Morrowind confessions

General discussion regarding the OpenMW project.
For technical support, please use the Support subforum.
User avatar
Zobator
Posts: 62
Joined: 23 Nov 2014, 19:35

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Zobator »

I've never killed Fargoth...
User avatar
GreyFox
Posts: 40
Joined: 16 Apr 2016, 22:41

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by GreyFox »

lysol wrote:I did enjoy that they took a cliché in storytelling: Evil imperialistic conquerors vs good peace loving native living people, but with a huge twist: The natives are xenophobic assholes, and the imperials are kind of good, at least if you compare to the dunmer. I really like this twist, it makes the story more realistic somehow.

I hate the movie Avatar for this reason. It's dumbed down simplistic garbage with characters that are 100% good or 100% evil. Morrwind is not at all like this.
Ha! Yes. Didn't they do something similar with Skyrims Stormcloaks?
Antsan wrote:Hmmm, I see why people are averse to the later TES games, but I'd recommend Skyrim. The main quest isn't really that good, but some of the Daedric ones are really damn awesome and there's some mods (Civil War Overhaul, Immersive Patrols, Frostfall, Hunterborn, there are probably tons more I've forgotten right now) that turn it more into the simulation that I think TES games should be. Of course it still misses the most important part of metaphysics simulation, but, you know…
I have read a lot about Skyrim to see were the mods have taken the game. It seems there have been some interesting things created, like "Realistic needs" and "Wet and Cold". I agree on the notion that TES should be more of a simulator, and if I finally should buy it I will go for a maximum immersion modding. As for playing Skyrim, I heard too much criticism on game elements which I favor, and that Skyrim took another step in a direction I disliked about Oblivion. I understand the choices made by Bethesda, but it is going in a direction that just is not what I want from a game. Oblivion was a big disappointment to me with RPG elements, and I had no interest in acquiring Skyrim after that.
Antsan
Posts: 47
Joined: 13 Mar 2014, 11:15

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Antsan »

Ha! Yes. Didn't they do something similar with Skyrims Stormcloaks?
Not really. The Stormcloaks obviously are meant as xenophobic, war-mongering, backwards idiots, but for that they can be quite sympathetic.
The only ones displayed as absolutely evil are the Thalmor, that is, the kind-of allies of the "good" faction of the Imperials. And the dragons, of course.
As for playing Skyrim, I heard too much criticism on game elements which I favor, and that Skyrim took another step in a direction I disliked about Oblivion. I understand the choices made by Bethesda, but it is going in a direction that just is not what I want from a game.
I have to admit confess, I like the direction they're taking the rules. Mostly.
The reduced skill set – this is very much acceptable to me. Having low Atheltics in Morrowind is mainly an annoyance and doesn't really add that much in my eyes. But having Acrobatics, Medium Armor and Unarmored back would be nice.
The skill trees – these are awesome, although in vanilla they are too small and choosing the "right" branches is kind of a no-brainer, which leads to low variety in character builds. Of course, there are mods for that.
One problem is that learning skills and leveling is (almost?) completely independent of what kind of character you're playing. There's a mod that lets you choose class skills, which then are much more influential in terms of leveling. There's also a mod that makes the differences between races bigger and makes how much experience they earn for leveling up a skill more dependent on the racial skills.

Skyrim is much better than Oblivion in almost every aspect. Regarding RPG elements in comparison to Morrowind… I'm not sure. Morrowind certainly is unparalleled in how alien and wondrous it is, and the variety of topics you can talk about with almost anyone isn't back in Skyrim, but Skyrim does have more varied characters in the end. It's just that instead of clicking yourself through dialogs for 5-10 minutes (if you're reading them in the first place) you listen to someone ramble on for 2.
User avatar
Okulo
Posts: 672
Joined: 05 Feb 2012, 16:11

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Okulo »

