Oh, come on, Bethesda!, Closed cities AGAIN? Options

[Thomas Kaira]

May I ask exactly why? Oblivion could take open cities in perfect stride. The only reason the cities got closed at all was because BethSoft panicked about the console support.

Granted, they did have an excuse then, as they only received the Xbox 360 to do actual testing over the last three months of dev. time, but here... not so much. The current excuse is that the consoles can't handle what they are doing. Trouble is, the industry always manages to surprise us with exactly what those consoles CAN handle.

So long as the NPC count in the cities goes up by at least twice what we got in Oblivion, I will be understanding and shall complain no more. If not... well... then I will KNOW you are just being lazy. I want to see progress in making these games the best they can be, I don't want Skyrim to simply be Oblivion HD.

Source

In other news:

- Alchemy is becoming a stealth skill. (Approve! Approve!)

- There will be no minigames involved with the crafting skills (Thank you!)

- Giants, Draugr, and other creatures will receive a bit of culture from the AI engine (Looking forward to this.)

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 3 2011, 07:07 PM

[Burnt Sierra]

You know, I'm actually holding out some hope for Skyrim, however misguided it may turn out to be. Morrowind, and Daggerfall (which I played after Morrowind), I loved. Loved. Oblivion, well I was looking forward to it like no game I'd ever looked forward to. In truth, I've never been a huge gamer, only about 25 games played properly in 37 years.

Then Oblivion came out, and I despised it. Where was the role playing? Where were the choices? Somebody earlier mentioned it being like GTA 3. Well, yeah. I agree with that. A huge, sandbox adventure game. Albeit one with the biggest immersion breaker ever:


Cue battle music
"Wait, who's attacking me? Oh, bandits."
"Grr! Kill! Fool"
"Hold on. Guys, wait!"
"What?"
"Why are you attacking me?"
"We need the money."
"You're wearing a full suit of glass armour. Carrying a daedric weapon."
"So?"
"Look, I know this merchant, she'll give you a good price. You could buy a mansion. Hell, you could buy a title. You could be NOBILITY!"
"Nobility? Ooh, I like the sound of that..."


After the disappointment of Oblivion, Stargel suggested I play the original Fallout games. Terrific. Choices galore. You want to fight? Talk your way out of trouble? Whatever you wanted, could be done. Then Beth got the rights, and made Fallout 3.

I was dreading it.

And yet... a lot of the things I hated about Oblivion, they - not fixed exactly - but improved immensely. It wasn't bad, in fact I actually really enjoyed it. It didn't have the depth of the originals (I'm not sure any RPG will ever manage that again), but it was a good game, and much improved from Oblivion. So... I just feel like there is some hope here. I've never powergamed (correct phrase?). That was one of the things that really bugged me about Oblivion. Why? Why should my cloth wearing mage have to attempt to level up skills in endurance? No roleplaying reason whatsoever. The perks I though worked well in Fallout 3, and meant I didn't have to worry about that. I could specialise in skills that were appropriate, and not curse the boar that was kicking the **** out of me, because I wasn't a heavy amour wearing, blade wielding warrior.

I'll reserve judgement of course, but I will be getting it, if only to see if they've learned from the past lessons. Most of what I've heard - which isn't a lot to be honest, I don't want to get sucked in by hype again - sounds fairly promising.

We shall see