I've been thinking the past few days, I honestly wouldn't mind playing an Elder Scrolls game again. It's been a while since I've done it, and it just sounds like a fairly good idea. So I sit and think to myself, "which would I play?".
Arena? Nah.
Daggerfall? The best Elder Scrolls game hands-down? The one with the great big wide open world and near endless possibilities as to how to play? The one where you can actually ninja, merchant, and diplomacy your way through most of the main quest? The one where reputation actually matters, and you can do bar none the most ridiculous game-breaking mechanics overpowered godlike stuff from the very character creation screen?
The one that I'd have to spend hours performing the Herculean task of emulating, unofficial patching, and modded my way into a half-functional Frankensteinian mutant beast of a game, and still have to save every half hour in a different spot to make sure I don't lose progress when the game crashes, and when it does it doesn't eat my save along with it?
Okay, well, what about Morrowind. Daggerfall may be the best, but Morrowind's my favorite. The epic quest of a lowly prisoner's journey to becoming Elf Jesus, just never mind that Elf Jesus may be a bipedal gecko or giant cat hooked on kitty meth. The sweeping tale of an island under siege from a divine plague, of burgeoning feudal nationalism and religious zeal as tradition meets head-on with urbane Romanesque values of law and order. The classic epic of...being a feudal NEET for twenty hours while you're grinding alchemy, enchanting, athletics, and acrobatics in Balmora for those sweet x5 level bonuses.
Oblivion? Ah, the one where Jean-Luc Picard gives you a necklace before taking a pointy stick up the pooper, and you give it to Boromir to watch a kaiju fight. The one with level scaling so ridiculous "Medieval NEET Simulator" becomes less a joke and more an obligation if you want to have a functional character past level 20, unless you go the pro gamer route and just never, ever sleep. Get those glowing lava-gineys moistened up, because I just can't wait to penetrate deep into the hot realms of Oblivion to fondle Mehrunes Dagon's pulsating stones.
And that leaves us with Skyrim. Which admittedly has the best bashy-bashy, slicey-slicey mechanics, and is probably the conceptually closest to Bethesda's entire idea of making a role-playing game where how you play actually determines how your character grows, instead of the other way around. It's also the one where 95% of the game is semi-randomized bear arse collection, and NPC's may occasionally make mouth-noises resembling words but I don't really care because they're just keeping me from getting to the next triangle on my mini-map.
So...is OpenMW any good? I hear tell you can actually mod it nowadays to have game mechanics more in line with Skyrim's, therefore bypassing the "medieval NEET simulator" aspects of the game, and getting your Nerevarine on right away.
Arena? Nah.
Daggerfall? The best Elder Scrolls game hands-down? The one with the great big wide open world and near endless possibilities as to how to play? The one where you can actually ninja, merchant, and diplomacy your way through most of the main quest? The one where reputation actually matters, and you can do bar none the most ridiculous game-breaking mechanics overpowered godlike stuff from the very character creation screen?
The one that I'd have to spend hours performing the Herculean task of emulating, unofficial patching, and modded my way into a half-functional Frankensteinian mutant beast of a game, and still have to save every half hour in a different spot to make sure I don't lose progress when the game crashes, and when it does it doesn't eat my save along with it?
Okay, well, what about Morrowind. Daggerfall may be the best, but Morrowind's my favorite. The epic quest of a lowly prisoner's journey to becoming Elf Jesus, just never mind that Elf Jesus may be a bipedal gecko or giant cat hooked on kitty meth. The sweeping tale of an island under siege from a divine plague, of burgeoning feudal nationalism and religious zeal as tradition meets head-on with urbane Romanesque values of law and order. The classic epic of...being a feudal NEET for twenty hours while you're grinding alchemy, enchanting, athletics, and acrobatics in Balmora for those sweet x5 level bonuses.
Oblivion? Ah, the one where Jean-Luc Picard gives you a necklace before taking a pointy stick up the pooper, and you give it to Boromir to watch a kaiju fight. The one with level scaling so ridiculous "Medieval NEET Simulator" becomes less a joke and more an obligation if you want to have a functional character past level 20, unless you go the pro gamer route and just never, ever sleep. Get those glowing lava-gineys moistened up, because I just can't wait to penetrate deep into the hot realms of Oblivion to fondle Mehrunes Dagon's pulsating stones.
And that leaves us with Skyrim. Which admittedly has the best bashy-bashy, slicey-slicey mechanics, and is probably the conceptually closest to Bethesda's entire idea of making a role-playing game where how you play actually determines how your character grows, instead of the other way around. It's also the one where 95% of the game is semi-randomized bear arse collection, and NPC's may occasionally make mouth-noises resembling words but I don't really care because they're just keeping me from getting to the next triangle on my mini-map.
So...is OpenMW any good? I hear tell you can actually mod it nowadays to have game mechanics more in line with Skyrim's, therefore bypassing the "medieval NEET simulator" aspects of the game, and getting your Nerevarine on right away.