DB and Thieves Guild quest lines blow the Fighters and Mages Guild questlines out of the water to such a degree that I feel sorry for the latter's writers.
Even before I replayed the game, I still remembered most of the DB missions and a good chunk of the Thieves Guild missions clearly even after over a decade. They had so many details to them that other quests didn't. In the DB mansion quest, if it was down to two targets left, one of the two left didn't like the other, and you had persuaded or charmed that one enough they would assume the other remaining target is the murderer at which point the AI would look for the nearest weapon laying around and kill the second to last victim for you, something that was mindblowing to see back then. In the quest to kill a mother and her four adult children all over the world, if the mother was dead you could goad one of the children into attacking you by saying his mother died screaming and watch a guardsman jump in to help you. You could get extra/early confirmation of the DB's final antagonist if you looted his mother's head from his hidden lair and dropped it in front of the group of suspects: the antagonist understandably freaks out more than the others. These are all entirely optional things on top of the optional objectives that netted you a contract bonus. The analogous quests in Morrowind and Skyrim don't have the same level of detail though they're still great in their own right. They're just more straightforward assassination contracts/writs.
The Oblivion Thieves Guild quests weren't as well scripted (see previous mention of not acknowledging if you were the Archmage they asked you to steal from) but still lead up to a memorable grand heist. It's the first time in the series you get to see the Moth Priests and an actual Elder Scroll. Unusually for the game, it's also a quest that has stakes since you can fail: Get caught and arrested in the Imperial Palace and you won't be able to get back in via the hidden entrance you used.
Being a stealth character also has the benefit of being able to just sneak past most of the combat slog areas, notably the Oblivion Gates. Combat has always been a weak part of the series (and a big part of why I restarted Morrowind as a stealth character back in the day and have since stuck to that archetype) so speeding it up and minimizing it go a long way towards making the experience better. Of course, knowing that I can just skip most of the gates helps a lot as well. Those are easily one of the weakest parts of Oblivion's design.
Most definitely, oblivion had a quest design philosophy that favored stealth a ton. I was always a bit disappointed more of that kind of thing didn’t make it into skyrim. Skyrim just tended to use “go do this dungeon” as a crutch too much. Oblivion would be like “you need to kill this guy, go break into his house after midnight and kill him in his sleep.” Where skyrim would be like “you need to kill this guy, go find him at his hideout in a room at the bottom of a dungeon full of bandits”
Also I felt like Oblivion and Fallout 3 came at a time when Bethesda was ironically much better at doing shorter set pieces than tying together a big giant story (this period has arguably never ended but it was really bad back then). Like Shivering Isles, the Pitt, Point lookout were all great, and there were quest sequences in Oblivion and Fallout 3 that were pretty good, but the main quests of both games were pretty bad, both in and of themselves and as a narrative device to tie the games together as a whole.
You can just ignore the meat demon gates? That would take me a long way towards replaying Oblivion! Even if it was just being able to mostly avoid them.
IIRC you only have to do maybe 4 or 5 to finish the game if that, and most of those are bespoke main quest dungeon gates.
Edit: there are also some optional ones for the main quest in the Allies for Bruma part which can make the main quest easier but aren’t required. Regardless if you haven’t been specifically sent to an oblivion gate by a quest (as in you have an actual quest arrow over the gate) you can safely ignore it.
We're talking about a series that infamously nudges or outright pushes people in the direction of "stealth archer" builds.
Sure, I could rush in and engage everything with melee or magic... or I could sneak around, find the quest target, and delete it with guaranteed (and sometimes poison-enhanced) crits.
I wouldn't say Morrowind nudged people towards being a stealth archer so much given that ranged weapons didn't get sneak attacks. Even two handed weapons got sneak attack bonuses so my first stealth character spent a lot of time sneaking up on enemies/targets to smack them with a two handed sword. On the other hand, it had Cliff Racers so you were strongly encouraged to have a ranged option of some kind.
