Features/functions without limitations ARE going to be exploited by players to the logical extreme. They always will. And that is why your analogy is not appropriate, because grenade launcher ammo being limited is, ironically enough, a LIMITATION, and like i said earlier, limitations can be good. Even though there isn't infinite grenade launcher ammunition, Modern Warfare still allows you to play with it for a while, which is enough. You don't see the min-maxer complaining that there isn't infinite loot in the keep either do you? The mere fact that there is limited ammunition in Modern Warfare is in itself an appropriate limitation which only hightens the fun, because it makes the time that you actually CARRY the grenade launcher more enjoyable, knowing that you can't do it all the time.Jonluw said:But including a function in the game is not the same as inviting the players to take it to its logical extreme.
Modern warfare lets you use grenade launchers. Is the fact that there isn't enought grenade launcher ammunition in the game to let the tube-enthusiasts play through the game using only that? No, I wouldn't say so.
An "invitation" is something that carries a benefit (either related to gameplay and enjoyment). Running into a tree has no benefit (unless you for some obscure reason find it funny, in which case I'd say i find you a strange human being) so there is no reason to do it.Levethian said:Not sure Skyrim invites players to indiscriminately pick up every item in every dungeon and trawl it back home repeatedly for hours non-stop, any more than it invites players to run into a tree.Athinira said:What i mean by that is that if a game INVITES you to do something, but then makes doing that something unenjoyable/sucky (for whatever reason), then it shouldn't have invited you to do that something in the first place.
I don't think Skyrim actively invites any manner of play, except by occasionally pushing quests in your face and making enemies hostile - it just lets you play how you like. That's the TES mantra I think, and long may it remain so.
Maybe, but I am not one of those. I don't play video games as often as I'd like, so when I play an open world game (or any game), I want to feel like I am actually doing something with the short amounts of time I put into it. With games like Fallout, Skyrim, and even Borderlands, there sometimes feels like there is never any progression when people don't give two shits about you. It feels like your not doing anything.Zachary Amaranth said:Isn't open and without consequence exactly what gamers want out of Skyrim, though?
I know. The limit is quite unrealistic. What I see it as is introducing a semblance of realism, while catering to the common player's need to carry many items, while avoiding absolute imbalance.TheMatsjo said:Just a funny little tidbit: I like how you call having a carrying limit realistic in a game where you can carry a dozen pieces of armor without as much as a back pack.Jonluw said:I don't think "people who need to have all the gold in the game" is such a big subgroup of RPG gamers that Bethesda should sacrifice realism
I agree, they are casting a wide net."A Jack of all trades is a master of none."Athinira said:A game that invites you to play in many different ways and SUCCEED in making all of them enjoyable is after all a rare gem that should be treasured.
I respect both of your viewpoints, I think an accurate summary would be that you have a fundamental disagreement over what this game should try to accomplish.
The Elder Scrolls series has gone the way of the jack of all trades, offering many things, but excelling in very little. This is a very justifiable choice, especially considering the mod-ability of the games. It's a compromise on many levels that delivers an extremely diverse, but ultimately hollow experience. So yes (Jonluw), the game is geared to cast a very wide net.
If TES had gone the way of the master it would have by necessity (in all likelihood) have become a far more narrow, focused game. I agree that if a game includes something, it can also be criticised on those aspects if it fails to deliver. So yes, from a mastery standpoint Skyrim fails in many ways to deliver on its promises. I think your (Athinira) criticisms are valid, but I think it's been a conscious choice on Bethesda's part.
The only way to satisfy both viewpoints would be to build a master of all trades game, but that's quite a tall order. I think Bethesda chose to go the way of the jack of all trades, and so far it's worked out well for them, and offers a lot of something for everyone. But, I do agree with the OP.
PS: just realised my wording's not exactly smooth, but I hope the content is at least legible.
The one talking in circles is you. You see, you keep having the illusion that any change i want in the game is gonna ruin your experience, when in fact it's not.PhantomEcho said:You're just talking in circles now.
You call me hypocritical in an argument which is at least as hypocritical as you claim for mine to be, all the while failing to understand the point. The point is that you're not SEEING the compromises that others, like me, have had to make to accommodate others. You only see what YOU perceive to be a flaw, and base your argument around that.
Well I see your PLAY-STYLE as being a flaw. And yet I welcome you to it.
