Morrowind confessions

General discussion regarding the OpenMW project.
For technical support, please use the Support subforum.
Vyrukas
Posts: 27
Joined: 01 May 2016, 08:30

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Vyrukas »

Antsan 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. 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.
I think the "lack of skills" is not really a hindrance to good mods. How do more skills help with modding interesting content or mechanics? To me it seems they just cut out a lot of superficial skills that were basically just padding. I do kind of miss Medium Armor and Acrobatics, but that's it. The rest of the skills that were gutted are filler.

Regarding animations: Don't know, don't care. The same goes for new kinds of weapons. Having mods for weapons seems kind of… boring. See later.

The loss of magic engineering is kind of sad, yes. I think they abandoned it because it isn't that interesting the way it was in Morrowind and making it interesting is kind of… hard. Actually, the alchemy system suffers from the same problem. Simply matching up strings doesn't seem like alchemy at all. Experimentation is absolutely straightforward, and that problem is not new in Skyrim.
The enchanting system in Skyrim makes more sense to me. Having to destroy some magic weapon to then realize that the weapon you are going to create yourself is going to be inferior… That's hardly "dumbing down".
With Skyrim you don't get the feeling of progression because everything is leveled to you, you never find any interesting or meaningful loot as you soon level past it. No armor or weapon in the game is worth a shit because the player can make better equipment. You can breeze through Skyrim at level one the game punishes you if you dare level anything other than combat skills by placing damage-sponge enemies everywhere.

With Morrowind you're just some poor fuck thrown off a ship with a post-it note and a package and told to get your ass to balmora. There are incredibly dangerous areas for low level characters, there are spells you can't cast, and the best equipment is either hidden, locked behind quests, or guarded by a high level enemy. There is a sense of progress from going from a level 1 weakling to a level 50 Sword-Wizard. Getting a daedric artifact at level one in Skyrim is useless because it will be worthless in a few hours, while in Morrowind it will retain it's usefulness throughout the entire playthrough. Going through a dangerous ruin to discover an enchanted unique warhammer makes you feel pretty good.

As for the skills, I'd honestly prefer a system sort of like Oblivion's were there are tiers of special perks that provide additional utility and uniqueness to skills, like the waterwalking ability you get when you get 100 acrobatics. The magic system shouldn't have been pared down because it had amazing utility that allowed you to tackle a vast range of situations in differing ways.

For the record, I don't think Skyrim is a bad game. I think it's half of good game with a lot of rushed elements.
User avatar
silentthief
Posts: 456
Joined: 18 Apr 2013, 01:20
Location: Currently traversing the Ascadian Isles

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by silentthief »

Vyrukas wrote: With Morrowind you're just some poor fuck thrown off a ship with a post-it note and a package and told to get your ass to balmora.
:lol:

This. I could not say it better than this.

ST
ezze
Posts: 513
Joined: 21 Nov 2013, 13:20

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by ezze »

Somebody said it like this: "In Morrowind you are in a complex and intricate fantasy novel. In Skyrim you are in the action oriented Hollywood adaptation of that novel."
Antsan
Posts: 47
Joined: 13 Mar 2014, 11:15

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Antsan »

ezze wrote:Somebody said it like this: "In Morrowind you are in a complex and intricate fantasy novel. In Skyrim you are in the action oriented Hollywood adaptation of that novel."
Heh, that's fitting.
Vyrukas wrote: With Skyrim you don't get the feeling of progression because everything is leveled to you, you never find any interesting or meaningful loot as you soon level past it. No armor or weapon in the game is worth a shit because the player can make better equipment. You can breeze through Skyrim at level one the game punishes you if you dare level anything other than combat skills by placing damage-sponge enemies everywhere.
And there's mods for that.
With Morrowind you're just some poor fuck thrown off a ship with a post-it note and a package and told to get your ass to balmora. There are incredibly dangerous areas for low level characters, there are spells you can't cast, and the best equipment is either hidden, locked behind quests, or guarded by a high level enemy. There is a sense of progress from going from a level 1 weakling to a level 50 Sword-Wizard. Getting a daedric artifact at level one in Skyrim is useless because it will be worthless in a few hours, while in Morrowind it will retain it's usefulness throughout the entire playthrough. Going through a dangerous ruin to discover an enchanted unique warhammer makes you feel pretty good.
I don't know about Daedric artifacts being useless after a few hours – the only one I ever found was the Black Book, and that was at around level 30 and certainly that one wouldn't get useless after a few hours.

Of course this is only because this is actually an unleveled artifact and you don't find Daedric artifacts at level one at all. Which is bad, yes.
As for the skills, I'd honestly prefer a system sort of like Oblivion's were there are tiers of special perks that provide additional utility and uniqueness to skills, like the waterwalking ability you get when you get 100 acrobatics. The magic system shouldn't have been pared down because it had amazing utility that allowed you to tackle a vast range of situations in differing ways.

For the record, I don't think Skyrim is a bad game. I think it's half of good game with a lot of rushed elements.
The tiered specialness is provided in the perk trees. The problem is that the vanilla perk trees are boring.

