Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[TVB]

Hey, Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur were honest about being made for dudes who played fighting games with one hand on the controller and the other hand on their shaft, considering that most females in those games packed enough cake and milk to make most boys wet. Mass Effect did the same thing for shooter/RPG fans, what with the space elf Asari race being a race of sexy space lesbians that can get fucked by every sapient species and grow bigger tits as they age. There's no shame in admitting that BG3 is the same, except it's made for left-leaning, DnD-playing shippers and furries. If we boys can have our smut, so can they.

Don't forget Tomb Raider. Lara Croft became a game for both genders, but the dudes who play it, Nude Raider exists

 

[KingofSomething]

That's why I really can't get people who hate Skyrim and love Morrowind because of such features. I mean, killing questgivers and essential characters may be good for a laugh, but at the end, it's pointless.

Yeah, I really don't like that at all. What if the character will do something interesting later on? What if there's a twist that the character I can kill will help me out down the line? What if they become plot-relevant? If you just run around and kill people wanton, and get one of those "with this character's death the threads of fate of prophecy is sealed and now the world's doomed" message, you've kinda just spoiled a bit of the game for yourself. And that's even worse if they get killed in crossfire. All of that really is totally pointless once you're done with the wow factor of it all, and it just leaves you with a bunch of NPCs you can accidentally kill. Even worse is those guards in the Elder's Scrolls series, where you can accidentally piss them off and wind up with a ton of them chasing you all over.

I think it's a fun way to punish murderhobos who just kill at random by deleting quests or for people who just want to fuck around and see what changes around the world. Just by making them unkillable, you've already signaled to the player that they're important to the plot, so you're not much spoiled by seeing a message about it. Hell there's a character in Pillars of Eternity that you can kill that leads to a non-standard game over because they were your sole lead. The only caveat I would have against it would be some Essential NPC dying to something outside your control because they decided to fist fight a dragon when you weren't looking. So I guess I wouldn't have something like Skyrim have killable Essential NPC's where there's random enemy attacks because you're only punishing the player at that point for having bad luck

 

[Spud]

So I guess I wouldn't have something like Skyrim have killable Essential NPC's where there's random enemy attacks because you're only punishing the player at that point for having bad luck

They already have an answer to that problem in the form of protected NPC's. Essential can't be killed at all whereas Protected requires the player to deal the last hit for.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Daggerfall's first dungeon feels like a puzzle, like many things in older CRPGs. Unless you've fucked around to know it by heart, then you can just make a build that can push through it like nothing. The wisdom of past players guide many new players, but people who play Daggerfall blind often bitch that they can't get past the first dungeon.

I've heard this a few times, and I don't get it.

There's maybe a dozen enemies in Privateer's Hold. A couple bats, a couple rats, a couple thieves, a skeleton and a bear (... for some reason), and of course the imp. I might be forgetting one or two. It's short. Six or seven rooms connected by corridors and stairs. The closest thing to a "puzzle" about it is that there's a secret door that can let you skip a bit of it, but if you don't find it, oh well.

I think I was around 15 or so when I first played it, I didn't have a strategy guide, and it didn't stump me or stymie me. Other than the (admittedly stupid) imp, there's nothing complicated or hard about Privateer's Hold.

If you can't make it out of Privateer's Hold, just stop calling yourself a gamer, ffs. I'm sorry. Maybe some Candy Crush would be more up your alley. I'm not usually one of these "games have to be hard, hur hur, play on Nightmare or go home!" assholes, but this is more like that journalist who failed the Cuphead tutorial. It's failing to meet even a basic level of ability.

"You can betray your party and destroy questgivers!" Great, so what am I supposed to do after that 15 minutes of frivolity?

Yeah, I really don't like that at all. What if the character will do something interesting later on? What if there's a twist that the character I can kill will help me out down the line? What if they become plot-relevant? If you just run around and kill people wanton, and get one of those "with this character's death the threads of fate of prophecy is sealed and now the world's doomed" message, you've kinda just spoiled a bit of the game for yourself. And that's even worse if they get killed in crossfire. All of that really is totally pointless once you're done with the wow factor of it all, and it just leaves you with a bunch of NPCs you can accidentally kill. Even worse is those guards in the Elder's Scrolls series, where you can accidentally piss them off and wind up with a ton of them chasing you all over.

