The Elder Scrolls is a series of action role-playing open world fantasy video games primarily developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. The series is known for its elaborate and richly detailed open worlds and its focus on free-form gameplay. Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim all won Game of the Year awards from multiple outlets. The series has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls
Talk about the Elder Scrolls series, post screenshots, etc.
My favorite game out of the series is Morrowind but I usually play modded Skyrim.
The Cliffracers Didn't Deserve Being Genocided
Been actually playing Morrowind (with MGO mind you), and damn idk why I never really got into it before. I don't even hate the combat anymore!
Commonly occurs if you have any mods that mess with the carriage model, Helgen and the surrounding area, etc.
My biggest problem with Morrowind is that I'm not patient enough to keep walking around in a circle looking for quest NPCs and whatnot. I still haven't beat it because of that exclusively. I don't even hate Cliff Racers all that much.
Give me Skyrim's Clairvoyance spell and suddenly the experience would be a lot more enjoyable to me. Sometimes I don't want to go searching for the right building or person or whatever.
Morrowind's kind of a massive slog if you don't read literally everything and utilize all the travel abilities the game has from speed boosts to teleport scrolls and whatnot.
It's designed around utilizing spells and tools which were pretty much gone afterwards so it's hard to come back to it and use these tools as initially intended.
"Hey guys, these scrolls have accurately retold history, should we actually care about them"
"Nah, who want's to read? Lmao you fuckin NERD"
- Oblvion Crisis and Alduin happens
"Lmao, who would've thought?"
Elder scrolls are fairly difficult to actually keep in one place, if I recall, since they're only corporeal by power of chim. I thought it was implied you need some next-level magical forces to actually keep them in one place for any length of time, if fate requires them to be somewhere else they'll just be somewhere else.
It's the same as daedric artifacts, whose corporeal form is ultimately pointless and a mere aid for mortals to understand what exactly these artifacts represent. They can even bend reality further and be in several places at once seemingly as the Oghma Infinium was apparently both locked away in a dwemer box of impossible space and in Cyrodiil at the same time. Basically daedric artifacts are capable of fucking with quantum physics to the point of being in several locations at once so long as only one of these iterations is actually visible at any given time.
But that's literally the best part, it doesn't hold your hand. It gives you the world and tells you to go make your own way in it, I love it. I wish a lot more games were less hand-holdy.
There's a pretty clear difference between a hands-free approach and outright obtuseness, and Morrowind often falls right into the latter category.
Nah. If you can't figure out where something is after "It's to the South East of town between here and Lake Amaya" then that's on you, not the game. There hasn't been a single quest I've done so far that I haven't been able to make my way to.
yea the ui is godawful, and even with whatever expansion added the ability to filter by quests the journal is a bitch. however, even with those flaws, it's beautiful. a game that doesn't need to give you a giant arrow pointing to where you need to go.
Some directions are far more obtuse than that. I have pretty bad memories of the ashlander quests requiring you to enter some ancestral tombs, with the directions referring to other tombs which in turn have to be found following equally confusing directions.
Usually the direction system is pretty awful and the world doesn't have enough landmarks to make exploring it easy enough, especially in the original version with the very limited view distance.
It's not that I can't figure it out, it's that after more than three minutes of walking around the designated area talking to everyone trying to find one person I don't want to.
I'd say it does need to give me an indicator of where to go, because otherwise it's just dull and potentially frustrating. You tell me "visit [x] city" and I have to find my way via signposts? Great! it's got a reasonable amount of indication and if you're capable of following directions you'll be there in no time. You tell me to "find [x] in the northeast of the city" and I have to walk around in circles until I finally see a door that I missed the first time because that's the only indicator other than people telling me "yep, he lives around here?" Fucking awful, and what you claim is the best part of the game.
