~Elden Ring~ anon the bestest and most hecking validating game for me and my buddies who don't fall for that sjw social engineering CRAP other game makers like shitthesda do. fromsoft is based and redpilled af
>who don't fall for that sjw social engineering CRAP other game makers like shitthesda do. fromsoft is based and redpilled af
Did you choose Body Type A or Body Type B?
>Body Type A or Body Type B
It's funny cause this non-binary shit is a small internet fad yet these huge fricking games will be marked with it forever. In 100 years someone will boot up Elden Ring and be like "what the frick? Type A or B? What is this asking?"
You're really going to sit here and tell me they should've kept the language skills?
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yes.
2 years ago
Anonymous
No, you're not, because you're just talking without thinking so what you're saying has no value. >just le fix it
The problem isn't that the language skills were broken. In fact they were probably one of the only skills that actually functioned in Daggerfall due to their simplicity. The problem is giving them meaning which takes 100x more effort than the lazy code monkey and uncreative ideas guy put forward towards them in Daggerfall. The only skill from Daggerfall that anyone should give a shit about getting cut is Climbing, but it's obvious that it wasn't in Morrowind because the geometry was a lot more complex than literal cubes. Even with the cubes of Daggerfall you'd still end up falling into nothing or climbing through a ceiling into the void, so you'd have to fix that, then implement free climbing which is in barely any games because of how difficult it is to do (usually you just get "climbing points" like in Mirror's Edge or Assassin's Creed.)
2 years ago
Anonymous
They should have reworked the language skills into speech as well as reworked the climbing skill
Whatever open world/bethesda game the poster played first in their childhood which will have all of its faults forgiven and all its good points exaggerated to a legendary degree. The fact people think Oblivion is a good game should be proof enough of this.
As opposed to literal generic nameless npcs who yoy can't speak to at all, and are still less populous than in prior games where they at least all had names?
2 years ago
Anonymous
are we talking about skyrim or genshin now?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>this other game nobody was even talking about has shitty NPCs, that means you're not allowed to criticize the shitty NPCs in Skyrim!
2 years ago
Anonymous
skyrim has the most intricately designed and detailed npcs in any game besides red dead 2.
>go to Winterhold >like five shacks across the bridge from one of the most respected schools of magick >the jarl lives in a literal hut >the rest of the "city" conveniently fell into the sea of ghosts and no one bothered to rebuild any of it at all
By contrast >go into Skingrad in Oblivion >all sorts of places to go and different, proper houses with NPCs with daily schedules >The Count lives in a fricking mansion castle with all sorts of shit and servants and officials in it
Even Bravil, which is supposed to be a shithole, is more populated.
I recently played Morrowind for the first time. Can confirm that this is your nostalgia speaking. The entire game is populated by nothing but MMO quest givers and walking word documents
The issue is major cities in morrowind and oblivion are simply awful so Bethesda just gave up. Like vivec is better than ANYTHING in Skyrim but it is objectively awfully designed and painful to navigate.
I recently played Morrowind for the first time. Can confirm that this is your nostalgia speaking. The entire game is populated by nothing but MMO quest givers and walking word documents
I'm replaying morrowind now with the goal of seeing every dialogue option and reading every book. One thing that helps a lot is installing openmw and enabling the feature that greys out dialogue options you have already seen. The dialogue in Morrowind is surprisingly robust, characters have a lot of interesting things to say and unlocking key words unlocks even more dialogue options with characters you have previously spoken to, it's just buried under massive amounts of options. It really helps a lot.
Go to the Skyrim Mission in Ebonheart and talk to Bedraflod. You will die of old age before you can finish reading all of his dialogue. No joke, these are all of his topics.
Something interesting I have observed about the way dialogue is handled in this game (a series of generic responses generated by background values + unique responses per NPC) is that this allows for a wider variety of dialogue on a per NPC basis. Comparatively the branching dialogue in Skyrim created in an attempt to emulate bioshit is much more intensive in terms of what has to be written while only giving the illusion of choice and hard locking you into dialogue trees, which leads to less AND worse AND repetitive writing, which in turn leads to less NPCs. Bethesda is really ass backwards.
Only brainless struggle to understand vivec. I'm a zoomer who first times morrowind last year (I like retro games) and if you ask any of the locals about the city layout they'll tell you everything you need to know
It's not about understanding, its about the city being a huge pain in the ass to traverse. After 2 decades of going through Vivec I can accept that not everything about Morrowind is perfect. The great tragedy to me is that nothing really surpasses what it does and fills that same niche, despite being a very flawed game. I like Morrowind. I want more of it. I want to see games that improve on what Morrowind did. This applies to vidya as a whole, but ES is especially bad because successors are generally just hacking away at what the game built without really improving anything.