Even in Skyrim I still prefer to get a melee sneak attack off if it's an option. A damage multiplier of 30 with a dagger and the DB gloves is big enough to one hit kill dragons if you catch one snoozing atop a word wall. It's not always a viable option though, especially at low levels when your Sneak skill isn't great and bow crits are good enough to really thin out a pack if there's multiple enemies or at least severely injure a higher tier version of a bandit/draugr/etc.
Most definitely, oblivion had a quest design philosophy that favored stealth a ton. I was always a bit disappointed more of that kind of thing didn’t make it into skyrim. Skyrim just tended to use “go do this dungeon” as a crutch too much. Oblivion would be like “you need to kill this guy, go break into his house after midnight and kill him in his sleep.” Where skyrim would be like “you need to kill this guy, go find him at his hideout in a room at the bottom of a dungeon full of bandits”
Also I felt like Oblivion and Fallout 3 came at a time when Bethesda was ironically much better at doing shorter set pieces than tying together a big giant story (this period has arguably never ended but it was really bad back then). Like Shivering Isles, the Pitt, Point lookout were all great, and there were quest sequences in Oblivion and Fallout 3 that were pretty good, but the main quests of both games were pretty bad, both in and of themselves and as a narrative device to tie the games together as a whole.
There's an odd dynamic in play with Skyrim especially where the dungeons are clearly not designed for stealth in mind but stealth with perks gets so effective that enemies stop being able to see you even from a few feet in front of you without a light source. It ends up working out for stealth characters but in a really immersion-breaking way. I'm hoping future games update the dungeon creation to at least have wider corridors to allow for things to actually hide behind so stealth doesn't have to be an invisibility cloak to maintain usefulness outside of quests designed for it.
Yea magic was always the real power move in morrowind.
Like. You can buff your mercantile and nuke your targets mercantile in order to make training hella cheap. You can buff your targets skills to make any trainer able to train any skill to 100. And if you get 115 in enchanting any activated item only costs 1 charge no matter what it does.
I haven't forgiven Oblivion for turning every non-human race into "human-wearing-a-furry/scaly-suit"
Also for taking away spears
tbh I'm expecting the next Elder Scrolls game to be "You are a human and you can modify your skin tone a bit, you have a sword and a shield. And, ugh, I guess you can maybe use magic to like, I dunno, heal something a bit? Look it's not really our problem, the modders will fix it."
Oh, so back to Arena interpretations of the races!
I appreciate Oblivion in a lot of ways for being a return to, well-- the more generic kinda high fantasy from Arena and Daggerfall. I also simultaneously love the fuck out of Morrowind but I don't think Oblivion turned the various races into anything they weren't already portrayed as.
Visually, not mechanically.
Argonians and Khajiit had unique physical shapes being digitigrades and Argonians in particular had a lot more variety and very differently shaped heads.
I distinctly remember scrolling through the races in the Oblivion character creator and busting out laughing clicking back and forth between Human and Argonian because it was like they slipped on a cheap halloween mask
I haven't forgiven Oblivion for turning every non-human race into "human-wearing-a-furry/scaly-suit"
Also for taking away spears
tbh I'm expecting the next Elder Scrolls game to be "You are a human and you can modify your skin tone a bit, you have a sword and a shield. And, ugh, I guess you can maybe use magic to like, I dunno, heal something a bit? Look it's not really our problem, the modders will fix it."
Oh, so back to Arena interpretations of the races!
I appreciate Oblivion in a lot of ways for being a return to, well-- the more generic kinda high fantasy from Arena and Daggerfall. I also simultaneously love the fuck out of Morrowind but I don't think Oblivion turned the various races into anything they weren't already portrayed as.
Visually, not mechanically.
Argonians and Khajiit had unique physical shapes being digitigrades and Argonians in particular had a lot more variety and very differently shaped heads.