Larian games account for this. It's virtually impossible to actually softlock yourself out of the game by killing anything. The game world adjusts. There are failsafe NPCs that will show up, or or another NPC offers the same quest, or you can just find the McGuffin without an NPC telling you you needed to, or whatever. There's actually content in Larian RPGs that most people won't see, because it's stuff that only happens if you kill NPCs most people wouldn't think to kill.

Not to say you can't miss out on some non-critical content by being a murderhobo. You will! But you can do it, and the game doesn't do a Ubisoft "you desynced from reality" soft reset or just game-over you or anything.

I've heard of them here and there. I've also heard about how amazing Neverwinter Nights is, only to finally get it in a Steam bundle and find out that it's just a clunky computer RPG full of all the classic stock tropes that CRPGs tend to have.

It won a lot of awards! So therefore it must be good! Just as good as The Last of Us Part II, which has its own Wikipedia article for how many awards it won. Apparently it won 46 and got 97 nominations. Meanwhile, Yakuza 0, a game with over 50,000 Steam reviews that come out to a 95% positive rating, only got three nominations. Are you entirely sure you want to take awards seriously?

I'm not making a "the games are good" argument (although I would say they are). I'm just rejecting the "the name doesn't have any built-in market" argument.

 

[Calandrino]

Meanwhile, Yakuza 0, a game with over 50,000 Steam reviews that come out to a 95% positive rating, only got three nominations. Are you entirely sure you want to take awards seriously?

No, but I don't trust steam reviews either.

When did people get so autistic and retarded that saving your game became a bad thing to do?

Way before your time.

 

[skykiii]

Ah, there's a one unpopular opinion i have:
Final Fantasy 6 is the peak of the franchise. FF7 is just a downgraded FF6 (even Sephiroth is just Kefka but without the clown part, just the insanity part).

Hell, the Materia system is itself just the Esper system but worse since you don't even get to keep the spells once the thing is removed.

This is generally the consensus for anyone who played CRPGs in the 90s.

Daggerfall says hi.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

That's fine, just means your okay with paying more for less.

Not really. Again, this whole idea of being able to kill everyone in the game just doesn't excite me that much. It's cute, but after 3 minutes, the joy of it wears off. You kill someone important and the game goes ''load a previous save file because you just fucked this playthrough''. Hope to God you saved recently. What if you didn't, because you didn't know and you haven't saved for hours, or your save file got corrupted, as in the case with games like these?

I should point out an additional factor here:

Games with an action component are easier to program (heck most intro programming courses start off by having you make a space shooter). RPGs or strategy games are not--they take a metric fuckton of planning even before you get to the headache of how to implement the rules and behaviors.

So I'm not at all surprised there's a ton of action games when a lot of those can easily be someone's first game (even Id Software had a space shooter called Slordax).

Not only that, they're also easier to play from the player's perspective. Just pick the thing up and play. Especially with games like Mario, Metroid, Gradius, or Ninja Gaiden. The faster a player can get to enjoying a game, the more they'll come back to it.

Daggerfall says hi.

My point exactly. Many CRPG fans enjoyed Bethesda's output up to Morrowind. Oblivion and Fallout 3 was when they started hating Bethesda, since Oblivion was a dumbed-down Morrowind in their eyes, and Fallout 3 pissed them off because it wasn't like the Interplay Fallout games. Then Skyrim and Fallout 4 pissed them off even more. But the CRPG fans were OK with Bethesda up to Morrowind, which they praised as a classic.

If you can't make it out of Privateer's Hold, just stop calling yourself a gamer, ffs. I'm sorry. Maybe some Candy Crush would be more up your alley. I'm not usually one of these "games have to be hard, hur hur, play on Nightmare or go home!" assholes, but this is more like that journalist who failed the Cuphead tutorial. It's failing to meet even a basic level of ability.

That's not what I hear; most gamers who go in blind can't get past the first dungeon to save themselves. Tons of posts online about ''I CAN'T GET PAST THE FIRST DUNGEON'' are all over the place. Cuphead never gave the gaming community that kind of flak; most gamers got past that shit rather easily, because it was just another platformer.

