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Elder Scrolls games?
Did any of you ever play the Elder Scrolls series? It's probably my favorite series of games, because of all the cool things you can do and how customizable your characters can get. I've played Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind, but not Oblivion, Redguard or Battlespire (have Battlespire, but can't get it to install, grr...).
What's it say about me if I actually spend more time using the TES Construction Set (a mod program) than actually playing the game?
What's it say about me if I actually spend more time using the TES Construction Set (a mod program) than actually playing the game?
Comments
So, naturally, I eagerly awaited Oblivion. I waited, and waited, as they delayed the game more and more to perfect their revolutionary graphics and AI. Then, finally, I got it...and they damn near broke my heart.
The problems with Oblivion break down as follows (IMO):
Graphics - they focused way too much on graphics, and yet brought little to the table. Anyone impressed by Oblivion should play Doom 3 or Half-life 2, both released 2 years before Oblivion. Instead of wasting years of development time on the 3d engine, they could have just licensed one of those two engines, and made it work in a massive outdoor environment. (See Dark Messiah or Quake Wars). The time they saved could have been put to better use.
Sandbox Factor - Morrowind was amazing because it was essentially the first 3d sandbox RPG. You could go anywhere and do anything, and the game was ready for it. Oblivion threw this away by making cities their own zone (with the side effect of removing levitation magic from the game, which was awesome in TES3), and putting most of the game into a series of alternate planes.
Loss of Uniqueness - Vvardenfell is a very different world than the traditional RPG. A volcanic island dominated by dark elven noble houses? That's certainly different than your basic D&D-rip-off setting. But Oblivion goes back to RPG 101 with its human-dominated, forest-and-caves approach. We trade in dwemer ruins for goblin caves, and daedric cities for skeleton-infested dungeons. Sure, they added traps, but they took away much more. And Oblivion? Meh, whatever, if I wanted to play a shooter in hell I'd play Doom 3.
Broken Rules - Morrowind was very playable out of the box. It was very intuitive; you could simply do just about anything believable given your abilities, equipment, and the limitations of a keyboard and mouse. If it occurred to you to stab the shopkeeper with your blade, then rob him of all the things he wanted to sell you for outrageous sums, you could. In fact, everything every shopkeeper sold was there, in his house, for rogue types to steal, or for fighter types to kill him over. In Oblivion? Not so. Almost nothing a shopkeeper sold was actually in his house, making it pointless to rob anyone, despite the fact that if you do, guards will come from nowhere to throw you in jail, and, should you get away from them, every shopkeeper on the planet will IMMEDIATELY know you stole those goods and won't buy them. Yeah, because this silver platter must've had a laser engraving saying "if found, please return to Gunther in the Imperial City". The sheer number of rule modification mods that popped up within days...DAYS...of the game's release were a testament to how much they royally fucked up the rules.
Not really immersive - Oblivion wants to be the most immersive game ever. I agree that a 3d sandbox game is the only platform where that is possible. However, simply pumping up the pixel shaders and bump-mapping doesn't give you immersiveness. They should have played Doom 3 a little more. Dungeons are uniformly dim and bluish. A torch helps, but you can just as easily pump up your brightness. I have played the game on zero brightness (requires a CRT monitor), and the effect is breathtaking; when dark is truly dark, a fight in a dungeon is incredible, and so is the view outside, at night, with a massive starfield and deep, foreboding darkness between the trees. Of course, my torch casts a dark orange light at my feet, and the only way to see anything at all is to pump the brightness back up. With the light model of Doom 3 or Source, they could have easily made incredibly immersive environments, viewable on LCD's on normal brightness.
Also, the world isn't responsive--it just is. The NPC's follow a complex, sophisticated (read: simple, not sophisticated) AI system that Bethesda widely lauded. You can make them love you or hate you. Of course, this means nothing, except for a couple of NPC's with pre-programmed responses, and the fact that it is slightly easier to get a price-gouging merchant to lay off just a tad if they love you. You can't actually have a relationship with anyone; they're just bundles of text. And on that subject...what exactly was the point of voice-acting all of the world NPC's, if they all just have the same voice and say the same things? In Morrowind, even unimportant NPC's would say odd or funny things, just to spice up the game, but that wasn't possible given the constraints of voiceacting.
I can easily explain all these problems by the first one; they wasted huge amounts of time on the graphics and had very little time to spend perfecting the world. It was not only unoriginal and uninteresting, but lacked the polish Morrowind had that allowed for truly open-ended gameplay. Their graphical engine prevented them from making any great strides in immersiveness. The only other 'feature' they had time to develop was the 'revolutionary' new AI, which amounts to nothing more than inconveniently wandering NPC's and a silly minigame that allows you to maximize your relations with everyone in the world with minimal effort.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the interface. TES3 was clearly designed for computers, then ported to Xbox. Not so with Oblivion; it was obviously designed for Xbox first. The windows are all tiny--you need mods to expand them. You can't peg windows to the screen while playing. The interface for buying and selling is god-awful. You can't adjust the speed of the mouse cursor in menus--it's terribly, terribly slow by default. In short, the interface is horrible, absolutely, positively horrible...whereas it was great in TES3.