I distinctly remember scrolling through the races in the Oblivion character creator and busting out laughing clicking back and forth between Human and Argonian because it was like they slipped on a cheap halloween mask
I did miss that unique property going from Morrowind to Oblivion, but the change did mean Argonians and Khajit could finally wear boots. That restriction caught a number of people by surprise in Morrowind.
I haven't forgiven Oblivion for turning every non-human race into "human-wearing-a-furry/scaly-suit"
Also for taking away spears
tbh I'm expecting the next Elder Scrolls game to be "You are a human and you can modify your skin tone a bit, you have a sword and a shield. And, ugh, I guess you can maybe use magic to like, I dunno, heal something a bit? Look it's not really our problem, the modders will fix it."
Oh, so back to Arena interpretations of the races!
I appreciate Oblivion in a lot of ways for being a return to, well-- the more generic kinda high fantasy from Arena and Daggerfall. I also simultaneously love the fuck out of Morrowind but I don't think Oblivion turned the various races into anything they weren't already portrayed as.
Visually, not mechanically.
Argonians and Khajiit had unique physical shapes being digitigrades and Argonians in particular had a lot more variety and very differently shaped heads.
I distinctly remember scrolling through the races in the Oblivion character creator and busting out laughing clicking back and forth between Human and Argonian because it was like they slipped on a cheap halloween mask
I, too, meant visually.
Arena:
Daggerfall:
Plantigrade humanoids, shit they didn't even have scales or tails in Arena!
Again, I'm not saying the Morrowind Argonians and Khajit WEREN'T awesome, cause they were.
But Oblivion also was a return to what they had been pre-Morrowind, not a radical departure from what they had been in the series.
Yea magic was always the real power move in morrowind.
Like. You can buff your mercantile and nuke your targets mercantile in order to make training hella cheap. You can buff your targets skills to make any trainer able to train any skill to 100. And if you get 115 in enchanting any activated item only costs 1 charge no matter what it does.
None of that is combat, though. (Again, if one-shotting your foe from a safe distance without them ever knowing you're there counts as "combat".)
I haven't forgiven Oblivion for turning every non-human race into "human-wearing-a-furry/scaly-suit"
Also for taking away spears
tbh I'm expecting the next Elder Scrolls game to be "You are a human and you can modify your skin tone a bit, you have a sword and a shield. And, ugh, I guess you can maybe use magic to like, I dunno, heal something a bit? Look it's not really our problem, the modders will fix it."
Oh, so back to Arena interpretations of the races!
I appreciate Oblivion in a lot of ways for being a return to, well-- the more generic kinda high fantasy from Arena and Daggerfall. I also simultaneously love the fuck out of Morrowind but I don't think Oblivion turned the various races into anything they weren't already portrayed as.
Visually, not mechanically.
Argonians and Khajiit had unique physical shapes being digitigrades and Argonians in particular had a lot more variety and very differently shaped heads.
I distinctly remember scrolling through the races in the Oblivion character creator and busting out laughing clicking back and forth between Human and Argonian because it was like they slipped on a cheap halloween mask
I, too, meant visually.
Arena:
Daggerfall:
Plantigrade humanoids, shit they didn't even have scales or tails in Arena!
Again, I'm not saying the Morrowind Argonians and Khajit WEREN'T awesome, cause they were.
But Oblivion also was a return to what they had been pre-Morrowind, not a radical departure from what they had been in the series.
I mean "a return to pixel art" isn't exactly compelling
There's a lot of things from Arena and Daggerfall that should never see the light of day and "we couldn't even afford art" is probably one of them!
We've been talking about beastfolk losing their weird feet in Oblivion, but everyone's heights being standardized in Skyrim is just as bad. I miss High Elves being NBA all-stars and Wood Elves being Santa's helpers.
Learning Dwarves are a subspecies of Elf in Elder Scrolls lore wasn't that surprising back when there was already an extant race of Elves who where half the size of everyone else.