It's easy to know where you're going in Vivec, but that doesn't mean it's not poorly designed. I'm one of those insane people who actually doesn't mind the aesthetics of the Cantons and even I admit that they just suck to traverse and walk around. You can kind of tell that the designers wanted to do more with the city, but even for the time the stripped down Vivec was pushing what most computers and consoles of the time were capable of.
>enabling the feature that greys out dialogue options you have already seen
im doing my first vanilla morrowind playthrough and this is the one non-vanilla feature that has carried me through. i can't believe they didnt think to implement this in the original.
That's already what it looks like. This is what they wanted it to look like.
2 years ago
Anonymous
This version of vivec is no longer in the game and I dont think the files survived for us to see that layout.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I don't think there ever were any files. It's just a mock-up made of placeholder assets and other assets they already finished for other things. A seasoned 3D modeler could make all those assets in a day or two. Also fun fact, I think the reason the ministry of truth has ropes hanging from it is cause climbable ropes were originally a planned feature for the game. Possibly to replace the climbing skill from Daggerfall.
Which is funny, because most of Vivec's interiors in online are small as shit, and ruin the aesthetic of the original. Why Redoran designs all throughout Vivec? Makes no sense.
KCD has open cities without huge performance hits (not any worse than skyrim had at launch anyways) and it doesnt even have things like vertical movement compared to Fallout 4 or Morrowind.
Compare to Skyrim it's a masterpiece.
It actually tried to make all builds viable rather than handicapping all non barbarian and sneakthief builds.
2 years ago
Anonymous
> rather than handicapping all non barbarian and sneakthief builds.
Amazing how in 2022 people are this bad at skyrim they say shit like this
2 years ago
Anonymous
Glitches and exploits dont count.
Bethesda admitted themselves they didnt want magic to be stronger than the physical playstyles.
2 years ago
Anonymous
No one said shit about using gltiches and exploits m8.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>conjuration in general >paralysis spam >enchanted gear paired with high level alteration buffs that makes you invincible >ice magic against melee enemies
Conjurer/Alteration mage is one of the strongest things in the game. Also melee stealth is entirely viable with good gear and perk investment, you're almost invisible and with DB boots you're silent. Melee stealth executions are a hell of a lot more satisfying than watching a slow mo arrow ragdoll someone into a cartwheel for the billionth time like you're playing Archer Elite.
2 years ago
Anonymous
magic is so unfun compared to what it once was its depressing, I'm not sure how you can post this in good faith
2 years ago
Anonymous
It was good in Morrowind. It was genuinely just as dogshit in Oblivion if not worse. The hairdryer "flamethrower" and elemental equivalents you start with are genuine dogshit but it's pretty fun to shoot an icicle straight through somebody's face. That said mods make magic more fun in skyrim than unmodded is in Morrowind.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Skyrim's magic would be good if anyone at Bethesda regularly played Mage. When it comes to cutting features magic is always first because Todd is well known for playing mainly Barbarian-type characters, and the meme Stealth Archer playstyle was apparently played by most of the staff.
Skyrim's magic is the base of a fairly robust magic system without any of the customization that would make it anything but underpowered and sidelined by people who prefer being smashtards.
2 years ago
Anonymous
The summon magic is fun though, I like raising the dead and shoving high quality weapons in their arms.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Actual necromancy was one of the legitimately good additions Skyrim made to magic and is something the series had desperately needed up to that point. The different types of Destruction spells were also a really good addition that varies up the kind of combat magic you can do.
Too bad it was built off arbitrary cuts to Alteration and the complete dissolution of Mysticism because no one can think of mystical shaman-style spells.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I find it quite fun that a good chunk of Conjuration spells basically makes you a Necromancer/Warlock hybrid, summoning demonic creatures and raising the dead is so much fun!
2 years ago
Anonymous
I find it quite fun that a good chunk of Conjuration spells basically makes you a Necromancer/Warlock hybrid, summoning demonic creatures and raising the dead is so much fun!
Just pirate the CC content, its quasi official and adds a bunch of new spells to each school that make up for how dogshit magic was in the base game.
Pretty much eliminates the need for magic mods
2 years ago
Anonymous
>That said mods make magic more fun in skyrim than unmodded is in Morrowind.
I know for a fact that they do not. They simply cannot interact with the world in the same way. And not just in obvious ways. Like I can't just make a ring that permanently sets me on fire that does zero damage and use it as a light source in Skyrim, but I can in Morrowind.
2 years ago
Anonymous
There is no magic in Skyrim.
2 years ago
Anonymous
You're nuts. The game is impossible with light armor. You get into a group fight and you're fricking dead unless you pussy archer them from your horse. Sneaking around camps and executing people was kino though.
2 years ago
Anonymous
It really isn't. It's a completely historically inaccurate game who's entire selling point is being historically accurate, so now we get a shallow open world game with Netflix tier writing, which redditors mistake for being deep and soulful euro jank because it's slightly clunky.
Never forget that Imperial City in Oblivion was originally intended and designed to be bigger, but had to be shrunk down because QA testers kept getting lost exploring the larger version (of course this is on top of Xbox 360 hardware forcing them to split the city into 5 separate world spaces).
