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Honestly I find all of the TES locations interesting enough that you could set it pretty much anywhere and I'll be happy. Especially now that we've got Medieval England out of the way with Oblivion.
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Apr 5, 2015 10:22
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Berke Negri posted:Well, if it makes you feel any better, Kirkbride said that in the end the Thalmor are going to win. 
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Apr 5, 2015 11:04
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Do they really win though? I don't much like c0da, but isn't it just the current kalpa of Nirn that ends? Alduin is a concept as much as a being; he doesn't have to be a big black dragon. He could just as easily be an apocalyptic war, or a giant earthquake, or a sword-nuke that sinks the continent. Or a giant time-robot-god crashing back into existence. In that sense, things go more or less according to Lorkhan's plan. The end of time still devours everything, Nirn still resets, and everyone's spirits still cycle back round for another shot at CHIM.
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Apr 5, 2015 13:25
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Pikestaff posted:Especially now that we've got Medieval England out of the way with Oblivion. Wasn't Cyrodil supposed to be mostly covered in tropical rainforests at one point in the lore? Jungle Roman Empire would have been an interesting take on things, perhaps with some fusion of classical architecture and Mesoamerican, and legionnaires decked out in Roman attire but wielding Aztec macanas. Instead they went for the most aggressively bland presentation possible. It's not even necessarily about it being faux medieval England or whatever, because I think it is possible to take that kind of setting and do an interesting spin on it. It was more about how completely samey and uniform everything was. Then again the game was a massive success, so I guess it was right choice.
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Apr 5, 2015 15:30
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Cyrodiil was a jungle until Tiber Septim blew on it and used CHIM to turn it into a beautiful countryside. It's one of the things Heimskr is yelling about in Whiterun. But I think TESO retconned all of that so I'm not sure what the official word on it is anymore 
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Apr 5, 2015 15:54
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Jungles are beautiful too, Tiber, you rear end in a top hat. 
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Apr 5, 2015 16:05
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Moryrie posted:And Tiber Septim, at face value looks like the most generic warrior god ever. Oh yeah, he has background story. But he's a dead emperor, who was a complete rear end in a top hat, who is now regarded as a saint, because he's dead. He's Caesar. Only Caesar was less of a dick. But we're supposed to look at what he accomplished, not what he was, for some ridiculous reason. And oh, he's so important to holding reality together now! Ugh. I don't see how this is the most generic thing ever? Being an rear end in a top hat who conquered the world instead of just some kind of knight guy obsessed with justice is kind of refreshing. Drunk in Space posted:Jungles are beautiful too, Tiber, you rear end in a top hat. I know, jeez, wiping out the habitat for how many species of beautiful and irreplaceable native wildlife and probably extincting them all? Tiber you rear end in a top hat, forget everything else, that is the real atrocity. 
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Apr 5, 2015 17:01
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My understanding was that all elder scrolls gods are self-absorbed, egotistical assholes. Though I've never paid the lore any mind so I could be slightly off
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Apr 5, 2015 17:11
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My understanding is that only daedra do anything of consequence in the games. So I could care less about the eight and one besides the rad KotN armor in oblivion.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:27
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axolotl farmer posted:Please no more foresworns. That storyline kind of went nowhere in Skyrim. Playing as a foresworn would be awesome.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:31
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For me, the jungles disappearing wasn't the main problem. It was how all the details the Pocket Guide teased me with had disappeared. The old Pocket Guide to the Empire's article on Cyrodiil (link) promised a more.. dynamic province, being culturally divided between the martial Colovian West and a Nibenese East ruled by merchant-magicians and a thousand cults. Or something. For me, that was the most disheartening discovery in Oblivion. Where were the crazy battlemage aristocracy and their "garish costumes, bizarre tapestries, tattoos, brandings, and elaborate ceremony"? Of course, by Oblivion it had been three hundred years since the Pocket Guide was written. Cultures changing is easier to explain away than the geography of the place changing totally, I guess. Also, remember the Green Emperor Way in the city? The weird kind of graveyard-kind of park? You had to go to a specific tomb at a specific time and there would be a map showing you where to go? Imagine if instead of that you could have had a giant topiary bush shaped by Tiber Septim's head tell you, flocks of birds singing his voice and moving its branches for facial emotions. quote:The Emperor's Palace is a crown of sun rays, surrounded by his magical gardens. One garden path is known as Green Emperor Road-here, topiaries of the heads of past Emperors have been shaped by sorcery and can speak. When one must advise Tiber Septim, birds are drawn to the hedgery head, using their songs as its voice and moving its branches for the needed expressions. Cyrodiil just used to be a heck of a lot weirder. edit: spelling.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:34