Not that the above was a joke, but in ACTUAL "oh hey it's finally out" news, The Great City of Winterhold version 4 finally dropped and it looks fantastic. It's not done done (he plans on adding NPCs and such), but we're just about done patching for it, and I highly recommend giving it a look - it genuinely feels like an "abandoned" city. Jelidity put together a patch which combines TGCW city with COTN's castle.
Here's the COTN mod author showcasing an ENB preset he's working on while walking around it the city and such:
Not that it isn't magnificent in its own way--but in continuity with the general design direction, I still prefer JK's interpretation of Winterhold, which is not a massive stone fortress (or the remains of one), but a formerly affluent city in that pre-medieval Scandinavian style, that had a a very cleat cut-off when part of it sank into the sea. It's clearly fallen on hard times, but it's substantial enough to compare to Solitude, Windhelm, Whiterun, etc., while remaining short of it.
The irony is that, I actually think that rustic style is ugly in general in video games, but seems much more natural to Skyrim's "vision", with less dissonance when you go into the wooden insides of cottages, warehouses, etc. If I wasn't using JK's compilation, though, this would be the first place I'd look--I do use The Great Cities compilation....for minor towns and villages.
(Not that any of that matters, seeing how I still can't play the game right now anyway.)
We've been talking about beastfolk losing their weird feet in Oblivion, but everyone's heights being standardized in Skyrim is just as bad. I miss High Elves being NBA all-stars and Wood Elves being Santa's helpers.
Learning Dwarves are a subspecies of Elf in Elder Scrolls lore wasn't that surprising back when there was already an extant race of Elves who where half the size of everyone else.
it's honestly a nice thing in ESO that Bosmer are Wee Lil Folks and Altmer are FUCKOFF HUEG.
It has ZERO gameplay relevance but you can REALLY tell when you're just derping around in a city. A miniumum height Bosmer is WEE, and a maximum height Altmer is HUEG.
(My max height Orismer, Princess Punchfist, routinely gets angrey at max height Altmer, who have a whole TWO INCHES on her. TWO INCHES! an affront to Malacath to be sure.)
We've been talking about beastfolk losing their weird feet in Oblivion, but everyone's heights being standardized in Skyrim is just as bad. I miss High Elves being NBA all-stars and Wood Elves being Santa's helpers.
Learning Dwarves are a subspecies of Elf in Elder Scrolls lore wasn't that surprising back when there was already an extant race of Elves who where half the size of everyone else.
it's honestly a nice thing in ESO that Bosmer are Wee Lil Folks and Altmer are FUCKOFF HUEG.
It has ZERO gameplay relevance but you can REALLY tell when you're just derping around in a city. A miniumum height Bosmer is WEE, and a maximum height Altmer is HUEG.
(My max height Orismer, Princess Punchfist, routinely gets angrey at max height Altmer, who have a whole TWO INCHES on her. TWO INCHES! an affront to Malacath to be sure.)
The lack of gameplay relevance is a big part of why it works well all around in ESO. In the non-online games, there's a link between movement speed and height and Morrowind Bosmer were slower than Orcs and Nords. I suspect that's part of why they normalized the heights in Skyrim: They wanted more even movement speed but probably couldn't separate it from leg length or something in the engine. All in all, a very Bethesda way to try and resolve the issue.
Easy, just adjust the lore so that Bosmer are still tiny, but their legs are the same length as an Altmer. So what if it's disproportionate, it's what makes them good runners and climbers and sneakers!
Yeah, it's not going to be a matter of "push this new button on the menu screen and everything will automatically look more awesome." More like "download half a dozen mods that were made with this new tool, and then be sure to set this mode to enable them when you start playing."
We've been talking about beastfolk losing their weird feet in Oblivion, but everyone's heights being standardized in Skyrim is just as bad. I miss High Elves being NBA all-stars and Wood Elves being Santa's helpers.
Learning Dwarves are a subspecies of Elf in Elder Scrolls lore wasn't that surprising back when there was already an extant race of Elves who where half the size of everyone else.
it's honestly a nice thing in ESO that Bosmer are Wee Lil Folks and Altmer are FUCKOFF HUEG.
