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The dungeons in Oblivion were terrible. If it wasn't part of any kind of quest it would basically be three rooms, a couple leveled enemies and then five gold and some calipers in a chest. There's literally zero reason or reward for entering any dungeon a quest doesn't point you to, whereas Skyrim will always have at least some decent random loot and usually some kind of self-contained story or neat set dressing. Also, did people really dislike the 'dungeons loop back around' thing in Skyrim? I mean in a perfect world we would still have Mark/Recall but there is nothing worthwhile about backtracking through all the rooms you cleared for five minutes versus using the bandit leader's convenient escape hatch or whatever. Even a couple of the actually-decent dungeons in Oblivion did the same thing (the ruin you see immediately across from the tutorial sewers that starts that Ayleid statue quest and the old fort where the orc hunts you and that guy in a recreation of 'The Most Dangerous Game').
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Apr 26, 2015 04:30
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chairface posted:Another way a canon ending for Skyrim could make player choice in the civil war irrelevant is if the last known dragonborn y'know, steps into the obvious opening for one as emperor. That neatly reunifies Skyrim and the Empire regardless of what the player did before. All hail our new gay lizardman emperor~
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Apr 30, 2015 01:09
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Next Elder Scrolls game should replace all human race options with Left-Handed Elves, Tsaesci, Sload, and one of the weird Khajiit variations, like the giant tigers or housecat magi. I know way too many people who played both Oblivion and Skyrim as the most generic white guy possible and they shouldn't be allowed to be that boring 
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May 2, 2015 19:23
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GrumpyDoctor posted:If you don't always play a beast race with a murderous grudge against everyone in authority I don't know what the point of TES games even is. This guy gets it. Or a racist-as-gently caress Dunmer or Altmer who looks down on all the non-elven lesser species. Skyrim actually somewhat supports playing a Dunmer, even; they probably have the most race-specific dialogue in the game next to Nords. Thalmor patrols even threaten to send you back to a Morrowind in a box 
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May 3, 2015 07:07
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Mr. Fortitude posted:It's not exactly hyperbole when people say the Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion was the highlight of the game until Shivering Isles came out. It starts off with simple assassination jobs, including a fun one where you have to sneakily murder people one by one in a supposed "haunted" manor and plant evidence to make it look like others did it while you try to improve your disposition with them so they'll never suspect you which ends in the last survivors going insane and trying to break out of the manor, to tracking down a serial killer who has a very unhealthy attachment with his mother who is operating outside the Dark Brotherhood interests. If nothing else, the questline was pretty memorable. I actually really liked the build-up to the Oblivion Mages Guild, when you're getting all the recommendations from the local guild halls. I really enjoyed the Anvil one where you pretend to be a traveling merchant to entice that rogue mage to attack  It was unfortunate that after you join the university proper it basically becomes 'go dungeon, kill necromancers' all the way up until the end.Also, did anyone not have that bug where the mages at the university became locked in eternal combat with the imperial guards?
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Jun 13, 2016 06:24
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I'm holding off on re-buying Skyrim on PS4 to see if modders can do anything interesting with it despite all of Sony's restrictions. Otherwise I'll wait until it's on sale. Or in a few days when I just can't help myself. You know, either way.
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Oct 28, 2016 06:12
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Doorknob Slobber posted:the super special skyrim edition reminds me that with each game bethesda gets progressively worse. Fallout 4 is such poo poo compared to Skyrim. Also the special edition runs really well. Skyrim is easily better than Oblivion. Cyrodil is a big ugly level-scaled nightmare with lovely empty procedurally generated dungeons and a literally broken combat system. The reason the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood questlines are remembered so fondly is because there's very little combat or dungeoneering in either. Fallout 4 also improved on Fallout 3 in every way I can think (while still being a huge step back from New Vegas) but this may not be the thread for it.
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Oct 28, 2016 17:49
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Buschmaki posted:Enchanting really helps the loot system in this game because you can just give whatever gear whatever you want. It totally sucks that you have to put shitload of perks and experience into it though. Bethesda also stopped giving unique weapons unique models and that's so lame. Unique models were still a thing in Skyrim? At least, all the actual daedric artfiacts and such were, and all the random elven shields of fire resistance/etc weren't, but that's been the case since Morrowind. Fallout's the one where they just didn't bother having uniques anymore, but that was the case in 3 and 4 so not like a new thing  I also don't know that I really miss stats in Skyrim, but that may be because they dropped the ball so hard leveling them in Oblivion (I'm still not entirely sure on the relationship between willpower and intelligence, what luck actually does, and if anyone ever didn't use personality and the related skills as a dump stat). The only things I really miss are a proper unarmed tree, spellcrafting and acrobatics, because getting your jumping skill up to 150 and then vaulting clear to the top of those stupid loving sigil towers was hilarious.
