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

[mALX]

It's CRUNCH TIME at Bethesda, Todd Howard is beginning to sound tired already, lol. (either that or they caught him for the interview in the middle of the night).

This post has been edited by mALX: May 4 2011, 03:30 PM

[Kiln]

I'm worried about the future of TES as a whole, the more I hear the less I like.

-Attributes are no more

-Classes that some of us enjoyed so much are gone

-Several skills have been cut

-Closed cities (personal gripe really)

-I personally hate the menu overhaul and prefer the charts so I can easily check character skills without scrolling

[Helena]

-Attributes are no more

No more attributes? Seriously? Classes I could live without, but how are you supposed to create a distinctive character without attributes (especially at the start of the game when you won't have had a chance to get any of the 'perks')? It's sounding like your character will start off a total blank slate with no special skills or talents whatsoever - talk about boring. At this rate they'll probably ditch skill progression altogether for the next game, and turn it into a sort of mediaeval action-adventure/FPS (First Person Stabber?)

[Destri Melarg]

First off I need to stress that I am not a Bethesda apologist here. I have the same concerns about the future of the games as the rest of you. I just don’t understand the negativity about all of this. Can’t we at least try to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt until we have the benefit of seeing the game?

Classes are no more because the class system tied directly into the leveling system and both were flawed. Maybe they should have fixed it to give us something better, but they chose instead to try something new. Something new does not automatically equal ‘dumbing down’ for all you PC snobs out there (ok most of the time it does ). I give Bethesda kudos for scrapping a flawed system rather than just recycle something that didn’t work properly.

Attributes . . . this one just floors me. Other than overall magicka and encumbrance (both of which are better addressed with perks), what did attributes really do for you in Oblivion? The base weapon (silver does more damage than iron for example) plus enchantments determined weapon damage more than character Strength or Agility. Mastery of a particular school of magic determined spell cost more than Intelligence, Willpower, or Personality. Health gains per level were a static ten points plus whatever your Endurance rating was, meaning that you would still have decent health even if you never touched Endurance.

As for the argument that attributes helped to make distinctive characters, I would ask one simple question. How? Most players max their character’s attributes. I have several characters in Oblivion. My Bosmer is just as strong as my Orc who is just as intelligent as my Altmer. Race, clothing/armor, weapon choice (if any), and faction affiliation did more to make characters distinctive than attributes. I think that we all have a tendency to panic whenever we feel that we are losing something from our beloved Elder Scrolls, no matter how ridiculous that something is. I won’t argue that the games couldn’t benefit from an attribute system that worked properly, they absolutely could. But that isn’t something that we have ever had in a TES game, and whatever we think we are losing in the absence of flawed attribute progression is being compensated for by (count them) 280+ perks.

Open cities would have been nice aesthetically, I suppose. But in a region rife with Giants, Draugr, and other hostile wildlife (not to mention warring factions/clans) it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. To create such only because the technology allows it would feel cheesy to me.

Just my two cents.

[King Coin]

I was initially pissed off about attributes being gone, but I listened to a few interviews and Todd basically said what Destri said. And it makes sense too. The game will accomplish the same things, just in a more direct manner.

I don't miss classes at all.

[Thomas Kaira]

To tell you the truth, I can accept the cities being sort of closed off if Bethesda can at least find a way to hide the loading screen and retain the immersion. Oblivion's method of closing the cities was rubbish, it was a real hack-n-slash compromise decision that didn't really get a whole lot of thought put into it. You walk up to a door, press space, then have to twiddle your thumbs staring at a loading screen. I like to think we have reached a day and age where loading screens are, apart from the initial start-up, a sign of shoddy design. They are bland, uninspiring, and boring.

Here's what could happen: the city gates are closed off, but in order to get inside the major cities, you do not stride up to the gate and activate it so that you are transported to the city cells via loading screen, instead you ask a guard to let you in, and the game loads the city and unloads a portion of the overworld while you watch the gate crew actually open the doors. This keeps you in the game. If Bethesda does something like this, then all will be forgiven. If they decide to make the transition as clunky as it was in Oblivion, no progress will have been made at all and I will have to call them out for simply being lazy.

[King Coin]

@ TK

Sounds like ME's infamous elevators... you want that?

[Thomas Kaira]

Yes. I do.