It has ZERO gameplay relevance but you can REALLY tell when you're just derping around in a city. A miniumum height Bosmer is WEE, and a maximum height Altmer is HUEG.
(My max height Orismer, Princess Punchfist, routinely gets angrey at max height Altmer, who have a whole TWO INCHES on her. TWO INCHES! an affront to Malacath to be sure.)
The lack of gameplay relevance is a big part of why it works well all around in ESO. In the non-online games, there's a link between movement speed and height and Morrowind Bosmer were slower than Orcs and Nords. I suspect that's part of why they normalized the heights in Skyrim: They wanted more even movement speed but probably couldn't separate it from leg length or something in the engine. All in all, a very Bethesda way to try and resolve the issue.
It's even simpler than that. If races have different body proportions, it can make apparel look funny. Textures will look stretched out, bulkier armor will have clipping issues etc.
Standardizing heights means they can create two bodies, male and female, and just slap different heads on them. Drastically decreases the amount of work they have to do to make apparel look good.
Basically, there's going to be hooks for old DX8/9 games which allow them to use RTX features in mods or something along those lines, if my understanding is correct, but their before/after is "vanilla vs a modded version that ALSO has this other stuff" thing - it's adding more clutter, has textures that are bump mapped, etc.
It's neat tech from what I can see, but the before/after video comparisons aren't really likely to be fully accurate, either.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that of at least 90% of the audience for the video, the first thing they see isn't the ray-traced lighting. It's the total model asset swap, something equivalent to Skyrim's SMIM, but for Morrowind, which is literally two generations older and originally came with object geometry that matched that. Morrowind very obviously has complete lighting overhauls that are massive improvements over the original model, even if they're not as nice as this.
I finally watched that "magical improved graphics for Morrowind" video, and the first thing that jumped out at me was how the "modern graphics" video completely drained the tone and personality of Morrowind right out, partially by changing the lighting from cool, blue tones to warmer ones, and partially by changing the art aesthetic (which was heavily constrained by the technology of the time) to something a lot closer to photorealism. I'm not saying that this is inherently bad or anything, I just personally thing it's a lot more bland and a lot less interesting than the original art.
I finally watched that "magical improved graphics for Morrowind" video, and the first thing that jumped out at me was how the "modern graphics" video completely drained the tone and personality of Morrowind right out, partially by changing the lighting from cool, blue tones to warmer ones, and partially by changing the art aesthetic (which was heavily constrained by the technology of the time) to something a lot closer to photorealism. I'm not saying that this is inherently bad or anything, I just personally thing it's a lot more bland and a lot less interesting than the original art.
It removes a lot of the visual shorthand morrowind had to rely on by completely redoing how scenes are lit. Everything ends up that bland orange yellow from a flame like lightsource, as opposed to all mages guilds being inexplicably blue but it meant you always knew you were in a mages guild (Caldera excepted) because it was just so very blue.
I finally watched that "magical improved graphics for Morrowind" video, and the first thing that jumped out at me was how the "modern graphics" video completely drained the tone and personality of Morrowind right out, partially by changing the lighting from cool, blue tones to warmer ones, and partially by changing the art aesthetic (which was heavily constrained by the technology of the time) to something a lot closer to photorealism. I'm not saying that this is inherently bad or anything, I just personally thing it's a lot more bland and a lot less interesting than the original art.
It's not exclusive to Morrowind obviously. A lot of games had what we could literally call "bespoke lighting"; ray tracing, as a literal concept, wipes that out. Sometimes RT lighting isn't better, contrary to a sort of assumption a lot of proponents of the technology would assume is gospel.
I went ahead and got the Anniversary Edition of Skyrim on gog. Just to have a DRM free version.
Honestly, I might see myself doing the same thing as an insurance policy.
