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Tankbuster posted:what it lacks in cutting edge ENB features, it makes up for in being modular and actually letting me play the game at a sensible framerate. And also not being made by a weird bigot who wants to fight people in the parking lot
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Aug 17, 2023 02:00
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All those community patches you seem to rely upon so heavily actually strip out the bulk of the fun but bullshit stuff bethesda left in Skyrim. The base game has an insane alch-ench-blacksmithing feedback loop that modders strip out because its wildly broken. Levitation couldn't be added in oblivion or skyrim because the hardware on which the games were designed for couldn't support a seamless map. Morrowind also had wildly basic NPC schedules in comparison to later games and less systems in general. A hell of a lot of successful immersion mods in skyrim generally hook into systems that were in the base game.Skyrim is when bethesda added things like the basics of a settlement system with constructible housing; a crafting system that was expanded upon in fallout 4 etc. The skyrim skill-perk system is also a departure from fallout because you actually have to use the skills ingame if you want your character to get better. If anything fallout is the cursed bethesda series because no matter whatever new thing they will try to do, some dumbass nerd will crawl out and explain why bethesda doesn't get fallout. Rebuilding the wasteland? No, fallout is about complex moral choices! Adding a new playstyle that is well balanced around managing a unique type of resource? Introduced too early and doesn't fit with my preconceived notion of canon. Added mechanical and gameplay benefits to Charisma? Game is forcing me to invest in Charisma if I want to create a network of interconnected settlements! They shouldn't have brought the drat IP to begin with and made their own OC version of the idea. Worked for inExile. Depending on how much stuff is going to
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Aug 17, 2023 02:12
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Magmarashi posted:And also not being made by a weird bigot who wants to fight people in the parking lot Yeah, being a brown guy for whom english is a second language, I have been dealing with bigots long enough to learn and ignore the lovely things. At least with skyrim the modding scene has come far enough that people are mostly collaborating again and making alternatives to older more established staples. Theres a bunch of mods that revert most of arthmoor's "fixes". Immersive citizens got overtaken by AI overhaul. Cutting room fixes can be replaced by BUVARP. Theres tools so you can batch patch NPC appearances with their other records.
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Aug 17, 2023 02:21
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I also contend that most bethesda games are pretty playable without community patches now. I sometimes eschew them for that exact reason - I sometimes want to gently caress around with the weird broken-fun stuff that the community patches remove. They're really not that much less stable or broken without the patches.
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Aug 17, 2023 02:22
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skyrim absolutely is. Fallout 4 even moreso. Also Fo76 apparently has a lot of friendly players helping newbies.
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Aug 17, 2023 02:32
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Oblivion was pretty bad and forgettable, even with an extreme amount of mods it brought the game up to "eh, average I guess."
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Aug 17, 2023 03:04
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Oblivion was pretty bad and forgettable, even with an extreme amount of mods it brought the game up to "eh, average I guess." no
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Aug 17, 2023 03:24
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Tankbuster posted:All those community patches you seem to rely upon so heavily actually strip out the bulk of the fun but bullshit stuff bethesda left in Skyrim. The base game has an insane alch-ench-blacksmithing feedback loop that modders strip out because its wildly broken. Levitation couldn't be added in oblivion or skyrim because the hardware on which the games were designed for couldn't support a seamless map. Morrowind also had wildly basic NPC schedules in comparison to later games and less systems in general. A hell of a lot of successful immersion mods in skyrim generally hook into systems that were in the base game.Skyrim is when bethesda added things like the basics of a settlement system with constructible housing; a crafting system that was expanded upon in fallout 4 etc. The skyrim skill-perk system is also a departure from fallout because you actually have to use the skills ingame if you want your character to get better. I wouldn't say I rely on community patches, but the mod guides I've looked at recommend them. Still, that's a fair point. In regards to the perk thing, I wasn't really referring to the leveling system, but moreso how perks are presented to you. Oblivion had set perks once you reach a certain rank in a skill, but Skyrim's a little closer to Fallout