What I don't welcome is Bethesda changing the entire structure of their game to suit you. Because you're not a majority, nor are you more important than me and folks who like to play like me. We all make compromises so that other folks can get the things they want.
Except that it's not a disagreement over what it should try to accomplish. My argument is that the game could accomplish EVERYTHING if the developers just did it right. Being the "master of all trades" isn't impossible ) It does, however, require dedication, intuition, talent and above all else, common sense in game design.TheMatsjo said:"A Jack of all trades is a master of none."
I respect both of your viewpoints, I think an accurate summary would be that you have a fundamental disagreement over what this game should try to accomplish.
The Elder Scrolls series has gone the way of the jack of all trades, offering many things, but excelling in very little. This is a very justifiable choice, especially considering the mod-ability of the games. It's a compromise on many levels that delivers an extremely diverse, but ultimately hollow experience. So yes (Jonluw), the game is geared to cast a very wide net.
I like random encounters - really adds to travelling. So far found 26 different encounters.weirdguy said:btw, due to the "radiant" wild encounter system, you WILL be attacked for things you've done earlier, although to be fair most wild encounters are hostile anyway.
No, but I did see the min-maxer complaining about merchants not having infinite amounts of money and players not having infinite amounts of inventory space.Athinira said:Features/functions without limitations ARE going to be exploited by players to the logical extreme. They always will. And that is why your analogy is not appropriate, because grenade launcher ammo being limited is, ironically enough, a LIMITATION, and like i said earlier, limitations can be good. Even though there isn't infinite grenade launcher ammunition, Modern Warfare still allows you to play with it for a while, which is enough. You don't see the min-maxer complaining that there isn't infinite loot in the keep either do you? The mere fact that there is limited ammunition in Modern Warfare is in itself an appropriate limitation which only hightens the fun, because it makes the time that you actually CARRY the grenade launcher more enjoyable, knowing that you can't do it all the time.Jonluw said:But including a function in the game is not the same as inviting the players to take it to its logical extreme.
Modern warfare lets you use grenade launchers. Is the fact that there isn't enought grenade launcher ammunition in the game to let the tube-enthusiasts play through the game using only that? No, I wouldn't say so.
Yes. And like I've been saying: Skyrim isn't catering to the min-maxing crowd, so they have no incentive to include this feature.Let me give you an appropriate example of how i would fix the min-maxing problem in Skyrim by imposing a limitation.
Imagine if the keep talked about in the original article got devoid of items after you leave it the first time. You clear out the keep, loot it, go to sell the stuff you looted, but when you come back to loot the rest, it's gone.
Not only can this limitation make sense in the context of the game (someone else looted the keep while you were gone), but it would also improve it for the min-maxers. Why? Because the goal of the min-maxer is to make the absolutely best performance with what he got, and by limiting what he got (you can only loot the keep once instead of coming back several times), you make him able to min-max faster and help him progress faster in the game without having to feel that he wasted an opportunity to min-max, and at the same time you also make him do a min-maxing consideration about which loot to bring and which loot to abandon, which further stimulates his min-maxing-mind for more enjoyment?
See how this works?
That's because it's a limitation you can get around (but it's very bothersome to do so), which in the end means that it's not really a limitation. You can get around the inventory problem by returning to the keep multiple times, and you can get around the merchant problem by searching far and wide for more merchants. These are bothersome solutions, but they are there, and the min-maxer is going to put himself through them to satisfy his desire to min-max.Jonluw said:No, but I did see the min-maxer complaining about merchants not having infinite amounts of money and players not having infinite amounts of inventory space.
And like I've been saying, that's a blatant lie. Skyrim is only second to WoW in a game that invites to min-maxing, and ALOT of the players who bought the game play it because they enjoy min-maxing. If it wasn't catering to min-maxers, it wouldn't allow you to min-max to the degree it does in the first place. Bethesda understands that many of their customers are min-maxers, so they don't ignore it (they just don't understand what to do with it). It's a ridiculous statement, just as ridiculous as vanilla raiders in WoW saying that the game wasn't ever going to cater to casuals.Jonluw said:Yes. And like I've been saying: Skyrim isn't catering to the min-maxing crowd, so they have no incentive to include this feature.
And as I've also been saying: I really need to finish my homework before going to bed, so I really can't put any more effort into this debate.