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Pikestaff posted:Cyrodiil was a jungle until Tiber Septim blew on it and used CHIM to turn it into a beautiful countryside. It's one of the things Heimskr is yelling about in Whiterun. Cyrodiil used to be a jungle in TESO too, but isn't anymore in TESO's second era Cyrodiil thanks to Tiber Septim's CHIM. There's a couple books that talk about it in-game. I am guessing what happened was: A) Cyrodiil as-is is a mandate from Bethesda and for consistency between games that is how it will appear. B) TESO uses the height maps from Oblivion to create Cyrodiil and they wanted to keep it visually similar for fans of Oblivion coming to the game. C) Cyrodiil is set as the big open world PVP battleground for the game with hundreds of players fighting over castles and the more wide open and less dense Oblivion-esque Cyrodiil is a lot less of a performance hog than doing a crazy jungle. edit: It'll be interesting to see what they do with the Imperial City once they release it as it is now run by Daedra with a giant portal to Coldharbour looming right over it. Berke Negri fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Apr 5, 2015 |
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Apr 5, 2015 17:43
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Zoe posted:I don't see how this is the most generic thing ever? Being an rear end in a top hat who conquered the world instead of just some kind of knight guy obsessed with justice is kind of refreshing. Because Emperor "Gods", even living ones are kindof common in our world? And a God of War that resolves conflicts is not something that's common at all?
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Apr 5, 2015 18:13
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Berke Negri posted:Cyrodiil used to be a jungle in TESO too, but isn't anymore in TESO's second era Cyrodiil thanks to Tiber Septim's CHIM. There's a couple books that talk about it in-game. Huh, interesting. Thanks for clearing that up, I haven't played TESO so I wasn't sure. I think a jungle Cyrodiil in Oblivion would've been fun but I don't know if it would've saved it from the potato faces.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:17
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I didn't play Oblivion until about 2011 and I couldn't believe how bad the character faces were. Did they have a really poor reception when the game was released in 2005 as well? I wasn't playing games around that time so I don't know if they were considered normal by the graphical standards back then.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:41
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Most people thought they looked bad then. To me it was probably the second biggest notably bad thing about the game visually, the first being how distant ruins are invisible which just looks really stupid. Procedural faces as they exist are a fundamentally poo poo concept that need to die in a fire. There isn't a single game with an acceptable one. The only good thing about them is being able to make yourself a horrendous looking demon, they absolutely blow at making attractive or even notably different characters. Bring back the concept of hand crafted faces, throw in some modular options for variety, and RPGs could have much better looking characters.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:58
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There's no 'used to be' as far as I'm concerned. Cyrodiil was always jungle and still is and Heimskir doesn't know poo poo and and TESO didn't happen and the hours I spent playing Oblivion were eaten by Anumidium (except the shivering isles)  Though what I don't get is that they flat out said they made it genericland to capitalise on Lord of the Rings' surge in popularity. Except even the films are nowhere near as primary coloured, un-grounded, 'adventuring-in-ruined-forts-is-a-profession-like-mining  ' as Oblivion was.I mean someone made that conical hairstyle and thought it would totally fit in a world where life is dictated by the rhythms of the harvest and the woods are filled with the ruins of empires. It's why D&D can't hold a candle to Tolkein, or come to think of it anything involving good writing.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:30
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K8.0 posted:Most people thought they looked bad then. To me it was probably the second biggest notably bad thing about the game visually, the first being how distant ruins are invisible which just looks really stupid. The Saints Row one isn't trash garbage.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:33
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post
Friendly Factory fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2015 20:17
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K8.0 posted:Procedural faces as they exist are a fundamentally poo poo concept that need to die in a fire. There isn't a single game with an acceptable one. The only good thing about them is being able to make yourself a horrendous looking demon, they absolutely blow at making attractive or even notably different characters. EVE's is ok.