in that you get a perk point to spend when you level up. It is different in that you don't have to spend the perk at the same time you level up, and perks are more dependent on one another (ex. how you can choose to focus on a particular element in the Destruction), but I got the impression the Fallout perk system inspired the change. I think people are always going to complain about Bethesda and how they handle Fallout, but I don't think it always stems from a place of disdain for Bethesda. In some cases, I think it's just frustration that they don't reach the potential that they could. I think Bethesda will sometimes hit on really interesting concepts (be they story elements or gameplay elements); it's just that they don't expand on them fully. I'm also not really clear what you mean with inExile, since Wasteland was the inspiration for Fallout, and Brian Fargo bought it back from EA. Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Oblivion was pretty bad and forgettable, even with an extreme amount of mods it brought the game up to "eh, average I guess." In all honesty, I feel like I have more of a fondness for Oblivion than Skyrim (although I also haven't played Oblivion in close a decade). For all its shortcomings, Oblivion did have a charm to it. In particular, I feel like the facial animations in Oblivion have a lot more character to them, as opposed to Skyrim, where everyone looks better, but barely emote 
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Aug 17, 2023 03:44
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Tankbuster posted:All those community patches you seem to rely upon so heavily actually strip out the bulk of the fun but bullshit stuff bethesda left in Skyrim. The base game has an insane alch-ench-blacksmithing feedback loop that modders strip out because its wildly broken. Levitation couldn't be added in oblivion or skyrim because the hardware on which the games were designed for couldn't support a seamless map. Morrowind also had wildly basic NPC schedules in comparison to later games and less systems in general. A hell of a lot of successful immersion mods in skyrim generally hook into systems that were in the base game.Skyrim is when bethesda added things like the basics of a settlement system with constructible housing; a crafting system that was expanded upon in fallout 4 etc. The skyrim skill-perk system is also a departure from fallout because you actually have to use the skills ingame if you want your character to get better. Bethesda took out Levitation in Morrowind, in the Tribunal expansion. It wasn't an engine limitation, it was them deciding that it was too hard to work around the idea that the player might be able to float. Each game becomes more and more streamlined, removing stats and rolling things into less and less specialized systems. At this point you may as well have two stats that amount to "Gun/Bow" and "Not Gun/Bow" for your weapons, and then about four or five "extra" stats they jam all the non-weapon skills into. Whether or not you think that's better than the earlier games' more esoteric and varied systems is in some ways subjective. What isn't subjective is the fact that the games are becoming simpler and simpler system wise, and yet Bethesda still can't manage to put one out without it being a broken mess. Beyond building settlements, a system that was in itself buggy as gently caress, Fallout 4 has some of the simplest mechanics in the series. Yet it was still a nightmare of glitches and scripting errors and just plain poor and unpolished design decisions. Asking a developer to make a game that loving works without exploding into a million pieces when you look at it funny should just be expected. Bugs happen though, and at least these days we can patch games. When you consistently release broken messes that you then refuse to fix for years, including rereleasing them multiple times for over a decade with massive and glaring issues still unaddressed? No, that's not "progress", that's just sheer incompetence. Modders being able to hook into undeveloped systems and expand them does not show that the systems were well thought out; it shows that the systems were kludged in, poorly designed, and incredibly lacking, and the developers left them that way. Bethesda makes games with large, expansive worlds, and they populate those worlds with half finished systems and broken scripting, and run them on software that was showing its age back in the loving Oblivion days.
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Aug 17, 2023 03:54
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Challenge Time! Explain how the Block Skill in Morrowind was more complicated and interesting than the Block Skill in Skyrim.
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Aug 17, 2023 04:43
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7c Nickel posted:Challenge Time! It wasn't. Morrowind wasn't a perfect game. It was horribly broken and buggy and the combat system was jank as gently caress. It was, of course, a Bethesda game. It was also a game running on much weaker hardware, that had much more decentralized stats, more weapon types, and more player-equipped items to keep track of. The point is that Bethesda keeps streamlining their systems, and yet they still keep being broken messes. It's been decades since Morrowind, yet the games have arguably regressed in terms of both game design and stability.