If that's the best part, Morrowind must actually be a piece of shit and there's literally no reason for Skywind to exist, as it's going to remove that "feature."
man, part of what makes morrowind so great is that its unforgiving and doesn't hold your hand. you're on your own in this alien land, and you have to make your way around. fuck around, walk around, be your own N'wah. like yea, you'll get lost every now and then, but that's like any other unfamiliar place. i think thats why i've finally gotten into it, because it lets me do whatever i want. it's all player driven, or to quote LGR, "Player Motivated Advancement". the game doesn't tell me where to go, I tell myself where I want to go, how I want to go about it, when I want to go about it. Vvardenfell is my oyster and the game isn't going to get in the way of that.
but on specifically the lack of quest markers, it involves you in the world. you actually have to explore the world, its cities and villages. you learn the layouts and routes. there are very few routes and city layouts I'd be able to draw reliabily from Skyrim, and I have a couple hundred hours in it. That mainly comes down to the fact the entire game I was just following a quest marker. In Morrowind I'm not, I'm actually involved in the world, getting lost in a foreign place and being immersed.
Oh, they're part of the wibbly wobbly quantum metaphysics of the universe, ok.
So then when shit was about to go down some people were screaming "WHERE'S THE FUCKING BOOK!?"
I don't like RPGs that completely discard quest markers because game designers are fallible and all it takes is one sidequest that's poorly put together for your current session to go down the crapper and transition from enjoyable romp to some of the most tedious bullshit you've ever encountered.
There's much better ways to involve the player than to force them to read a bunch of uninteresting drivel just to figure out the location of a dungeon. You're also an outsider to an alien land in every single TES game so that argument is inherently flawed.
If your character is capable of learning, memorizing and visualizing the position of an objective then it should be marked for you, the player. Ideally Morrowind should have had markers pointing to locations after you ask about them once to someone knowledgeable enough to know where it is. And once inside, if you're looking for a specific object or individual or whatever, the marker should switch to them once the player-character is once again able to discern and identify that object/individual as their objective. That way you avoid extreme hand-holding while still granting the player with basic quality of life pointers.
oh so you mean pretty much every quest in skyrim? go to dragur cave #453 to solve my random problem. and they don't even give you the satisfaction of letting you discover that shit on your own in Skyrim, you have to be babied through it.
oblivion and skyrim are far from alien, sadly. one is generic medieval fantasy land, and the other is generic viking fantasy land. there's nothing truly unique or out there about Cyrodill in Oblivion or Skyrim in Skyrim. In Morrowind it's actually unique and alien (do i even need to point out the mushrooms?). how many "normal" animals are there in Morrowind? How about Oblivion and Skyrim? point being, Morrowind does more to actually be alien and unique, and being thrown into the deepend only makes that much more rewarding to explore.
what you described is still "Extreme handholding". like, after talking to one NPC you still want it to point you exactly there, and after entering said place you want it to point you to exactly where an NPC or object is. that's the kind of shit we should be moving away from.
Nice deflecting the argument by pointing at a completely different issue. This doesn't change the fact Morrowind has many quests in which it is possible to get stuck because what you were supposed to do, find, kill or whatever was not evident enough, and reading directions can only help so far.
You can also turn off quest markers in Skyrim if you want to by simply not selecting a quest.
Once again missing the point, you're always in a spot you don't know in all of those games. Because you, the player, can recognize certain tropes and identify them, doesn't mean the character can.
And calling either Oblivion or Skyrim "generic" is ignorant at best. For someone who's all that pompous and proud of how much reading and discovering you do you seem to be blissfully unaware of the more esoteric shit you can find in both those games and sure are quick to stop at the more shallow aspects ie "it's got snow and the big beard man has an axe so it's VIKINGS".
I sure as fuck wasn't aware of the Vikings being able to bend reality by screaming in a language made up by dragons while repeatedly fighting off the evils of a tentacular presence which coalesces in their midst in an eternal thirst for knowledge.
