The Elder Scrolls

RPGs are gauged by how varied you are able to play your role. Being an established character doesn't mean that it ceases to be a roleplaying game; you are simply playing a predetermined character. You control the character and make choices. Are you a heartless witcher or does Geralt have a heart of gold underneath the cold front? Does Revan fall to the dark side as he did before, or does he decide to make the best of the second chance he was given? Does the exile seek revenge or answers?

Skyrim is the least RPG of the TES games, not because it doesn't have Attributes or makes the MC a chosen one, but because it is the most limited in how your character can react and shape the story. The companions quest is a good example of the problem Skyrim has, but you can find these kinds of design decisions all over the game, like:
- The thieves guild forcing you to pledge your eternal soul to Hircine, with no way to reject this "gift"
- The civil war being literally the exact same quest line on both sides with no meaningful difference in outcome
- Your inability to throw Bella Delphine out of the Blades for insubordination and telling the fucking dragon born what to do, despite pledging earlier to serve him. The game won't even let you kill her.

It's just no fun. Instead of shaping the world and leaving my mark, I am simply following a really badly written script and groaning at the next line they want me to say. If I go off-script, the game crosses its arms and pouts until I decide to play the game how it wants me to. Fallout 3 and 4 have the same core issue, which is why modern Bethesda games are barely RPGs - they are guided tours.
 
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Brap God said:
Look, once again I just think you dislike when the protagonist is a more highkey important figure. Nothing we say will change the fact that every TES game has you as the central figure of a plot that's lore defining. They even came up with the retardation that is a "Dragon Break" to canonize all the endings of Daggerfall. My point is, none of the stories told are personal, you're just injected into the setting as a major player in one way or another, doesn't matter if your character has humble origins or is a special boy, slightly different variations of the same sandwich.
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Yeah I'll just have to agree to disagree on Skyrim not being an RPG I guess. I just personally think Skyrim is a much better action/adventure game than it is an RPG. Someone said earlier that Daggerfall could be more considered more of a sim game than an RPG itself so we could go back and forth all day about this dumb shit lol

Coldsteel the Hedgehog said:
I'm not agreeing with you, if you don't think KOTOR is an rpg then you're actually retarded.
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I know KOTOR is an RPG I just never liked that you are stuck playing a character with a very strict "canon" story which devalues other decisions made in the game by the player. Very good game but it's always been a gripe of mine about it. That's a topic for a different thread though.
 
Krayt Dragon said:
RPGs are gauged by how varied you are able to play your role. Being an established character doesn't mean that it ceases to be a roleplaying game; you are simply playing a predetermined character. You control the character and make choices. Are you a heartless witcher or does Geralt have a heart of gold underneath the cold front? Does Revan fall to the dark side as he did before, or does he decide to make the best of the second chance he was given? Does the exile seek revenge or answers?

Skyrim is the least RPG of the TES games, not because it doesn't have Attributes or makes the MC a chosen one, but because it is the most limited in how your character can react and shape the story. The companions quest is a good example of the problem Skyrim has, but you can find these kinds of design decisions all over the game, like:
- The thieves guild forcing you to pledge your eternal soul to Hircine, with no way to reject this "gift"
- The civil war being literally the exact same quest line on both sides with no meaningful difference in outcome
- Your inability to throw Bella Delphine out of the Blades for insubordination and telling the fucking dragon born what to do, despite pledging earlier to serve him. The game won't even let you kill her.

It's just no fun. Instead of shaping the world and leaving my mark, I am simply following a really badly written script and groaning at the next line they want me to say. If I go off-script, the game crosses its arms and pouts until I decide to play the game how it wants me to. Fallout 3 and 4 have the same core issue, which is why modern Bethesda games are barely RPGs - they are guided tours.
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Fallout 3 was infamous for this. Especially since the ending was originally the lone wanderer having no choice but to enter the water purification plant and get ass blasted by radiation. Yet at the same time they also had a super mutant companion who was totally immune to radiation.

Fallout 3 had to get patched because the climax of their fucking main story had such a blatant fucking plot hole. Never mind fixing a broken game with patches. They had to patch a broken story
 
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The Ugly One said:
People who argue over whether game is REALLY representative of a genre are usually just trying to cover up massive coping and seething over something they don't like being popular. Nobody argues that Soulbringer isn't really an RPG, because it was a shit game and nobody cares. By most of these "Skyrim isn't an RPG" arguments, Planescape: Torment isn't an RPG, but rpg nerds mostly love that one, so it gets a pass.
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Oof. We're going there? Fuck it. In for a penny...