This experience with having to shrink down their largest city in any of their games informed their future city design (basically, that was what they've largely used as a measuring stick for when a city/settlement is "too big" so they've never gone larger than Imperial City since then).
My point here is that QA testers are a bunch of drooling morons and they're a significant part of the reason that Bethesda games don't have larger cities and towns.
>QA testers nuke a larger imperial city because they got lost a couple times >also can't find major gamebreaking bugs before release
Do Bethesda's QA testers even have brains? Is the reason they keep including Super Mutants in their Fallout games because they're representing their employees?
its been known across the industry that only complete morons can be hired for QA. bethesda's games are far from alone in this, half life 2 is a major example of every game getting nuked because of brainlet testers not being able to figure out the most simple "cube shaped toy goes in square shaped hole" puzzle.
>had to be shrunk down because QA testers kept getting lost >still incredibly easy to get lost (without the map) because it's very samey, flat, and you can't see over the walls to get an idea of where you are, only the tower that looks identical on all sides gives you an idea of where you are
Putting the cities in separate load zones was already where they died as far as I'm concerned
>QA testers nuke a larger imperial city because they got lost a couple times >also can't find major gamebreaking bugs before release
Do Bethesda's QA testers even have brains? Is the reason they keep including Super Mutants in their Fallout games because they're representing their employees?
>had to be shrunk down because QA testers kept getting lost >still incredibly easy to get lost (without the map) because it's very samey, flat, and you can't see over the walls to get an idea of where you are, only the tower that looks identical on all sides gives you an idea of where you are
Putting the cities in separate load zones was already where they died as far as I'm concerned
He's wrong. Bethesda only shrunk cities after Fallout 3 when people complained about being lost in Rivet City
So it was shitters yet again that ruined the quality of a game. Rivet city wasn't even that big and it's not hard to remember the way if you've explored for a bit.
Nah, I would say a good portion of the towns nail it. Balmora feels like your typical shitty suburban US town with a bar, a church, a strip of stores and services, and a bunch of shitty apartments that keep them all on life support with NPCs that fill out all the appropriate roles, as well as some intrigue behind the scenes. I could care less than they don't occasionally go to the inn to stock up on mazte before they go back home to binge drink. That would just make finding and interacting with people confusing.
Have you seen the cities in Tamriel Rebuilt?
They use the same engine, and yet the city designs are absolutely incredible and BTFO everything in the original game, especially in the Indoril areas where they also use verticality to pad everything out and make everything seem bigger.
NPCs don't render far away also the buildings are taller than the NPCs
2 years ago
Anonymous
Take a better picture then, moron. Do you understand your whole premise rests on showing that morrowind cities are lively?
2 years ago
Anonymous
not him but don't be stupid
the size of the towns and number of buildings is obviously part of the argument
2 years ago
Anonymous
Most critical NPCs thankfully have fairly static positions in Morrowind but generally it's pretty hard to take a picture of the busier places and not capture a few NPCs walking around. I do sort of wish there were more NPCs doing things outside in some places though.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I didn't post it. That's not even the vanilla game anyway, that's Morrowind Rebirth I'm pretty sure. But I do enjoy Morrowind cities more than the other TES game's cities. There's just more to see and do, and them actually being out in the world and not behind a loading zone helps immensely with believability too. Vivec City has 100+ quests that either start there or take you there.
>I saw a mudcrab the other day. >*Sniff* >I saw a goblin the other day. >Goodbye. >Hello! >I saw a mudcrab the other day. >HOLY SHIT ITS SO LIVELY ITS LIKE IM REALLY THERE
Oblivion was empty because their shit engine crashes with more than 20NPCs on screen at once and Morrowind felt dead because NPCs just sat in yhe same spot all the time
What. Oblivion and Morrowind had larger cities compared to Skyrim with even more NPCs in a single area too.
It was a design philosophy that changed. Almost any NPC that was not part of a quest was never put into the game. The cities were small because only a few dozen people would live in each city. The rest of the game was spent on condensing the world so when you immediately exit a city you would be greeted with unique locations where the developers hoped players would rather spend their time.
They did the same thing for Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. The good thing about this design philosophy is that you're more likely to meet quest givers, the bad thing is the world feels small.