ME2 was a great technical achievement, but in terms of the product we received it was a huge step backwards for Bioware. As much bling as you put into a loading screen, it is still a loading screen. ME2 just seemed to me that Bioware tried to make the best generic shooter title they could. They made an excellent shooter, but there is absolutely nothing special about the game anymore. ME's elevators, while not particularly in the greatest form, worked, because they kept you in the game while the loading went on in the background. Now with ME2, we get pulled away from the game to watch some flashy blinged-up mini-cutscene while the game loads. I'm sorry, but that was a terrible idea for them to go from not using loading screens to using loading screens. Either way, this is a rather boring part of playing a game that we will never be without, so at least we can do our best to spice things up. Load screens are obsolete in this day and age, can't we just move on?

I never had any problems with those elevators.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 7 2011, 04:54 AM

[King Coin]

To each their own.

I personally liked the loading screens. I'd rather read something than stare at a wall.

[Thomas Kaira]

But therein lies a problem: load screen text has become just another way for video game developers to insult our intelligence. All you ever see there nowadays are basic instructions like how to open doors or how to use your sword. I really can't stand the flim-flam that developers are putting into the load-screen text anymore. Even Bethesda is guilty of this, and most of the lore snippets they give you can be gleaned from the in-game books anyway.

If you use hidden loading ala the ME elevators, you can't do that, and so you must find new, meaningful ways to keep the player's attention. ME did this by occasionally broadcasting news clips while you rode the elevators, and I see no reason Bethesda couldn't do something like having the guards outside the city have a little chat about the goings-on in the game world while the gates were being opened, or perhaps having a few random travelers pass by on the way in or out. that keeps the player's interest, and keeps their head in the game.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 7 2011, 05:08 AM

[Destri Melarg]

Glad to see I'm not the only one who didn't mind ME's elevators!

I agree with what you're saying, TK. It sounds like a great idea. I think they should keep it as basic as possible, though. Just the simple act of the guards opening the gate. If you try to include dialogue or other stage business you're bound to run into this scenario:

Say you’re coming up to the gate to Solitude. There are two guards outside minding their posts. You request the gate to be opened. They grudgingly oblige. While you wait for the gate to open they engage in small talk about the happenings in town or the fact that they hate the Skyrim equivalent of mudcrabs. A farmer or two sidles up beside you waiting for the gate to open. You sit there and you go ‘this is really cool! I am so immersed in the game right now!’

Cut to 100+ game days and nearly half that many level-ups later. You are now the full on Dovahkiin. Even dragons fear your steps. You walk up to the gate to Solitude and the guards know you on sight. They immediately begin to draw open the gate. While you wait you manage to overhear the two guards having the exact same conversation that they had when you were an unknown scrub (or scrib)!

Eventually any kind of contrived transition between areas of the game world will suffer through repetition. I do agree with you in that I would like to see them get more creative with the loading screens. Instead of the so-called flim-flam that passes for load screen text, why not give us the full text of an in-game book chosen at random? Those without the patience to read the books can just wait for the prompt that lets them know that the new area is loaded. The rest of us can immerse ourselves in the lore.

[ureniashtram]

Woah. Woah. Attributes are .. gone? They could've made something with that, you know. Like . . . . restrictions. On weapons and armor.

For example, you see an Elven Blade lying on the floor. Being a newbie who always gets Iron, you get excited. But when you pick it up and try to wield it, you get the message that it Requires:

55 Strength for swinging the Blade- Gameplay wise, you do a fraction of the sword's real damage.

60 for doing real damage.

50 Endurance so you don't tire out easily-Gameplay wise, your stamina depletes at a mediocre rate.

55 to get the hang of it- Gameplay wise, your stamina depletes at reasonable-rate.

If any of your attributes are below the required numbers, you get clumsy and tire out easily. Hell, if your Strength is low, you might even hold a longsword as a guddamned claymore!

For goodness' sake, Bethesda should've known that everything has potential to be converted into something new. But alas, I would say that they are veering dangerously close to mainstreaming. Alas.

As for the loading screen, I agree with TK here. I think its time the loading screen be put to rest. In Oblivion, it was simply bad.

[King Coin]

While you wait you manage to overhear the two guards having the exact same conversation that they had when you were an unknown scrub (or scrib)!

This is why I would rather have standard loading screens. ME's elevator rides were mostly in complete silence, because they didn't have enough 'news reports' to play with out repeating them dozens of times.

[Helena]

First off I need to stress that I am not a Bethesda apologist here. I have the same concerns about the future of the games as the rest of you. I just don’t understand the negativity about all of this. Can’t we at least try to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt until we have the benefit of seeing the game?

Okay, I'm going to answer this purely from my own point of view. I don't claim to speak for anyone else.

