Skyrim is worse than Oblivion in every way

[DalekFlay]

Well opinions and assholes and all that. I liked the atmosphere a lot. I liked the city design a lot. Only thing wrong with it from that point of view for me would be the incredibly small big cities, but that's just tech limitation. They were smart enough to design around it in Morrowind but haven't been since.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I liked the city design a lot.

 

[DalekFlay]

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Agreed on the design of the cities, they all felt unique, and some of them looked great. Solitude, especially that distant view with the rock formation, Markarth, Windhelm's palace of the kings. And even the uglier ones did have atmospheric feel to them, Whether that be harsh or glum, or even creepy; I think they did a good job on them.

Better than Oblivion, not to say Oblivion's cities were terrible, they were okay, and pretty diverse, but Skyrim >.(As with everything.)

 

[Perkel]

Cities ? You mean villages.

Riverwood is almost as big as whiterun. Only solitude is rather large but still Riverwood is like 1/2 of solitude size.

They obviously blow their budget designing whole lot of pretty landscapes filled with nothing and ton of caves which all are similar.


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[Clockwork Knight]

Not really. Riverwood is like four houses plus the tavern and blacksmith.

 

[RK47]

Yes, it also lacks soil erosion.

 

[Perkel]

I meant size

But i never seen cloud district personally... So how shoul i know

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

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Which reminds me: At this point, why doesn't Bethesda hire a bunch of eastern Europeans to work with their easy-ish to use toolkit and churn out cheap dlc after cheap dlc? Seriously, they could probably have the entirety of Tamriel built out with no quests in one year for less than one million dollars and it'd sell like hotcakes. Then charge for quest packs etc. Heck, ANY dlc would be better than none from a profit standpoint. I mean, why go to all the trouble of building a new game on a "new" engine when you have easy access 20 million to people who've already bought once and are just waiting to hand you money.

 

[Perkel]

Various reasons. With increased size of the word bugtesting is harder, vo budget grows lineary with each npc and what is more important increased team size usually means that iterations of build slow down a lot, add communicating with team members in various time zones and you have script for disaster movie.

 

[Cadmus]

I wonder why they don't make really big cities. I bet the engine could handle it, or they could split it up with some loading zones if necessary, but the towns really feel like villages.
What game has good cities? I can't think of anything right now. Well, GTA I guess.

What is the cost of voice acting by the way. Anybody knows? Like how much does it cost to hire 1 actor to voice all his NPCs?

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Cities ? You mean villages.

Holds, technically, but I get your point. I didn't touch on that because dalekflay already said it.

 

[DalekFlay]

I wonder why they don't make really big cities. I bet the engine could handle it, or they could split it up with some loading zones if necessary, but the towns really feel like villages.

They already had massive memory issues on consoles. They even had to delete things from the game world to fit the DLCs in for their previous games. I think they avoided that somehow with Skyrim, not sure, but the memory cramp was massive.

Should be better next time, assuming they don't go cross-generation.

 

[RK47]

I think PS3 saves simply died due to filesize. Beth never fixed that one.

 

[Cadmus]

Come to think of it, every TES city ever has had just a handful of NPCs and a few buildings..
Or were Daggerfall and Arena better in that regard? I think Vivec was probably the biggest city I've seen yet it was completely empty. Or maybe Mournhold? It seems to me that the engine is capable of rendering bigger cities, only they separate them from the main map...
I don't remember if all Skyrim cities were isolated from the main map, were they? I think they were, hm.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

It's a video game thing in general, there are few exceptions, in general games rely on imagination when it comes to scale. Can't think of any exceptions, good video game cities =/= huge video game cities, otherwise the list would be as sparse as you said. I'd take the small Skyrim cities in Skyrim over the cities in GTA, because of the interactivity.

 

[Cadmus]

I'd take the small Skyrim cities in Skyrim over the cities in GTA, because of the interactivity.

I think this specifically is a pretty bad comparison, beause GTA's cities are both bigger AND more interactive, imo.

 

[Perkel]

Memory as dvd problem yes, memory as ram problem no.

Problems on consoles were mainly caused by bloated saves that kept track of all things you have changed in game. Natural sollution was to trim down saves bloat by returning cells to default state quicker which they did later but hey it is same company that released pc version without running debbuger even once which was later discovered by modders and finally added to game in one of the patches.
Also their engine is decade old at its core. Ot is good for modders but it scales back what can be achieved.


For example cell system is from morrowind time where upon reaching different cell you were greeted with loading screen, oblivion sometimes did it too on consoles or slower pcs.

Bitcher2 engine for example has streaming at its core and there are no cells to load, thanks to progressive and eddicient modern design Bitcher2 looked vastle better on consoles than skyrim.

Obvious choice from technical point of view would be to move from archaic design and move to modern engine design.

But you will lose vast mod support for a long time so choice is not obvious as you think.