No it doesn't. Oblivion has more NPCs in it's largest city then Skyrim. Morrowind has more NPCs in it's largest city then Oblivion.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Oblivion has about 800 NPCs, Skyrim has about 1000. The city is irrelevant because it is insanely awful and one of the worst parts of the game.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>The city is irrelevant
shifting the goal post
2 years ago
Anonymous
>quest in the imperial city >it takes you into the sewer
2 years ago
Anonymous
I like the one with the graverobbers but it makes no sense since you rob graves constantly
2 years ago
Anonymous
You get used to the inconsistency if you roleplay your character as someone with brain damage who does whatever he feels would be appropriate for his current opinion of himself for the day.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Its just funny that Jensine will buy zombie flesh but acts like Gilgondirin is the problem
2 years ago
Anonymous
The merchant quest makes more sense if you think of Jensine as the leader of an informal merchant mafia who's only reason to go after the bosmer guy is that he's not price gouging customers and undercutting her bottom line.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>That one quest where you snitch on a guard >Have to do all the legwork since Hieronymus Nosex is busy trying to find a master theif by patrolling in broad daylight. >Finally gather the evidence and send the guard to the slammer >HE BREAKS OUT AND TRIES TO MURDER YOU
Kino
2 years ago
Anonymous
even better >breaks out using the same route you did at the start
2 years ago
Anonymous
Reminds me of a similar quest in Morrowind >find some guy out in the middle of nowhere >tells me his "contact" hasn't arrived yet to pick up a shipment of weapons >agree to take them to his contact in Ald'Ruhn for him >sell the weapons at some random vendor cause they weigh too much and I'd get a better price for them that way >sometime later visit Ald'Ruhn and he's waiting there on the fricking silt strider platform and he tries to murder me for fricking him over
Quests like this are always great
as big as the imperial city is in oblivion it's a fricking ghost town
oblivion really is my favorite, but when i went back to play it was really fricking astonished at how much was covered over by nostalgia
at any time most towns have like 8 npcs tops, four are guards and the rest just walk a patrol path and say like three phrases
It is lively though, NPCs talk to each other, interact with objects, NPCs even commit crime. Bethesda should have further improved upon the rumor dialogue system and radiant AI instead of giving it up completely
It's a massive fricking stretch to call any of the cities "lively." The cities are usually pretty sleepy or otherwise dull, usually because of their size and lack of "lively" details. Look at this fan art of Suran. This is fricking lively. If you walked into town and saw this, I'd say yeah, that's lively as shit. But you don't, you walk into town and see one guy walking around with his shirt of talking about the end of the world. I don't even mind the cities being more sleepy and dull, but the fact that NONE of them feel lively is because of engine limitations and not some purposeful artistic decision to make huge cities feel like every inhabitant is a zombie waiting for the next shipment of coffee beans that's several months late.
>is because of engine limitations
It has frick all to do with engine limitations, it has to do with game design.
Elder scrolls game's have small cities with low NPC counts because Bethesda does a lot of things other games don't do that zaps away alot of system resources that other games use for larger towns.
1. In most games NPCs, and their clothes/armor, are modeled, textured, and rendered, as a single object. This is because you can't take them off, so there's no reason to render them a separate objects. In Bethesda games every single piece of armor, clothing israeliteelry, etc is rendered as a separate object to allow for the dynamic removal of NPC items
2. In large cities in most games NPCs are all controlled by a singular AI system. There is almost no individual AI scripting for any singular NPC. In Bethesda games not only does nearly every single NPC in towns have their own AI script, but all of these scripts are running all the time, even if you aren't in the same cell, so that way, if your in Riften, and get a quest to kill someone in Solitude, the game can keep track of where that NPC should be at that time of day in the city.
3. Most games don't let you pick up, move around, destroy, or interact, with world objects at all. And in the case of something like breaking a bench in GTA it gets repaired the moment you leave the view. In Bethesda game every cabbage, fork, spoon, etc is its own object, with physics, and every object that gets moved get saved into memory until the cell resets(this was the cause of the poor performance on the PS3)
People made GTA style cities in the engine as far back as Morrowind, and they worked fine so long as you built them like a GTA style city, and not like a Bethesda game world. These issues are why other games like Witcher 3, GTA, etc. don't even let you attempt to do these things. The game would kill itself if it tried with towns that big.
These issues are also the cause of rather infamous things like dead bodies getting cleaned up in Read Dead 2 every time you go through a doorway. The game is desperately trying to remove ANY changes to the game world to cut down memory use becuase it would run into these same issues.
Its really not an engine problem, in so far as every engine would have the same problems if they tried to do these things and have big cities. Its a design issue on Bethesda's part for wanting these highly detailed worlds/individualized NPCs rather then a big cardboard city with random NPCs that just walk around the block all day.
>it's not an engine limitation, it's a limitation of the engine
Okay, well Kingdom Come had more lively cities with all this stuff and they were bigger and there were no loading screens. >but that's 2017
Fair, but regardless, Bethesda doesn't go the extra mile to make cities feel lively. They have repeatedly shown they don't know how to compromise between their AI/NPC systems and giving the player a feeling of scale/liveliness. And I appreciate the benefits of what you see is what you get with NPC inventories, and that the radiant AI system at least is unique in what it's trying to do, but it's not helping the city atmosphere. You know what they've wanted to implement for years but never have? Holidays. Those could help a lot, but they're focused on Dwemer Ruin #625 or Ayleid Ruin #216 or Draugr Ruin #796 or forgettable quest #21096 or forgettable dialogue #82060
>Holidays.
