The Elder Scrolls

[Watcher]

Since we've been debating like mad about Elder Scrolls. Let us all post our opinions on the games.

 

[spaps]

It's like Far Cry 3 with swords.

 

[exball]

Oblivion was the best one.

 

[c-no]

Arena is fun, Daggerfall is buggy and huge, Morrowind is unique, Oblivion is fun even if the landscape isn't as unique as Morrowind's, and Skyrim is fun with its fantasy viking setting. Battlespire is tough (and it's been a long time since I played it) and Redguard is rather interesting (I do wonder if there is a way I can try to play the game.).

 

[Mondo Zappa]

I feel like they get better with each installment. I haven't spent too much time with the first 3, but I loved Oblivion and I feel like Skyrim surpassed it in every way.

Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind are a bit too tabletop for me to get used to, but with time I hope to get into them.

 

[exball]

I feel like Skyrim surpassed it in every way.

Strongly disagree there sir.

 

[Mondo Zappa]

Strongly disagree there sir.

Really? I thought it was great. The gameplay elements are much more engaging, combat feels better, voices have variety for a change, you can roleplay better than ever, environments are more varied, and they fixed the leveling issues.

I will concede that questlines and factions were pretty lacking by comparison.

 

[exball]

Really? I thought it was great. The gameplay elements are much more engaging, combat feels better, voices have variety for a change, you can roleplay better than ever, environments are more varied, and they fixed the leveling issues.

I will concede that questlines and factions were pretty lacking by comparison.

Honestly Skyrim bores me a bit. Oblivion had awesome faction questlines and the Shivering Isles. Really Dawnguard and Dragonborn were the most interesting things about the game. But my god is it's modding community beautiful.

 

[Watcher]

Strongly disagree there sir.

Really? I thought it was great. The gameplay elements are much more engaging, combat feels better, voices have variety for a change, you can roleplay better than ever, environments are more varied, and they fixed the leveling issues.

I will concede that questlines and factions were pretty lacking by comparison.

What Exball said.

One issue I had with Skyrim upon replaying it was the lack of classes.

I know why Bethesda did it, because the first time you play the game you probably don't know what kind of character you wanna play as. So it lets you conceivably play however you like with no restrictions. The problem with this is it causes every character you play as to feel eerily similar to each other. Like you could use magic for the first part of the game but you run out of mana so easily (because you can't pick what level your starting skills are at either apart from race) you have to double dip into using a sword too. Likewise because there're few consequences you could easily just play as a thief in heavy armor if you really wanted to. They also removed hand-to-hand for some reason which makes playing a guy who punches dudes impractical as well.

Quests and factions being lacking was only half of it. In Skyrim it is impossible to fail a questline. In Oblivion and especially Morrowind you could fail a quest and a questline by doing something you were told not to do. Like killing a member of your faction or stealing from them. In Skyrim the guards get summoned but nobody really cares. Likewise in both Oblivion and Morrowind you had a rank in an organization and it generally felt like you were advancing past other characters rather than just being the new guy for 7 quests and then being promoted to the head of an organization out of nowhere.

 

[exball]

My main problem with Skyrim is a can't recreate my favorite character from Oblivion. A drunken Argonian named Deep-in-his-cups. He never wore armor and punched everything to death. Bring back hand to hand Bethesda.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

I don't know if anyone here cares about it, but tye MMO is a complete trainwreck.

 

[c-no]

One other thing to say about The Elder Scrolls is that is managed to have two things furries would go crazy over: Khajiits and Argonians. I wonder how many have been desecrated by creepy furry fan-fics. Also, the lore of the series is something, especially when considering what Kirkbride writes (though one has to wonder if any of it is canon and I mean stuff outside of the games).

I don't know if anyone here cares about it, but tye MMO is a complete trainwreck.

How so? Please, tell us more since some of us never played it. How bad is the wreck?

 

[A-Stump]

My main problem with Skyrim is a can't recreate my favorite character from Oblivion. A drunken Argonian named Deep-in-his-cups. He never wore armor and punched everything to death. Bring back hand to hand Bethesda.

Hand to hand was actually a hidden stat in Skyrim that became incredibly powerful but you had to spec it the proper way. I know because my favorite character in Oblivion was a Nord who ran around punching the piss out of everything and I wanted to replicate it.

