bartholen said:
Of for f...
I'm not going to sugarcoat this: your stance sounds incredibly elitist. As I said, Morrowind is a modern game on the outside, but an old school RPG on the inside. This leads to both good and bad. Including, for example, your assumption that people want to play RPGs with a specific build in mind, min-maxing and all that. Maybe I just want to, you know, play the game for myself? Is that so hard for you to accept that you have to use phrases like "mindlessly play the game"?
Garbage ... even people that
like Skyrim (and I didn't spend about 100 hours playing it because I hated it) will tell you that 'stealth archer phenomena' is problematic. The difference is the last Elder Scrolls game I played was Morrowind precisely becaue it rewards exactly those types of gamers that actually wants to dig into the guts of an RPG.
Seriously, since when did that attitude become 'elitest'? What exactly is 'elitest' about the tangible
fun that comes from cultivating a very specific build of character you honed over double digit hours? What exactly is 'elitest' over liking Morrowind's progression from at the start of the game scrounging up enough gold to take the Silt Strider to being
a magical lunatic that simply leaps into a city anywhere on the map 20 odd hours in?
Really? You need to use archaic, dice roll based systems to make a specific build viable? It's the only way to do it? Instead of, you know, designing a game with more modern technology without Morrowind's technical constraints?
Yes, that is literally the only way you could have it.
The dumbing down of mechanics to 'autohit' if you have workable brain an fingers does breakthe mechanical progression of the game. Like if I want to enjoy that unarmoured, hand-to-hand & restoration heavy character as quickly as possible I'm going to prioritize Speed, Willpower, and probably a mix of Agility and Intelligence ... not necessarily Endurance. So I'll probably be getting a hell of a lot less hit points per level than someone perpetually covered in medium or heavy armour. And unlike other stats Endurance has the same problem it has in Oblivion ... where future increases to it do not retroactively give HP/level up.
Which means if I'm going toi be in perpetual melee combat, or trying to get into combat as quickly as possible, I need to exploit that dodge and evasion mechanic ... because I may even have less total HP than a tricked out caster of similar level. By exploiting the fact that those autododge mechanics relate to you in the same way as the enemies, means that I don't necessarily need to worry too much about physical damage, however, if I get surrounded by a horde of enemies.
This fundamentally changes the game and how you can play it. It fundamentally opens up new character speccing options. It offers new opportunities to exploit and take advantage of, and creates unique opportunities to unconventionally 'tank' certain enemies beyond 'wear 'defendiest' armour and carry a shield' ...
When you actually spec out through enchantment and careful build cultivation that dream of the Super-Saiyin magical monk combat is
actually faster and less of a slog than either Oblivion or Skyrim. Precisely because they treated block as a passive skill and because of the evasion mechanics in the game... and because you've carefully cultivated that character build, you're no longer
just missing. You're hitting, and the enemy is
missing you.
Because of how they handle magic, and the fact that even melee builds will experiment with it, means you have every tool necessary to create an incredibly unique avatar for your interaction with the world. One you have cultivated and have been given
every possible means to make utterly realized within the mechanics of that world.
Which gives a wonderful sense of
progression when at the start of the game it often felt reversed... but by mid-game, you're
actually living up to the propecy of being the Nerevarine. You're not just some hapless prisoner and experiment of dealing with the corprus disease... you
actually begin feeling like every bit the demigod people are beginning to say you are ... and your playstyle has radically changed from those early nights of hacky-slashy-shootyness that always felt like a mad dalliance with death every hard fight.
It's almost as if it's not so much a 'dated mechanic' as opposed to Bethesda actually thinking about contemporary RPGs like D&D 2E and 3.x and concepts like the 'AC tank' and 'Glass Cannon' builds in that tabletop RPG of the time. That idea of quadratic power growth ... where every level isn't just some perk point and a selection of one of three things to bump up slightly as the rest of the world scales with you ...
Oh no ... you're constructing maddeningly powerful personally tailored armour and weapons, constructing the perfect spells to implement with your build, and instantly paralyzing people with a punch.
And that's precisely why
RPG players might like it. Because it is essentially an open world action game blended with RPG stylings. It's a new take on the genre. And that's why their 'elitest' critique of Oblivion and Skyrim ixnaying that to simply become an action game with RPG 'shades' rather than a complex spreadsheet of carefully constructed elements the player has built might be looked on disfavourably.
Also, yes ... it turns out old games have bad draw distance ... it's almost as if you can use mods and overhauls to radically increase it.