I expect betsheda to use same engine for few next games before moving

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Come to think of it, every TES city ever has had just a handful of NPCs and a few buildings..
Or were Daggerfall and Arena better in that regard?

They had tons of cities and buildings. Most had minimal detail, though.

I don't remember if all Skyrim cities were isolated from the main map, were they? I think they were, hm.

Bigger cities like Whiterun and Markath are walled off. Smaller ones like Riverwood and that village with the hot springs are part of the overworld map.

I think PS3 saves simply died due to filesize. Beth never fixed that one.

The problem was present on Oblivion as well. Bethesda, Bethesda never changes.

 

[DraQ]

True, it worked only as long as you (the player) could fill them yourself. Still when it worked player may have a blast not attainable even in MW.

The problem is that (unless you're the kind of person that posts oblivion roleplaying ideas on UESP) you didn't really get enough to work with.

True, at its best Daggerfall is monumental gameworld full of mystery, with deadly diseases, rich background mechanics (banks, diseases, holidays, trials, hidden witch covens, diurnal cycles, weather and seasons), labyrinthine dungeons you could get actually lost in, branching MQ with a lot focus on pretty low key stuff, like politics, awesome character and item creation plus delightful mechanical stuff like fireballs that were capable of knocking targets back and inflict additional damage by slamming them into walls (making Daggerfall's physics more relevant to gameplay than Oblivion's could ever hope) or climbing.
It was easily THE most ambitious TES game and one of the most ambitious cRPGs aver created.

At its worst, however, it was a massive chunk of nothing, with no detail nor any point to the existence of overworld, with the same handful of cities randomized and pasted all over the place, with dungeons being pointlessly contrived mazes of twisting passages all alike (with some aggravating trial and error lever puzzles thrown into the mix), majority of quests boiling down to going to X and killing/bringing Y regardless if this made any sense in given situation, sketchy background lore, and isolated bits of mechanics reduced to pointlessness (language siklls, all of them) or pure flavour (diseases via relatively easy healing spells, seasons not doing much to begin with, horse being carryable in your pocket as scale walls) surrounded by massive amount of nothing and bugs.

Oblivion has a (...) atmosphere.

What.

I'm not sure how to explain this

I'm not sure you can. I'm not sure even modern medicine could.

Armor stats

How?

magic

Everything you can do with Oblivion's limited and purposeless spellmaker can be done in Skyrim using dual wielded spells or spell and weapon. OTOH you can't set up runes, firewall, LARP Palpatine, summon storms, or fling people off high places in OB. In Skyrim you also raise dead bodies instead of summoning zombies when it comes to necromancy.

Skyrim's spells actually have more modes of action than Daggerfall's, too bad there is no morrowindesque spellmaker to go with it.
And daggerfallesque enchantment system .

skill-development is still better developed, than in Skyrim.

Yeah, no. Just by virtue of having selectable perks organized in trees Skyrim wins by default.

It also have better side quests as well.

Both games have shit quests. Skyrim's at least fit the gameworld better and may even have some token C&C.

Not the loot or not the boss or what you do (all of those are a fail for both games), but just the stories. (the whores who kill their patron, the vampire count of Skingrad, the grave robber in the capital, the mythic dawn, etc etc. )

Yet it improved things like malee combat (in therm of responsiveness and "feel")

Nope.
Morrowind's combat was pretty bad due to sheer clunkiness, but it was actually far more responsive than in any of its sequels.
First, if you actually hit the target you usually got some physical reaction, same when you were hit, unlike Oblivion and Skyrim where you feel like every combatant sits in their invisible bleeding shield bubble of HPs and only get actually hit when they run out, but then it's with the force of a freight train.
Second, in Morrowind you were in control of your movement and attacks unless you were disabled by enemy action or own stupidity (falling on your face from a high place) - in later games you're often forced into uncontrollable movement with things like power attack animations.

new GFX improvements

Ugly and shit.

to modding tools and so on.

Actually, there was quite a bit of ruckus when OB was released due to *reduced* modding capabilities compared to Morrowind (animation support, for instance), so no.

Thanks to this Oblivion with modding support was actually good game which i played shit ton of hours.

You playing it for shit ton of hours doesn't make it a good game.

Enemies level scaling was absolutely horrible in Oblivion and thanks to modding community i played it without enemy scaling. Whole oblivion gates plot and what is more annoying GATES were horrible.

Everything was horrible - all plots, world, characters. Even with unfucked mechanics there was simply no reason to play.

Now Skyrim as Oblivion dumbed down even more things. No eq. repair , Armors became 4 piece equipment, spells became joke, dungeons became linear as fuck

True.

almost no hidden items

Still better than Oblivion where there not only were almost no handplaced loot, but scaling mechanics made searching for generic hidden loot worthless.

Whole Dialogue and Quest design is whole other bullshit.

Quest and especially questline design is pretty shit, but other than shortness it's still better than OB (less derp, some token C&C), while dialogue is infinitely superior to it, thanks to dialogue being concentrated in characters actually having something to say instead of everyone saying painfully inane shit.