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Aug 17, 2023 05:15
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Magmarashi posted:And also not being made by a weird bigot who wants to fight people in the parking lot Might as well delete over half of any given mod library!
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Aug 17, 2023 05:51
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Kurui Reiten posted:The point is that Bethesda keeps streamlining their systems, and yet they still keep being broken messes. One could very easily argue, given the state of Fallout 2 and its popularity over the first game and Tactics, that this fact alone is what makes them the most appropriate studio to work on the franchise. People only seem to remember the series fondly when it's a broken mess.
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Aug 17, 2023 07:05
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Zesty posted:These games from 12 and 15 years ago that I've played ad infinitum really need mods to work for me today. Curse Bethesda for experimenting with new things in later games, or not, both of which I'll criticize. What later games
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Aug 17, 2023 07:10
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The only really lovely thing in vanilla oblivion is the level scaling making certain main quest beats virtually impossible if you’ve gone around doing slightly too much side poo poo because it adds a bunch of extra high level bullshit to fights in tiny spaces Level scaling always sucks forever if I wanna go out of my way to break the game over my knee just let me
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Aug 17, 2023 09:49
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Zesty posted:These games from 12 and 15 years ago that I've played ad infinitum really need mods to work for me today. Curse Bethesda for experimenting with new things in later games, or not, both of which I'll criticize. It’s possible for Skyrim to be both great at the time and fun in the moment and extremely shallow with many problems in hindsight. I slapped I wanna say around 120 hours into my first save right when it came out? Had a blast, wandered around as a catman suplexing everyone I could into oblivion. And then every time I try to play it again I get about twenty minutes in and realize that what I enjoyed then was fundamentally not the game as I perceive it now. We’ve had really, really good melee combat in video games since 2012. Arguably before but certainly after. Skyrim’s sword swinging is actively terrible in the face of that. Its spells are anemic. The writing is, wall to wall, extremely stupid. Not even necessarily bad, just incredibly dumb and so full of both narrative and logical holes that it’s kind of infuriating. 90% of the locations in the game are five skeletons and a draugr and fifteen gold and a sword. The problem is that while it’s not entirely fair to hold Skyrim to account for games that have come often far after it, Bethesda hasn’t markedly improved on these problems in any of their following works. I haven’t even touched on their constant technical problems, which are a large part of why I am wildly skeptical about Starfield. Ultimately Bethesda coasts and rereleases Skyrim fifteen times because they’re the only ones in the game. Nobody else makes RPGs like Bethesda and I’m not going to call the devs lazy because the amount of effort and time they put in clearly invalidates that. But I don’t think they’ve sought to improve on anything since Oblivion, not in ways that show anyway. E: Also the fact that Bethesda straight up said “We have a 1,000 visitable planets in Starfield! Oh but 80% of them will be lifeless, content-less balls of rock” and people are hyped for that number is beyond wild to me. Orv fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 10:09
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Come to think of it I think that, perceptually anyway, ‘modern’ Bethesda loves creating worlds and then putting a Fine game over the top of them. That seems to be where they run into trouble. They don’t seem to give as much care to how you interact with the environmental story of the skeleton in a chair with a dagger between his ribs and a book in his lap called “Oh poo poo It’s the Dark Brotherhood.” Orv fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 10:21
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Kurui Reiten posted:It wasn't. Morrowind wasn't a perfect game. It was horribly broken and buggy and the combat system was jank as gently caress. It was, of course, a Bethesda game. they absolutely haven't. Morrowind is the game that famously has it's own fanmade engine that fixes bugs that even community patches don't end up fixing core issues with the game. Morrowind didn't have a radiant quest system, a very barebones NPC schedule, generally less interactivity with and in the world. The newer games are stable enough that you can play through the entire game without needing community patches unless you are getting into modding. Tankbuster fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 10:44
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Orv posted:Come to think of it I think that, perceptually anyway, ‘modern’ Bethesda loves creating worlds and then putting a Fine game over the top of them. That seems to be where they run into trouble. They don’t seem to give as much care to how you interact with the environmental story of the skeleton in a chair with a dagger between his ribs and a book in his lap called “Oh poo poo It’s the Dark Brotherhood.” I mean this is how I feel about Starfield. All I know about that game for now is what it is. I don't know anything about who you are or even what can you do. Like all the info I see about the game is "you can customize your ship" or "the world is XYZ planets big". But nothing even similar to "you are the Dragonborn, you can fight dragons with shouting".
