RealRT said:
Deus Ex, for one, also had a mix of stats and action combat, but when you see a bullet hit a person, it actually hits a person...
Funnily enough I could never stomach to finish that game because I came to it very late, and couldn't stand its Mass Effect 1 style wandering crosshairs to represent skill progression with weapons (that, and the ugly visuals, iffy script, and b-movie voice acting about on par with Oblivion).
Yeah, it's keep hitting attack. Which is better than "keep hitting attack and hope that at least half of your attacks actually do something despite it clearly showing you landing them".
Okay, let's get detail-y...
Is melee combat in-game a 1:1 representation of your character's actions? Or an expression of combat involvement? It's a given combat in these kinds of games is unrealistic; no warrior circle strafes or swishes their longsword around whilst conveniently moving their shield (if equipped) out of the way. It is unrealistic that blocking with a blade should incur damage at all (extra stamina drain would make much more sense), given weapons are used for offence and defence, but this is done out of an attempt at balancing skills.
What occurs when the player hits the attack key is, essentially, an abstract representation of the character's ability and the player's choices. So in
that context I feel dice rolls for hits is pretty reasonable. There is no skill required to wield a weapon in Oblivion or Skyrim, nor mechanically and skill wise in Morrowind - it's just a silly, physics free exchange of two in-game actors waving their arms about and hitboxes sorting out what connects before factoring in armour/damage/health values.
...remember, I'm certainly not advocating that Morrowind's solution is a stroke of genius. But it at least makes combat truly tethered to your build, and so RP's and builds
mean more.
Ideally, I'd want more of a skill based, more realistic Dark Souls [1] vibe in terms of melee actually being about timing/distance. Have weapons interact with the geometry around you to make them distinct, and steer away from lazy damage sponge nonsense so combat is consequential.
But I digress...
Oh, I dunno, maybe the fact that even if you max out agility, speed and pickpocketing, your chances of a successful pickpocket without being caught are so low you are better off buying a lottery ticket. There's a reason Morrowind Code Patch reworked the whole chance calculation system to make the skill actually useable.
I must've played after any patches were released, because I don't recall any major issues with the system.
Oblivion's journal was perfectly fine. You had quests with a short description for each stage of the quest that got you up to the point on what happened. You could find any of your current or finished quests without any trouble at all.
I'd maybe concede Oblivion's journal was the least worst of the major mainline TES's, but 'it has the least worst X' isn't a ringing endorsement, and I still prefer the concept of Morrowind's journal, if not the execution (certainly after returning to a playthrough after weeks or months away).
TES had fast-travel back in Arena and Daggerfall, Oblivion didn't add it, it brought it back...
Arena was set in Tamriel - Daggerfall in an entire [woefully realised] bay. Even I wouldn't demand people trek across a world or a continent.
Vvardenfell, however, was part of one richly detailed province and therefore didn't necessitate such shortcuts.
What about all those ruins, small villages, Ashlander camps? No transport goes there.
...you
walk. Simples!
Dragon Age Inquisition was ostensibly set in two entire nations. Yet the game felt tiny, largely for one major reason; there was no consequence or context for travel, and all you saw of each land was a portioned off zone you teleported to. No time had passed, no journey was remarked on, and as a result space was compressed. They felt like disconnected levels in a videogame, not parts of a connected world.
Vvardenfell has a genuine sense of coherent place because you were required to traverse its space, and the more you played the more options you had for getting around quicker (rewarding preparation and invested time/effort).
And fuck Propylons and their dog because I'm SO not going on a bug-ridden quest that would enable me to use new points of fast travel... only, of course, I would need to be of sufficient level to perform it, which means I'd do it in the later stages of the game, by which point I would have no need of it.
The player being rewarded for their effort and punished for not
giving to
get a little? Perish the thought!
As I intimated, I wouldn't really count those chambers as modes of travel within the game as features. I value them for how it gives the player options (esoteric rewards for the very hardiest of adventurers or collectors of obscure artifacts), and how it enriches the land's sense of reality given those strongholds and their secrets represent Vvardenfell's murky, violent, mysterious history.
Well then just turn off the arrow. You can do it in Skyrim. In Oblivion you can just switch to a different quest. Boom. Problem solved. No more arrows.