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Oct 30, 2016 18:01
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Rygar201 posted:Also lol at the goon who thinks games journalists talk to Todd Howard like he's a king. It's like Games version of DnD posters getting mad that NPR hosts don't rip into Republican guests like they're loving Keith Olbermann. Mr. Howard, have you considered that everything you do is lovely and bad? Joining us here in the studio is several people from the internet who have sunk 100+ hours into every Bethesda game since Morrowind to tell you why they hate all of them
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Oct 30, 2016 20:44
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Rygar201 posted:The best part of Oblivion's story is that you're Sam to Martin's Frodo hah. It was a nice twist on the player always being the great hero of prophecy. Much like Morrowind's repeated hints that the Nerevarine prophecy was more a guideline than prophecy. Yeah but you're still the random guy/girl/elf/gay-married lizardman that comes along, falls rear end-backwards into a dozen different legendary daedric artifacts and works their way up from trainee to president of every major guild in the country in the span of roughly a month Like, there's no way to make that not a power fantasy, so why not just own it?
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Oct 30, 2016 22:54
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Dumb question, but do mods disable achievements on PS4? I shouldn't care, but...I do 
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Oct 31, 2016 20:04
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Yeah I love Morrowind for having the best lore and the hilarious ways you can break it and become a permanently flying death-god, but...you're not really playing anymore of a character than you are in Skyrim. Or rather, you're playing as the reborn version of a predefined character, but everything else is you making up a story to suit the fact that you decided to gently caress off and practice alchemy in Seyda Neen for a week, just like it is in every following Elder Scrolls game. To say nothing of the fact that the game is full of useless skills (there is literally no reason to touch security or half the weapon skills like axes) that can trap you into severely gimping your character for most of the game unless you're following a guide.
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Oct 31, 2016 22:29
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:get boots of blinding speed, get a 50% movespeed mod (there were like 10 of them at launch) or level up speed more, or cast a higher levitate spell, or just get the 100 point levitate spell from vivec's temple. Or fast travel. There are so many solutions to your problem that I can't really take the complaint seriously. Look mang I like Morrowind too but if your solution to 'the game is very slow and combat is a chore' is to mod it, find some very specific items halfway across the map, and then only play a specific class and playstyle (but also mod this because it's still a chore otherwise) then you're not really making a good argument for the game being approachable at all? Are you also one of those guys who says anything past AD&D is garbage because they got rid of all the trap classes
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Nov 1, 2016 07:45
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Krowley posted:What a weird counterpoint. Ehhh but is that really an argument It's like saying Oblivion's level-scaling and stat-leveling systems are completely fine because you can just mod them to be totally different
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Nov 1, 2016 08:24
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:Do you get to the Cloud District often? What am I thinking, of course you don't. Corpses can talk in the SE 
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Nov 5, 2016 16:35
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I actually liked the Thieves Guild, at least, up until the dumb twist, but before that every location can be completed in proper thiefy fashion by sneaking past guards, setting up traps, etc. The special jobs you do to get new fences are also pretty great. Its only everything involving the Dunmer girl and the evil guildmaster that's completely nonsensical and retarded, is all!
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Nov 15, 2016 23:52
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:join a guild and progress through it, if it gets too hard level up some and try it again. don't go into deep dank dungeons far away from cities, generally the closer it is to a city the easier the dungeon is. Except for that Falmer murder nest just north of Whiterun Five years later and the memory still haunts me
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Dec 13, 2016 06:17
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Considering how loving gorgeous Velen's swamplands are in Witcher 3 the Black Marsh could be gorgeous ( Bethesda will never make a game as beautiful as W3). I'm loathe to ask, but how do they actually handle it in ESO?
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Jan 9, 2017 05:43
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RBA Starblade posted:Also lol at anyone who didn't just hop around like an idiot to kill Umbra at level 1, then kept the sword instead of getting the lovely mask. It would have been easier to just sit on a pillar and shoot arrows, but one of my fondest Oblivion memories is getting Umbra to chase me allll the way to the Imperial City jail, where I got to see her fight like ten guards at once before going down. She only managed to kill two but it was still pretty impressive.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:35
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Yeah no fast travel isn't as big a deal because theres still boats and carriages everywhere, and if you go werewolf/vamp your movement speed is pretty ridiculous on top of it. The carriage drivers you can hire for the Hearthfire homes will also take you to a lot of the smaller villages too. I will definitely be playing the gently caress out of this, because I was already the guy that has my character follow a reasonable sleep schedule and who prepared various soups ans such even though there's almost no actual benefit to doing so. I don't know if I would've paid for it but if it's free on release then  Of course there's no way this accounts for every possible quest/etc, so I'm looking forward to dying of frostbite during some unskippable cutscene because I forgot to eat some soup before Sheogorath started talking.