Skyrim is much better than Oblivion in almost every aspect.
Except for world building, decision making, character arcs, skill set and especially the story telling - gods the story telling is trash in Skyrim!... pretty much anything that makes a game a good RPG is finally complete lost in Skyrim. Add to that that Skyrim is incredibly pretentious about what it tries to be while delivering an incredibly shallow experience overall, and you'll have the video game equivalent of McDonalds.
User avatar
GreyFox
Posts: 40
Joined: 16 Apr 2016, 22:41

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by GreyFox »

Antsan wrote: I have to admit confess, I like the direction they're taking the rules. Mostly.
The reduced skill set – this is very much acceptable to me. Having low Atheltics in Morrowind is mainly an annoyance and doesn't really add that much in my eyes. But having Acrobatics, Medium Armor and Unarmored back would be nice.
The skill trees – these are awesome, although in vanilla they are too small and choosing the "right" branches is kind of a no-brainer, which leads to low variety in character builds. Of course, there are mods for that.
One problem is that learning skills and leveling is (almost?) completely independent of what kind of character you're playing. There's a mod that lets you choose class skills, which then are much more influential in terms of leveling. There's also a mod that makes the differences between races bigger and makes how much experience they earn for leveling up a skill more dependent on the racial skills.

Skyrim is much better than Oblivion in almost every aspect. Regarding RPG elements in comparison to Morrowind… I'm not sure. Morrowind certainly is unparalleled in how alien and wondrous it is, and the variety of topics you can talk about with almost anyone isn't back in Skyrim, but Skyrim does have more varied characters in the end. It's just that instead of clicking yourself through dialogs for 5-10 minutes (if you're reading them in the first place) you listen to someone ramble on for 2.
I am not talking about game mechanics, in that regard I think that there was a constant improvement throughout the series as the developers rethink and refine it. The visual immersion factor has developed in quantum leaps also, I do not think anyone is disputing it. But what all the concentration on the audio-visual experience has done is that they are putting less thought and resources into the story telling immersion. This is not just a subjective notice, it is a natural development in the creation process. After all, earlier games had limited means to convey a virtual world through visuals, so they had more time and incentive to work on optimizing the parts were the immersion is mostly driven in a book experience kind of way. What you favor is subjective though, and I for one always liked refined stories more than visuals. I'm not with the crowd who puts nostalgia over being open to new things, which is part of were a lot of "new title = worse title" criticism seem to come from. I think though that most visually orientated people do not notice the difference in depth and refinement of story telling and how it went down in TES. Which is fine, you are more attuned to what you like than to what is secondary or tertiary to you. I fell in love with the series with Daggerfall, but I am not blind or indifferent to the amazing progress in visuals in the later titles. I wish that the story telling part would keep up with the other advancements though.
Vyrukas
Posts: 27
Joined: 01 May 2016, 08:30

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Vyrukas »

The problem with Skyrim and Fallout4 is that they're both simplified and marketed towards a more casual audience to such a degree that making interesting additions is very hard to do. In Skyrim you still have to deal with the limited amount of attack animations the game which prevents adding new kinds of weapons you also have to deal with the completely gutted magic system and the lack of skills. In FO4 you have a fully voice acted PC and the horrible dialogue options in general, not to mention that Bethesda hasn't released the Construction Set which in my cynical mind means a few possible things
1) They needed additional time to go through and purge everything that would indicate that they just 'updated' the gamebryo engine to prevent the goof they had releasing the Skyrim CS
2) They can't figure out how to get mods to work on XB1 & PS4 and/or they are still trying to figure out how to effectively set up a mod market place
3) They're going to release a free version of the CS and offer a 'premium' version to people who pledge to host their works on bethesda's platform, or maybe make it so mods can only be uploaded onto their platform period.