Firstly, I should point out that unlike most people here, I'm not a big fan of Oblivion. It was my introduction to the Elder Scrolls series, and I wasn't particularly impressed (especially given the insane amount of hype around the game when it was first released). Since then I've played Morrowind and a bit of Daggerfall, and I can see clear trends in the way the series has developed - which from my point of view are in completely the wrong direction. So I have no reason to expect that I'll like Skyrim any more than I liked Oblivion, and good reason to expect that I'll like it less.

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

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). A gameworld which constantly rearranges itself around your character, just like in Oblivion. Randomly-generated missions, which I've seen in various other games (including Daggerfall) and always hated. And so on. The only glimmer of hope is Todd Howard's statement that the gameworld will be closer to Morrowind in terms of design, but so far I see no evidence of that.

Something new does not automatically equal ‘dumbing down’ for all you PC snobs out there (ok most of the time it does ).

Well, you said it. In all honesty I couldn't care less about the 'PC vs console' debate; dumbing down is dumbing down, whatever the reason for it.

As for the argument that attributes helped to make distinctive characters, I would ask one simple question. How? Most players max their character’s attributes.

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.

In Daggerfall, Bethesda actually plans out a detailed background for your character based on your class and starting skills. In Skyrim they seem to be going to the other extreme, giving you a character who is literally a nobody - no past, no strengths or weaknesses, no identity apart from 'hero of today's random prophecy'. The focus is all on how your character is OMG THE DRAGONBORN and none at all on what sort of person they are.

I think that we all have a tendency to panic whenever we feel that we are losing something from our beloved Elder Scrolls, no matter how ridiculous that something is.

Honestly, I'm not panicking. I never expected much from Skyrim in the first place, so it's hardly a huge disappointment to me that I don't like what I've seen of it so far. My overall reaction to the previews has mostly been 'meh', with a few instances of 'oh God, you cannot be serious'. But that's part of the problem; at the moment I care so little about Skyrim that I'm not even sure I'll bother to play it.

[Ahrenil]

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.

As far as the closed cities go i'm not that bothered. I mean, we look back to Morrowind as the ideal open cities, but it wasn't always open. Look at Vivec and Mournhould, they seem open at first, but with Vivec especially you were always required to go inside, it was just the sense of scale that made them seem so open. The style though changes throughout the provinces, the more traditional style cities like those of Cyrodil and Skyrim would have gates, they're been routinely invaded, and with the descent of civil war and infighting from the plot closing the gates can well be justified. Vvardenfel was an island with pretty much no strategic value, why would it's cities need gates? Is ash that valuable a resource?

I would like a ME style scene instead of a loading screen, but waiting a few seconds isn't going to put me off the game, and i'd rather get some pretty artwork to look at on a loading screen than a few seconds of awkward silence.

[Kiln]

I'm with the crowd of people that have had very low expectations of this game since it was announced so I'm not entirely disappointed or upset at all. I'm almost 100% that the founders of this site fit into this group as well. Sad maybe but alot of the older fans have been alienated by the changes to the series already and I'm sure that many more will be after Skyrim. As I've said before if you have a winning recipe and you make too many changes, at some point that recipe ceases to be good anymore...or at the very least will stop resembling what the recipe used to make.

I'm sure that this game will go on to sell more copies than the old games because these days a game doesn't have to be good to sell, it only has to promote itself well and have an established series. That has been proven to me time and time again. Skyrim will be bought by many just because it is a sequel to Oblivion, by the same people who bought Oblivion just because it was a sequel to Morrowind.

They won't mind that Bethesda opened up an old mythology book and just grabbed out the same tired old things that have filled RPGs for the last 20 years rather than creating something for themselves, or that they've removed more skills, taken away attributes, and generally gone as generic as possible in nearly every way they could. They will enjoy it because they were won over by a game they enjoyed a decade ago even though the current product isn't even even similar or they'll buy it just because in large bold lettering it says Bethesda on the case.

[Thomas Kaira]

Bethesda changed their "recipe" completely when they created Oblivion; remember that. This is the reason many Morrowind fans (like Helena) refused to continue on, because Bethesda tried to rewrite their tomes and fell flat on their faces as a result. The main reason Oblivion has such a huge modding community is a that it is a testament to how much Oblivion fell short of expectations Practically nothing that was wanted ended up in the final product, mostly because Oblivion was not designed to be as much a "game" as it was designed to be a technical marvel, and such marvels are fleeting and tend to die fast. If Oblivion did not get its SDK, it would not have lasted a year.

Yes, Oblivion did many things most games had never even dreamed of before, such as the distant land rendering that it was possible to explore every inch of (unfortunately, the Distant LOD is horribly low-res and rife with glitches), a dynamic weather system (with broken precipitation), Radiant AI (that is incapable of decent pathfinding and tends to not value their lives), and HDR lighting (that was way WAY too bright).