I find the biggets immersion breaker when playing Skyrim is still being able to see the room in which the console and TV I'm playing the game on is contained. Until Bethesda fix this glaring flaw, I'm just not going to be able to get fully immersed in any of their games.Zachary Amaranth said:Honey, EVERYTHING is an immersion breaker.SonicWaffle said:If you make big, world-changing decisions and the world fails to change notably, it can be an immersion-breaker to say the least.
The sooner you learn how useless the word "immersion" is, the better.
"First person breaks my immersion!"
"Third person breaks my immersion!"
"Health packs break my immersion!"
"Regenerating health breaks my immersion!"
"Lens flare breaks my immersion!"
"HUDs break my immersion!"
"The inability to see my status breaks my immersion!"
"Immortal kids in a fantasy game break my immersion!"
Lack of consequence may be an immersion breaker, but I'm sure not being able to roleplay out a consequence-free murder fantasy breaks a few thousand other people's immersion.
Hmm.. for me personally I happened upon her while she was sleeping I think. A sneaky arrow made short work of her.Therumancer said:I believe you are correct Agnis is a Dark Brotherhood target.winter2 said:Agnis? I could have sworn I killed her as part of the Dark Brotherhood storyline. Maybe I'm wrong.
For me, Skyrims soul lives in the environment it gives us. I have spent hours just jaunting through the hills enjoying the snow and wind.
Most NPCs seem to have some use, if you haven't found it, then chances are you don't have the relevent quest/storyline.
You might be going "huh, what" only to find out what was going on later on down the road.
Going by the other games in the series, The Dark Brotherhood isn't as evil as they are portrayed even if the members are kind of twisted. The concept is similar to that whole Wanted/Weapons of Fate thing, where they kill people for the greater good without it nessicarly being obvious why. I get the impression Sithis and The Night Mother play the role of nilistic murder machines for a higher purpose and I believe that was spelled out in some other games. If you look into some of the things going on (the stories told through the enviroment) there is oftentimes a clear reason why your killing someone... like say a cult shrine in their basement, relation to another NPC, or whatever else.
Oh and if you attack Agnis if I remember she's a little tougher than you might expect... I'm just saying.
"Oh please don't hurt me..." Gullible much.
A response to the article as much as to the message I'm quoting.
That is the silliest, most untrue statement I have seen in a long time. Any game can be "played wrong."Athinira said:If a game can be played "wrong" in the first place, then it's the fault of the game, not the player, because for some players, playing the game "right" isn't enjoyable.
I would disagree. You (as in the player) define your own happiness. If you watch a movie and enjoy it, that is all you. You may enjoy the hell out of a movie that your neighbor hated. Happiness is defined by disposition, not by circumstance. Nobody, and I mean nobody, can make you happy, but you.Athinira said:No it's not.StriderShinryu said:While I get the general point of teh article, I can't help but think that part of the problem was the author's own expectations and approach. It may be true that the Agnis situation is odd, and I felt the same thing when I ran into her, but there is some responsibility on the part of the player to put themselves in the role rather than have it be handed them entirely by the game.
It's a games responsibility to draw you into an immersive experience. You can't just tell a player to take up a very specific mindset (in this case particularly, you are telling the player to take up a mindset where he ignores all the faults and shallow areas of the game on purpose, but by that argument, any game can be great).
If a game requires you to go into it with "the right mindset", then it's not GotY material, because i can mention a lot of games out there who have succeeded drawing in different audiences who normally didn't play that sort of game and didn't know what to expect. Take a game series like Modern Warfare. Even though they use a very generic formula, the gameplay is so compelling that most people will be able to pick that up and enjoy it without any particular mindset. In fact, it's almost impossible to go into Modern Warfare with the wrong mindset.
Skyrim is, at its best, a game which offers you a great amount of freedom, but 'freedom' isn't what everyone wants, and more importantly: The freedom is in most cases rather shallow (which is why this article was written in the first place).
Which is also why I'm going to pick up this quote for the last part of this post......and point out that it hasn't stopped a lot of people from NOT being immersed either )Zachary Amaranth said:And they probably never will.
But it hasn't really stopped people from being "immersed," regardless of what you've argued.
And i feel this really is the core problem of Skyrim: People keep claiming it's a deep and expansive game, but while it's certainly huge, it's also in fact a rather shallow game. Now, there isn't anything wrong with a game being shallow (hell, Modern Warfare is rather Shallow too, and it's still the best selling game series ever), but there is something wrong with trying to pretend to be something else, and this rather breaks up the immersion for many people.