Larian games account for this. It's virtually impossible to actually softlock yourself out of the game by killing anything. The game world adjusts. There are failsafe NPCs that will show up, or or another NPC offers the same quest, or you can just find the McGuffin without an NPC telling you you needed to, or whatever. There's actually content in Larian RPGs that most people won't see, because it's stuff that only happens if you kill NPCs most people wouldn't think to kill.

So basically, they pull a Mass Effect 3 and replace a dead important character with an NPC that offers the same thing.

Don't forget Tomb Raider. Lara Croft became a game for both genders, but the dudes who play it, Nude Raider exists

Exactly. Games back then weren't afriad to show off sexy chicks for boys; BG3 just does the same for furries and shippers in the DnD community.

 

[cia-log]

If you can't make it out of Privateer's Hold, just stop calling yourself a gamer, ffs. I'm sorry. Maybe some Candy Crush would be more up your alley. I'm not usually one of these "games have to be hard, hur hur, play on Nightmare or go home!" assholes, but this is more like that journalist who failed the Cuphead tutorial. It's failing to meet even a basic level of ability.

Sometimes it feels like nobody actually plays these old games and just parrots whatever opinions they read on /v/ to look knowledgeable. I don't even like Daggerfall and in general I think it's poorly designed, but you have to genuinely be learning disabled to not make it out of Privateer's Hold.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

That's not what I hear; most gamers who go in blind can't get past the first dungeon to save themselves. Tons of posts online about ''I CAN'T GET PAST THE FIRST DUNGEON'' are all over the place. Cuphead never gave the gaming community that kind of flak; most gamers got past that shit rather easily, because it was just another platformer.

Then most modern gamers are pathetic faggots. I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm really not. Their opinion is worthless.

So basically, they pull a Mass Effect 3 and replace a dead important character with an NPC that offers the same thing.

Some, yes, that's one trick. Also just alternate ways to do the same thing.

But I mean, there's basically four options, and any option you pick someone is going to complain about:

1. Fallback NPCs and quest redundancies. It becomes difficult to screw the game up, but at a slight cost of admitting that that individual NPCs are not all that important.
2. Make important NPCs invulnerable. The cost here is that the game world becomes less dynamic and more obviously game-ish. And it doesn't really matter if you mean "actually invulnerable" or just "so massively overpowered they might as well be", the effect is the same.
3. Some sort of "history desync" or something, along the lines of what AssCreed games do. Again, it makes the world more obviously artificial and game-ish. Related would just be to "game over" the player as soon as they kill an important NPC... The end result is exactly the same, reload from the last save, just one is more direct about it.
4. Soft-lock the player so they can "keep playing" but the game becomes uncompletable and can't be progressed further.

Any of those four options are going to piss someone off. At least option 1 requires some effort, 2-4 are just the lazy way out.

 

[The Ugly One]

Players who want to min-max will do it in any game and reduce it to one "optimal path". That's a flaw of humanity, not game design - gamers will do it even if the differences are so minute as to be irrelevant.

... The ebony dagger choice is an egregious example, and fairly singular. There are ways you can exploit the character generator, yes - the "take a weakness to something you have a racial immunity to" trick, for example. But the game isn't so hard that any reasonable build isn't going to be viable.

Most people don't play "optimal" builds. Even in tabletop...everyone knows that in D&D 5e, Human Champion Fighter is not optimal at all. It's also the most popular race/class/subclass choice. The important thing is that building your character to play the game the way you want to play it is fun, and works out roughly like you expect it to.

I couldn't give a flying fuck if my Stealthy Sneaky Spy Guy is "optimal" or not, but if I eventually run into a boss that can only be defeated by Tankbody O'Lanternjaw, that's just bad design. Or if the game offers three different weapon specializations, but tee hee hee, don't choose the sniper option because the entire game is in close quarters other than the starting area, tee hee. Oh, you specced out a diplomat who can handle himself in a melee? GUESS WHAT, FAGGOT, THERE ARE NO HIGH-LEVEL MELEE WEAPONS HAHAAHAHA WE GOT YOU LMAO.

Bethesda games have traditionally been full of trap options where you have no way of knowing when you start out that you have completely fucked over your game. That's bad design.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Most people don't play "optimal" builds. Even in tabletop...everyone knows that in D&D 5e, Human Champion Fighter is not optimal at all. It's also the most popular race/class/subclass choice. The important thing is that building your character to play the game the way you want to play it is fun, and works out roughly like you expect it to.

