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That's sort of the problem with Bethesda, there are clearly talented writers there who write creative, compelling lore and stories, but then that just gets shunted into background texts and the sort of still-life scenes they did a ton of in Fallout, while the actual story that the player engages with is whitewashed and watered down into something sterile, generic, and uninteresting, with a tendency to only give the players one or two really stupid choices to progress a story.
i think theyre aware, but choosing to pander to chuds who are not, because they saw too many "liberty prime so based lolol gommubism get rekt" memes crop up, so they decided to lean into that.
3 is also nowhere near as self aware as the originals, but its pretty apparent they at least tried in that one
I like to think that Nick/Nora are the power armor soldier in the FMV intro of Fallout I that shoots the Canadian prisoner in the head, then laughs about it and waves for the camera.
:this: the lore and world is genuinely amazing. the issue is that the games suck at delivering that.
morrowind was good for its time, but it does not in any way shape or form hold up as a game. all of the wonder of the game is in reading text.
it sucks to say that cause i love morrowind, but its the truth.
can't hear you, i'm chugging sujamma and smacking ashlanders with my giant axe
imagine doing a violence to the velothi people, and then bragging about it like youre cool. smh my head
that's it. you pushed me too far. im gonna say the n word
n'wah
it do. they were doing this in oblivion before skyrim
prolly gonna do it in whatever the next game is too.
for sure. a new engine definitely makes a difference, but idk that it actually fixes all the issues of what makes the whole format "not great" for transmitting all the really cool stuff in the lore.
honestly kind of needs to switch from open-ended wish-fulfillment be-everything do-everything rpg to a more hyper-focused rogue-lite model of gameplay where they really boil whatever part of the lore, and you uncover more and more as you go through successive iterations of the player characters timeline
fair.
the rpg format can work, but in poe the player character absolutely cannot do and be everything.
its a fairly focused story even though the world itself is fairly open, because the focus isnt on "player character number go up" which is def the focus of tes games, but on the various choices that get made as you progress.
in poe those choices often have immediate consequences as well as long reaching ones, whereas i cant honestly recall a choice in any bethesda game that ever mattered at all
edit; i mean, i guess you can kill vivec and still beat morrowind which is cool. but thats about it
ngl itll probably be a letdown, but one that ill enjoy anyways.
so, exactly like deadfire i guess
I'm really interested in TES lore but every time I try to dive into it I bounce right the fuck off because of how dense it is.
What would you recommend as a starting point?
The coolest part about each culture having different interpretations of history and their own versions of the different gods with their own names for them is that every interpretation is true. All different interpretations of the god of time Akatosh that you mentioned are all true, all exist, and are all the same being and unique separate beings simultaneously. In the elder scrolls universe if a large enough group of people all believe something it becomes true.
I played Skyrim for maybe a couple days and it was really good....and then it was just the same dungeon over and over and got really boring. There was too much to do too soon and I ended up doing bits of disconnected nonsense. I had no idea what was going on in the story and there was no direction in the game play. Exploration wasn't all that fun I think because there was no 'walls' there was nowhere I wasn't meant to go....nowhere that felt secret or undiscovered...nowhere that took effort other than go to place.
I think RPG's either need to be heavily story driven or they need to be open ended but restrain how the player character develops in some way to make you craft your own story and make your choices make sense.
As I get older I keep thinking more and more that I’d probably enjoy tabletop games more than video games but I have no irl friends and I suck at math lol so I look for games that try and capture the feel of a DnD session.
We have a DnD 3.5e West Marches game going on if you want to join
Exploration wasn’t all that fun I think because there was no ‘walls’ there was nowhere I wasn’t meant to go…nowhere that felt secret or undiscovered…nowhere that took effort other than go to place.
Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact both understand this problem in the open world.
In BotW the game is filled with mechanics that slow the player down tremendously, things that make travelling the world impactful and not just "run in straight line to location". Even annoying mechanics exist specifically to force the player into accepting they're in a world with conditions that change that they must plan around. Weapons break in the game specifically to force the player to constantly adapt and be creative, the mechanic exists to force the player to stop doing the same thing over and over and over again. By the same token the rain slipping and preventing the player from climbing cliffs exists to force the player to take a different route, to force the player to adapt and do something different to what they might normally want to do because the conditions aren't right for them to do it. Further things like stamina function for the same reason. Temperature management too. These are things to make the world complex to traverse so that getting to things actually feels like exciting exploratory victories.
Many people find these things annoying but they unmistakeably contribute to these games being good. Excellent game designers understand this, terrible ones do not. Limiting the player is a good thing. Players should be limited often and always but provided with a large variety of tools and options with which to attempt to overcome their limitations. How the players achieve something is irrelevant, merely that they feel good from having overcome a challenge.
Skyrim presents no challenge. It presents walking from location to location, collecting quests, then travelling to them and performing the exact same method of running the dungeon they always do (usually stealth archer). Then taking the quest back to the quest NPC. Big YAWN.
It's an outdated. Boring. Old and highly sterile method of open world design. As per usual Nintendo has pioneered a path forwards out of this shitty niche the open-world RPG genre has been stuck in for ages.
Exploration wasn’t all that fun I think because there was no ‘walls’ there was nowhere I wasn’t meant to go…nowhere that felt secret or undiscovered…nowhere that took effort other than go to place.