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Aug 17, 2023 11:03
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Orv posted:Come to think of it I think that, perceptually anyway, ‘modern’ Bethesda loves creating worlds and then putting a Fine game over the top of them. That seems to be where they run into trouble. They don’t seem to give as much care to how you interact with the environmental story of the skeleton in a chair with a dagger between his ribs and a book in his lap called “Oh poo poo It’s the Dark Brotherhood.” Making a fantastic world and then forgetting to put a good game into it is also the number one sin of games like Assassin's Creed in my eyes as well. Tankbuster posted:they absolutely haven't. Morrowind is the game that famously has it's own fanmade engine that fixes bugs that even community patches don't end up fixing core issues with the game. Morrowind didn't have a radiant quest system, a very barebones NPC schedule, generally less interactivity with and in the world. The newer games are stable enough that you can play through the entire game without needing community patches unless you are getting into modding. I really don't like the radiant quest system. I always find myself asking if it is a radiant quest or a Real Quest I should care about.
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Aug 17, 2023 11:16
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Wrr posted:I really don't like the radiant quest system. I always find myself asking if it is a radiant quest or a Real Quest I should care about. Its pretty obvious when it is. They dont say what the name/location of the place is and you dont get a uniquely named quest for it. Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 11:25
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the one time the radiant quest system works fully in the context base game are the thieves guild heist quests you do in parallel to the guild questline. You keep stealing poo poo from cities and eventually the guild becomes strong enough in the area that you can do a bespoke quest for each hold and gain access to bribing guards for ignoring crimes.
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Aug 17, 2023 11:25
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Skyrim was the last game where it felt like Bethesda made any forward progress on their world and systems building. Everything since is either treading water or backsliding. In 2011 there weren't a lot of games like Skyrim, but by 2018 there were more than enough games like Fallout 76. Some may argue too many!
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Aug 17, 2023 12:08
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History Comes Inside! posted:The only really lovely thing in vanilla oblivion is the level scaling making certain main quest beats virtually impossible if you’ve gone around doing slightly too much side poo poo because it adds a bunch of extra high level bullshit to fights in tiny spaces Level scaling is the only thing I actively dislike in Bethesda games. The rest is fine, they're fun. Chill out and explore and fight some weirdos, a great loop even if I'm less than happy about their storytelling. But even in that context level scaling just feels bad. But lots of people like it and, despite this being the Video Games forum, I think people should like games and have fun playing them. So here's to all the Bethesda gamers no matter their preference 
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Aug 17, 2023 12:45
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Assigning level ranges to regions of the game, and scaling within that range the first time you visit that region and saving the scale for the rest of the play through is the correct way to level scale.
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Aug 17, 2023 18:32
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pseudorandom name posted:Assigning level ranges to regions of the game, and scaling within that range the first time you visit that region and saving the scale for the rest of the play through is the correct way to level scale. One of the (few?) things Kingdoms of Amalur did right.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:10
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Tankbuster posted:Morrowind didn't have a radiant quest system, a very barebones NPC schedule, generally less interactivity with and in the world. Are you sure? Even Daggerfall had the whole 'talk to NPC and get sent to a randomly generated place (that may or may not work) and kill 10 rats' thing which is as advanced as Radiant Quests ever really got. I swear I remember similar poo poo from the fighters guild in Morrowind but it's also been twenty years.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:36
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Bedurndurn posted:Are you sure? Even Daggerfall had the whole 'talk to NPC and get sent to a randomly generated place (that may or may not work) and kill 10 rats' thing which is as advanced as Radiant Quests ever really got. I swear I remember similar poo poo from the fighters guild in Morrowind but it's also been twenty years. All of Morrowind's quests are premade, and it's possible to run them all out.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:42
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Hell, I did that on the OG Xbox e. mw owns ee. I've been playing it every year since release and I'll probably still be playing it until I die Proletarian Mango fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 21:16
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pseudorandom name posted:Assigning level ranges to regions of the game, and scaling within that range the first time you visit that region and saving the scale for the rest of the play through is the correct way to level scale. If you’re gonna do it at all then yeah that’s the way to do it, because it still allows you to go away then come back and gently caress everything up with your fancy new powers if you want to. The lovely part is when you come back and find that all the local bandits have also found space lasers and full suits of unobtanium armour while you were away.