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Sep 28, 2017 23:30
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Smol posted:My beef is that you become peckish maybe 5 minutes after eating and then lose 30% of your attack speed. That’s too annoying to deal with in practice. So sneak archery is not just still OP but now absurdly so? Sounds about right.
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Nov 4, 2017 02:40
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Kite Pride Worldwide posted:The Forsworn Conspiracy is seriously the dumbest quest. Skyrim is pretty bad at times in regards to pigeonholing the player into bone-headed, repugnant, or otherwise extreme choices, but I think it's the only quest where you're actually given a choice where one of the options is just completely invalid, but it's a) the completely sensible option for once, and b) you can actually choose it without the game forcing you back onto the 'correct' route.I've killed so many Markarth guards after resisting the false arrest; at first because I didn't understand what was going on (seriously, who would actually just give up and go to jail without a fight?), but since I've just refused to ever let myself get arrested and just fight my way through Markarth every single time I visit. Maybe I just play the game differently but 'get into a prolonged battle with a dozen guards literally every time I enter a certain part of the map' sounds like a huge hassle versus actually just doing a short quest, or just ignoring it entirely in the first place
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Dec 11, 2017 07:58
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Lycus posted:Stormcloak sympathizers probably also say "The War of Northern Aggression". The one time I dabbled on the Stormcloak side I like that when you try to join up Ulfric's second-in-command basically goes "ummmm why would a non-nord want to join our extremely racist militia, you see how we treat non-humans in this town right"
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Apr 21, 2018 19:10
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:new elder scrolls when?! Coming soon to a mobile device near you 
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Sep 23, 2018 05:59
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Nasgate posted:Wow Todd, the speech wheels were the best speechcraft has been in your games, making it not only always useful, but actually allowing you to raise it. Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAHBMj2N5Qs
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Oct 19, 2018 23:57
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I dabbled in Blades a bit yesterday and it's like F76 in that its weirdly depressing to see a decades-old open-world RPG series with an enormous amount of lore and care previously poured into it reduced to the most bare-bones cash-grab. But it did remind me that Argonians are cool and made me wanna go play Skyrim again so it was kind of successful?
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Apr 8, 2019 17:13
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I also couldn't get into ESO because the illusion of being a stranger exploring a strange land is kinda ruined when you see dudes in daedric armor bunnyhopping everywhere. Is Bethesda...dead to me? I almost wonder if Skyrim was so successful that their shareholders demanded 'consistent recurring revenue streams' or something. Like, I know horse armor was a thing but the weird nickel and dime bullshit didn't really start until Fallout 4, with paid mods and $6 DLC that just adds more lamps and such. I'm almost hoping they get such an enormous backlash a la Star Wars Battlefronts that they reverse course but maybe there's enough whales around that it balances out 
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Apr 8, 2019 17:48
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Babe Magnet posted:only version of the ES theme that matters One of two https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jY66zHksLc
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May 31, 2019 18:59
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Yeah I would argue that W3 shows how people would live 'realistically' in a monster-filled world and how fearful and superstitious peasants would become. It's a marked contrast from Elder Scrolls where a troll that can murder and eat people lived 200 feet outside of town and is treated as a nuisance in the same way that running out of butter is a nuisance. I feel like ES is a fundamentally different experience though, there's not a lot of dungeon diving in W3 and whereas leveling up and getting better gear is a huge draw in Skyrim it's more of a hassle you have to deal with in W3 (those crafting menus...Jesus). I also love that classic sneak archer life but that's not really a thing in W3 since it's all 3rd person action. Related, trying to loot interiors in W3 without being able to switch to 1st person is a nightmare. Having said that the Witcher 3 is literally better in every other way other than the five or so listed and the quests and writing are far and away something every other RPG should aspire to be so its kind of a draw.
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Jun 5, 2019 16:33
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Thirding (fourthing?) that the TG radiant quests were better than the actual TG main quest, not only because you actually have to use your thiefy skills but also because it's the only guild where the radiant quests actually build to something; after X number of jobs in a hold you'd get a special job that both unlocked a fence and a unique merchant back at the guild hangout. It's like they got it perfectly right but then hid the good TG questline underneath some insane nonsense about having to become batman to kill your former boss or whatever the gently caress
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Jun 6, 2019 22:03
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I'm fine with Bethesda jank because any game that is both a huge open-world and makes a point of having every object be interactive and physical and all that is going to be janky. I'm trying to think of another game that does that and can't really think of any? Like Prey and the Deus Ex games come kinda close but those aren't really open worlds and have their own issues with bugginess.