 

[Uzumaki]

My cousin got me into Elder Scrolls with Oblivion, and I remember a few months after I got Skyrim I was visiting him at his house and he showed me Skyrim on his dedicated gaming machine. It was like seeing the N64's graphic the first time, if any of you damn kids who make me feel old in my late 20s can even REMEMBER a time before 3d graphics.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

How so? Please, tell us more since some of us never played it. How bad is the wreck?

It has quite a few so I'm making a list.
1. The game doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. It suffers due to the fact that they tried to make multiplayer game in a framework not meant to be as such, and they didn't know what concessions to make at what points. They also put all the players on singular, continental megaservers which leads to latency problems because of system load and
sheer distance.
2. The monsters don't drop anythig good. Doesn't matter if its a cave spider or a deadra, its only gonna have 1 or 2 gold
pieces on it. Strangely enough the bosses have this problem
too.
3. The game has problems WoW got rid of years ago. The
game had a problem with bots when I played it. You couldn't
complete quests because a group of bots would descend
upon the boss of the dungeon as soon as it respawned. The
bodies also didn't go away. If it was a spider or something
you couldn't even see the thing through the upturned legs.
Look up Angry Joe's review on Youtube. His critique is better than mine. Also, go with Wildstar or WoW for an MMO. At least they know what they're doing.

 

[Watcher]

TES was just a case of Zenimax pushing a game that nobody really wanted. I remember I was at a Gamestop and someone there called it "Skyrim Online".

That was what people wanted, some multiplayer version of Skyrim. Or at least some game where everyone's an NPC like in Star Wars Galaxies. Not a clone of WoW circa 2003 that is going to go free to play within a year or so.

I thought the TORtanic already alerted publishers that mmorpgs are dead in the water right now. TOR was the most expensive game ever made (at the time) and it failed, why would anyone expected TES to be any different?

 

[Arkangel]

The first Elder Scrolls game I've ever played was Morrowind on the original Xbox. I didn't know what it was at first, but when I got into it, I was pretty much hooked. I spent most of my time playing as a thief/assassin character going around and stealing and murdering everything. Good times.

 

[Watcher]

Speaking of Morrowind, a team of modders is trying to recreate Morrowind's engine.

What this'll allow for is much more enhanced mods, a more stable engine, and allowing for complete overhauls to things like the combat and skill system.

The project is called OpenMW. Why I'm mentioning it right now is the dev team recently stated they're only a few versions away from release. And that version 1.0 should come within the year, if not by the end of the summer.

 

[Bgheff]

TES was just a case of Zenimax pushing a game that nobody really wanted. I remember I was at a Gamestop and someone there called it "Skyrim Online".

That was what people wanted, some multiplayer version of Skyrim. Or at least some game where everyone's an NPC like in Star Wars Galaxies. Not a clone of WoW circa 2003 that is going to go free to play within a year or so.

I thought the TORtanic already alerted publishers that mmorpgs are dead in the water right now. TOR was the most expensive game ever made (at the time) and it failed, why would anyone expected TES to be any different?

Subscritpion MMO's make a profit until their userbase it's really low, lie in the tens of thousands. and at that poinbt they can just go free to play. I suspect it was a consistant profit that made them want to make it.

Until TOR closes it didn't fail. Not being on top doesn't mean they aren't going to keep it going for money.

 

[Watcher]

Subscritpion MMO's make a profit until their userbase it's really low, lie in the tens of thousands. and at that poinbt they can just go free to play. I suspect it was a consistant profit that made them want to make it.

Until TOR closes it didn't fail. Not being on top doesn't mean they aren't going to keep it going for money.

What I mean is TOR costed between 150-200 million dollars and was clearly not designed from the start to be a free to play mmorpg. When it initially went free to play the devs began cutting parts of the interface off and selling it to paid subscribers. Indeed many reviewers revised their reviews of the game after it went free to play due to some of the more rampant price gouging that Bioware began to implement.

With TES it doesn't really have much of a long-term plan, and I know very few people that are interested in it at this point. Much less when it was in beta where the general feeling was "I don't want to pay 15$ a month for this". With WoW, once it started getting popular it didn't stop for many many years.

Eventually it'll get to the point where even announcing a new expansion pack won't bring the numbers up and they'll have to go free to play. At that point, sure it'll make some money over a few years but not enough compared to their singleplayer RPGs that still sell copies to this day due to their modding communities.