See what I'm getting at here? Bethesda tried to do too much too fast, and we were left with a bunch of technical features that look great at a glance, but when analyzed are actually kinda sloppy, and that is what we got at the expense of a HUGE amount of Morrowind's atmosphere. Where Morrowind feels unique, and a sort of Wonderland, Oblivion is the generic "been there, seen that" Sylvan forest type landscape. Cyrodiil was supposed to be a jungle, too, until Oblivion smashed that to bits and Bethesda pulled a ret-con on us (I hate ret-cons).

Oblivion does a heckuva lot of stuff, but it does absolutely NOTHING well. It's actually quite similar to GTA III in that regard, I quote an article I once saw in Game Informer:

"If you can't do one thing right, you can just do a bunch of stuff poorly."

Oblivion falls into the latter category; it is a game that stuffs so much into your face it makes it very difficult to realize that the distant landscape is full of tears, for instance, or the rain ignores rooftops and balconies, or the NPCs constantly get stuck on lampposts and repeat conversations in the same conversation and the same person changes his opinions constantly, or the notoriously terrible level scaling, or the hacky-slashy boring and way too drawn-out combat, or the fact that the entire world feels exactly the same throughout, or that Bethesda broke several skills by making them rely entirely on player skill over character skill.

My current load order numbers hundreds of plugins, and 90% of them are dedicated to addressing those above problems (the rest are new quest mods). I really hope Bethesda learned their lesson with Oblivion, because they blew it big time on what could have been something really special.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 26 2011, 08:25 AM

[Kiln]

I really hope Bethesda learned their lesson with Oblivion, because they blew it big time on what could have been something really special.

Doesn't sound like it, seems kinda like Bethsoft is saying "the sales numbers look good on Oblivion so lets remove more stuff to save us time and add in dual wielding and perks...yeah that should do just fine."

To be perfectly honest I really don't know enough about the game to make a proper judgement but so far I'm not liking what I have heard and it definately doesn't sound like an Elderscrolls game to me.

[haute ecole rider]

I'm not going to jump on the Skyrim bandwagon. Oblivion was such a commercial success (and for good reason - I'll explain later), that it doesn't surprise me that Beth wants to do more of the same rather than take some serious creative/design risks that could blaze new trails. From what I saw of Skyrim, it doesn't seem to have as much environmental variety as Oblivion (honestly, does Skyrim have much to begin with?). No offense intended to our northern friends, but when I think of Norway or Sweden, I think of glacier covered mountains with slivers of forests and alpine meadows in the valleys dropping down to rocky fjords. If I'm wrong in thinking that's all there is to these two grand countries (each with their own grand histories that I've only skimmed the surface of), then will a resident of either country enlighten me please?

So that's what I think of when I think of Skyrim. Cold, mostly inhospitable, and dark in the winter time. Do I want to spend all my time immersed in winter? I'm not sure about that, even though winter is one of my favorite seasons (fall is the other). I would be rather bored if that was all I saw.

Now, Oblivion has good reasons for its success. Put yourself in my place. I've never played an RPG before, all of my games were either puzzle games (like the Myst series) where death was rare or never, or they were first person shooters (either space-based like Wing Commander or ground based like Rainbow Six). My favorites were those that had strong storylines, though the older games were quite boring once I played them through and learned the story by heart. They were also restrictive in their gameplay in that I couldn't explore everywhere - there were places my PC couldn't go, no matter how much I wanted to go there.

Oblivion was the first RPG I ever bought, and I got it when I got my Xbox 360. I fell in love with it right off the bat, and its limitations were not obvious to me until after I played it with three or four characters (that's more than any other game). Overall it was slower-paced with moments of sheer terror, and entirely under the player's control. In other words, I could choose whether or not to explore that spooky dungeon - if I chose not to explore it, there were other less scary things I could do. I loved the options open to me.

Oblivion on the console gave me an opportunity to let my imagination run wild while being very immersed in the game. I would play for three or four hours straight before noticing the time. And may I remind you, for all of Oblivion's shortcomings on the consoles, the story of Julian that I am writing is based entirely on the console game. Yes, I'm replaying the Main Quest on the PC hybrid that I now have, but it's not adding much to the story Julian already told me.

So while I'm interested in Skyrim, I'm not pulling at the bit for it to come out. I'll sit back and let others try it first, and see how they like it. Maybe I will wait a few years, until the price drops to $20 or $30 (I got the PC version for $20), then try it out. But right now I'm not that interested in the game enough to drop $60 on it.