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Apr 5, 2015 20:40
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You know, I understand people complaining about how generic Oblivion was, but at the same time my first TES game was Oblivion and I liked it because it was "unique".
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Apr 5, 2015 22:30
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Friendly Factory posted:poo poo, we've even had a prominent one this generation in Emperor Hail Selassie Also Hirohito, up until 1945 (maybe).
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Apr 5, 2015 22:38
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Bholder posted:You know, I understand people complaining about how generic Oblivion was, but at the same time my first TES game was Oblivion and I liked it because it was "unique". Play Morrowind you donk pocket, and fall in love with giant bugs.
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Apr 5, 2015 22:46
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Bholder posted:You know, I understand people complaining about how generic Oblivion was, but at the same time my first TES game was Oblivion and I liked it because it was "unique". Oblivion was my intro to ES as well. When the most open-world game I had played prior to that was Ocarina of Time, it was pretty easy to get blown away by everything. When I later did Morrowind I could acknowledge it having better atmosphere or writing or whatever, but you can't get the impact of "Holy poo poo, I can actually enter every door I see and they're not just painted textures?!" a second time.
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Apr 5, 2015 23:05
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I put Oblivion down after about five hours of looking at the same boring towns and the same mutant faces, but one thing that did pique my interest over Morrowind, at least initially, was the Radiant AI and the schedules that NPCs had. I'd seen NPC schedules in games before, like Ultima, but to see it in a first person setting like that was pretty neat, at least until I realized how completely shallow and broken it actually was.
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Apr 6, 2015 04:28
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Drunk in Space posted:until I realized how completely shallow and broken it actually was. Having played morrowind, I'm surprised you didn't assume this would be the case. Oblivion was my first of the games, and the first thing I noticed about morrowind was A)how easy it was to break the game apart and B)how thankful i am for quest markers. Some location descriptions in morrowind are about as reliable as in Skyrim, which is to say not. Which would be understandable if the direction giver was unreliable or it was a side-quest. Nope, Main quest, and an honest character. Don't let anyone's rose-tinted glasses fool you. All the games are good, and all of them have their own bits that are hosed up, broken, dumb, or a combination thereof.
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Apr 6, 2015 09:39
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Oblivion was the first TES game I really tried to get into but unlike a lot of the other people here it didn't engage me at all. When I finally played through it later it was because I had played both Morrowind and Skyrim by that point and my curiosity regarding the lore was able to keep me engaged. (Obligatory acknowledgement that a couple of the questlines and Shivering Isles were really good) I played Morrowind several years after it had already been out. It did admittedly take a couple of days for it to really click with me, but once it did, goddamn  I ate that game up like chocolate cake. That's not to say it doesn't have its problems but it just grabbed me and didn't let go, even though it was already dated by that point. I don't know what it is about it, but it was just lovely to play  I wish I could go back and play it for the first time again.edit: to be honest thinking about it now I'm pretty sure my biggest problem with Oblivion is the weird uncanny valley realdoll faces, it's probably a dumb thing to be put off by but there you go. Pikestaff fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 10:34
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I like the saturated look of Oblivion and the spoopy Ayleid ruins. The main quest is kind of boring since it's a lot of fetch quests, but the guilds and Dark Brotherhood are pretty good. Shivering Isles is insane and great.
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Apr 6, 2015 10:57
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Otoh the actual Oblivion areas where you have to get a sigil stone are easily the ugliest and worst parts of the game. I level speed and just run past every enemy, grab the stone and hope to survive long enough for the gate to collapse.