The thing is that Skyrim feels kind of broken. Even compared to Oblivion. For example, needing to equip spells? Well that utterly destroys the
spellsword w/ shield type of build... and as much as I think nerfing the general excessive performance of just how important Endurance is to boost early on creating the situation where even casters would mass Conjuration burns and simply let enemies hint them until I they levelled enough points in Endurance, Intelligence and Willpower based skills to maximize each level up bonuses ... or ending up with grinding conjuration, alteration and spear in Morrowind to get the biggest possible power jump the next level. But then Skyrim takes a step backwards with
how you actually cast spells.
So what Oblivion did, taking a step forward with its spellcasting, Skyrim then ixnays for odd reasons.
Which means further obsolence of actual experimentation once more...
I mean, Skyrim is
fun ... but it certainly isn't smart in terms of how it has handled its 'RPG' mechanics ... and this is problematic when you consider it is supposed to be an
RPG.
See, the thing is I love Soulsborne games ... but then again I love them
because the action is front and center. Let's face it, even my
beloved Morrowind, or any TES game, they have never handled action well. So it's always been my opinion that a TES game has to then do
three things moderately right ... its open world, its narrative and its RPG mechanics.
The problem is, purely on those grounds, it seems to be stumbling ever more as time goes on. Morrowind has a verticality to every element ofits environment. The landscape, its people, its ideas of religion, even their
diets and ideas of transport, are so far removed from conventional fantasy tropes that just
bleeds an alien world you will learn like the back of your hand eventually.
At the start of the game, you're scrounging up gold to take the insect taxi... at the midgame, you're teleporting or just leaping into cities. You have floating islands you can only get to by levitating. You have the Telvanni who have mushroom mansions and have
pretty much disposed of stairs because they're mages and can float through the air ... so why do they need stairs to get to their bedroom?
And all of these alien constructs trump horses and cheese wheels. Combine that with elabourate roleplaying mechanics that truly give you reasons to experiment, to explore fully, to construct your demigod in waiting, and you have a fantasy game that is something unlike anything that had come before or even since.
And yeah, it's kind of a shame that Skyrim is a problematic aspect of an Adorno-style symptomatic expression of the culture industry simplification for purely the sake of the easiest possible means of consumption. That's not to say
Skyrim is bad ... I don't play a game for hundreds of hours if it were
bad ... but pretending like there is nothing to gain from the 'old Bethesda' is also ignoring all its fundamental problems that can be tied to this idea of dumbing down the mechanical complexity of their games.
The thing is in the TES games you were told of this magical place of Cyrodiil ... the heart of the Empire. The primary seat of Tamriel and the beating heart of its cosmopolitanism ... with diverse native cultures within it, and how the different regions of Cyrodiil related to their world as if alien to those outside it but still within the same province ... Then Oblivion
actually came out.
To say that its world and how people related to it was poor in comparison to the stark contrasts of Vvardenfell societies, and their alienesque ways, is an understatement. Combined with dumbing down the mechanics, you have to dumb down the entire world. No longer are there places you must levitate to. Nope every build of character must be able to get to everyplace they need to regardless of impediment at the time. You have to have that compass pointer at the bottom of your screen, because heaven forbid if you ever get lost and need to use landmarks to find your way someplace... Heaven forbid if the just so happen to miss a said landmark so we'll just dot your compass with stuffyou can't actually see but you know is somewhere around the place by, IDK, instinct I guess?
And it's kind of hard not to see that problematic relationship to character abilities, and the worldbuilding itself.
See, the funny thing is about Morrowind is dungeon crawling was actually the exception, not the rule, of what you
actually did in the world. In fact the dungeons themselves were also used to metrically assess your character's actual abilities. With hidden nooks and crannies you could only get to with spells, and the capacity to be easily lost in them... the problem with Oblivion andsomething Skyrim inherited was the idea of
shortcuts. Because every place needed to be accessible by
every character regardless of capability ... you end up with these self looping areas that
just so happen to always have a shortcut to the start. Just so happen to have a hidden entrance to the overworld. Just so happened tro have a piece of levelled loot by some levelled bad guy and levelled chest and without ever actually chancing the disappointment of the player.
And the problem with that is ... yeah, that's eminently enjoyable ... but only ever in way that happens when you stop trying to wonder what it would have been like if the game
actually chanced your disappointment ... by making you get lost, and teased you with possible stuff you can't get to, or constantly left wondering whether you have actually properly explored a place or not and the simple idea that
now you have to hike back to a settlement because you forgot to prepare as well as you should have for that low-level wandering somewhere.
In the back of my mind somewhere, I have memorized all the transportation options for a low level Morrowind character. Basically like a bus terminal route listing of Silt Striders and teleport services. And that's ... a pretty darn cool effect to have on a player.
And I'd be lying if I said on
some ontological level that if a game can effect such a feeling akin to, say, bonfire locations of Dark Souls and similarly have me wanting to play it again... it's probably
doing something right.
