The decline of the Elder Scrolls series

[Regvard]

Being able to cast Recall and quaffing as many potions as you like in combat, were among the many things that made MW too easy.
But having a Recall spell that worked only outside combat in Oblivion would have been nice.

"They make the game too easy" is probably the top excuse Todd used to remove all the cool shit like levitation.

.

Afaik levitation was removed because cities/towns were universes (cells?) on their own, connected to the rest of the world by gates. Major decline.


I wonder how they are going to handle new Telvanni (optimized for idiots tm) towers without levitation.

 

[Bahamut]

I wonder how they are going to handle new Telvanni (optimized for idiots tm) towers without levitation.

They showed this in that trainer,
magic telvanni trampoline!

 

[wormix]

Whoah, whoah, hold on there.

Different quests have different reputation point rewards.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Fighters_Lich
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Hunt_for_Giant_Rodents

Exactly the same reward.

And different quests are blocked to different levels of reputation.

It's very rare for a quest to have an upper reputation limit.

If you already have a high level of skill (borrow loads of money and train yourself) and if your personality and past deeds ensure you have a high reputation before you join the Guild, nobody will ever ask you to kill a rat. They will straight away ask you to handle a lot more complicated tasks. And if you do handle those complicated tasks like banishing daedra, you get higher reputation point rewards.

For example, if you have already made a strong reputation as a Brother of the Temple of Julianos, and if you already have developed a high level of skill in Alteration, Mysticism, and Thaumaturgy as a Brother of Julianos, then when you join the Mages Guild, you will straight away begin as a medium-to-high ranking member, and straight away get the really challenging tasks. Your reputation from other guilds carries over. Nobody will ask the Patriarch of a temple to wash dishes and clean out rats if he joins any guild. And nobody will ask the Archmage of the Mages Guild to run chores for a temple.

I have checked this myself several times. I got promoted to Archmage of the Mages Guild without doing Mages Guild quests. Why? Because I regularly did favours for friends of the Mages Guild - namely the Daedric Princes. Doing daedric quests over and over made my character highly reputed across several guilds.

Skill has nothing to do with quests offered, only gaining ranks.

Doing quests for guilds gives you reputation with their allies but I don't see how that's relevant.

 

[ohWOW]

magic telvanni trampoline!

Haha, what? Serious?

 

[Bahamut]

magic telvanni trampoline!

Haha, what? Serious?

Watch the trailer, at one point the character poops from a hole

 

[General Maxson]

magic telvanni trampoline!

Haha, what? Serious?

Watch the trailer, at one point the character poops from a hole

What an "elegant" and "user friendly" solution. Todd is a genius in making something so complicated and "unfun" like levitation form older TES more modern, streamlined and appealing to the masses.

 

[Regvard]

stuff

Whole point of levitation in Telvanni Towers was to prevent plebs from getting around.

 

[Murk]

No. The good idea would've been to re-introduce mark and recall. Same effect, without making dungeons feel like some contrived circular made-for-adventurer-convenience structures.

You don't have to convince me -- there's a lot wrong with Skyrim. I am glad that, regardless of what particular mechanism, I didn't have to backtrack through the dungeons while I played my nephew's game. If you want to come up with better ways for it, then go ahead, but it doesn't negate that a subpar fix is better than no fix.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The significance in comparing Daggerfall (easily the best one in the series, fuck Morrowind. God damn atmosphere fags) with Oblivion or Skyrim is that all the issues in the first are due to bugs or technical constrains. All the issues with the latter games are purely due to design flaws. If Daggerfall supported modding out of the box, it would have already become a classic. No amount of mods can fix Oblivion in any way or form, and God knows that people have tired.

 

[General Maxson]

stuff

Whole point of levitation in Telvanni Towers was to prevent plebs from getting around.

I guess plebs have won the battle.

 

[Bahamut]

stuff

Whole point of levitation in Telvanni Towers was to prevent plebs from getting around.

And plebes indeed will reach them

 

[dibens]

I was actually searching for a thread like this for some time to express my feeling towards Morrowind...

While I definitely enjoyed Skyrim, post Morrowind games are and always will be broken. Designer motto "You can be anyone, do anything and go anywhere" means that games will never be challenging, smart or with any kind of replayability.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

A more elegant solution would be to have a portal connecting the ground to the top of the tower, but the portal on the ground level requires you to activate it with a high level spell, like when you want to enter the college of Winterhold. Since the college is a place for people who want to study magic, it only requires you to cast a Novice spell. Telvanni could go balls to the walls and require you to cast, say, Expert spells.

I watched the trailer but didn't notice any trampoline, but...derp.

 

[Metro]

Actually, while I have not played Skyrim (or Oblivion) I always hated the magic spell generator. It trivialized magic, and made it unfun.

Having custom, designer made spells is much better, because then you can have spells with unique animations and effects, and also offer sekrit, uber powerful spells as rewards for exploring in out of the way places

This. I have always hated the sandbox/editor feel that TES games tended to have. Especially the ability to enchant and craft grossly overpowered items. Granted you can just ignore it but why put something so balance breaking in the game? The world design in Morrowind was outstanding but the way they handled character progression (run to raise athletics, attack to raise martial skills, cast to raise magic abilities, etc.) was just a huge blunder. If they had gone a more traditional route and totally ditched level scaled monsters (regardless of how many tweaks they add to it) then Morrowind would probably be one of my top RPGs of all time.

 

[Broseph]

Series made a huuuuuuge with Oblivious, as we all know. Skyrim is a superior game on many levels, but it's still only good for what it is; a sandbox action/adventure game for plebs who don't like using their brians.