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Apr 6, 2015 10:59
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Nasgate posted:Having played morrowind, I'm surprised you didn't assume this would be the case. I played Morrowind when it came out in, what, 2002? When I played Oblivion in 2011, it was one of the first games I'd played in many years after a long break from gaming in general, so Morrowind was almost a distant memory by that point. Off-hand I can't remember too much broken or frustrating stuff about it, but admittedly my tolerance for video game BS was a lot higher back then, so I'm sure there probably was a ton of stuff that I just shrugged my shoulders about and got on with killing elves. The only thing that really stands out in my mind is the constant cliff racer attacks. I think it was the Ashlands where at any given moment you could chance a look up at the sky and there'd be at least one circling its way down towards you? One of my favourite lore tidbits from Skyrim is that the Dunmer on the boat with you at the start of Morrowind went on to become a national hero and eventually a saint because he exterminated the all the cliff racers. Ok there's actually one other lovely thing from Morrowind I do remember and that's the quest log. I think all the quests you got were just clumped together in a day-to-day journal, which you had no way of navigating except page forward and back. I remember that being pretty tedious. I think one of the expansions improved it, though. Drunk in Space fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 12:04
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I loved Oblivion and put hundreds of hours into it but the more I think about it the more I think it may have been because I was late to the party and had never played a proper huge open world game before (except maybe GTA). My experience of RPGs was limited to Final Fantasy and other JRPGS. The idea that I could go literally anywhere glossed over many of the flaws. Also some little touches I really liked: needing to get all the recommendations from the local mage guilds just to get into the university and start the quest proper springs to mind. It really fleshed out the world, encouraged travel and exploration rather than speed running in a neat way. Still hope in future games there is a bit more depth with guilds like there was in Morrowind where you actually had to be a skilled fighter to progress in the fighters guild etc. Also mutually exclusive groups/quests. Doubt it'll happen though because Bethesda like the idea that everything can be done on one save to avoid scaring filthy casuals.
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Apr 6, 2015 13:43
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Nasgate posted:B)how thankful i am for quest markers. Some location descriptions in morrowind are about as reliable as in Skyrim, which is to say not. Which would be understandable if the direction giver was unreliable or it was a side-quest. Nope, Main quest, and an honest character. I never realized how much I should appreciate quest markers until I played through a couple of quest mods that were all, "We want to be like Morrowind, so you need to read everything carefully and you won't get any quest markers!" .. and they only told me where I should be going/what I should be doing .. 15% of the time maybe? In one I managed to make the quest unwinnable because they hid a bunch of keys behind doors, and didn't give you an order, though one key could (potentially) open more than one door.. it was used up as soon as the door was opened? 2 of the doors would break the quest, the 3rd would give you enough of these special keys to progress. Of course there's nothing in the quest log telling you maybe you'll break things, and since the particular quest takes place in a large 6 zone maze, it might take you a while before you figure out you lost. In Morrowind... you could have just picked all the locks and gone your merry way. Oh, and those types of mods tend to not give you directions, and occasionally not even tell you where to go. + They don't usually give you the appropriate journal notes, so I hope you're good at remembering NPC dialogue and playing every day, because if you come back after like a month good luck. Morrowind records everything no matter how unimportant it is, and the post-tribunal journal is easy enough to navigate, so it isn't impossible to pick things up later. But no. These mods try to be like Morrowind, and then refuse to give you the crutches that Morrowind had, making everything worse. VostokProgram posted:Also Hirohito, up until 1945 (maybe). Also (to an extent) Kim Jong Il.