There is a cool youtube channel called Camelworks who has videos exploring basically every nook and cranny in skyrim that's pretty interesting.
alexa, play skyrim extra-special unrated edition
porno music starts up
I can't wait for all the copium overdoses when the next one comes out on the same engine they've been using for 230 years.
I had a ton of fun with skyrim at the time. It was real cozy to sit back and just explore a big world with all sorts of sidequests and caves with stuff that might be way stronger than you. The sounds, lighting, music, and pace of exploring and questing created an ambience that drew me in, and i enjoyed the bit of jank too. Fond memories of barely surviving a five minute battle alone with multiple enemies only to have J'zargo casually jog out from some trees a few seconds later chastizing me for being a little bitch and telling me I should be grateful he was there to save me.
The mmo was a huge let down for me. I guess i should have known better, i wanted multiplayer skyrim but what i got was WoW with a reskin.
I loved morrowind. It was like the most interesting and inspired world out of anything. It goes really deep and I could pick any corner of Morrowind and nerd out.
Oblivion and Skyrim are dogshit. Especially Skyrim. The skyrim opening triggers me. I know you're not a movie Mr Skyrim, you think I'm stupid? Everything just has to be SO immersive. Except what if it doesn't work, then you're just the worlds shittiest movie.
sometimes i like eating paste. you should give skyrim a shot imo, it's kinda shallow but they improved on oblivion for sure
I like the weird background lore of the elder scrolls, but my main draw is that i can turn it into much better games with mods, especially skyrim
Yeah, although i would like it if they made better games in the first place, i like how mods make it way more configurable with exactly what and how you want to fix things.
Don't like the god awful combat? There are mods that can make it way closer to dark souls
Dont like dark souls either? There are mods to make it way closer to [insert other game here]Do you hate the kinda janky and overly forgiving stealth system? There are mods to make it way closer to thief
Do you hate how magic is fucking terrible? There are an enormous amount of mods to add spells, rebalance spells, make magic hilariously OP, make magic rare....
Are you an enormous immersion monkey who just wants to rp walk through the world like some kinda weirdo? That's half my goddamn load order
But I understand why people don't see all that as a good thing, it is a fuckton of extra work to get the game just how you want it
i think vanilla is fine. never messed with mods. but the big appeal to me is the open world. i like exploring stuff, foightin' bandits and other baddies, reading the books (also my favorite part of morrowind!), getting loot (tho none of it is particularly interesting). it's brainless entertainment and i love it
Skyrim is awful, I stopped playing that game when I entered the harry potter-ish magic college and noticed the entire school was basically three students constantly shooting ice spells at a wall in the main hall. It's just a mediocre experience and everything feels glued together by a bunch of slapdash scripting.
Morrowind is just so engrossing in comparison, I poured like 100 hours between two computers, and I never even finished that shit proper. I dunno, maybe at some point we should admit that Morrowind was genuine lightning in a bottle among the rest of the TES entries. Like, the gfx limitations really complemented the surreal landscapes of Morrowind and made stuff that would've otherwise been rather innocuous felt memorable, like seeing Balmora's silt strider for the first time through the fog felt genuinely unnerving. In contrast Daggerfall was way too ambitious for what was available at the time and everything after Morrowind is just tepid and derivative fantasy stuff, and no amount of graphical fidelity will make the generic-ass dragons any less boring.
Morrowind on the xbox and later modding on PC was a huge aspect of my fantasy world escapism when I was a teen dealing with dysphoria, I appreciated the lore tangentially. Oblivion was ok, I really got into some of the portal invasion mods, I beat skyrim once and never really cared to come back to it.
Loved fallout 3, and new vegas but see them way differently than fallout 1 & 2. I had to force myself to finish fallout 4.
Didnt try the mmo as I've played alot of mmorpgs and knew it wasnt for me at inception.
Now if they made a sandbox mmo with the morrowind character progression mechanics and just focused on cresting a beautiful and canonnically accurate sandbox to roleplay in I would play that in a heartbeat. Would love to make a khajit traveling merchant, or a wood elf apothecary sneaking & charming beasts to get the best ingrediants or make the purest Skooma and etc.
Exactly the plot railroading and uninteresting mechanics made them unappealing. As I type this I did really enjoy the settlement building in fallout 4 but wish there were more interesting factions around that interacted so I could roleplay someone trying to rebuild afterwards, farm, help others, etc. I enjoy that in rust but not the pvp.
Exactly, the factions explored interesting aspects of a post apocalyptic world. I spent so much time exploring the raiders
/r/TESLore.
Learn the deep wisdom. Explore the higher secrets. Turn the wheel on it's side and see the tower that is I.
idk, i never got into them, and any remaining interest dried up when i got into dark souls
Exactly, the fact that the first game has everything so interconnected (the lore, the world map, the mechanics, the seeming futility of it all and the feeling of success in the face of it)
It's so damn intentional in how it was made
I've honestly had RPGs ruined for me after playing Disco Elysium and watching one of HBomberguy's videos, so I can't really get into any of them now. But Oblivion's actually pretty good, especially compared to Skyrim. The main quest is terrible, but basically every other quest in the game is amazing. The guild questlines are also better than either Morrowind or Skyrim, they don't feel as rushed as Skyrim, and they have more story to them than Morrowind.
Yeah like I'll boot up Dragon Age or Fallout and quit within 30 minutes because the combat's boring
Dragons are just a slightly less annoying version of cliff racers CMV
