Guy on youtube starts a let's play with OpenMW...

[Chris]

There are no idiots Chris. It was an idiom like dumbing down.

That's what I take issue with. Using an idiom like "idiot-proofing" or "dumbing down" implies a deliberate choice in helping "idiots" or simplifying beyond reason. It's an attempt to insult the games, the developers, or the people who like or prefer the games, and doesn't really express a helpful or meaningful opinion.

RPGs should be accessible. Bethesda came with wrong solutions to problems that should have been fixed "in the system". I thought it to be temporary but I found myself mistaken.

Well, I'm not sure I'd say it's the "wrong" solution. Poorly done, sure, but I'm sure it made sense to them at the time. I'm not sure why you think it isn't temporary, though. They certainly fixed the level scaling problems Oblivion had, they are looking at other ways to handle NPCs inadvertently dying (protected status, though that's not a great solution either), and at least with Fallout 4, they seem to be improving their writing and quest design to deal with quest-relevant NPCs being killed (though I hope you can understand that such a thing isn't easy and takes away from other things, like having more or longer quests).

High levels being easy is a balance problem. Level scaling is the easy way out.

The vast majority of CRPGs have some form of level scaling. Even Morrowind did, but it quickly capped out. Daggerfall did as well, though it only really applied to human enemies. Even tabletop RPGs, its not unusual for a GM to fudge dice rolls or enemy stats if a party is struggling with an encounter, or mowing down enemies left and right without a sweat. It's not an "easy way out", it's standard RPG mechanics. They just didn't do it that well for Oblivion.

NPCs traveling can be a great flavor to the stupid predictability of quests. Gandalf is not in the Prancing Pony. Now what?!

Good question. What did the quest designers account for? Did they expect Gandalf to not show up? Is it going to put the scripts and quest variables in a bad state if the player tries to push ahead anyway? Will other NPCs still talk as if they had met Gandalf and were told important things by him? You can't really expect the developers to account for every eventuality in an unpredictable system.

NPCs dying is a tragedy, again a missing flavor for the drama. Importance of NPCs is decided by quest writer's hubris. If the problem is in the AI, maybe fix the AI.

It's easy to say "fix the AI", but this is fairly advanced stuff that's going to interact in unpredictable ways. And not everyone is going to be content with "that NPC somehow ran into a giant when I wasn't there and died, stopping the quest in its tracks? oh well." I've never been a fan of that in storytelling, particularly in fantasy, where characters important to the story being told are simply killed by an otherwise inconsequential and/or unforeseen event, leaving the plot thread unfinished.

We are talking about a decade+ here(protected status is new, also mostly unused).

It's also not the greatest option. A protected NPC is still unable to be killed unless it's by your hand, so if they run off into a group of Daedra, they're still invincible against them. And when you're the only character that's able to deliver the killing blow, it creates a problem with close-quarters combat because if they die it will always be your fault. An errant swing or arrow could have you killing an NPC where they'd have been fine if you didn't. It incentivizes using them as a meat shield, backing off and not doing anything when they're in the thick of it because then they'll survive if you don't help.

Directions is not easy but decade+ is enough to change paradigms.

Not sure what you mean. Some people having a difficult time with directions is just an inherent part of some people. There's nothing Bethesda can do to fix that. And as I've said, they have come up with a solution: "Let me mark it on your map." They've used that as far back as Daggerfall.

I hear these excuses for over a decade now, I am jaded.

Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty jaded with Bethesda too. Their M.O. is practically to come up with great or reasonable-sounding ideas, then mess it up when implementing it. It's been that way since the beginning of the series. The difference is, I can generally see what they were going for, and take issue with the conceit that any unpopular or poorly implemented change is a deliberate "dumbing down".

I am saying, people are greatly exaggerating the complexity of directions to a meme level. Humans aren't divided into those who can play Morrowind and those who can't.

Never said it was. There's a difference between "I can't handle directions at all" and "I don't enjoy having to deal with directions." Again, like in that video I linked, the guy's favorite game in the series is Morrowind, so he can obviously play it, but he doesn't enjoy dealing with the directions. I myself don't enjoy dealing with the directions either, and prefer how the other games lead you to where you needed to go*, but I still play Morrowind too.

* To a point. There are times its leading you by the nose a bit too much, such as pointing to the specific chest a long-lost artifact is in, instead of just leading you to the dungeon you've been told about. But that's not a problem with the system itself, just poor use of it.

Would've been interesting. Bring it back to how it was like in Daggerfall, but with a more advanced system controlling how the quests were set up and built off each other (imagine you get married to an NPC of your choice, and join the Dark Brotherhood, and an otherwise radiant quest has you target your own spouse whoever it might've been, then depending on whether you do that or not, it changes some things about the quests you get afterward). Could've been pretty awesome actually.

Well, I envy your optimism. The reality, from what I have seen... So bad that they would have to scrap it all.

Not sure they'd have to scrap it all, but it'd definitely need more work. I sincerely believe that is the kind of thing they were going for with the Radiant Story/Radiant Quests, but somewhere later in development they realized they simply didn't have the time to complete the system and fix all the problems, or that making quests that way required too much effort for too little gain, or something, so they pulled back on it hard and made quest lines that acted as a facsimile of what they wanted Radiant Story to be like. See the Civil War quests and the Civil War Overhaul mod to get a glimpse of the kind of dynamic questing they wanted.

[CMAugust]

Yes. Procedural generation can do terrain and such (including lakes, rivers, streams, roads, etc) very well when properly tuned, especially when you have preexisting geography data to "sketch out" the gameworld with.

I wouldn't even necessarily say No Man's Sky is a good example. While I'm sure it is on a technical level, on a more practical level it way over-extended itself... it has 18 quintillion planets and the game is based on you exploring, so it won't throw all the interesting and nice looking places at you early because it wants you to find them. By comparison, the whole of Tamriel done to-scale would only be a fraction of an earth-sized planet, so you can have procedural generation algorithms that don't have to spread out nearly as much. And with predefined topography and major settlement locations, along with a good travel system, it'd be a lot easier to make sure the player can find things to keep them engaged.

I like to think Todd Howard's mention of "technology" for TESVI is about bringing back the massive world, rather than the (more likely) push for VR. A guy can dream, can't he?

Incidentally, I'm still eager to see further progress with OpenDF

[psi29a]

Incidentally, I'm still eager to see further progress with OpenDF

Same... We must know Chris!

[Greendogo]

Watched the whole series. That was fun!