I agree, although I would say that sadly the internet is magnifying the "must optimize!" mindset.

I couldn't give a flying fuck if my Stealthy Sneaky Spy Guy is "optimal" or not, but if I eventually run into a boss that can only be defeated by Tankbody O'Lanternjaw, that's just bad design. Or if the game offers three different weapon specializations, but tee hee hee, don't choose the sniper option because the entire game is in close quarters other than the starting area, tee hee. Oh, you specced out a diplomat who can handle himself in a melee? GUESS WHAT, FAGGOT, THERE ARE NO HIGH-LEVEL MELEE WEAPONS HAHAAHAHA WE GOT YOU LMAO.

Bethesda games have traditionally been full of trap options where you have no way of knowing when you start out that you have completely fucked over your game. That's bad design.

I'm not going to say that none exist, but I've never really run into this.

 

[The Ugly One]

I agree, although I would say that sadly the internet is magnifying the "must optimize!" mindset.

True, there were people in online groups who would legit get mad at me that I went with hammers instead of axes in Skyrim. First, who fucking cares, it's not WoW and we're not farming ph4t l3wt by speedrunning raids. Second, hammers make a satisfying BONK and send enemies flying, which is fun.

I'm not going to say that none exist, but I've never really run into this.

Archery is a trap option in Oblivion. That's the most obvious example that comes immediately to mind. IIRC melee is a trap option in Fallout 1 or 2 or both, but I played those 20 years ago. Necromancer in Diablo 2 is full of trap options. Demon's Souls has quite a few trap options.

 

[cia-log]

There is a special kind of Bethesda hipster that loudly proclaims that their latest game is much worse than their previous game because it is "dumbed down," and by "dumbed down," they mean, "fixed broken garbage that made it a pain in the ass to play."

They're not completely wrong, Bethesda games do get more simplistic over the years. That's not to say the more complicated ones are better, if anything I think it just highlights the inherent shortcomings of Bethesda's game design, in particular the fact that all the extra options don't really add any strategic or tactical depth (or roleplaying for that matter) because you're always a loner whose whole job is wandering around stabbing random critters and people.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Then most modern gamers are pathetic faggots. I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm really not. Their opinion is worthless.

I disagree. You're talking from the POV of a person who knows Daggerfall by heart, so it's easy for you. Just in the same vein, it's easy for me to power through games like Star Wars Rebellion and Knights of the Old Republic, because I know these games by heart and I know how to make an optimal build, or where the right quests and items are.

Within the first hour after starting a new game in KOTOR, I can take enough quests and kill enough enemies to level myself up to the point where I can find the strongest enemy in the starting planet of Taris and kill him in single combat. Most players, meanwhile, even back in 2003, were struggling just to figure out the controls. Even the guy who made the KOTOR comic made his protagonist a guy whose skill with the Force was clumsy, basically as a way to communicate how he was more than a bit confused at how to play KOTOR the game.

Same goes for Rebellion; I know to assign troop deployment and economic development to my robo-vizier when I start the game, so I only have to worry about diplomacy, researching new tech, recruiting people, and building a massive fleet to kick the enemy out of the core worlds and chase them to the rim worlds where I decimate them one planet at a time. That doesn't erase the fact that most people who play the game for the first time are probably going to be confused as fuck as to how they're supposed to run things, let alone how to win.

Some, yes, that's one trick. Also just alternate ways to do the same thing.

But I mean, there's basically four options, and any option you pick someone is going to complain about:

1. Fallback NPCs and quest redundancies. It becomes difficult to screw the game up, but at a slight cost of admitting that that individual NPCs are not all that important.
2. Make important NPCs invulnerable. The cost here is that the game world becomes less dynamic and more obviously game-ish. And it doesn't really matter if you mean "actually invulnerable" or just "so massively overpowered they might as well be", the effect is the same.
3. Some sort of "history desync" or something, along the lines of what AssCreed games do. Again, it makes the world more obviously artificial and game-ish. Related would just be to "game over" the player as soon as they kill an important NPC... The end result is exactly the same, reload from the last save, just one is more direct about it.
4. Soft-lock the player so they can "keep playing" but the game becomes uncompletable and can't be progressed further.