That would be an absolute waste of time IMO because players can spend days of game time out in the wilderness and are almost certainly going to miss them unless the know about them beforehand.
And like, unless you spend A LOT of time creating tons of decorations, dances, special bard songs, etc. to make it feel like a real holiday, its just going to be some banners added to houses, and like 1-2 lines of dialogue changing. But doing all that is a minor novelty, that most players will never really care about, when you could be making Swner ruin 625, or Aylied ruin 216, or Dragur Ruin 796, and actually provide more content to the players
2 years ago
Anonymous
>players can spend days of game time out in the wilderness and are almost certainly going to miss them unless the know about them beforehand
So don't make them last 1 day or have an announcement or have a town NPC that likes you send you an invite with a courier, also stop making so many quests send people to shitty dungeons and actually use the towns more
2 years ago
Anonymous
>So don't make them last 1 day
Most holidays last only one day IRL otuside the winter holidays. At this point your just trying to artificially inflate in-game holidays to being much longer then they should simply to justify having holidays in the first place. That's fairly shitty reasoning.
>also stop making so many quests send people to shitty dungeons and actually use the towns more >stop making quests that have you explore the world >in a massive open world game where exploring the world is the main draw
Seems to me you don't really want an open world game.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>ignores the other points about having announcements/invites >heh, if you don't like shitty copy pasted content, why are you even playing an open world game kiddo?
Frick off
2 years ago
Anonymous
>ignores the other points about having announcements/invites
I didn't ignore it, its just fricking dumb. Are most holidays "announced" like its some thing most people don't already know is happening the same time this year as it does every year? Why would you be invited to any of it in the first place? Are you "invited" to Presidents Day?
2 years ago
Anonymous
Gee I don't fricking know, every year christmas just comes and goes and no one talks about it unless it's literally December 25th! FRICKING WEIRD HUH? >Why would you be invited to any of it in the first place?
BECAUSE AN NPC LIKES YOU AND WANTS TO SEE YOU THERE YOU DUMB Black person? BECAUSE YOU HAVE A HIGH SKILL IN HORSE FIGHTING OR SOME SHIT AND THEY WANT YOU TO PARTICIPATE IN A COMPETITION ABOUT IT? >Are you "invited" to Presidents Day?
YES BECAUSE EVERY HOLIDAY IS FRICKING PRESIDENTS DAY. YOU ARE SUCH A DUMB CLUELESS BRAINDEAD FRICKING Black person. have a nice day
2 years ago
Anonymous
Hit submit too fast >And like, unless you spend A LOT of time creating tons of decorations, dances, special bard songs, etc. to make it feel like a real holiday, its just going to be some banners added to houses, and like 1-2 lines of dialogue changing. But doing all that is a minor novelty, that most players will never really care about, when you could be making Swner ruin 625, or Aylied ruin 216, or Dragur Ruin 796, and actually provide more content to the players
Have some repeated quest/quests happen. Have a cook off you can participate in. Have a randomly generated easter egg hunt for some prize. Have a mock horse combat battle in an arena. Just something to make the towns not feel so dead. I would sacrifice half or more of the shitty quests and dungeons in these games if they did more shit like this.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Have a cook off you can participate in
Shit like this is a novelty most video game players don't give two fricks about. And is worse because it would come at the expensive of the rest fo the game world most people do care about.
2 years ago
Anonymous
The player doesn't have to participate, but the knowledge that something is happening other than "do you get to the cloud district very often" contributes to the feeling of being in an actual fricking town. Also, so what if its a novelty? It's a fricking holiday. What holiday isn't a novelty at this point?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Fallout 4 had Christmas events in Diamond City >literally no one who played the game gave a shit outside of the first mention
2 years ago
Anonymous
>That would be an absolute waste of time IMO because players can spend days of game time out in the wilderness and are almost certainly going to miss them unless the know about them beforehand.
And? Lots of games have timed content that players can miss if they're too busy just killing random shit and ignoring the world around them. There can be meaningful content that isn't delivered via dragging the player by the ear till it's right in front of their face.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>And? Lots of games have timed content that players can miss if they're too busy just killing random shit and ignoring the world around them.
timed missable content is one of the single most complained about things in video games, and almost no devs does it otuside of indie gay CRPGs trying to play off of the nostalgia for BG still do it because its so universally reviled.
Your argument at this point is >Do the thing literally everyone hates!
2 years ago
Anonymous
>players complain, remove it
Hi Todd. Also it'd be annual, you wouldn't miss it forever
>Fallout 4 had Christmas events in Diamond City >literally no one who played the game gave a shit outside of the first mention
Daggerfall had a ton of holidays. Some did stuff, some were just flavor text, but they were a nice extra layer of world building.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>games are made to be fun >no one likes thing >WHY DID THEY REMOVE IT!
hmmm. Hell, even the original Fallout patched out one of the game's two big time limited because everyone hated it.
