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

[Destri Melarg]

See . . . this is what happens when you are absent from the forums for awhile, you miss out on some lively debate! Again, I am not a Bethesda apologist (even though I think it seems like it re-reading my own comments), but please indulge me while I comment on a few things that struck me when reading this thread:

I'm still so unutterably furious with Bethesda for destroying the only part of Tamriel which I actually care about (i.e. Morrowind) that I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything, let alone the first game post-Infernal City. It doesn't help that the setting (Skyrim, 200 years after the last game) doesn't interest me in the slightest. As far as I'm concerned, they wasted a golden opportunity to show Tamriel in the chaos following the Empire's fall - a period which could have been really interesting."

So what you are saying is that you are throwing a ‘Mourning Morrowind Tantrum?’ I would not be surprised to learn that the reason that Skyrim is set 200 years into the Fourth Era is because Bethesda is looking to remove the stain of the Infernal City from the hearts of fans. Bethesda has shown a history of squandering a number of opportunities for compelling stories in the Tamrielic timeline (The Alessian Reform, The War of the Red Diamond, and the Rise of the Camoran Usurper immediately come to mind). You yourself lament the repetition of tired motifs in Bethesda’s games, wouldn’t yet another game set in the too often mined Third Era just be another repetition? Besides, I am of the opinion that events moving forward can be just as compelling as what has gone before.

Instead we just have "oh, the Empire is back but it's on the brink of collapse. Again.

I may be wrong but I don’t believe that there is a very strong Imperial presence in Skyrim. A country at war with itself isn’t likely to recognize any outside authority. If what you meant is that the world is on the brink of collapse, well, of course it is. How can we be the hero otherwise?

And really, nothing I've seen of Skyrim so far inclines me to change my mind. Apart from the improvements in graphics and AI, which were to be expected anyway, all I see is: A plot which is basically a retread of Oblivion, with extra dragons. Gameplay which has been simplified even further in all sorts of ways. Starting off as a f*cking prisoner AGAIN (seriously, I point-blank refuse to even consider playing the game until someone mods this).

This one I can’t argue at all since I agree with you. Let’s hope that the rumor that you open the game being led to your own execution finally puts paid to this tired and clichéd plot device.

I never got close to maxing any of my characters' attributes in either Morrowind or Oblivion. It depends on your playstyle; I don't powergame, and don't try to do everything with one character, so I always moved on to another one well before I reached that stage. That said, it is a genuine problem - but the solution is to make attributes more significant and less easy to maximise, not to get rid of them altogether. It's not like this would be difficult; there are player-made mods for both MW and OB that do exactly that.

And while getting rid of classes and attributes may not make a huge amount of difference from a gameplay perspective, it's absolute murder from a roleplaying perspective. I don't want my character to start off a complete non-entity, and only develop into something unique at the point where I'm getting bored of playing them. In Morrowind, I can tell a huge amount about my character just by looking at her starting stats: that she's strong and tough, not stupid but not especially intelligent or scholarly; that she considers herself a freelance mercenary; that she's a fighter, trained in various weapons and armour skills; that she's learned a little about Restoration and haggling to help her along in her daily life, but otherwise has no interest in stealth, diplomacy or magic. Already, before I've even begun the game, she has a background and a strong personality which I can then build on.

I wasn’t commenting on your personal play style. The fact that you didn’t choose to powergame doesn’t mitigate the fact that it was possible to do just that. I was commenting on the homogeneity created through powergaming. In terms of ‘roleplaying’ as elegant as your solution is, it is not the only one. Even with attributes and skills you still start the games as something of a non-entity. Other than a negligible 5-10 point bonus/deficit in certain skills and attributes there is no real difference between a female Bosmer and a male Imperial. The individuality of your beginning character in Morrowind didn’t come from the game, it came from you. The initial skill/attribute spread could have been shared by any race/gender that you chose to use. It wasn’t the game that decided your character ‘considers herself a freelance mercenary,’ and that she has ‘no interest in stealth, diplomacy, or magic.’ You don’t need the game to tell you those initial considerations of character. In Skyrim the hope (I believe) is that those decisions will be made by what the player chooses to have the character do instead of what the player decides to tag.

As far as the removal of attributes go i'm not so fussed. For those of us who feel more connected with the traditional stat measurements it's a loss. It was one of the little things in the game that made you feel more powerful, especially in Morrowind. When I started noticing I was getting between A and B faster, that now this skeleton wasn't quite as tough, you felt like progress. It was that little drip freed of encouragement that kept us going, gave us the sense of achievement.

In Oblivion this dissapeared with the levelling of monsters, every fight was now pretty much the same, and the changes to the scale of the world were removed by the fast travelling and just general...sameness of the scenery. Or at least I felt that's what happened. So Bethesda are trying a new system, with the perks we'll get the sense of accomplishment and improvement we got in Morrowind, but without the needless numbers that become redundant in Oblivion.

Can't say it any better than this! The hope shared by those of us who are optimistic about the game is that they succeed.

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 think this is what has me at least willing to give Skyrim the benefit of the doubt. In Fallout 3 we can see that the system of perks works in ways that a broken system of attributes doesn’t. If the reports are true and Skyrim is giving us ten times the number of perks provided by vanilla Fallout 3 then I remain optimistic.

Rumor has it that now Bethesda has chosen to merge together the Cuirass and Greaves armor pieces into a single generic "Armor" piece.

Yeah, I’m with you here. This is a terrible idea! I hope that there are enough people who feel the same to make Bethesda rethink this.

From my point of view, it isn't an increase in action that's the problem, it's the direction towards combat.

Let's say, just for the sake of it, you've decided to roleplay a diplomat. You increase your speechcraft, with the aim of talking your way out of trouble. An increase in action would put you in the position where you have to use that skill more frequently. A direction towards combat means that skill becomes useless, as you have to fight - whether by sword, use of magick etc.