If for you "extreme handholding" means literally any quality of life additions to a game in order to avoid frustration by overbearing the player with a barrage of information, with absolutely no way of simplifying a honestly very tedious process, then you're simply not in the right mindset and I don't think there's much else that can be discussed. Drop the elitist hat, stop saying shit like "you're being babied around" and then you'll start making sense.
Being pointed with a magical sky arrow to exactly where you need to go/what you need to pick up is being babied. the game designers don't respect your intelligence enough to let you figure things out after giving you a set of instructions.
It's not a deflection, because it's the same issue. Bethesda does not let you discover shit on your own in Skyrim, they put a big ole arrow in the sky.
you can. but the game is not designed around it and it shows. NPCs don't give you actual directions, the quest journal is sparse - its a basic issue of game design. they designed it around having a giant floating arrow guide your every move.
you're the one missing the point, because it doesn't fucking matter if the world is alien to your character, as your character is not the person actually PLAYING and actually EXPLORING the game that's all YOU. the worlds of Oblivion and Skyrim are much more familiar and generic to audiences. just because there may be a few more fantastical elements, doesn't mean that the setting on the whole is.
The worlds of Skyrim and Oblivion weren't familiar and generic to me because I don't live in a frozen hellhole nor do I live in a medieval empire.
I also don't recall a whole lot of games that let you play around in a world that comes even close to what Skyrim offers. The Witcher 3 is the closest I can think of since it has Skellige and you could also argue that The Witcher 3 is "generic fantasy", yet that doesn't stop it from being good.
holy shit dude, are you seriously trying to argue that the generic medieval foresty setting of oblivion and generic vikingesque setting of skyrim aren't generic simply because you don't live there????
If you call Skyrim "Vikingesque" and the Nords "Vikings" then you're clueless about both Vikings and The Elder Scrolls.
hey there gamers who here loves skyrim haha
just curious haha i wonder what it would smell like
Wouldn't say I LOVE it, but I don't HATE it
I want them to explore more of the quantum metaphysical bullshit of their lore in a game. Just have the ending be your character achieving CHIM and go on a Doctor Strange mindbending acid warping trip around the world
I just want to be able to levitate again.
I hope they listened to people's complaints about Fallout 4 (At least Todd admitted the dialogue system was bad) and the next TES will be good.
I really like the games' core gameplay, being able to just go to most places from the start and how active the modding community is, it'd suck if the only redeeming quality of the next TES was just the fact it takes place in the universe we like
Well, considering the fact every protagonist so far has mysteriously vanished after their actions in their respective games, it's fair to assume they could have just gone full CHIM.
Not to mention that a lot of stuff you do in the games, especially during the Main Quest and Daedric Quests, is already pretty mind-fucky. In no particular order you notably:
Destroy a rotting mechanically enhanced heart with a magical hammer in order to stop a literal god from creating a giant mech
Learn to shout reality apart and then travel dimensions to vanquish a world-ending entity
Witness the undoing of reality itself as you murder the mind which forged it
Enter a room of impossible space to retrieve a tome of eternal knowledge confined beyond fabric of space and time
Meddle with several entities whose mere appearance would be enough to render most mortals mad
Read a scroll which has the power to effectively predict all possibilities, past present and future, and time travel with it
Literally walk through a dream and use it as a warp-tunnel to another place entirely
Enter and cleanse the mind of a man who's been dead for centuries
Talk to a dead woman who speaks for an incomprehensible void
Fight in an arena with nothing but a fork for the amusement of a god
Go on a literal drunken rampage under the command of an obscenely powerful prankster
Give your soul away to at least two daedric princes for completely different reasons, with at least one other deity also wanting a piece
I never really thought of them that way since for the most part it all plays out as if it's a daily occurrence and surrounding NPCs and shit don't really react to it.
I really liked how in Skyrim you could kill Astrid in that shack and and then you'd speak to that imperial guy and he'd give you a quest to destroy the dark brotherhood.
It's a real shame that you can do that with the thieves guild.
Oh god yes. You get to join the thieves guild even if you mess up the first quest. I get that they're desperate, but damn.
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