Can't wait for the 1 Armor piece equipment, where everything is integrated already ("Ascension to the Throne" had it like that and I just "wtf?").

Let's be honest. Mixed armor pieces are stupid. Nobody likes to run around with mixed armor sets. It's fact that only pieces of the same type provide a bonus. Caring about armor (selling/buying/forging different pieces of the set) detracts from actual gameplay. Which smith is as stupid and hasn't even got a full armorset in a town full of soldiers? - so you are forced to run to the other side of the map to get another piece of shit? Retarded.

Make it dumb.
Real dumb.
Full armor sets.
Full weapon sets (e.g. Sword & Shield combined, Bow & Unlimited Arrows, etc.).

1 Slot for Armor
1 Slot for Weapon
1 Slot for Jewelry

Ban theSavant.

shitty unreactive and empty world

Actually, if you consider generic mechanical reactivity rather than case by case unique scripting, it's pretty good. It's also not exactly empty, even though it would benefit from handplaced stuff and less combat focus.

Also inventory system is pretty standard - have you mistaken UI for system or what?
Try BG if you want a game with shit inventory *system*.

shitty and ugly 3D models

Actually the only bad part of the models are feet, animations are also better than anything Bethesda has done before, though that's not saying much.

shitty and extensive level scaling

Less extensive than OB and probably on par with DF.

Exactly. Success/=/quality. Look at Black Isle Games, Todd himself went out and said that Graphics and Characters were the future of RPGS.

I just don't understand why anyone in Bethesda would be fixated on characters - they fucking suck at making characters or any sort of scripted questlines, besides, the latter are thoroughly incompatible with the kind of games they're making.

Let's say I had horrible head trauma and for some reason decided to replay Oblivion... Is there anything like Requiem mod for it? You know, something to remove level scaling and add some challenge but without a need to install hundreds and hundreds of mini mods.

You'll simply need to inflict more head trauma on yourself, 'till you're capable of enjoying it.

I guess if you get what CK recommends, only play the expansion, and preferably do it while drunk or stoned you might get *some* mileage out of it, but don't expect wonders.

We should definitely attack Skyrim for its silly simplified dungeons and mechanics, but attacking it on world design and graphics and such is all subjective and probably not at all relevant.

And questlines. Don't forget questlines.

not to say Oblivion's cities were terrible

Actually, they were. If they weren't so small, plain (in terms of terrain and layout) and didn't have half of their area occupied by identical huge gothic cathedrals they might have worked, but they did not so they did not.

Skyrim's were workable, if only barely. They were still very small, but they were designed to feel larger than they were (like its whole gameworld and in such downscaled games as TES from MW onward illusion of size is more important than actual size), visually distinct, built on some actual terrain and accompanied by interesting vistas.

Various reasons. With increased size of the word bugtesting is harder

Bethesda does any testing?

vo budget grows lineary with each npc

Nope.
deus_ex_vs_oblivion_va_comparison.jpg

and what is more important increased team size usually means that iterations of build slow down a lot, add communicating with team members in various time zones and you have script for disaster movie.

Actually there is a lot of stuff in Morrowind suggesting that barely any communication has taken place when designing it and it still arguably worked out the best of all TES games.

Or were Daggerfall and Arena better in that regard?

They were pretty massive (and crowded) but same-y and devoid of detail.
Some mixed solution would be the best, I figure.

 

[DalekFlay]

It's a video game thing in general, there are few exceptions, in general games rely on imagination when it comes to scale. Can't think of any exceptions, good video game cities =/= huge video game cities, otherwise the list would be as sparse as you said. I'd take the small Skyrim cities in Skyrim over the cities in GTA, because of the interactivity.

The best 3D RPG cities design around the fact they can't have them be huge. Vivec for example is designed in a way that makes it feel massive, even though it isn't really. A different method would be Risen's camps and towns, which are meant to feel like small bastions of a devastated humanity.

Memory as dvd problem yes, memory as ram problem no.

Dude Bethesda people are always talking about the struggle with RAM to get more NPCs and shit in the game world. Read literally any article on the subject.

 

[Perkel]

And yet in oblivion there were more npcs in game.

If they would move to modern streaming engine they would have option to use more npcs on screen or overall on game.

Again bitcher2 which run on x360 constantly had scenes with more npcs on screen that whole winterhold town.

 

[RK47]

And yet in oblivion there were more npcs in game.

If they would move to modern streaming engine they would have option to use more npcs on screen or overall on game.

Again bitcher2 which run on x360 constantly had scenes with more npcs on screen that whole winterhold town.

more NPC doing jack shit, you mean.

 

[Perkel]

Like skrim npcs have robust ai...

 

[Cadmus]

Hmm I remember reading somewhere that Oblivion's Rectal AI was so complex and advanced that the NPCs would live their life and interfere with the gameworld too much so they had to scale it back, is there any truth to it? I wonder what happened.