Any of those four options are going to piss someone off. At least option 1 requires some effort, 2-4 are just the lazy way out.

Again, that's not a hill I wish to die on. I really don't care about killing questgivers or important characters. Feels more like a gimmick than something that adds legitimate fun to the gameplay.

Most people don't play "optimal" builds. Even in tabletop...everyone knows that in D&D 5e, Human Champion Fighter is not optimal at all. It's also the most popular race/class/subclass choice. The important thing is that building your character to play the game the way you want to play it is fun, and works out roughly like you expect it to.

I couldn't give a flying fuck if my Stealthy Sneaky Spy Guy is "optimal" or not, but if I eventually run into a boss that can only be defeated by Tankbody O'Lanternjaw, that's just bad design. Or if the game offers three different weapon specializations, but tee hee hee, don't choose the sniper option because the entire game is in close quarters other than the starting area, tee hee. Oh, you specced out a diplomat who can handle himself in a melee? GUESS WHAT, FAGGOT, THERE ARE NO HIGH-LEVEL MELEE WEAPONS HAHAAHAHA WE GOT YOU LMAO.

At that point, they're guilty of selling you false goods. ''YOU CAN PLAY THIS GAME HOWEVER YOU WANT, WITH WHATEVER CLASS/BUILD YOU WANT TO ROLEPAY AS.'' Then as you said, your sneaky thief runs into a boss that rips them to shreds because only a tough, tanky character can take them on. It turns out that all the BS about them giving you freedom of choice falls apart when you exercise that freedom and get raped by a later boss that needs specific skills to defeat. I remember Spoony's playthrough of Fallout 2 ended that way. He built his character based on his personal tastes, not based on what makes an optimal build, and so he got fucked by the enemies he came across.

Bethesda games have traditionally been full of trap options where you have no way of knowing when you start out that you have completely fucked over your game. That's bad design.

From my parlance, Bethesda fixed that by Oblivion. At that point, you can just level up everything because the class system does not matter. Class limits don't matter to a monster that just grinded in the forest and leveled everything up to the point where he or she can kill the enemy with magic, melee, archery, or get past the enemy with stealth.

They're not completely wrong, Bethesda games do get more simplistic over the years. That's not to say the more complicated ones are better, if anything I think it just highlights the inherent shortcomings of Bethesda's game design, in particular the fact that all the extra options don't really add any strategic or tactical depth (or roleplaying for that matter) because you're always a loner whose whole job is wandering around stabbing random critters and people.

Which means they're not using the DnD class system and leveling system to its full potential. It works best when you have several characters working together in a party, so you can spec one character to be good at one skill, and have other characters be good at other skills, so you can have a tank, a melee dude, a ranged attacker, a healer, a hacker/thief, etc.. It was for the best that Skyrim junked the class system altogether; it was useless in Oblivion, and it doesn't make sense in the context of Elder Scrolls where as you said, you spend most of the time alone, so you might as well have every skill.

 

[The Ugly One]

They're not completely wrong, Bethesda games do get more simplistic over the years. That's not to say the more complicated ones are better, if anything I think it just highlights the inherent shortcomings of Bethesda's game design, in particular the fact that all the extra options don't really add any strategic or tactical depth (or roleplaying for that matter) because you're always a loner whose whole job is wandering around stabbing random critters and people.

Agreed. Having 739 skills, only 15 of which are actually useful for completing the game, the other 724 of which are trap options, is not "depth," and disliking the fact that most of the options a game presents you with are useless is not "wanting your hand held."

From my parlance, Bethesda fixed that by Oblivion. At that point, you can just level up everything because the class system does not matter. Class limits don't matter to a monster that just grinded in the forest and leveled everything up to the point where he or she can kill the enemy with magic, melee, archery, or get past the enemy with stealth.

Archery's a trap option in Oblivion. A 20th level archer in Oblivion might as well be unarmed. Not worth wasting those few precious daedric arrows you scavenged off a bandit to take out some random minotaur in the woods.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Agreed. Having 739 skills, only 15 of which are actually useful for completing the game, the other 724 of which are trap options, is not "depth," and disliking the fact that most of the options a game presents you with are useless is not "wanting your hand held."