2 years ago
Anonymous
It'd be annual you autist, you wouldn't miss it forever. Read homosexual >no thats still bad because... because it just is!
2 years ago
Anonymous
Its bad because its something that the vast majority of people don't care for, and because it would take away time and development on more worldspace stuff people do care for, just to sooth your specific form of autism.
Gaming was held back so fricking badly by consoles in the late 7th gen it was unreal. Skyrim was a 2011 game that had to run on fricking 2005 hardware, and they still got another 2 years out of that gen after that.
I hope we never experience something like that again.
Anti bethesda gays will never be pleased, it's a useless fight with them.
I can recognize skyrim's flaws, but at it's time the open world was impressive.
unless you want to rewrite time and make it so that the ps3 was the only console and make it more powerful and cost 799$
there's no way to make skyrim bigger besides mods which means you're no longer playing the same game
People still mod Bethesda games? I know the degenerates and freaks from tesg are into but do actual fans mod the game?
I don't think mods have been necessary to fix a Bethesda game post Morrowind.
In my brief foray it was all waifugays and degenerates. From what I remember someone really liked fat women. Like a fricking lot. I don't remember anything about lore being discussed.
Have not ventured back since.
I remember there was a cat at the bar I had gay sex with in VR with at that town, good times. Though I had some forest mod so it was all covered in trees
Dawnstar is an active port that isn't frozen over at least.
Winterhold is what is truly perplexing, it supposedly used to be the capital of skyrim but it was always a frozen shithole and there's no evidence of it ever having a port (and even if it did, it would be frozen)
I love how this question is in every thread ever like Ganker users all get a hole in their head and cant conceive of a town shipping in food from another town
It's even funnier for shit like Skyrim where the wilderness is teaming with wildlife, the pastime for nearly every Nord is hunting, or there's just a straight up farm outside.
The problem is that most nords seemingly subsist on a diet of nothing but meat, sweet rolls, and beer. There is also various produce littered around with absolute zero explanation as to where it comes from. It's also strange that Skyrim has less than half as many NPCs as Morrowind despite being more than twice its size. Everything in the world is kinda just empty and dead, and nothing feels real or cohesive.
towns should have a reason to exist. If they're shipping in food then they better be raking in cash from some other industry.
Its just good worldbuilding.
Why is the town there if it has to import food? Is there some significant landmark? Natural resource? They just built a village in a barren land to import food to for fun?
There are actually a number of reasons, as you said it might have access to some landmark or resource of importance (mining towns spring to mind).
It may also be a strategically important location (border city/town that guards against neighbouring forces, center of commerce or government, etc).
There are TONS of reasons why a city or town might pop up in a strange location and need regular imports.
>We will never get an all around good ES game with the world of Morrowind, Quests of Oblivion and whatever Skyrim has over those 2 games all put together.
feels bad man
>still have the same LOD quality.
You can adjust it in the game files Anon. And if you're feeling bold and you want to set your PC on fire, adjust the UGRID
I don't get it really, if they keep rereleasing Skyrim, what's stopping them from restoring cut content or remaking said cut content?
Not all cut content is complete. Fallout 3 had a metric ton of cut content, from riding giant mole rats to all of the Enclave content.
>to all of the Enclave content.
there was never any Encalve content cut from Fo3.
The only thing cut form Fo3 that involved the Enclave was that the very original plan for the game involved the Enclave attacking Rivet city, and the people having to be evacuated to the citadel. But that was never even in actual devlopment at any point
>to all of the Enclave content.
there was never any Encalve content cut from Fo3.
The only thing cut form Fo3 that involved the Enclave was that the very original plan for the game involved the Enclave attacking Rivet city, and the people having to be evacuated to the citadel. But that was never even in actual devlopment at any point
>from riding giant mole rats
this was also never cut cotnent.
cut content is content made for the game that got removed from final release. At no point during Fo3's development did they ever actually intended or try, to make giant rideable mole rats. That was just some concept art one of the artists did.
Hey remember how Rorik said he bought the land during the great war so that's why it's named after him, and then you read a book saying Rorikstead is 1000 years old?
I am always upset that theres no unique NPC you can talk to in Rorikstead that knows the thief at the beginning of the game and you can break the news about his death.
its a great thing i turned skyrim into an uncregonizeable uncanny valley mess thats more fun to play than any bethesda game both modded and vanilla and now ive been stalling playing again since im having issues getting my custom follower turned into a legit mod through racemenu
fricking yes, its destroying my model, i think its only because the first time around in the nifoptimizer i forgot to click "head parts only" but its enough to make me set it aside for another day, im using the high poly head to make things worse.
I'm not sure if it was a placebo effect or what, but what I started doing is creating an NPC in the ck and I would make their face as similar to the facegendata I exported from RM as I possibly could, then I merged the nifs. It seemed to turn out reasonably well.