See the difference? The Elder Scrolls series has always prided itself on letting you create any character type you wanted, yet the increase in direction towards events where you have no option but to fight limits the approaches you can take - which for those of us who don't just want to create warriors or battlemages is a problem.

I lament that the days of navigating the games strictly as a ‘diplomat’ are gone. I think the number of new fans drawn by the intellectual prospect of gore and severed limbs outweighs the loss of a few Neanderthals who wish to explore dialogue possibilities!

There probably will be, but I'm sure there'll be an equally massive backlash from the people who think Bethesda can do no wrong. *sigh* There's a reason why I'm staying away from the official Skyrim forums. People over here may disagree over Skyrim, but at least we can still have a relatively civil discussion about it.

"No, your wrong and stoopid! My opinyun is the only won that matters!" – Official Skyrim Forum Banner.

What gets me about the 'tradition' argument is that it's not even true. Daggerfall didn't start off in a prison, just a random cave where you were shipwrecked (which happened to look like a dungeon). Two games in a row do not a tradition make - and as you point out, even if it were a tradition, that's still not a good argument for keeping it in. All the ES games so far have been poorly voice-acted and horrendously bugged, but I don't see anyone clamouring for more of those things in Skyrim on the basis that they're 'traditional'.

Well, that’s not really a fair comparison, is it? Starting in prison is not a mistake or glitch in the game, it is a deliberate (albeit nauseating) plot point that has been repeated enough times to be reasonably considered a tradition. I agree with you in that I would like to see it removed, but in all fairness it has become something of a tradition.

[Helena]

So what you are saying is that you are throwing a ‘Mourning Morrowind Tantrum?’ I would not be surprised to learn that the reason that Skyrim is set 200 years into the Fourth Era is because Bethesda is looking to remove the stain of the Infernal City from the hearts of fans.

All right, yes, I'm throwing a 'Mourning Morrowind Tantrum'. I'm not buying the 'making up for Infernal City' idea, though - the timeline and setting for Skyrim must have been decided long before TIC was released. Frankly, the impression I get is that the devs are fed up of hearing Morrowind fans compare Oblivion unfavourably to MW and wish they'd all just shut up. I'm not going to accuse them of deliberately blowing up Morrowind to piss off the fans, but either way it seems spectacularly mean-spirited of them.

You yourself lament the repetition of tired motifs in Bethesda’s games, wouldn’t yet another game set in the too often mined Third Era just be another repetition?

I don't see that at all. For a start it would be set in the 4th Era rather than the 3rd, but that's pretty much irrelevant anyway - there's no way a game set after the Empire's collapse could just be 'more of the same'. It has to have a massive effect on Tamrielic society and politics, at least in the short term - in the long term it's obvious that nothing significant ever changes in Tamriel anyway, which is precisely why fast-forwarding 200 years makes no difference. Even the factions are still the same - the Dark Brotherhood is back, as are the Fighters' and Mages' Guilds (oh wow, they have different names now. I may faint from the excitement).

I may be wrong but I don’t believe that there is a very strong Imperial presence in Skyrim. A country at war with itself isn’t likely to recognize any outside authority. If what you meant is that the world is on the brink of collapse, well, of course it is. How can we be the hero otherwise?

I don't know the details; I'm just quoting from the official Skyrim site: "The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge... The future of Skyrim, even the Empire itself, hangs in the balance" yadda yadda yadda.

I wasn’t commenting on your personal play style. The fact that you didn’t choose to powergame doesn’t mitigate the fact that it was possible to do just that. I was commenting on the homogeneity created through powergaming. In terms of ‘roleplaying’ as elegant as your solution is, it is not the only one.

But this isn't a 'solution' at all. It's just the devs throwing up their hands and saying "we couldn't fix the old system, so we had to get rid of it altogether" - which is complete rubbish. There's a very popular mod for Morrowind called Galsiah's Character Development, which deliberately sets out to make characters more distinct and powergaming much more difficult, and by all accounts succeeds very well (I've never used it myself as I've never really felt the need).

The reason Beth have ditched the old system is not that it's inherently flawed, but that their design philosophy has changed. They're targeting a different audience, one that prefers action-adventure-style combat to stat-based RPGs where the character's skills matter more than the player's. They're hoping it will help them sell more games, and they may well be right. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

The individuality of your beginning character in Morrowind didn’t come from the game, it came from you. The initial skill/attribute spread could have been shared by any race/gender that you chose to use. It wasn’t the game that decided your character ‘considers herself a freelance mercenary,’ and that she has ‘no interest in stealth, diplomacy, or magic.’ You don’t need the game to tell you those initial considerations of character. In Skyrim the hope (I believe) is that those decisions will be made by what the player chooses to have the character do instead of what the player decides to tag.

You're missing my point somewhat. What's important is not that the game gave my character particular attributes, but that it allowed me to set them up that way before I'd even taken a step in the gameworld. I want a character with a pre-existing background and skillset, not a blank slate.

Well, that’s not really a fair comparison, is it? Starting in prison is not a mistake or glitch in the game, it is a deliberate (albeit nauseating) plot point that has been repeated enough times to be reasonably considered a tradition. I agree with you in that I would like to see it removed, but in all fairness it has become something of a tradition.

I really don't agree that three non-consecutive repetitions make a tradition, and the devs' choice of voice actors at least is definitely not a mistake or glitch. But regardless, there's no sense in pleading tradition when there are massive differences between all the games, and the devs are constantly dropping and introducing features of gameplay and lore with each new game (often for no good reason). There's no good argument for keeping this one boring, overdone plot device in the name of 'tradition'.