I'll let you in on a secret: Most Morrowind fans still bought Skyrim, just like they bought Oblivion. The fact that we prefer one over the other does not, in all but a few very extreme cases, mean we don't play the other games. Eeesh. What sort of black and white world are you trying to construct?
Of course they bought Oblivion and Skyrim. That's why they hated them, because they bought them, played them, didn't like what they saw, and bitched about it. Except their complaints, to most of us who play other RPG games, feel like people grasping at straws as to why Skyrim is a lesser game. Morrowind obviously is the lesser game, since it's jankier and less smooth on the gameplay.
You're moving the goalposts and using nebulous language to do it. What does "a significant audience" even mean when I said they had a smaller audience?
Nope. Again, Morrowind had a significant audience behind it from the previous Elder Scrolls games. And the audience for Morrowind hated both Oblivion and Skyrim, seeing those games as dumbed-down, so if anything, those two games had to prove themselves to the rest of the gaming community since Morrowind fans hated them and loudly proclaimed how they were dumbed-down.
Off hand? I doubt the PS2 could have handled it, and I know the Gamecube couldn't have. The PS2 could maybe have managed it with a herculean programming effort, given the PS2 was notoriously difficult to program for, but I doubt it was considered worth the effort.
Modern consoles like the PS5 and the Series X should be able to handle it. Fuck, the Switch should be able to handle it, despite the Switch being an outdated toaster. Why haven't they made it for those consoles, then? Where's the modern remakes and remasters? Fucking Fallout 3 is getting an HD touch-up, you'd think they'd do the same for Morrowind too, if it was that well-loved.
I'm not even sure what argument you're trying to make here. That Skyrim sold better? I mean... yeah? I've never denied that. That Morrowind isn't as popular with "the kids today" as Skyrim? Never denied that either. It's a relic of a different era of gaming.
Not only did Skyrim sell better, but people repeatedly kept buying it long after 2011. The fucking Switch version came out in 2017, long after the original fanfare for Skyrim's release died down. Morrowind didn't command that kind of market strength; meaning that in the end, for all the loud complaints about how Skyrim sucks and how Morrowind is the better game, that's all just hot gas. Either it's a minority making those complaints, or the same morons whining about how bad Skyrim is keep coming back to it because it's just that good, and they were just belching out hot gas to be hipsters.
The public also wants 9 dollar Starbucks coffees, Taylor Swift, the Barbie movie, and... fuck, I don't know. I actually try very hard to stay out of what "the public" wants. It's a piss poor argument about quality.
And what exactly is your argument here? The public wants affordable comfort food and movies, boo-hoo. And again, if you're looking at quality, Morrowind is rather janky and clumsy when it comes to being a game, and as a story, it ended with the narrative equivalent of premature ejaculation. The kind that makes the other side go ''that's it?'' and walk away disappointed. At least with Alduin, there was the very real threat of him annihilating the world, and he decimated a city in the opening to prove that he had the power to do it. I'd be more forgiving of Morrowind if Dagoth Ur at least got to decimate ONE city with his Numidium before he got put out to pasture. Now we'll never know what kind of power it would've had.
Say what you will about Fallout 3, but at least we got to see Liberty Prime tear shit up before he got blown to pieces by an Enclave orbital strike.
There's a reason George Lucas had the Death Star blow up Alderaan; to show what the bad guys are capable of, what the good guys are up against. Oblivion did that with Kvatch, and Skyrim did that with Helgen. At least we know what we're up against and what's at stake. Hell, at any time in Skyrim, a dragon can choose to swoop down and attack your favorite city and kill some NPCs that you've come to rely on. That's far more involving than some dweeb building a robot in a basement that never even goes on its maiden voyage.
Now you're just being disingenuous. Or else you grew up in a decidedly not-American culture. Yes: Plenty of adults went to arcades. Yes: Plenty of adults played games. That still doesn't mean they didn't have a stigma. I didn't say "kids", I said... What was the word I picked, dweebs? Kids and dweebs? I don't even remember at this point, but take your pick. Dweeb, nerd, geek. Weirdos and losers. No, it wasn't true, not even back then. Guess what: Stigmas are very rarely universally true. Were there just enough examples for people to point to, though? Yeah, sadly, there were.
What stigma? The stigma video games had back then was that they were driving kids crazy. That they had adult content that was not appropriate for children. That they should be controlled. Parents saw Sub-Zero kill someone by ripping out their spine; and they shat themselves. That led to the ESRB being made. Even the popular kids played arcade games to try and prove their popularity; kids who passed out things like Mortal Kombat fatality combo lists at school became heroes to the class.
And the fact that a lot of 90s games had some really demonic symbols here and there didn't help.
So no, the stigma for games in that age was a lot less ''lol dweeb shit'' and more ''stuff that should be doused with Holy Water and kept from the kids'' shit.
Or, you know... remaking the game in more modern engines as fan projects?
I was wondering about that. Are they any good? Which one is better, Skywind, or Morroblivion?
You win, Imperator. Nobody likes Morrowind. Okay? So you can stop doing this anytime anyone suggests they do, because clearly they don't. Or else we would all be buying our fifth copies on the Switch. Morrowind isn't Super Mario World levels of popular, that clearly means it was a bad game that nobody actually liked.
That's not what I said. What I said was that Morrowind was a cult classic that had its own dedicated fans, but said fanbase isn't as big as the ones playing Skyrim. I used the words ''cult classic'' to describe it and even stated that Morrowind had its own fanbase, one that loudly denounced Skyrim and Oblivion. Were you not reading what I have stated?