Don't know if thats any help.
interesting, in every tutorial its not needed at all since you just replace the facegen files from CK with the racemenu follower ones. It might just be me needing to enable an esp with HPH.
I'm not sure if it was a placebo effect or what, but what I started doing is creating an NPC in the ck and I would make their face as similar to the facegendata I exported from RM as I possibly could, then I merged the nifs. It seemed to turn out reasonably well.
Don't know if thats any help.
These are the notes I had written for myself back when I made a few followers for the site, after a few long weekends of watching youtube tutorials figuring out how to make this shit work
Ideally you should never need to put any other plugin as a master .esp outside of body physics, and it sounds to me like you're messing up something with the merge itself (I solved the same issue by double checking that the number of parts actually matched); the HPH model itself should be included as a body part and nothing more I'd almost offer to make it for you, but I don't wanna fall back into that spiral just yet
Alright, what if >shitty late 90s graphics >no voice acting >all the saved space is used to make a bigger, fuller world with more NPCs, interactions and consequences
Would you play this hypothetical RPG?
Chronicles of Myrtana has a reasonably sized port city with all buildings enterable with no loading screens and majority of named characters are involved in several quests.
They are still voiced though.
I think the graphics/size/population balance is pretty damn good here.
they really did a fantastic job with TR. im still playing through the main game but i cant wait to finish seeing all of the original game and go to the extended lands
2 years ago
Anonymous
my personal favorite town is almas thirr. i'm an absolute dunmergay, so having a vivec canton town with some substance along with an incredible temple questline was quite the treat.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>they really did a fantastic job with TR
Finished the main game (this is only my second full playthrough) and started TR about a week ago.
I expected this to just be another decent attempt at a mod but holy shit i did not expect this to put bethesda to shame.There is so much great stuff in TR it's unreal , what is also great is the fact that when (in 20 years) they recreate all the provinces they will be lore friendly (as of morrowind time line anyway).Can't wait to explore the jungles around the Imperial City built in the Akaviry architectural style
> The year is 2079 > TR rebuilt is 30% done overall, Morrowind and Skyrim are complete > The MP mod has been fully integrated into OpenMW and the OpenOBL branch has finally hit 1.0 > Finally the MMO everyone dreamed of.
Do morons seriously want to aimlessly walk around needlessly big cities? You either get cities like Novigrad from Witcher 3 that is big but has no depth to it, or towns that have a small scale but dense with substance and that are big enough to sell the illusion.
thats the problem with the average "i never played skyrim so this is what i think" opinions, most of the small towns in skyrim are tiny but detailed with the npcs and the stories revolving around the npcs. Shor's stone for example, tiny town but its a mining town so there's a story behind the mine + the miners and the cute wife Sjola orwhatever her name is. That seems to be the design philosphy of the game, in exchange for some places being seemingly barren, they add the detail to the NPCs.
but it hardly works vanilla because the game is literal eye cancer and once you finish quests the npcs just go back to vanilla lines so there's really no reason to revisit. I think mods should be a great way to fix that but a lot of people just don't touch the smaller towns.
>most of the small towns in skyrim are tiny but detailed with the npcs and the stories revolving around the npcs
Skyrim has theme park design. It is quite literally designed like an mmo where towns are purely quest hubs.
that doesnt really disprove what i said kek, they're literally you talk to some npcs and then leave when the quests are done. though i'd even say "theme park design" is giving it too much credit. At least there's sights to see and things to do besides ride the rides in a theme park.
Well obviously the big city crowd wants their cake and eat it too. They want the size of novigrad with the density of small town designs. Which would be great if a developer could pull that off but that developer isnt going to be Bethesda
>Do morons seriously want to aimlessly walk around needlessly big cities
I would like towns and cities like that are content dense like Khorinis and/or fleshed out like Balmora.
Novigrad is cool though. That said, I really liked the Imperial City and would enjoy something like that but with more size and detail. If that means the entire game needs to be set there then I'm ok with that.
I like Skyrim for it's map design, locations are placed and distanced from each other just enough to give a sense of wonder what might be over a cliffside or a treeline or just over a hill.
Its where Bethesda excels more than anything else. Fallout 4 is the same way even if the quests, rpg mechanics, characters, voice acting, plot, graphics are all shit what is undeniably enjoyable is roaming the wasteland exploring whats around the bend.
i know it's a meme, but when fo3gays unironically use this town to defend megaton it frustrates me.
like this town being on a peninsula that's submerged at high tide while still being surrounded by french farmland on the mainland is exactly the same as megaton having zero places where it either produces food itself, or gets food from literally anywhere else in the wasteland.
They trade for food.
Also they probably do grow food, Bethesda just didn't think anyone would give a shit so they didn't plop a farm down in their themepark.
Trade just adds a middleman since the game doesn't bother explaining where those traders get their food either. Which is why 3gays over a decade and a half later still can't answer where Megaton gets its food, because the answer doesn't exist in the game.
