Yeah....you really need to play Morrowind....putting off doing a quest isn't freedom. Freedom is doing it your way, damn the script (and you could do that very thing....Morrowind sets you up for this epic thing where you follow a prophecy similar to the Dragonborn...but the key difference is...you can tell destiny to F itself, break the prophecy utterly, but still do the overall objective by collecting enough information on your own, not because the plot rail-roaded you into doing it, but because you wanted to (and you can even tell the final boss (a physical god) as such in one of the most badass lines in the whole of the series).
Morrowind isn't without it's flaws. I personally don't mind the graphics, since they were actually very good for their day. But the combat is very flat (which I agree Skyrim improved on by making it a bit more fluid, and smashing the enemy's face in with a shield is just good fun). Also while I enjoyed the system for the most part, the level up system would've worked much better to just give you a flat 15 stat points per level, instead of forcing you to level just right (though no where NEAR as bad as Oblivion was...closer to Skyrim in terms of overall difficulty, or rather, Skyrim was closer to Morrowind).
And the Ai for companions...or lack thereof...
I actually didn't mind the lack of information (it's very much like BG, where you have to pay attention to conversations or ply the taverns or temples for rumors....or at least you would without the internet...was a fun adventure though back in the day since there was that great sense of discovery.....Oblivion and Skyrim, you can ignore the quest text/conversation entirely and just go where the sparkly thing and/or arrow tells you to).
Though the abilities to fly, total freedom for enchantment, spellmaking (which is one of the series's most defining features) are some of my favorite features.
Yeah you can mod oblivion and Skyrim to re-add flight...but it was a dumb move to remove it in the first place, especially since you can't enter backdoors anyway 99.999% of the time). I'm also pissed at how much of an obvious beta Skyrim STILL is, despite them ending development for it. The X-box version works excellent (since the game was made for the X-box), and PS3 runs ok...after the initial kinks...but the PC version is a unstable POS that crashes all the time damn time. You NEED mods just to make it run worth a crap. I can forgive games, like the Troika titles, for still being buggy since the company supported them till it collapsed, but there is no reason for a game as buggy as Skyrim to be released by a company like Bethesda....yes they have buggy games, but Skyrim is the buggiest to date, and the patches have actually made it worse in most cases.
Oblivion removed a large element of freedom when it gave NPCs plot flags to shoehorn you into their preferred way a story MUST go...and Skyrim inherited that, but unlike Oblivion which removes the flags when a person's role is done, unless a quest specifically requires you kill someone, you can't.
I have Morrowind, but walking around makes me nauseous in that game. For some reason I get nauseous after 30 minutes of Morrowind, but I can play Oblivion and Skyrim all day long without feeling sick.
Wasn't Morrowind the game where you could also put points into a stat to be able to run around faster? I remember my character walking around as slow as a snail... It was quite aggravating, and making a stat for it is in my eyes just annoying. Why waste precious points on a walking skill?
I remember that with Morrowwind, although I've not really played any Elder Scrolls since (Morrowind came with my 3D card). Yet, Daggerfall was one of the first RPG's I ever played on the PC... sigh... I still remember crawling around dungeons, then getting a chill when I heard the creaking screech of an Ancient Lich or Vampire, then legging out of there. Good times.
@Kitteh_On_A_Cloud : there is the Speed attribute and athletics skill. Both matter partly, but most importantly it's speed, which you can start with at 30 with some characters (out of 100).
It's worth noting that speed doesn't affect only your movement speed but also hit rate, so it's ESSENTIAL to get it up as fast as possible (pun not intended)
For powerplayers though, there are some boots that improve your speed by 200 points, making you road runner actually. The catch is that they blind you 100% (turning your screen black, how cool is that?!) - however, with magic resistance of at least 1%, the blindness is just partial : It's like wearing sunglasses XD
@Kitteh_On_A_Cloud : there is the Speed attribute and athletics skill. Both matter partly, but most importantly it's speed, which you can start with at 30 with some characters (out of 100).
It's worth noting that speed doesn't affect only your movement speed but also hit rate, so it's ESSENTIAL to get it up as fast as possible (pun not intended)
For powerplayers though, there are some boots that improve your speed by 200 points, making you road runner actually. The catch is that they blind you 100% (turning your screen black, how cool is that?!) - however, with magic resistance of at least 1%, the blindness is just partial : It's like wearing sunglasses XD
Where are these boots? Sounds useful whenever I might play that again before I get rich and enchantment crazy. As a Breton it sounds perfect.