In my personal opinion the newer games aren't worth playing, especially with openMW coming to fruition. I'm confident that without the Gamebryo engine stifling innovation and with the ability for people to have essentially free access that more than a few modders will come back, I remember Trainwiz saying he was interested in OpenMW
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Chris »

Vyrukas wrote:The problem with Skyrim and Fallout4 is that they're both simplified and marketed towards a more casual audience to such a degree that making interesting additions is very hard to do.
On the contrary, I find Skyrim's mods more mechanically interesting and add much more to the world than Morrowind's. Mods like Frostfall, Realistic Needs & Diseases, Interesting NPCs, SkyRe/PerMa, Enhanced Skyrim Factions: The Companions, Moonlight Tales, Civil War Overhaul, and many more, do a lot to make the game far more interesting. These are on a level way above most Morrowind mods, given Morrowind's more primitive engine and limited scripting (even with MWSE).
not to mention that Bethesda hasn't released the Construction Set
It's been released.
Vyrukas
Posts: 27
Joined: 01 May 2016, 08:30

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Vyrukas »

Chris wrote:
Vyrukas wrote:The problem with Skyrim and Fallout4 is that they're both simplified and marketed towards a more casual audience to such a degree that making interesting additions is very hard to do.
On the contrary, I find Skyrim's mods more mechanically interesting and add much more to the world than Morrowind's. Mods like Frostfall, Realistic Needs & Diseases, Interesting NPCs, SkyRe/PerMa, Enhanced Skyrim Factions: The Companions, Moonlight Tales, Civil War Overhaul, and many more, do a lot to make the game far more interesting. These are on a level way above most Morrowind mods, given Morrowind's more primitive engine and limited scripting (even with MWSE).
Skyrim always felt hollow to me, the first 10 or so hours were pretty fun before you found all the locations and burned through most of the content. The radiant quests and very linear dungeons/caves really sapped the fun out of the game for me at least. The base game was boring, so boring that I've never actually worked up the effort to finish the main quest. The mods are bandaids trying to make the game what it should have been from the start. For me Vanilla Morrowind offers a comprehensive and fun game, the mods just make it better.
not to mention that Bethesda hasn't released the Construction Set
It's been released.
I'll freely admit that I played FO4 for maybe 20 hours back in November before I burned through all the locations and most of the quests. It seemed less like a RPG and more like a weird FPS/Diablo hybrid. At first I thought that maybe the story would be interesting but there was more than a few puzzling and frankly really dumb plots such as the ghoul kid stuck in the fridge, Dwane(?) the Paladin being a synth, retconning FEV again, why the institute was so stupid. It felt like the entire game went through multiple heavy revisions.

I will admit that I was wrong about the CS coming out, but I guess Bethesda has crushed my hopes and dashed my dreams one to many times for me to trust them.
User avatar
AnyOldName3
Posts: 2668
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by AnyOldName3 »

My biggest problem with Fallout 4 wasn't the voiced protagonist, but instead that almost everything turns into 'go to this place and kill these things', whereas in New Vegas, even when that was what you were told to do, there was usually a way to talk everyone down and even create an alliance. I found my character being forced to do things I thought were stupid to be a bigger problem.

Also there were some situations where the dialogue didn't give me a choice about what I wanted to talk about first. Before I'd decided who to build the teleporter with I had loads of quests backed up because I had to talk to someone to finish them, and it would only let me talk to them about the teleporter.
User avatar
DestinedToDie
Posts: 1181
Joined: 29 Jun 2015, 09:08

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by DestinedToDie »

Morrowind confessions turned into FO4 bashing now? I´ll join.

I played FO4 for maybe 2 days before I quit. I tried to be real evil. Like really really evil. I always looked for the most evil choice in the dialogue. But a lot of the times it just wasn´t there. And sometimes when it was the other character would just shrug it off and continue as if nothing had happened. I tried my very best to piss off the reporter girl, but she became open to romance despite that.

I just couldn´t roleplay the character that I wanted...

Also I´m probably the only one with this peeve, but I hate crafting. Skyrim didn´t force it on you if you didn´t want it, but Fallout 4 weapon drops are nearly all crafts. 20 kinds of pipe guns that deal same-ish damage and look same-ish and every hostile NPC just keeps dropping them... that´s all the weapons that I saw in my playthrough. Pipe guns, everywhere.
Post Reply