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Apr 6, 2015 14:33
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Quest markers are a horrible feature for any game that's trying to be immersive and/or explorational. All they do is let you get away with really lazy and boring game design and world design, and they make a lot of design concepts not work well or at all. In Bethesda's newer games removing them is a disaster because the games are designed around you dutifully following an arrow until you achieve success, but in Morrowind the lack of a quest marker and a filled out map is one of the game's single strongest design points. There are like two quests with broken descriptions, aside from that if you can't find something you need to learn how to read and open your eyes. That said, like a lot of things in Morrowind it was godawful at release because the original quest log was terrible and if you didn't write poo poo down you were hosed because everything wound up buried 200 pages in the past with no way of finding it. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 15:02
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Reminder that there's a roleplaying mod for Morrowind that removes every single journal entry and makes you fill it in yourself 
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Apr 6, 2015 15:10
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Sorry but finding a "cave west of here" is pretty drat awful when there are multiple caves, and you don't even know where "here" is. And I don't see how marking something on your map for future reference is immersion breaking. But speaking of Morrowind. I played it relatively late and I feel it was ruined for me. I actually played it after I played Daggerfall so I compared Morrowind to that rather than Oblivion and I noticed a bunch of similarities, like how NPCs in both games are similar except in Daggerfall they are static, untouchable sprites while in Morrowind they are interactable beings, but on the other hand the day-night cycle in Morrowind is really just for show there's no real difference between day or night, stores never close, people still walk on the street, city gates are always open. Then there's the scaling. People constantly complain how level-sclaing ruined Oblivion and every other future Bethesda game and Morrowind was perfect with hand-placed, static enemies and loot. Except, that's a complete and utter lie, Morrowind and many other RPGs at the time had level-scaled encounters, only exception is that NPCs never leveled up in Morrowind. And of course, the combat system blows.
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Apr 6, 2015 15:18
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K8.0 posted:Quest markers are a horrible feature for any game that's trying to be immersive and/or explorational. All they do is let you get away with really lazy and boring game design and world design, and they make a lot of design concepts not work well or at all. I've seen mods remove markers in a way that makes them work. But.. mostly they just end up claiming 'this is like Morrowind!' while.. missing the point completely. And lack of clear objectives/quest markers can make it impossible to tell if the quest broke, of if you just can't figure it out on your own. Which usually means you're stuck finding walkthroughs, looking through TESedit, or checking the CK to figure out wtf went wrong, and what you're supposed to do, or what the quest ID is so that you can console progress in a worst case scenario. And that's a whole lot less immersive than having quest markers. I also had one mod decide that it would write everything in the very long speech that an NPC gave me down, and hand it to me as a note? The problem is, it was all in daedric, and I haven't learned to read daedric yet. Pikestaff posted:Reminder that there's a roleplaying mod for Morrowind that removes every single journal entry and makes you fill it in yourself That's terrifying.
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Apr 6, 2015 15:43
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Speaking of Daggerfall, a demo of that was one of the first things I played on my 'brand new' CD-ROM drive around 1995. I'd actually had the demo for a while before that, as it'd come bundled on a CD from a gaming mag (PC Gamer iirc), which I'd obviously been unable use to prior to getting the drive. As soon as I did get the drive, naturally the first I did was to start going through this big pile of CDs I'd accumulated. Anyway, I thought the game was a giant pile of clunky, ugly poo poo and immediately moved on to playing Dark Forces instead. When I played Morrowind years later I don't even think I knew that Daggerfall was related to it, or that Elder Scrolls was even a series (I guess I thought the whole 'TES III' thing was like some kind of Star Wars Episode IV gimmick, or something). Gave it another go a few years back when I found out Bethesda had released the full version for free. Still poo poo.
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Apr 6, 2015 15:59
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I actually always liked Arena more than Daggerfall.
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Apr 6, 2015 17:30
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If you feel like doing an archaeological dig through the ancient internet you can find people kvetching about Morrowind in comparison to Daggerfall shortly after it was released. "Dumbing down the series", "not a true RPG", "appealing to casual gamers with whizzycool features and graphics", etc. Now, I think there are legitimate complaints that the series has been stripped of depth over time and that certain features seem catered to an audience that doesn't really care for this RPG nerd poo poo. But on the other hand, it's a bit comforting to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Apr 6, 2015 19:08
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Bholder posted:Sorry but finding a "cave west of here" is pretty drat awful when there are multiple caves, and you don't even know where "here" is. I don't want to tell you how to enjoy games or anything, but Morrowind usually had much more detailed description of destinations and you could almost always suss out where to go. Morrowind had a great balance between static and scaled content, though.
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Apr 6, 2015 19:48
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