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Jun 10, 2019 23:33
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R.L. Stine posted:I just want a game where someone like Rockstar makes the world and Bethesda fills it with their little vignettes and set pieces. I'm always kinda disappointed with Bethesda towns and cities while I've never seen a game with a world so alive and plausible as what Rockstar puts out. I guess there's only so much you can do in Elder Scrolls when every townsperson is named and has an actual role though, not to mention inventory and daily schedule and radiant mudcrab conversations, and that nearly every building can be entered. Rockstar games already have vignettes and set pieces
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Jun 11, 2019 02:18
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ThaumPenguin posted:I think the argument being put forth regarding the engine isn't necessarily that it's working perfectly fine as it is, but rather that it isn't irrevocably broken. Like all the main issues could be addressed if the programmers were given enough time and resources to do so. My point was more even if they could do it in a new engine and threw enough money and people at it, but still wanted to have the whole 'you can go into every house in every town in this giant world, you can see a bucket of apples and take one or pour the bucket out and the physics would cause apples to fly everywhere and also you can put the bucket on a guy's head and steal his silverware and one single book from his shelf and the game will permanently remember this' design going on it would inevitably be buggy and janky. You could argue that they should ignore that and just make it Witcher 3 style with static decorations and such but then you couldn't fill your player home with so many hundreds of cabbages that the game crashes when you try to enter your house and then it wouldn't really be the Elder Scrolls, would it Average Bear posted:Yeah which is why it's a tragedy that Bethesda holds the IP that made morrowind. Isnt that kinda like being mad that Disney still holds the rights to Mickey Mouse
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Jun 11, 2019 06:20
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I never understood the big deal about ports. Like I guess I can see the cash grab aspect but like it's cool to me that Darkest Dungeon started as a little PC game and was eventually ported over to PS4, the Bone and then the Switch because more people can play it? It's like the gamer equivalent of hipsters being annoyed that people would rather listen to mp3s instead of the original vinyl.
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Jun 11, 2019 21:38
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Average Bear posted:A 13 year gap between game series is insane. Like a large portion of your built in fanbase has grown out of it already lol. True, this is why Star Wars stopped being profitable, they just waited too long between movies
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Jun 12, 2019 18:27
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Who do you think plays these games
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Jun 12, 2019 19:27
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Bad business would've been rushing a sequel instead of maximizing Skyrim profits by releasing a bunch of remasters and ports on every possible system and tacking on paid mods to boot, to say nothing of siphoning money out of people with an MMO and two freemium mobile games in the meantime. I wouldn't say any of this is good for consumers but it's probably extremely good for their bottom line. I'm genuinely surprised they haven't released a remaster of F3/NV yet, it seems like easy money. Fallout 76 was an absolute tire fire of a business decision and probably their biggest financial misstep in history though, that is true.
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Jun 12, 2019 20:32
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PinheadSlim posted:It's just funny because they don't want to be known as the "Elder Scrolls/Fallout" guys as if being in control of the two biggest RPG IPs isn't a massive blessing. I get that the devs don't want to do the same thing over and over again, but I think they're forgetting the only reason anyone cares about them at all is TES/FO. And it's not like they can't temporarily hand off the IP if they get burnt out on it, just look at New Vegas. Is it really ignoring it if they put out a bunch of ES-branded stuff in the meantime? I don't care about ESO but it is a continuous thing that's constantly adding content and reminding you that the brand exists. Basically just a more savvy version of stuff like Redguard and Battlespire or those awful-looking Nokia phone games that they use to put out back in the day.
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Jun 12, 2019 21:29
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People would lose their poo poo if the lost Half Life 3 came out today and it turned out valve had been secretly working on it all along People use Duke Nukem as an example but it was absolute garbage which was probably a bigger factor
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Jun 12, 2019 22:11
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marktheando posted:Yeah people always complain about the Bethesda engine but I can’t think of another one that tracks a couple thousand NPCs with schedules, let’s you open every door, and remembers where you dropped a sweetroll 50 hours ago. This is where I'm at too. Witcher 3 is a vastly better game in all the ways that should matter but it's so narrative heavy that even though its technically an open-world with sidequests around every corner it doesn't feel the same as starting a new save on an ES game and going "hmm.....Dunmer battlemage this time?" (it will end up as a sneak archer of course) and then just running off in random direction. On the flipside I also hate games like Minecraft that are purely 'no plot at all, make your own fun!' so maybe it's just that Bethesda hits that middle ground between the two? And yeah, if there are other games that hit that same balance/design principle please share with the class. The last one I tried was Far Cry 5 and hoo boy, Bethesda plots may be mediocre but at least the plot doesnt literally hunt you down and make you listen to it.
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Jun 13, 2019 20:01
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