The Elder Scrolls

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All right, got as far as Ebonheart and did a couple Thieves' Guild quests. The second one was as stupid as the previous one, you have to align yourself juuuust behind a pillar so two guys in the same room with you don't have LoS on you when you open a chest. One of them is maybe 5 feet away.

The appeal of this game is the same as their other games. There are some well-written quests (just did the one with the drug mule slave) and very good world-building, but the core fundamentals of the game just kind of suck. I'm talking about things like leveling up my barter skill more quickly by selling one piece of loot at a time, or sitting down behind rat so I can watch my sneak skill rise, the bad graphics, the insane number of bugs that Bethesda couldn't be assed to fix, the clunky movement, the useless torches, or the way everything feels slapped together by people who didn't work together.

I know there are tricks to getting basically infinite money and broken magic items, but I'm not making any effort to find out what those are. If I happen across it, well, that's what happens. I also like not having quest markers. The map isn't that complicated.
 
The Ugly One said:
The appeal of this game is the same as their other games. There are some well-written quests (just did the one with the drug mule slave) and very good world-building, but the core fundamentals of the game just kind of suck. I'm talking about things like leveling up my barter skill more quickly by selling one piece of loot at a time, or sitting down behind rat so I can watch my sneak skill rise, the bad graphics, the insane number of bugs that Bethesda couldn't be assed to fix, the clunky movement, the useless torches, or the way everything feels slapped together by people who didn't work together.
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I agree with all of this. I think the reason people revere Morrowind so much is that it comes the closest in the series to feeling like a real world, with a unique setting and lore, a compelling threat and a plot that manages to make the player feel important while keeping the sense of mysticism and ambiguity. Oblivion is just too jank in its presentation and Skyrim is too centred around the player.

Morrowind's systems aren't well designed but at least they give you a sense of progress, compared to Oblivion or Skyrim where levelling magic gets you a more powerful but otherwise identical fireball to shoot at identical enemy health sponges until you eventually hit the level scaling wall and give up.
 
I played Morrowind on both the 360 and a heap of shit PC when it was released and faced no issues.
 
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/57831
MelchiorDahrk released new kino a few weeks ago in case anyone missed. "The Garden of Dreams"
Over 13,000 objects using over 500 custom models placed in expansive new areas to explore
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A Monastery of Mephala with a unique tileset and quest-chain with the Morag Tong where a murderous figure is chasing you through the literal cycle of reincarnation of the Godhead. Needs Tamriel_Data and OAAB_Data as well!
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Sheep King said:
I agree with all of this. I think the reason people revere Morrowind so much is that it comes the closest in the series to feeling like a real world, with a unique setting and lore, a compelling threat and a plot that manages to make the player feel important while keeping the sense of mysticism and ambiguity.
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The way I would put this is there's a half-baked concept for an excellent game here, but the execution falls down. The reason it's persisted so long is enough is exposed to the fan base that they can basically make the game they feel Morrowind should have been. You know, like turning it into a game where an overpowered ninja assassin doesn't kill you in your sleep when you're first level.

Sheep King said:
Oblivion is just too jank in its presentation and Skyrim is too centred around the player.

Morrowind's systems aren't well designed but at least they give you a sense of progress, compared to Oblivion or Skyrim where levelling magic gets you a more powerful but otherwise identical fireball to shoot at identical enemy health sponges until you eventually hit the level scaling wall and give up.
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I played Skyrim as a hammer-wielding maniac. I smacked guys with my hammer. I shouted them off cliffs. I had a good time. I played Oblivion as an Argonian stealth archer, and it was bad. Not only was there not a sense of progression, but it felt like I was regressing once I needed high-end (better than dwarven) arrows to keep up, since the shop didn't sell them. Mid-game, I was one-shotting bad guys from stealth, and late game, I couldn't kill anything.
 
The Ugly One said:
I played Skyrim as a hammer-wielding maniac. I smacked guys with my hammer. I shouted them off cliffs. I had a good time. I played Oblivion as an Argonian stealth archer, and it was bad. Not only was there not a sense of progression, but it felt like I was regressing once I needed high-end (better than dwarven) arrows to keep up, since the shop didn't sell them. Mid-game, I was one-shotting bad guys from stealth, and late game, I couldn't kill anything.
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You picked the most boring and skill*/resource-demanding build and you're surprised you were not having fun? Marksman basically necessitates the use of poisons and enchanted arrows at the bare minimum, and the only reliable source for the latter is the cat trader in the DB sanctuary. It becomes extremely boring very quickly, since every non-immune enemy can just be plinked with a single shot of a paralysis + damage health poison and hen turned into a pincushion.
*Marksman needs to be supplemented by alchemy, stealth, athletics, acrobatics, illusion and armorer in order to be effective, and you also have to dump a lot of points into luck to recover more arrows from slain enemies. Swinging a big bonker really only needs blunt and heavy armor, maybe alchemy and later restoration.
 
Pierre D'Olnique said:
You picked the most boring and skill*/resource-demanding build and you're surprised you were not having fun?
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I admit, 20 years ago I was too naive to realize you should never expect Bethesda to make a good game.

Pierre D'Olnique said:
Marksman basically necessitates the use of poisons and enchanted arrows at the bare minimum
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This is only because the game soft-locks you out of ebony, glass, and daedric arrows by hard-coding the shops to cap at dwarven. There is no good reason for the game to do this. There is no warning the game will do this. Everything in the game just scales up as you level...except the shops. No other weapon is crippled in this way. It's just bad design.

Pierre D'Olnique said:
Marksman needs to be supplemented by alchemy, stealth, athletics, acrobatics, illusion and armorer in order to be effective
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Marksman works just fine until the game soft-locks you out of level-appropriate arrows.
 
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The Ugly One said:
I admit, 20 years ago I was too naive to realize you should never expect Bethesda to make a good game.


This is only because the game soft-locks you out of ebony, glass, and daedric arrows by hard-coding the shops to cap at dwarven. There is no good reason for the game to do this. There is no warning the game will do this. Everything in the game just scales up as you level...except the shops. No other weapon is crippled in this way. It's just bad design.


Marksman works just fine until the game soft-locks you out of level-appropriate arrows.
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Daedric arrows do 15 points of damage, while Arrows of Immolation do 68 points of damage, with 65 of them ignoring armor.
That means you need about 10 or so arrows for a high level boss enemy even with no stealth damage. After having levelled marksman to max there's no reason to not also invest into some magic skills to buff your damage.

But yes, the stealth builds in Oblivion are the weakest in the game compared to being overpowered in Skyrim.
Combat builds are so and so, while magic is busted.

This is not particularly unique to Bethesda games, in most of the From Software titles some attributes are clearly better than others. In MMOs there's always the fotm class and the one that has been nerfed into the ground
 
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Kharash said:
Bethesda would probably have ended up as an EA victim or something.
Somehow that's the better timeline.
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Honestly it would’ve been better if the suits ran them into the ground and their real talent moved on all at once. Modern Bethesda is one of many zombie studios coasting off the reputation they got from their masterpieces from a decade ago. Now they just shamble around and turn out slop that’s a shadow of what they used to make with their old talent.
 
I don't think we have a Wayward Realms discussion board as the game is still not in any real state to look at so I am going to post this here.

https://x.com/OnceLostGames/status/1995538384584884507

They are moving away from Unreal engine into a custom version of Wicked engine. Which I had not heard of until this.
I was kind of skeptical before the death of Julian LeFay, but the engine swap doesn't inspire confidence in me even more.

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