Though there's a number of games I own exclusively via GOG (mostly out of a distaste of Steam DRM, assuming it's an option at all, which it frequently isn't), Bethesda Games in the past had liabilities that their mod scenes were sometimes dependent on Steam for setting the pace of updates, or even something more closed-off. But that's generally no longer the case, and as the most recent update showed, there are cases where you might really want to avoid updating or roll back one.
I got Fallout 3, Oblivion, and New Vegas off gog just to have a complete package of the games and DLCs.
I wish gog would let you pull all your games down at once and back them up. Have a backup program that lets you know how much space the installers for all your games would take up.
Been feeling the urge to play Skyrim again. I was thinking about getting the PS5 version, so I checked it out on the store. Turns out it's free to download and play if you have a PS4 disc. So I am going to borrow my buddies disc and get my 3rd platinum, 4th 100% since I originally bought it on Xbox 360. It's a shame no one else has quite done what Bethesda does. Would be interested in seeing what they would do with some actual competition.
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Oh, so back to Arena interpretations of the races!
I appreciate Oblivion in a lot of ways for being a return to, well-- the more generic kinda high fantasy from Arena and Daggerfall. I also simultaneously love the fuck out of Morrowind but I don't think Oblivion turned the various races into anything they weren't already portrayed as.
Better to address problems before consumers become so fed up with them that they affect sales.
Bethesda knows this, on some level. They listen to feedback, to an extent. Starfield is ditching the voiced protagonist from Fallout 4. It has eighty skills, only a fifth of which are direct combat skills. It brings back classes in a way that doesn't make the player beholden to them throughout their entire playthrough. They've promised more handcrafted content than any previous game they've made. These are all responses to feedback they've gotten over their last few games, mostly Fallout 4.
Rumor has it that Bethesda is very aware their QA problem. Their previous owner, Zenimax, wouldn't give them funding for proper testing or post-release patching. If Skyrim was so popular despite its many problems, imagine what a fully developed Elder Scrolls game could achieve.
Microsoft is imagining it.
My observations over the years lead me to believe that ones memories of Oblivion hinges on whether they played a stealth character. The DB and Thieves Guild quest lines blow the Fighters and Mages Guild questlines out of the water to such a degree that I feel sorry for the latter's writers.
Even before I replayed the game, I still remembered most of the DB missions and a good chunk of the Thieves Guild missions clearly even after over a decade. They had so many details to them that other quests didn't. In the DB mansion quest, if it was down to two targets left, one of the two left didn't like the other, and you had persuaded or charmed that one enough they would assume the other remaining target is the murderer at which point the AI would look for the nearest weapon laying around and kill the second to last victim for you, something that was mindblowing to see back then. In the quest to kill a mother and her four adult children all over the world, if the mother was dead you could goad one of the children into attacking you by saying his mother died screaming and watch a guardsman jump in to help you. You could get extra/early confirmation of the DB's final antagonist if you looted his mother's head from his hidden lair and dropped it in front of the group of suspects: the antagonist understandably freaks out more than the others. These are all entirely optional things on top of the optional objectives that netted you a contract bonus. The analogous quests in Morrowind and Skyrim don't have the same level of detail though they're still great in their own right. They're just more straightforward assassination contracts/writs.
The Oblivion Thieves Guild quests weren't as well scripted (see previous mention of not acknowledging if you were the Archmage they asked you to steal from) but still lead up to a memorable grand heist. It's the first time in the series you get to see the Moth Priests and an actual Elder Scroll. Unusually for the game, it's also a quest that has stakes since you can fail: Get caught and arrested in the Imperial Palace and you won't be able to get back in via the hidden entrance you used.
Being a stealth character also has the benefit of being able to just sneak past most of the combat slog areas, notably the Oblivion Gates. Combat has always been a weak part of the series (and a big part of why I restarted Morrowind as a stealth character back in the day and have since stuck to that archetype) so speeding it up and minimizing it go a long way towards making the experience better. Of course, knowing that I can just skip most of the gates helps a lot as well. Those are easily one of the weakest parts of Oblivion's design.