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Aug 17, 2023 21:20
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That's what FO4 does, regions are scaled to within a small level range, so you will always get alpha deathclaws in the glowing sea and always get bandits in leather to metal armor in concord. Works pretty well, means you can find yourself outclassed sometimes, which is nice.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:42
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Yes, also Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
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Aug 17, 2023 23:08
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Oblivion was the one that messed up the scaling most noticeably iirc, but I've not played it in over a decade.
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Aug 17, 2023 23:17
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Even then people exaggerate the problem. I've seen people claim they were one shot by level 50 wolves, but wolves max out at level 6 Timber Wolves. The overall scaling situation is still bad mind you, but people will just make stuff up for whatever reason.
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Aug 17, 2023 23:28
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On the one hand Oblivion's level scaling was lame, on the other you could equip a combination of armor that reflected 108% of all physical damage and the enemies passively killed themselves, so who can say if it is bad or not?
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Aug 17, 2023 23:33
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Jawnycat posted:Oblivion was the one that messed up the scaling most noticeably iirc, but I've not played it in over a decade. I remember fallout 3 getting really janky and unbalanced later on, like the scaling "works" but only if you're playing the base game without DLC. Because each DLC increases your level cap so eventually boss mutants spawn as regular enemies that aren't interesting or challenging but just have enough HP to facetank multiple nukes, and are magically impossible to to pickpocket so you can't even sneak-grenade them.
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Aug 17, 2023 23:42
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silentsnack posted:I remember fallout 3 getting really janky and unbalanced later on, like the scaling "works" but only if you're playing the base game without DLC. Because each DLC increases your level cap so eventually boss mutants spawn as regular enemies that aren't interesting or challenging but just have enough HP to facetank multiple nukes, and are magically impossible to to pickpocket so you can't even sneak-grenade them. Fallout 3 also added extra damage and innate damage mitigation to most/all of the DLC enemies, separate from their level. The hillbillies in Point Lookout have bare skin that's tougher than the best Power Armor you can get in the game. edit: It also fucks up the radio so THREEEEEE DAWWWWWG (AWOOOO!) will talk about end-game post-Broken Steel stuff from the very beginning of the game, potentially spoiling some story stuff. Fifty Farts fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 23:52
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https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98519 Make all the Dark Brotherhood torture victims women for reasons that are not creepy, this guy swears
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Aug 18, 2023 00:17
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Let's turn to more wholesome discussions, like  Big gut dragonborn. quote:I believe one thing that greatly improves gameplay is slapping the good ol' ball gut to your character, so this is the mod if you believe that. Or you're just a big gut lover. Unfortunately you can't get a big gut without seeing some dragon dick, but such is the limitations of modding.
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Aug 18, 2023 01:25
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Bedurndurn posted:Are you sure? Even Daggerfall had the whole 'talk to NPC and get sent to a randomly generated place (that may or may not work) and kill 10 rats' thing which is as advanced as Radiant Quests ever really got. I swear I remember similar poo poo from the fighters guild in Morrowind but it's also been twenty years. morrowind was infamous for being a massive step down from the sprawling daggerfall map. People were mad that the entirety of morrowind wasn't even in the game, just vvardenfell.
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Aug 18, 2023 01:26
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