This is why I usually opt for an optimal build in these games. I don't give two shits about choice, because choice is a trap. I want to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentation of their women. When I start a KOTOR playthrough, I usually roll as a soldier, because soldier is the most useful class in the first 8 hours; the combat skills allow me to just go to the crime-infested lower rings of Taris and go door-to-door killing criminals and leveling up. Then I go to the gladiatorial arena, beat people up, and level up some more. Then I kill the optional boss who's the strongest guy on the starting planet, and once that's done, I'm more than ready to take on the remaining quests on the planet, since I can just cut through the enemy like a hot knife through butter.

Archery's a trap option in Oblivion. A 20th level archer in Oblivion might as well be unarmed. Not worth wasting those few precious daedric arrows you scavenged off a bandit to take out some random minotaur in the woods.

I see. Still, I didn't stop at level 20; I just kept leveling until most of my skills were at 50 or higher.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Archery is a trap option in Oblivion. That's the most obvious example that comes immediately to mind. IIRC melee is a trap option in Fallout 1 or 2 or both, but I played those 20 years ago. Necromancer in Diablo 2 is full of trap options. Demon's Souls has quite a few trap options.

Oh, if you're talking about games in general, yeah, I've run into it. Just not so much in Bethesda games.

Oblivion archery is viable, but I'll admit it requires playing a stealthy character to make it work really.

I disagree. You're talking from the POV of a person who knows Daggerfall by heart, so it's easy for you. Just in the same vein, it's easy for me to power through games like Star Wars Rebellion and Knights of the Old Republic, because I know these games by heart and I know how to make an optimal build, or where the right quests and items are.

Like I said, I think I was 15 the first time I played the game. Maybe 14, I dunno, math, leave me alone. The point is, I was young, dumb, and inexperienced too, and I did it just fine. This is not me, a 40-some year old man who has been gaming all my life I'm talking about. I'm talking about a kid back when the game was contemporary, and with the jankier UI than something like Daggerfall Unity gives you, to boot.

Its not that goddamned difficult.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Like I said, I think I was 15 the first time I played the game. Maybe 14, I dunno, math, leave me alone. The point is, I was young, dumb, and inexperienced too, and I did it just fine. This is not me, a 40-some year old man who has been gaming all my life I'm talking about. I'm talking about a kid back when the game was contemporary, and with the jankier UI than something like Daggerfall Unity gives you, to boot.

Its not that goddamned difficult.

Same thing with me and KOTOR, since as I said, I went for optimal builds instead of going for shallow things like ''choice''. I toyed around with the game, figured out the skills I needed, built a new character based on what I knew, and blew through the game just fine, but I'd be stupid if I didn't notice the fact that yes, many players struggled with KOTOR, and not every player is like me, who goes for what wins instead of what they feel like.

 

[popnloch ness monster]

many players struggled with KOTOR

guy, nobody struggled with KOTOR, it's a game for under 12yos that plays and is written like one - you can't fuck up because it's so easy, any time spent "optimising" would be time wasted, what the fuck are you on

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

guy, nobody struggled with KOTOR, it's a game for under 12yos that plays and is written like one - you can't fuck up because it's so easy, any time spent "optimising" would be time wasted, what the fuck are you on

Er, no. Tons of players struggled with it. The dude who made the KOTOR comic made his protagonist a clumsy oaf because the man struggled with the game when he played it, and the SW gaming community at the time had more than a few players struggling to figure out the game.

As for optimizing, the starting planet of Taris is filled with enemies and not many instances where someone with lockpicking/tech skills would be that necessary, especially since you get party members who can do that. A player who chooses to be a scoundrel or scout will have limited utility, and indeed, many players who played as those classes got smoked in Taris' more challenging areas. So of course, the best choice would be to play as a soldier and bump up combat skills, so you can make your main character into a Dynasty Warriors-style gore machine that can handle any fight, while some robot or some street urchin can hack computers and pick locks for you.

As for its story, KOTOR is one of the few RPG stories that reach up to classic, movie-level quality in terms of the story. It makes most movies like the MCU look like they're brainless cartoons for kids. It makes Morrowind look like an Agatha Christie novel for grade-schoolers. To paraphrase one fan, it was the Prequel Trilogy that many fans wanted, but didn't get from Lucas.