That's not how any thieves guild except the Skyrim one has behaved towards Nocturnal. You can quibble about definitions of the word "patron" all you want. Hell, other than Skyrim really only the guild in Oblivion seemed to give a damned about Nocturnal, and even for them it was mostly just in their recognition phrase. There weren't shrines to Nocturnal or ancient rites or anything.
Patron is a very defining term. Usually, when a group has a patron, said individual is the one they report to, the one who funds them, the one who gives them the strength to carry on, and if worst comes to worst, the one that can pull the plug. And again, Skyrim depicted a world that was uncertain and unstable, so the Thieves Guild becoming more devoted to Nocturnal makes perfect sense, given that these weren't the days of the Septims anymore when things were stable and stealing from a few fat pockets is no big deal...........
Or Elder Scrolls games retcon shit. It happens. But in-game, the thieves' guilds in the various provinces are all independent of each other. They are allied only in that they have a sort of mutual trade/non compete/protection alliance, and generally follow a few common rules (don't rob the poor and destitute, don't murder to steal), but they all have their own rules, creeds, practices, etc.
Or, bear with me now, times change, and people become less or more devoted to a religion or cult as time goes on. That's more or less natural with how the world works, why can't Tamriel have that as well?
I base this purely on Sony being the driving force of 4K in gaming, the insistence on extreme realism in graphics, the insane push to making games into "cinematic experiences", and generally just pushing gaming into a near unsustainable position by making everything so damn AAA focused and overly expensive.
They basically spearheaded the transformation of games from party and skill contests to interactive movies; a change I noticed as early as the PS3 with MGS4. They've since doubled down on that and added SJW nonsense as well.
Every time someone tells me that Microsoft killed gaming, I'm left scratching my head. I'm not going to say that Microsoft was GOOD for gaming, but Microsoft has been far more diverse when it comes to their games. They release games with different art styles, they release games that are far more gameplay focused than cinematic focused, they had a far better track record with backwards compatibility, their online services have *always* been far superior.
Microsoft's true value was adding another competitor in the gaming market and becoming the ''dude-bro'' console where they have all sorts of FPS games that catered to young men looking for a good time. Mass Effect, Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, these titans of gaming originated from the Xbox platform and created a third wheel as opposed to the party-games of Nintendo and the movie-games of Playstation. How it saddens me to see them run away from what made them great; now they're just a glorified development house for games that people may or may not want, and judging by Starfield's icy reception, and the lukewarm attitude towards games like Halo Infinite, it seems to be wavering more towards the latter.
And even taking all that away, Microsoft hasn't been successful enough in the past 14 years to have had *that* much of a negative effect on gaming. Their push into subscriptions and cloud based gaming are hardly the things that are currently killing gaming as they both haven't been very successful for them, to the point that it now seems they're going to go 3rd party because they've been such a disaster.
Subscriptions were something we bore because MS' online services were at least more competent than Sony's. At least back in the day.
Abby isn't trans but I spent multiple years thinking her character model was literally a man with a ponytail because they went out of their way to give her no feminie features. Turns out she is based on a woman, but some short body builder with negative boobs and hips.
They've been trying to push this body type as a counter to all the hot chicks with big, round tits and nice feminine figures that have populated gaming for a good two decades. The feminists and SJWs were never comfortable with that, and while the second-wave feminists saw kickass hot chicks as empowering, the third-wave feminists did not, so they desired a more ''realistic'' take that looks more like a man a la Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones.
Morrowind wasn't very popular because the game that is actually on the disc is a broken piece of shit that is a tedious, sluggish, unfun mess of crap. Trudging through the fog, swinging ineptly at these green, reptilian bats that attack you every 38 seconds is not fun. Even most Morrowind fans agree that Morrowind, the actual game that Bethesda released, fucking sucks, they just argue that because Morrowind + Various Mods is good, and that makes Morrowind good.
That's the point I was trying to get across. The fact that Morrowind is broken as hell is something that cannot be understated.
I'm not against people saying that Morrowind was a fun game. It's just that it's a horribly flawed game, one that is practically a janky piece of software that makes Skyrim look immaculate by comparison. Is Skyrim perfect? The answer is obviously no. But it was functional and it was easy to pick up and have fun with, which is why it was more successful than Morrowind, which at most, is a cult classic with a cult following.
And while that may be, the vast majority of the public does not play games with mods, or buy shitty games with cool high concept in the hopes that modders will make the game good. Skyrim is really the first Elder Scrolls game Bethesda released that is actually fun to play, front to back, as the game that Bethesda actually released.
I thought that was Oblivion, which built up the fanbase that eventually had a lot of fun with Skyrim. But Skyrim was a bit more improved in the gameplay front.
Finally, with Skyrim, Todd Howard said, "What if I just made the core mechanics actually work? Instead of dropping a fat shit on the disc? Instead of just expecting modders to make an actual finished product?" And holy shit, he couldn't stop selling the thing, it was that easy all along.
Exactly. The detractors called this ''streamlining'' and said it was bad, but it was what made Skyrim so successful that even the Japanese started taking notes and copying its systems for games like Breath of the Wild. When classic game franchises like Zelda start copying you, you know you've made it.
All the more reason why I'm stupefied that Nintendo and its fans are persecuting Palworld. If they're copying your formula, it means your formula works. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If I were in charge of Nintendo, I wouldn't go after Palworld, I'd have fucking crossover events with them and Pokemon.