No, not problem solved at all ('problem slightly fudged temporarily', at best) because - as with fast-travel - Oblivion and Skyrim are games
designed for arrows and fast-travel. You cannot use alternate means if none are given.
And yeah, Morrowind went to the other extreme of the arrow spectrum, not even marking the quest objective on your map and giving you vague descriptions like "Oh, go find that ancestral tomb, somewhat south, between two dwemer ruins" and having THREE ancestral tombs fit those descriptions.
That's exactly how I want it again, or with a few exceptions depending on context but I'll get to that in a sec.
Morrowind required you to
pay attention to actual directions, to look at the very world around you or your map (in-game or printed) instead of a patronising magic arrow that you had to follow because you had no other help or aid.
And "discovery" has nothing to do with it. Because (and it'll probably be a shock to you but hear me out) when I'm doing a quest, I actually only care about that one particular quest. When I want to explore, I do it on my own volition. If when looking for the objective I only "discover" a bunch of stuff that I don't need for that quest, it only serves to irritate me.
No, you misunderstand, or perhaps I worded it poorly. When I talk of a sense of real, personal discovery I mean how the spec-ops magi-compass in Oblivion and Skyrim denied the player the reward of using their eyes and ears to learn for themselves precisely what was over a nearby ridge.
I can fault Bethesda for a hundred and one issues, but I think my biggest bugbear since Oblivion was in how they forced icons onto the compass, and the impact that had on a genuine sense of exploration and personal discovery. Morrowind's manual touches on one of the most powerful plus points of the series; you have the option to go where the story or a quest wants you to, or you can look off to the side, see a verge, and sate your curiosity about what's beyond.
In Morrowind? I discovered entire ruins beginning with a block or two of dwemer or daedric stonework. The world unfolded realistically as if I were a newcomer, perhaps stumbling into dangerous regions I shouldn't be.
From Oblivion on? Given I've played on console since then, I've not had a single moment of discovery or exploration which matched countless moments in Morrowind. The idiot-compass would tell me - whether I wanted to know or not - what was over that ridge. The mystery was stripped away, and as a result Bethesda's worlds became filler placed between POI's (the icons). 'What's over that ridge?' was a question satisfied by looking at the bottom or top of the screen, not walking forward and treating the land as if it were real, and I was standing right there.
(adding red pips for enemy locations was more salt into the wound; why use your eyes and ears for enemy cues when you can just look at the cheat-oh-compass? why Bethesda never allowed all players to customise their shitty HUD's/UI's I'll never know. thank feck for mods)
Re waypoints placed on the map (meaning you must open the map to see it)? Yeah, for certain quests and tasks that absolutely makes sense. But for other key quests and tasks, Bethesda could provide the player with Morrowind-esque instructions. If you're searching for a long lost tomb, it should not have a big flashing neon sign pointing the PC towards it. In Morrowind when searching for the Cave of the Incarnate (I think, it's been a while), you need to look out for a certain valley configuration from one of two directions and then explore deeper. That is another example of the sense of discovery - which also reinforces and emphasises the mystery of these places and the story.
Bethesda are numpties, frankly, for simply thinking they need to provide arrows and map markers and never mix things up with more exploratory approaches, which reward the player for effort and observation skills.
As another solution to their wayward design, how about having NPC's
ask whether you want to have your map marked after they've given you a brief description of where you need to head? That would provide arrows for those only caring about perfunctory A-to-B journeys (about ticking off checklists and 'advancing' the story), as well as give those looking for a more realistic sense of adventure a choice to challenge themselves and be rewarded accordingly.
Also, I remember how I spent hours looking for the goddamn Bonebitter bow because the directions ot the cave were vague at best and the bow was on the body of the ancestral ghost which looked like every other goddamn ancestral ghost in the bloody game and I actually had to look up in CS where the bloody thing is.
I have a similar memory of Morrowind - I'm sure all who've played it at length have. It was the hunt for Mehrunes Razor, I think, and it didn't take me hours - it took me days (about a week or more in-game time). I made my temporary HQ Molag Mar, which I would return to after each sortie. The room at the inn had an increasing amount of loot dumped around the bed and floor.