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Sure, I could rush in and engage everything with melee or magic... or I could sneak around, find the quest target, and delete it with guaranteed (and sometimes poison-enhanced) crits.
But yeah all the problems mentioned are definitely there. It showed flashes of brilliance but never really rises up to being great.
Most definitely, oblivion had a quest design philosophy that favored stealth a ton. I was always a bit disappointed more of that kind of thing didn’t make it into skyrim. Skyrim just tended to use “go do this dungeon” as a crutch too much. Oblivion would be like “you need to kill this guy, go break into his house after midnight and kill him in his sleep.” Where skyrim would be like “you need to kill this guy, go find him at his hideout in a room at the bottom of a dungeon full of bandits”
Also I felt like Oblivion and Fallout 3 came at a time when Bethesda was ironically much better at doing shorter set pieces than tying together a big giant story (this period has arguably never ended but it was really bad back then). Like Shivering Isles, the Pitt, Point lookout were all great, and there were quest sequences in Oblivion and Fallout 3 that were pretty good, but the main quests of both games were pretty bad, both in and of themselves and as a narrative device to tie the games together as a whole.
IIRC you only have to do maybe 4 or 5 to finish the game if that, and most of those are bespoke main quest dungeon gates.
Edit: there are also some optional ones for the main quest in the Allies for Bruma part which can make the main quest easier but aren’t required. Regardless if you haven’t been specifically sent to an oblivion gate by a quest (as in you have an actual quest arrow over the gate) you can safely ignore it.
I wouldn't say Morrowind nudged people towards being a stealth archer so much given that ranged weapons didn't get sneak attacks. Even two handed weapons got sneak attack bonuses so my first stealth character spent a lot of time sneaking up on enemies/targets to smack them with a two handed sword. On the other hand, it had Cliff Racers so you were strongly encouraged to have a ranged option of some kind.
Even in Skyrim I still prefer to get a melee sneak attack off if it's an option. A damage multiplier of 30 with a dagger and the DB gloves is big enough to one hit kill dragons if you catch one snoozing atop a word wall. It's not always a viable option though, especially at low levels when your Sneak skill isn't great and bow crits are good enough to really thin out a pack if there's multiple enemies or at least severely injure a higher tier version of a bandit/draugr/etc.
There's an odd dynamic in play with Skyrim especially where the dungeons are clearly not designed for stealth in mind but stealth with perks gets so effective that enemies stop being able to see you even from a few feet in front of you without a light source. It ends up working out for stealth characters but in a really immersion-breaking way. I'm hoping future games update the dungeon creation to at least have wider corridors to allow for things to actually hide behind so stealth doesn't have to be an invisibility cloak to maintain usefulness outside of quests designed for it.
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Like. You can buff your mercantile and nuke your targets mercantile in order to make training hella cheap. You can buff your targets skills to make any trainer able to train any skill to 100. And if you get 115 in enchanting any activated item only costs 1 charge no matter what it does.
Visually, not mechanically.
Argonians and Khajiit had unique physical shapes being digitigrades and Argonians in particular had a lot more variety and very differently shaped heads.
I distinctly remember scrolling through the races in the Oblivion character creator and busting out laughing clicking back and forth between Human and Argonian because it was like they slipped on a cheap halloween mask
I did miss that unique property going from Morrowind to Oblivion, but the change did mean Argonians and Khajit could finally wear boots. That restriction caught a number of people by surprise in Morrowind.
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I, too, meant visually.
Arena:
Daggerfall:
Plantigrade humanoids, shit they didn't even have scales or tails in Arena!
Again, I'm not saying the Morrowind Argonians and Khajit WEREN'T awesome, cause they were.
But Oblivion also was a return to what they had been pre-Morrowind, not a radical departure from what they had been in the series.