Last thing mentioned off topic, I PRRROMMISSS! (from my end at least)
@ChildofBhaal599 Just north of Caldera, off the main road, there is a redguard woman. You can either accept her escort quest to take her to one of the western coast cities (I can't recall the name, just north of Hla Oad?). The quest by itself is easy even on level 1 as long as you don't get any Cliff Racer or Kaguti on the way. Once you get there, she gives them as a parting gift. And yeah, a breton is AWESOME with them, even more so if you wear the Cuirass of the Savior's Hide (complete immunity to magic for Bretons, canceling the negative effect)
I think it's good to remember that compared to most other modern games, Skyrim still is incredibly free and nonlinear. At least I'm still allowed to explore the world and do quests largely at my own leisure, in whatever order I prefer, instead of being literally stuck in a pipe, having to go through setpieces, and forced to appreciate special effects and stuff.
@Chow: Totally agreed. I think most people pretty much ignore this fact. That's also why I spoke earlier about being able to go onan epic cabbage hunt instead of doing the main quest... I myself went on an epic sweetroll hunt instead. I remember I had about 100 'authentic' ones (ones that weren't spammed by the CLUA console, but which I found in houses all over the world).
There are tons of different ways to play the game, hundreds of weird self-imposed challenges and funny character builds, probably thousands of the type @Kitteh_On_A_Cloud just said where you go out there and do something blatantly ridiculous. Are you even going to eat those sweetrolls when you're done? Who cares, it's fun.
All you need is a little imagination, look at the game in a different way, and you can go and play the whole thing all over again with an entirely different experience. And that's not even going for the mods, which add several new layers to it on their own.
The sort of "movie" games like Battlefield can be fun too, I guess, but there's not really any more point to play them again than there would be to, well, watch a movie a second time: you can do it if it's a good movie, yeah, but it's not going to be very different the second time around, even if it's one of those really good movies that open up whole new perspectives in a retrospect view. And I don't think Battlefield would be one of those movies.
Last thing mentioned off topic, I PRRROMMISSS! (from my end at least)
@ChildofBhaal599 Just north of Caldera, off the main road, there is a redguard woman. You can either accept her escort quest to take her to one of the western coast cities (I can't recall the name, just north of Hla Oad?). The quest by itself is easy even on level 1 as long as you don't get any Cliff Racer or Kaguti on the way. Once you get there, she gives them as a parting gift. And yeah, a breton is AWESOME with them, even more so if you wear the Cuirass of the Savior's Hide (complete immunity to magic for Bretons, canceling the negative effect)
thank you. i will remember that for next time. have an insightful for reward. save up for something nice, like a shiny badge!
@Chow: Exactly. I actually liked Skyrim so much because the player was given total freedom. Don't want to do any quests? Go explore a cave instead! I admit, caves and dungeons got repetitive in the long run, but even after 200 hours of gameplay I always managed to find something new or silly to do. And to answer your question, @Chow, no, I didn't eat all of the sweetrolls. I decorated my house with them. Or at least tried to, as the game mechanics REALLY are clunky when it comes to moving objects around.
At any rate, I am not at all considering the Xbox One... And I will watch how the overall situation will develop, as things are, it's more or less cheaper to get a PC that can out perform the next gen consoles for cheaper than the consoles... or well, the PS4 is on the lines that can it be done for it's NA price, for the euro price it's easy though.
So here's just me who grew up as a PC gamer hoping developers take advantage of PCs being cheaper and more powerful and change platforms.
In all honesty, I'm not really happy about any of the next gen systems.....as far as games go, the only one I'm aware of being developed I used to be interested in was the new Thief game....until they announced it was going to be much more combat heavy then older entries, which means it's not a Thief game, it's another %^$& game (Ninja-themed this time) using the IP to try and get people to buy it (like Lord of Shadows. I refuse to use Castlevania in the same sentence as it...if it was a new IP, I probably would've liked it, but trying to say it's a Castlevania game makes it instant %$^&).
Apparently, this weekend, there were demonstrations of new games coming out for the Wii U at several Best Buy locations. Apparently, Microsoft people were at several of these locations trying to talk people out of a Wii U and into an Xbone. "Why buy a Wii U, when the Xbox One is coming out soon?" one of them was heard to say. Several customers basically trashed the Xbone to the employee. (These people were wearing Microsoft shirts, so it was easy to tell they were employees). Best of all, Microsoft says they have a console for people who can't stay pretty much constantly connected to the internet or who want to own their games. It's called the XBox360. :P Nice way to give your customers the finger, Micro$haft.
Well, what can I say... I just think the videogame industry has become a lot more restrictive. With this, I mean that developers and publishers have put far more rules onto their games and gaming systems. You can't re-sell used games anymore, you have to be constantly online, you gotta buy membership and so on. They're clutching onto their game way too tightly. It's as if they don't trust their customers anymore. The game has become a product. It has to sell well, and that's basically it. That's why games get stuffed with microtransactions and DLC nowadays. Not like they weren't earlier, but nowadays it just has become more obvious, more apparent. Same with the systems. Developers and publishers want to sell their product to a wider audience, which is in itself not a problem. The more people who get to enjoy the game, the better. But in doing this, they have to adapt to an audience who isn't as aware of gaming as the 'hardcore' audience is. And thus games and systems get adapted to the 'casual' audience. The Xbone is thus far the most prominent example of this shift in audience, which is not necessarily a good development for the gaming industry...