It became frustrating, sure. But y'know what? It also became one of my fondest memories in all my years playing TES, because I built it into my RP, and that sequence of events helped change the course of my character in a way I hadn't planned or predicted.
I also remember another incident where the actual instructions were wrong or just plain terrible. And y'know what? I
enjoyed that, because to me it felt realistic - people don't always give good directions... (again, no, I'm not demanding all games start including bad directions: but a sense of character can be found in flaws as well, and that was one example in Morrowind which enriched my own experience)
And yes! Not using the fast travel IS a solution, you just choose not to use it.
As I said: no, it's not,
when the game is designed to use a given system. If the player chooses not to use it, they are simply being punished given Bethesda are lazy arses who don't like giving people choices. Morrowind was had no lazy magic zipping about, sure, but it was built to give the player options; a good hiking was required in many instances, as I believe it should, but you had all the options I mentioned - plus more esoteric ones such as levitation or simply leaping across the map in a few bounds, provided you had the means to land safely.
You could also enchant for speed, or don those boots which made you streak across the land at the same time as making you blind...
Given Skyrim's Radiant quests for crappy little tasks could be anywhere (the Dawnguard's tasks I mentioned is an apt example), players looking for lore-friendly means to travel without walking the whole journey have no options. In Vvardenfell you could use a combination of choices to get you closer to where you needed to be, and then perhaps use Recall to skip the return journey in a lore-friendly manner.
...or make your character an absolute narcoleptic who falls dead asleep after every major encounter and THAT is SO RP-positive.
Well, it's good to know Bethesda don't repeat such mistakes a decade later, right? Fallout 4's Survival save mode made
all kinds of sense... (before someone promptly fixed their design choice with modding)
Re potions: eh, I can only go from my own experiences, and I remember no issues with potion availability. I can't recall how Oblivion did things, but Skyrim and Fallout 4 dole out healing options like confetti, which given you can cheat combat entirely by spamming potions in the menus, made almost any encounter meaningless if you had enough healing options (Dark Souls' forced pause in combat is something I hope to see many more RPG's implement).
Well ain't that typical of a Morrowind fan.
I call a spade a spade, and a dumbed down TES a dumbed down TES. Morrowind was the last game that felt like they were designing an experience (of consequences, challenge, lore nuance) for me. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 are games 'for everyone' - hence why they have no real sense of identity any more.
Again, don't get me wrong; I've enjoyed many,
many hours on all those games (as dumb as F4 is I'm still playing it). But they are increasingly soulless, casual creations bereft of real vision. Given their history of junking or compromising their own fascinatingly weird lore, I'm deeply skeptical they'll do justice to any of their other lands and cultures in the next installment. I'd love for Kirkbride to come back and just go nuts... but that would represent a risk, and a distinct creative statement. Better we have what is familiar; medieval pastiche and grimdark-lite Norse realms.
I'm sorry, but since when green and brown Vvardenfell a visually interesting setting? A swamp and a couple of forests aside, most of the island is a barren wasteland. And if we're allowed to pick expansions, then I'd pick the dual swampy-sunny shores of Shivering Isles over any of the above any day of the week.
I wasn't just referring to the colour, hence why I mentioned more than that.
Vvardenfell alone had the swampy coastline (dotted with some wonderfully detailed little fishing villages), the ashen slopes courtesy of Red Mountain (dramatic be it in good weather, ash, or Blight storms. quite hellish when near daedric ruins in particular), the verdant Grazelands, the oversize flora, and so on.
Then you have the architectural and cultural diversity; boxy European Empire settlements and forts, dunmer settlements, the Ashlander villages, the sprawling cantons of Vivec City with its oppressively mystic trappings overhead, the Telvanni outposts, Ald'ruhn's city of-- well, bone, and so on. Throw in a hundred and one little islands around the coasts, and the sounds of the silt striders crying out across those landscapes, and you had a remarkably otherworldly, imaginative, and at times alien world.
Solstheim brings blizzards and glacial wastes, whilst Mournhold brings a new, opulent capital (replete with murderous warrens/sewers, of course).
Regardless of what someone makes of Morrowind's mechanics or aged foibles, by comparison Oblivion and Skyrim are safe and conventional - and I'd argue those have been design watchwords of Bethesda ever since.