None of that is combat, though. (Again, if one-shotting your foe from a safe distance without them ever knowing you're there counts as "combat".)
I mean "a return to pixel art" isn't exactly compelling
There's a lot of things from Arena and Daggerfall that should never see the light of day and "we couldn't even afford art" is probably one of them!
Learning Dwarves are a subspecies of Elf in Elder Scrolls lore wasn't that surprising back when there was already an extant race of Elves who where half the size of everyone else.
Not that it isn't magnificent in its own way--but in continuity with the general design direction, I still prefer JK's interpretation of Winterhold, which is not a massive stone fortress (or the remains of one), but a formerly affluent city in that pre-medieval Scandinavian style, that had a a very cleat cut-off when part of it sank into the sea. It's clearly fallen on hard times, but it's substantial enough to compare to Solitude, Windhelm, Whiterun, etc., while remaining short of it.
The irony is that, I actually think that rustic style is ugly in general in video games, but seems much more natural to Skyrim's "vision", with less dissonance when you go into the wooden insides of cottages, warehouses, etc. If I wasn't using JK's compilation, though, this would be the first place I'd look--I do use The Great Cities compilation....for minor towns and villages.
(Not that any of that matters, seeing how I still can't play the game right now anyway.)
it's honestly a nice thing in ESO that Bosmer are Wee Lil Folks and Altmer are FUCKOFF HUEG.
It has ZERO gameplay relevance but you can REALLY tell when you're just derping around in a city. A miniumum height Bosmer is WEE, and a maximum height Altmer is HUEG.
(My max height Orismer, Princess Punchfist, routinely gets angrey at max height Altmer, who have a whole TWO INCHES on her. TWO INCHES! an affront to Malacath to be sure.)
The lack of gameplay relevance is a big part of why it works well all around in ESO. In the non-online games, there's a link between movement speed and height and Morrowind Bosmer were slower than Orcs and Nords. I suspect that's part of why they normalized the heights in Skyrim: They wanted more even movement speed but probably couldn't separate it from leg length or something in the engine. All in all, a very Bethesda way to try and resolve the issue.
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It's even simpler than that. If races have different body proportions, it can make apparel look funny. Textures will look stretched out, bulkier armor will have clipping issues etc.
Standardizing heights means they can create two bodies, male and female, and just slap different heads on them. Drastically decreases the amount of work they have to do to make apparel look good.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that of at least 90% of the audience for the video, the first thing they see isn't the ray-traced lighting. It's the total model asset swap, something equivalent to Skyrim's SMIM, but for Morrowind, which is literally two generations older and originally came with object geometry that matched that. Morrowind very obviously has complete lighting overhauls that are massive improvements over the original model, even if they're not as nice as this.
It removes a lot of the visual shorthand morrowind had to rely on by completely redoing how scenes are lit. Everything ends up that bland orange yellow from a flame like lightsource, as opposed to all mages guilds being inexplicably blue but it meant you always knew you were in a mages guild (Caldera excepted) because it was just so very blue.
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
It's not exclusive to Morrowind obviously. A lot of games had what we could literally call "bespoke lighting"; ray tracing, as a literal concept, wipes that out. Sometimes RT lighting isn't better, contrary to a sort of assumption a lot of proponents of the technology would assume is gospel.
Honestly, I might see myself doing the same thing as an insurance policy.
Though there's a number of games I own exclusively via GOG (mostly out of a distaste of Steam DRM, assuming it's an option at all, which it frequently isn't), Bethesda Games in the past had liabilities that their mod scenes were sometimes dependent on Steam for setting the pace of updates, or even something more closed-off. But that's generally no longer the case, and as the most recent update showed, there are cases where you might really want to avoid updating or roll back one.
I wish gog would let you pull all your games down at once and back them up. Have a backup program that lets you know how much space the installers for all your games would take up.
PSN:Furlion
Oh while i'm here, did they fix the Skyrim patch that's broken all the Magnum Opus mod lists?
Checks out