Morrowind is my personal favorite in the series, but I can understand why someone would dislike it. Even Morrowind has its moments of derp and several areas have declined from Daggerfall. It's also a game with totally different goals than Daggerfall, less concerned with simulating the culture of a huge geographic area and instead focused on how fleshed out it can make one island (Vvardenfell.)

 

[Raapys]

Daggerfall > MW+OB+SR

Or at least it would have been, if they'd just finished it.

 

[Blaine]

I felt that Morrowind's atmosphere was superior to Daggerfall's. Call me a sucker for weird and whimsical creature designs, architecture and terrain, but in 2002 it felt very fresh to me. Also, Daggerfall had a gigantic pile of useless skills, and a relatively limited selection of "best" skills (and items, for that matter). If you've played the game, you know what I'm talking about. I've never been the biggest fan of procedurally-generated areas and content in cRPGs; Daggerfall has a lot of that, while Morrowind's world is handmade. That's not to say that Daggerfall was a bad game, far from it, but I'll choose Morrowind over it every time.

As for the series itself: Instant fast travel, quest markers, casual difficulty, dumbed-down mechanics, full voice acting, consolization and (in Oblivion's case) painfully generic fantasy terrain and scenery have permanently deep-sixed an otherwise promising series.

 

[Jack]

asking an npc the same question over and over until they marked something on your map

Did we play the same game? This literally never happens. The only time you have to really ask around is when you want to find an artifact, but since they are supposed to be rare magical items many people believe to be myth I think that it's justified that you have to give it some effort to find them.

So when you ask for directions to the nearest inn, store guild and they give you a compass direction, are you saying that if you keep asking they won't mark it on your map?

Yes, I'm quite certain that they only mark your map when you're within a certain radius of your target destination. Asking them multiple times won't make them mark it on your map.

 

[CorpseZeb]

Essentially - You realize that their amazing new radiant quests involve "Please go to Dungeon X and Retrieve Sword Y. I've marked the location on your map." -

Yeah, that's right. I always liked Gothic 3 or Morrowind quest description like " go to place that lies east of somewhere". Sometimes that kind of description was very misleading but always delivering a nice "mission accomplished" feeling when you hit the right place at least. Map markes are just not funny anymore (and they never was, in the fact). Discovering is one of essential part of playing games - RPG games especially.

Ps. I read somewhere about very old vase of wine (something like 600-700 years), and all they found inside vase was... a jelly.

 

[Stabwound]

Yeah, that's my biggest problem with Oblivion and Skyrim. Exactly what is the point of an open world game that is designed so that you just jump from quest marker to quest marker? You can play Skyrim by staring at the magical compass at the top of the screen if you want to.

There is a Skyrim mod that attempts to fix this, actually, by making the quest dialogues and journal entries like Morrowind so that you can play without the quest markers, but I believe it's incomplete and hasn't been updated in a long time. It's a shame, because that alone would make Skyrim enjoyable to me.

 

[Broseph]

As for the series itself: Instant fast travel, quest markers, casual difficulty, dumbed-down mechanics, full voice acting, consolization and (in Oblivion's case) painfully generic fantasy terrain and scenery have permanently deep-sixed an otherwise promising series.

This sort of thing would have affected every classic CRPG franchise had they kept going. Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic, etc. The Elder Scrolls series just came a bit late and as a result embraced the decline.

 

[Mastermind]

The significance in comparing Daggerfall (easily the best one in the series, fuck Morrowind. God damn atmosphere fags)

Daggerfall's atmosphere could hold its own with Morrowind's. It's not the lack of atmosphere that makes Daggerfall a shit game, it's one of the things it got right.

 

[Gord]

Yeah, that's my biggest problem with Oblivion and Skyrim. Exactly what is the point of an open world game that is designed so that you just jump from quest marker to quest marker? You can play Skyrim by staring at the magical compass at the top of the screen if you want to.

There is a Skyrim mod that attempts to fix this, actually, by making the quest dialogues and journal entries like Morrowind so that you can play without the quest markers, but I believe it's incomplete and hasn't been updated in a long time. It's a shame, because that alone would make Skyrim enjoyable to me.

Yes, I'm using it. Not too bad actually, makes Quest Compass obsolete in those quests that got changed (non-radiant quests).
As for the radiant quests, it's not that the entire game consists of them, so yeah. That's not to say that Skyrim's other quests are something to write home about or potentially award winning.
I think a good measure to judge the quality of an (Morrowind and up) TES game are the numbers of mods necessary to enjoy it. The number for Skyrim is relatively low, at least for me.

Btw., wasn't something like radiant quests already in Daggerfall? I remember reading an review back in the day mentioning random quests and how banal shit boring they were, which was, together with technical reasons, one of the main reasons why I wasn't interested in Daggerfall when it came out.

 

[Broseph]

Btw., wasn't something like radiant quests already in Daggerfall? I remember reading an review back in the day mentioning random quests and how banal shit boring they were, which was, together with technical reasons, one of the main reasons why I wasn't interested in Daggerfall when it came out.

Almost every side-quest in Daggerfall is Radiant.

 

[G.O.D]

I was actually searching for a thread like this for some time to express my feeling towards Morrowind...

Designer motto "You can be anyone, do anything and go anywhere" means that games will never be challenging, smart or with any kind of replayability.

Assuming that they are able to, they probably won't make another well designed, non-linear, replayable game (like MW) becouse in their mind it would probably hurt future sales of other games they are involved in (as people are still playing MW).
They instead give you the Construction Kit and go: "fuck it, do it yourself".