Planescape: Torment is more of a VN than an RPG
 
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Skyrim definitely falls flat in some areas, I won't deny that from anyone. Are the consequences lacking from the DBH finale? Yes. Is it weird and kind of retarded that you have to become a werewolf as part of the companions? Yes. Does Skyrim lack a lot of elements players might expect from an RPG like number-crunch and hard-locks? Also yes. It's not a perfect game. I'm not here to dickride it as the GOAT.

I'm just tired of this "Skyrim is a good game, but it's not a good RPG" bullshit because it makes it genuinely, truly impossible to have constructive or good faith discussions about both the individual titles and the series as a whole. That rhetoric regarding the later Bethesda titles is exactly why I stopped posting both here & in the Fallout thread for years after months of following both, because any time I or anyone else so much as brought up some of these games, you faggots circled the wagons and did nothing but endlessly jack off over how shit they all were until anyone who had anything new to say just fucking left because nobody wanted to talk about anything other than Dagoth Ur shitposts for another fifteen pages.

People are so reluctant to give Skyrim even a shred of respect because they think it's goyslop or whatever that they'll literally make shit up just to say "Skyrim bad." I appreciate everyone here who has been trying to have ACTUAL fucking discussions about the games regardless of whether we agree or not. Everyone else who has been making reddit-tier faggotposts like they're the next hhbomberguy should kill themselves and hope the nine have a sense of humor.
 
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Yeah, Skyrim did become cool to hate. It has a lot of issues but it plays the best of the TES games by a loooong way.
The dungeons are really fun to clear out even if the side quests were meh, especially following oblivion's which were some of the best they ever made.
Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind compliment each other well IMO, They each do something better than the others.
It's biggest flaws are just the dog water quests.
 
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I've avoided cheesing and exploiting but I've felt piss weak as a mage til now. I tried making a 5-6 sec spell dot with a weakness debuff attached to it, knowing it'd only apply to the 4 of the 5 seconds, but now that I made those two looping weakness spells that exponentially buff each other, I actually only really need one of them. So I guess what I lacked was just a 100% weakness spell before casting my damaging spell, not really much of an exploit.

Watched a streamer lose his absolute mind over having a 6 dmg dagger at lv 15, tens of hours in the game and 100 of the associated stat. It still seems like the scaling is fucked, so at this point I doubt I'll even level past 15.
Deus Exica said:
This thread and these semantics arguments are fucking gay. Whoever featured this thread should be shot.
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>Headline clicking tourist is mad that people discuss a game at length instead of a 600lb hamplanet.
StacticShock said:
let me try, Baldur's Gate 2 and Disco Elysium are books that have slapped in dice rolling because they pretend to be rpg's.
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It's like all those 90s aerobic trends like trampolines and pilates that people get into instead of just fucking working out. It's trying to drip feed a very basic concept to people who aren't actually into it. The reason BG3 has such success is because it's 1. a 'hard and complex' game for TTRPG spergs, and 2. a sex-sim akin Persona for all the fujo gooners. It is woman coded as fuck; the concept of romance and cutscenes justifying the tens of hours of gameplay to people who don't like TTRPGs.
 
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BullfrogBill said:
Again, the problem isn't that "Oblivion was always bad." It wasn't, it's a fun game of it's time. That's the key point "of it's time". Adding the ultra modern graphics on top of a game with a 20 year old engine and AI, playing pretend that it's a new 2025 game makes everything seem so much worse and more awkward than it did in 2006/7. If the original Oblivion was never made in 2006 and they only released the new 2025 version exactly as we have it now, it would be unexceptable how janky and odd everything is in that game for 2025.

Oblivion Remastered reminds me of George Lucas' Special Editions of Star Wars where he put all kinds of then modern CGI all over the place in movies from the 70s and 80s making everything feel much more unnatural and retarded than if they just kept the same special effects the movies of their time had originally that people already loved in the first place. Changing stuff like this in the pursuit of making old art "more modern" is always going to bite you in the ass because eventually the "modernized" version isn't going to be modern anymore and it's going to be even less appealing to people than the original was. The Oblivion "remaster" isn't going to stand the test of time like the original simply because it's over 125gb while the og is like 4gb.
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I'm actually frustrated when games are tiny like the Oblivion remaster. It feels like content has been left out. I wish my games were 500GB+. At least I'd know they were complete.
 
