Anyone here into Elder Scrolls: Morrowind?

[BogusMeatFactory]

Bah! The real reason I dislike Skyrim is because it does what makes a sandbox game fun, wrong. There is no reason to explore in Skyrim when you have waypoints, fast travel and a compass that tells you when anything is even remotely nearby. I also dislike the fact that the game was built for consoles, making the PC iteration very unintuitive, making you rely on mods to have a manageable menu.

I also feel like it was attempting to create a more living, breathing world akin to games like Ultima VII, but again falls flat with the same voice actors you have heard time and time again since Redguard repeating the same things over and over again. It lacked the personality and flair that a good game should have. Sure the combat was enjoyable, but at what cost? It took the Elder Scrolls series from being a fantastic, individualized fantasy world to a redundant fantasy world that we have seen time and time again.

[Ack]

Bah! The real reason I dislike Skyrim is because it does what makes a sandbox game fun, wrong. There is no reason to explore in Skyrim when you have waypoints, fast travel and a compass that tells you when anything is even remotely nearby. I also dislike the fact that the game was built for consoles, making the PC iteration very unintuitive, making you rely on mods to have a manageable menu.

I also feel like it was attempting to create a more living, breathing world akin to games like Ultima VII, but again falls flat with the same voice actors you have heard time and time again since Redguard repeating the same things over and over again. It lacked the personality and flair that a good game should have. Sure the combat was enjoyable, but at what cost? It took the Elder Scrolls series from being a fantastic, individualized fantasy world to a redundant fantasy world that we have seen time and time again.

You mean Oblivion?

[noiseredux]

so are you guys planning to play Elderscrolls Online when it comes out?

[Ack]

so are you guys planning to play Elderscrolls Online when it comes out?

My roommate beta tested it and let me hop in a few times. Neither of us were impressed. It did away with a lot of what we liked about the Elderscrolls series and just felt like the usual MMO rehash.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Bah! The real reason I dislike Skyrim is because it does what makes a sandbox game fun, wrong. There is no reason to explore in Skyrim when you have waypoints, fast travel and a compass that tells you when anything is even remotely nearby. I also dislike the fact that the game was built for consoles, making the PC iteration very unintuitive, making you rely on mods to have a manageable menu.

I also feel like it was attempting to create a more living, breathing world akin to games like Ultima VII, but again falls flat with the same voice actors you have heard time and time again since Redguard repeating the same things over and over again. It lacked the personality and flair that a good game should have. Sure the combat was enjoyable, but at what cost? It took the Elder Scrolls series from being a fantastic, individualized fantasy world to a redundant fantasy world that we have seen time and time again.

You mean Oblivion?

Oblivion is the same, except that it at least had moments of interesting storytelling. I felt like there were genuinely interesting moments that you could stumble across and go, "Oh cool look at that," like the guy with the vampire plants in his basement. Also the guild quest lines were very entertaining and engaging.

With Skyrim, I felt like they handled the guild quests like this. "What can we do to up the ante from what we did in Oblivion. People loved that right? So what can we do?" It isn't about topping the other games quest lines to make something bigger and grandiose, instead they should have just made it interesting. The characters you interacted with lacked that personality and flair and instead seemed cookie cutter. At least with Oblivion, you understood where characters were coming from. Here they behaved irrationally, without motivation and made you scratch your head in trying to understand what was going on and why.


@ Noise

Nah. I played the Beta and felt it was an absolute nightmare. I leveled to around 15 with only having to initiate combat a handful of times. Most dungeons and areas were flooded with players that, when finishing a quest, required me only to attack engage in combat with them. Luckily, there were 15-20 people fighting as well, so the enemy would die instantaneously and no work was involved.

The game tries to emulate certain elements that make the single-player games fun, but get lost in translation, like ranged weaponry and stealth. The areas in the game are akin to a standard MMO and have no fluid relation to other connected areas and there just seems to be an overall lack of cohesiveness. It really feels like they were trying to make one game, stop in the middle and attempt to cover it up with another.

[noiseredux]

all the coverage I had read of ESO did little to interest me. The screens I saw didn't help. So if you guys, who are fans of the series aren't pumped, then count me out haha.

[BogusMeatFactory]

all the coverage I had read of ESO did little to interest me. The screens I saw didn't help. So if you guys, who are fans of the series aren't pumped, then count me out haha.

It isn't a bad game per se, but it does not have any of the magic of what made the Elder Scrolls series what it is. I would say it is akin to Battlespire and Redguard, another game that was trying to emulate another genre and it just didn't translate well.

[MrPopo]

I'll 100% agree with your critique of how the VO work on Oblivion and Skyrim goes. I'd rather have lots of text with the occasional VO to punctuate important things. Hell, Morrowind has the same number of VAs as Oblivion, but since it's really only used for hello, goodbye, and insults you notice less the fact that every single Elf sounds the same.

And I also agree on the fast travel thing. The way Morrowind implemented it with a series of nodes that only allow node to node travel (silt striders, mage guilds, boats, ancient strongholds) keeps the world feeling much bigger. However, at least when I was playing it I was still doing a ton of exploring in Skyrim because you still have to deal with the fact that nodes have to be visited before you can fast travel to them (except for major cities, and maybe that's one that should also need visiting). I found as I quested that most of the things I needed to head to were far enough away from a fast travel point I'd visited that I was still doing a lot of cross country hiking.

[BogusMeatFactory]

I'll 100% agree with your critique of how the VO work on Oblivion and Skyrim goes. I'd rather have lots of text with the occasional VO to punctuate important things. Hell, Morrowind has the same number of VAs as Oblivion, but since it's really only used for hello, goodbye, and insults you notice less the fact that every single Elf sounds the same.

And I also agree on the fast travel thing. The way Morrowind implemented it with a series of nodes that only allow node to node travel (silt striders, mage guilds, boats, ancient strongholds) keeps the world feeling much bigger. However, at least when I was playing it I was still doing a ton of exploring in Skyrim because you still have to deal with the fact that nodes have to be visited before you can fast travel to them (except for major cities, and maybe that's one that should also need visiting). I found as I quested that most of the things I needed to head to were far enough away from a fast travel point I'd visited that I was still doing a lot of cross country hiking.

You did have to actually visit the cities in skyrim to be able to fast travel to them, but you could just spam the cart guy to take you to all the locations. True, that getting to some of the locations allowed for some exploration, but again, it did not succeed as much as Morrowind, especially when we talk about underwater exploration. When I realized that there were underwater grottoes in Morrowind it blew my mind and really challenged me to look around more. With SKyrim there is absolutely zero reason to explore underwater, which was just a missed opportunity.

[MrPopo]

The underwater thing I think is a defensible design decision. When you're making a huge open world game you want to have a good mix of things that are cool and easily noticeable as well as cool and out of the way (the latter for exploration people, the former for everyone). However, you also have to cater to the way people think; if you hide some your best stuff somewhere that people never look (such as manhole covers on mountain peaks) then you're wasting your time. My guess is that Bethesda found that the underwater grottos were the least explored places of the game and shifted resources away.