I was watching "...why Skyrim?" by Razbuten on sloptube this aft and it's so weird that it finally took Starfield for people to realise. Like Fallout 76 wasn't enough, only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness. It's so wild, like wow they ruined the magic system? The game has worse writing than a PS1 era Mega Man X game??? Skyrim is just shitty Game of Thrones?? Welcome to thirteen years ago!!
Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002, but it'll probably be years before that realisation sinks in.
Bethesda has really good environmental designers, they're the only department (idk if they actually have one organizationally) that has consistently delivered
i feel like sometimes this is meant disparagingly like they don't have respect for their work, but the tiny amounts of 'extra' illusion players see matter a lot for perception. i mean you're talking about it here, and if they'd use less 'immersive' solutions people would probably cite it as reasons they found it unconvincing
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i'm fast travel agnostic, i appreciate well thought out trips between places manually but it's also hard to have patience for back-and-forth tomfoolery, depending on the size of the map. for example Vvardenfel is a pretty good size that fast-travel limits don't feel agonizing but the Tamriel Rebuilt map added on top of it? i've resorted to some mad transportation schemes (custom jump+slowfall spells, tricked out levitates) which also don't feel like you're respecting the journey and care put into the environment as you leapfrog through it
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i like it when its diagetic to an extent but there's good reasons to not put an immersive way to transport at locations but still the player has to go there. balancing that with players not getting frustrated is a big pickle: 2 examples
Mojave Outpost in FNV, the corner of the map makes sense, not having a bus or teleporter makes sense, but you still have to go there a couple times and its a long fucking walk if you do it manually. i'd use console commands if i had to walk down/up that goddamn road more than once to discover the marker
Morag Tong headquarters in morrowind: ridiculous location that makes the finding of them kinda fun, but then your mark is going to live there on pain of going through 6 stupid vivec city areas to get back
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that's a really interesting illustration of how weird the fast-travel conversation is, isn't it? like it's an infringement on "realism" if you can magically zap between locations, but a random convenient trapdoor that doesn't have to account for how big the vault map is or the geology of the area is totally accepted
when i fast travel i just think it's a cut in the film and nothing note worthy happens as i normally made a trip. it generally fulfills the believability for a food meter and game time to change. i can accept that not everyone will find that to be enough illusion, but my point is we're all functioning on a level of it, which has a relationship to real world circumstances. real places take hours to get between, it's completely unfeasible for a videogame, so we're all operating on a plane of 'what am i willing to believe'
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i completely get this but it's felt weird for this to work on a magic-senseless barbarian character yknow? you can buy scrolls but it seems like mechanic creep into the roleplay kinda. i'm sure somebody has played morrowind as a nord magickless strength guy but if it isn't viable for everyone it feels like an imposition. giving me the option to accomplish the game with 4 hours more of walking is not what i consider good game design lol
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