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Sheep King said:
But I mean, I'd like to be proven wrong.
What are some good Morrowind non-normie builds? I'm not talking max alchemy intelligence potions or spellcrafting exploits, what do people here run to make combat genuinely fun? I'll keep it in mind the next time I go back to the game.
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Like anything Morrowind you have to be really specific about what you mean by playing fairly because the entire game plays like a series of exploits.

Without abusing potions or spellcrafting I suggest short blades and light armor. You can take Steed Sign and begin the game with a pretty formidable speed. Now, you can ALSO wear Brotherhood armor (which is nearly comparable to glass) and have a very strong character at level 1 (but some people consider brotherhood armor cheesy). Now if you want to take it a step further you can pick up the Boots of Blinding Speed and get magic resistance however strikes you as ethical and have even more speed to feed into your attack rating.

You can also make pretty much any of other strength/endurance fed vanilla melee build decent by sort of limping along until you get the Corpus Disease and wait until you permanently have max strength/endurance
 
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Sheep King said:
good Morrowind non-normie builds?
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Try enchanting only + summoned gear, is been one of my favourite characters to play, i walk around like an unasuming peasant and them BAM i just summon an entire power ranger set out of the ass of oblivion itself and murder the bandit right there on the spot, since im also a high elf with atronach i have a digustingly huge mana pool, but instead of using that mana to cast nuke spells or some other lame shit like that, i instead leave casting to my gear and use my absurd mana bar to cast a max range on touch paralizis spell to freeze everyone in time like if i were DIO.
Highly autistic i know, but very fun build.
 
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Coldsteel the Hedgehog said:
Skyrim is a good game, but it's not a good RPG
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It's not a good game nor is it an RPG, and no amount of kvetching will ever change that. Go write me another novel crying about how mean Obsidian is or something, Charles Dickens
Geno Dolphin said:
Yeah, Skyrim did become cool to hate. It has a lot of issues but it plays the best of the TES games by a loooong way.
The dungeons are really fun to clear out even if the side quests were meh, especially following oblivion's which were some of the best they ever made.
Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind compliment each other well IMO, They each do something better than the others.
It's biggest flaws are just the dog water quests.
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It's got the best combat, sure, but that's all it has. It lacks in quite literally every other area, aside from maybe open world exploration and the like. Fallout 4 and 76 also technically have the best combat out of any Fallout games(if you're a pleb and never played Tactics maybe) but it's hated by a huge amount of fanbase for a reason. Nobody would have a problem with Skyrim being like this if it didn't advertise itself as an RPG and instead more like an action game that it is(same as with Fallout 4). Bethesda tricked an entire generation into thinking their half-assed game is an RPG same way as the gooks convinced an entire generation of gooners that a gacha slot machine on their phone is a real video game.
 
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⋖ cørdion ⋗ said:
>Headline clicking tourist is mad that people discuss a game at length instead of a 600lb hamplanet.
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Been in the thread for a very long time, nigger. I am saying the fucking tourists coming in to greentext like 4cuck rapefugees about how Skyrim or Oblivion isn't an RPG are annoying and I wish the thread hadn't been featured so stupid cunts wouldn't have ruined the discussion.

You have niggers coming in that have clearly never played the games and have no idea what they're talking about acting like authorities on what is in them. It's very annoying. That isn't discussing a game at length, that's writing a YouTube essay and dumping it in the thread with the expectation that everyone else is too stupid to know that they're talking entirely out of their ass.
 
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hog cranking frog said:
I'm such a retard I'll probably put 200 hrs into the remaster while two geniuses in this thread mathematically prove that the R in RPG is Role.
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just don't cry once you get in the shivering islands, they done intro dirty because unreal engine i guess, if they tried to make it as beautiful as the original a regular person's pc would probably set itself on fire because of the butterflies.

also the vanilla ending was remade into something shit, SEAniggers doing a WC3 deforged all over again by changing shit they think it looks good in their retarded eyes.
 
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