And yes, Vanialla Skyrim is only half a good game and it shouldn't be up to modders to fix it. But modders did fix most of its problems and these mods are almost freely available. The costs are downloading and installing. That isn't really negligible, because Skyrim modding is an unholy mess (as is true for the previous games).
Well, aside from awful Hollywood storytelling. That would require much more effort.

I'm just really wary of this particular claim:
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.
Skyrim and Fallout4 are not simplified and they are certainly not harder to mod into something interesting.
If you're used to play story-oriented games instead of mechanics- or simulation-oriented games, fixing their mechanics and unlocking their potential for simulation won't really do a lot for you.
My favorite games just are Dungen Crawl, Dwarf Fortress, Darkest Dungeon and The Dark Mod. First comes mechanics, world building is second, atmosphere follows, but story is only a nice addition for me. So I just roll my eyes at Skyrim's and Fallout4's simplistic storytelling and focus on the stuff that I came for in the first place. And feel positively surprised by some of the Deadric Quests.
The magic system shouldn't have been pared down because it had amazing utility that allowed you to tackle a vast range of situations in differing ways.
I'd like to have some examples for that, because I really don't see how the magic system in Morrowind can be creatively used.
ezze
Posts: 513
Joined: 21 Nov 2013, 13:20

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by ezze »

Since it obviously deviated from Morrowind confessions to more general ones... I still did not play Skyrim as it is not either in shops or in gog...
icefox
Posts: 1
Joined: 10 May 2016, 08:25

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by icefox »

i cant get into mouse / keyboard combo for pc games :oops: ....its the controller support that opens pc gaming to me 8-)

thank you to everyone who works on this.
ezze
Posts: 513
Joined: 21 Nov 2013, 13:20

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by ezze »

I never understand sentences like "the game supports the joy(stick|pad) XYZ." Joy(stick|pad)s are just a set of buttons and axis what kind of support do you need a part of connecting game actions to each?
K0kt409P
Posts: 148
Joined: 06 Aug 2013, 09:14

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by K0kt409P »

ezze wrote:I never understand sentences like "the game supports the joy(stick|pad) XYZ." Joy(stick|pad)s are just a set of buttons and axis what kind of support do you need a part of connecting game actions to each?
It's about menu navigation. While navigating e.g. Morrowind's inventory screen via a cursor controlled by a joystick is doable, it's not fun. Instead, if a joystick is detected, moving the joystick should directly change which menu item is highlighted.
Ferik
Posts: 14
Joined: 05 Dec 2015, 21:01

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Ferik »

Antsan wrote:
The magic system shouldn't have been pared down because it had amazing utility that allowed you to tackle a vast range of situations in differing ways.
I'd like to have some examples for that, because I really don't see how the magic system in Morrowind can be creatively used.
Levitate can be used to cheese a huge amount of things.

You can use the calm spell to talk to certain people, and then raise how much they like you before it wears off to make them non-hostile. (Most notably the Master Enchanter)

The Boots of Blinding Speed can be combined with something the gives you Resist Magicka (or you could just be a Brenton) to function as sunglasses that make you Sonic fast.

Combine the above with Water Walking and you can breeze around the Sheogorad and Azura's Coast regions in no time and use rivers as makeshift highways where most enemies can't attack you.

You can nuke a targets Elemental Resistance and hit them with the same element at the same time to deal vastly increased damage.

You can make a weapon that fortifies you ability to hit every time you hit with it to make up for a poor weapon skill.

There are more famous (or infamous) tricks for getting around the game easier with spells and enchantments in ways that were either unintended or intentionally obscure.
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Morrowind confessions

Post by Chris »

Ferik wrote:
I'd like to have some examples for that, because I really don't see how the magic system in Morrowind can be creatively used.
Levitate can be used to cheese a huge amount of things.

You can use the calm spell to talk to certain people, and then raise how much they like you before it wears off to make them non-hostile. (Most notably the Master Enchanter)

The Boots of Blinding Speed can be combined with something the gives you Resist Magicka (or you could just be a Brenton) to function as sunglasses that make you Sonic fast.

Combine the above with Water Walking and you can breeze around the Sheogorad and Azura's Coast regions in no time and use rivers as makeshift highways where most enemies can't attack you.

You can nuke a targets Elemental Resistance and hit them with the same element at the same time to deal vastly increased damage.

You can make a weapon that fortifies you ability to hit every time you hit with it to make up for a poor weapon skill.

There are more famous (or infamous) tricks for getting around the game easier with spells and enchantments in ways that were either unintended or intentionally obscure.
I wouldn't necessarily call these "creative uses". They're either the intended uses (water walking to walk on water, calming someone to make them calm down, etc), or flat-out cheating (levitating to break enemy AI or shortcut a dungeon, a short one-second effect lasting indefinitely, etc). And while, sure, cheating can sometimes be creative, it's not really the kind of thing I look for in an immersive role-play. Ideally, creative uses of magic should be something that fits the world and doesn't break the suspension of disbelief, rather than exploiting gameplay anomalies or bugs.
Post Reply