What were they thinking? Just how many Xbox 360's did they think people would have in March 2006? Despite the crushing system requirements, there were far more PC's in the world capable of running Oblivion at launch than there were functioning 360's.
In conclusion, Bethesda are a bunch of sellouts. Just like Bioware before them, they sold out to Microsoft. What the fuck is up with RPG makers and selling out to the Xbox? And people wonder why World of Warcraft has completely taken over the RPG market.
So, if anyone else is disillusioned by Oblivion, check out Gothic 3 and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. I'm not sure if they're any better, but they sure are different, and they haven't sold out to Microsoft yet.
Or you could just play WoW, which does it for me so far. And if you're one of those WoW haters who doesn't actually play the game or know what you're talking about, go die in a fire.
Pretty much putting all my hopes on EverQuest Next at this point.
If I like the game, I will pay the monthly fee. If they have a free to play version with extras, I probably wouldn't pay more than $15 a month on those anyways. It will probably go free to play within a year to 18 months anyways, as it is very very difficult to compete for gamer dollars with World of Warcraft. Even with a popular franchise (Star Wars was pay to play for less than a year I think), most MMO gamers are playing WoW and won't be bothered by much else.
I could be wrong. I knew a lot of people to left WoW, at least for a while, when Skyrim came out. If ESO can feel as close to their original games as possible while populating the world with other player characters, then I think it has a chance to at least have a decent following, but it won't get WoW's numbers.
Which makes me wonder how a AAA title would do if it were pay to play rather than $60 one shot. For example if you could pay $5 a month to play GTA V would people just pay the $5 and go balls to the walls to beat it in a month so that the game only cost them $5 rather than $60? If Battlefield or Call of Duty went with an MMO pricing (when you think about the average lifespan of said games and the cost of all the 'premium' content it probably works out to $5 a month for two years) would they still make as much money?
Unfortunately for me, it was too easy and lacked the tight, snappy controls that I loved so much in Guild Wars 1.
The ability to have a mushroom for a head was almost too much for me to handle.
Most, if not all of the MMO's out there, started out as a subscription based or at least "freemium" game. There are exceptions, of course, but most start that way. Once attention spans wane, they are forced to go Free to Play with premium subs or items to keep going, otherwise they fade away. Not all free games are bad, but most of them (again, there are exceptions) are quite limited in one way or another on what you get for free. A lot of them have gated content, or character slot limitations, or only playable as certain race/class or even up to a certain level (WoW is free up to level 20). I read an article a couple of years ago that stated that a decent portion of long term players to the free MMO's pay around $10 or more each month for various content anyways.
I feel that if you can get more than 5-6 hours of enjoyment every month out of a game, then it could easily be worth the $15/month sub fee. 2 movies @ 3 hours each will run you around $15.
Skyrim took a lot of my free time, and I enjoyed it a lot. I think that team can make a fun, engaging MMO. The game will probably adapt a free to play model within 18 months (unless it can truly be a "WoW Killer") with premium subscription.
@Scott... If you have no intention of every playing the game, then why waste the time to download it at all? Also, yeah, the time to play is short, but there will be more beta weekends, then eventually open beta.
http://thepiratebay.sx/search/elder scrolls online/0/99/0
Trying out new games is fun, even if they're shitty. I've signed up for many free betas and trials for bad games I enjoyed exploring for a few hours.
Want to know what it's like? Imagine you are playing Skyrim. Except now there are other people also playing Skyrim. You see them running around doing the same thing you are doing. That's it.
Sometimes it's really cool. In the tutorial level you escape from a prison. It's awesome because it's like there's a riot, and those are all real people running for the exit, just like you! But they are making it seem like a real riot! When you go to infiltrate a bandit village, there's chaos everywhere! Those are real people making that chaos. The true possibility of the MMO shines through!
And then, it crumbles as usual. You find the checkpoint NPC on your quest. It is surrounded by other people also talking to that NPC. You are not the hero of Kvatch. You are just like all these other people doing the same exact thing over and over again.
One other thing. Unlike the single player games, rewards are meager. It takes a long time to get any kind of awesome shit. You're going to be poorly armored using shit weapons for a long time. Better pay some real money!
I also played the beta, and I would play this game if it wasn't subscription based.
It's the first hour and 20 minutes of the game. Then the hard drive I was recording to filled up because I was recording at 60fps.