We'll just have to hope the Xbone really crashes and burns as a result of all this. That way it would instead serve as an excellent example of how this kind of stuff does not work and should not be done, which hopefully will teach the others an important lesson.
Also, the Xbox One is region locked to 21 countries right now, amongst the witch big gaming nations like Portugal, Poland, Singapore and Romania aren't listed. Nice of Microsoft isn't it?
And before anyone asks - yes, Poland is unlisted. This means that the game Microsoft presented so happily for the Xbox One, developed by Polish CD Projekt... won't be available for the developers themselves.
Comments
Morrowind isn't without it's flaws. I personally don't mind the graphics, since they were actually very good for their day. But the combat is very flat (which I agree Skyrim improved on by making it a bit more fluid, and smashing the enemy's face in with a shield is just good fun). Also while I enjoyed the system for the most part, the level up system would've worked much better to just give you a flat 15 stat points per level, instead of forcing you to level just right (though no where NEAR as bad as Oblivion was...closer to Skyrim in terms of overall difficulty, or rather, Skyrim was closer to Morrowind).
And the Ai for companions...or lack thereof...
I actually didn't mind the lack of information (it's very much like BG, where you have to pay attention to conversations or ply the taverns or temples for rumors....or at least you would without the internet...was a fun adventure though back in the day since there was that great sense of discovery.....Oblivion and Skyrim, you can ignore the quest text/conversation entirely and just go where the sparkly thing and/or arrow tells you to).
Though the abilities to fly, total freedom for enchantment, spellmaking (which is one of the series's most defining features) are some of my favorite features.
Yeah you can mod oblivion and Skyrim to re-add flight...but it was a dumb move to remove it in the first place, especially since you can't enter backdoors anyway 99.999% of the time). I'm also pissed at how much of an obvious beta Skyrim STILL is, despite them ending development for it. The X-box version works excellent (since the game was made for the X-box), and PS3 runs ok...after the initial kinks...but the PC version is a unstable POS that crashes all the time damn time. You NEED mods just to make it run worth a crap. I can forgive games, like the Troika titles, for still being buggy since the company supported them till it collapsed, but there is no reason for a game as buggy as Skyrim to be released by a company like Bethesda....yes they have buggy games, but Skyrim is the buggiest to date, and the patches have actually made it worse in most cases.
Oblivion removed a large element of freedom when it gave NPCs plot flags to shoehorn you into their preferred way a story MUST go...and Skyrim inherited that, but unlike Oblivion which removes the flags when a person's role is done, unless a quest specifically requires you kill someone, you can't.
It's worth noting that speed doesn't affect only your movement speed but also hit rate, so it's ESSENTIAL to get it up as fast as possible (pun not intended)
For powerplayers though, there are some boots that improve your speed by 200 points, making you road runner actually. The catch is that they blind you 100% (turning your screen black, how cool is that?!) - however, with magic resistance of at least 1%, the blindness is just partial : It's like wearing sunglasses XD
(from my end at least)
@ChildofBhaal599 Just north of Caldera, off the main road, there is a redguard woman. You can either accept her escort quest to take her to one of the western coast cities (I can't recall the name, just north of Hla Oad?). The quest by itself is easy even on level 1 as long as you don't get any Cliff Racer or Kaguti on the way. Once you get there, she gives them as a parting gift.
And yeah, a breton is AWESOME with them, even more so if you wear the Cuirass of the Savior's Hide (complete immunity to magic for Bretons, canceling the negative effect)
Morrowind was more so, of course, but still.
All you need is a little imagination, look at the game in a different way, and you can go and play the whole thing all over again with an entirely different experience. And that's not even going for the mods, which add several new layers to it on their own.
The sort of "movie" games like Battlefield can be fun too, I guess, but there's not really any more point to play them again than there would be to, well, watch a movie a second time: you can do it if it's a good movie, yeah, but it's not going to be very different the second time around, even if it's one of those really good movies that open up whole new perspectives in a retrospect view. And I don't think Battlefield would be one of those movies.
Yes, but it wouldn't be an Elder Scrolls game without a clunky, nigh-impossible to use prop manipulation system, would it?
If you want to start a new thread about the Elder Scrolls games, of course, I'd be all for that.
And Microsoft lost any hope to sell me an Xbox One... If I buy a next gen console it'll be a PS4.
So here's just me who grew up as a PC gamer hoping developers take advantage of PCs being cheaper and more powerful and change platforms.
And before anyone asks - yes, Poland is unlisted. This means that the game Microsoft presented so happily for the Xbox One, developed by Polish CD Projekt... won't be available for the developers themselves.