But yeah, Bethesda didn't bother trying to explain their world and just tried to mindlessly copy the tone of the original Fallout without caring about the substance of that game's setting.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yes, and in the absence of the answer, we can imply some simple ideas.
They get food somehow because they have to to survive.
This simple idea seems to really upset some people.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>megaton gets food because it exists
Not an answer, when the existence of a town hinges not on things you can see in the environment or infer based on local factions you're saying that the town exists because it does.
You can see small farmsteads in Fallout 4 dotted around the landscape which explains how people in the wasteland feed themselves. You see not only massive farms like the Sharecropper Farms in New Vegas, but also the very existence of the NCR implies that they ship in a decent amount of food from their homeland as both supplies for their soldiers and trade goods to deal with the locals.
Fallout 3 does none of this, the closest it gets is Rivet City with those experimental vegetables that you are directly told are delicate and experimental. Megaton existing because it exists is not a satisfying answer when every other game in the series has at least done the bare minimum to answer what people eat.
2 years ago
Anonymous
See what I mean by making certain people angry?
This poster literally can not accept the fact that humans need food.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yes. Humans need food, so where does Megaton get their food?
You're acting like saying it exists because people are there so their must be food is some kind of gotcha, but it's just a self-own.
If Megaton gets food where does it come from? Fallout answers where food comes from, Fallout 2 answers where food comes from, Fallout New Vegas answers where food comes from, Fallout 4 answers where food comes from. Fricks sake, even the Elder Scrolls games barring Oblivion answer where food comes from. Why is it okay for Fallout 3 to not answer a basic fricking question that literally every other game not only in its own series answers, but also Bethesda's flagship fantasy series answers?
Pretending as if the end result existing is proof that the thing Bethesda objectively failed to show in its world actually exists is pants-on-head moronic circular logic.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>so where does Megaton get their food?
Somewhere.
They have to to survive.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>from the shop
ebin
2 years ago
Anonymous
this reminds of people claiming food comes from the supermarket kek
2 years ago
Anonymous
You can just say you don't have an answer and are just baiting for (You)s.
You already know why your circular logic is nonsense, and I've already accepted your concession.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>They have to to survive.
If self-preservation and basic survival were at the top of the list they would not be comfortably squatting around an undetonated warhead, thats surrounded by a puddle of irradiated water and living in homes with thin metal sheets that have holes in them.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yeah I know.
'tis a silly game.
I also agree that there's no answer.
I just don't get mad about it.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>i have no standards and don't want my games to be good
I mean, at least you admit it. It's okay that you have the consoomer mindset. Just don't pretend people are wrong for noticing problems and pointing out said problems instead of turning off their brains and consooming like you do.
2 years ago
Anonymous
It's so easy to "win" when you just decide what my argument is, isn't it?
Good for you.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>It's so easy to "win" when you just decide what my argument is, isn't it?
Pot meet kettle. Besides, what you've said makes it clear what your argument is. You're somehow mentally superior to other people for turning your brain off and just accepting nonsensical shit meant to extract applause from the lowest common denominator.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>You're somehow mentally superior
No? It's not a competition. It simply isn't worth the energy when the only possible answers are "it has to".
A video game isn't real life. The NPCs get food because they do. It's not hard.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>You're somehow mentally superior to other people for turning your brain off and just accepting nonsensical shit meant to extract applause from the lowest common denominator.
I fail to see how this isn't an accurate assessment of your mindset considering everything you just said. You might be okay with games treating you like a dribbling moron, but I'd like at least a modicum of thought, care, and effort put into the games I like.
2 years ago
Anonymous
You don't have to be mad to point out absurdity or stupidity. Did you think your parents were mad when they told you microwaving silverware or talking to strangers was dumb?
2 years ago
Anonymous
It is neither absurd, nor stupid. It's a video game.
If you believe not putting a farm next to a town in a video game is absurd then I am very happy for you because apparently you have no real problems you have to deal with.
2 years ago
Anonymous
A game can follow a degree of internal consistency with simplistic aspects and worldbuilding. If every other game could address this then 3 had no excuse. You started crying when your parents told you that eating mouse poison is bad didn't you?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>even the Elder Scrolls games barring Oblivion answer where food comes from
but there are farms outside the cities >not the capital of the empire!
probably relies on food imports just like Rome did
2 years ago
Anonymous
>actually they import all their food from the 1 farm outside of a minority of the cities
There's more world building towards where the NPCs get wine than where they get food in Oblivion.
2 years ago
Anonymous
There are farms near most settlements, many of them are coastal, if you give the 'farms' in the Fallout games a pass then you should also give Oblivion a pass
2 years ago
Anonymous
Oblivion's farms are hilariously barebones in comparison to both its predecessor and successor. Morrowind's farmland is obvious considering the Ascadian Isles, but Skyrim's farmsteads do a better job than Oblivion's farms.
Not saying Oblivion's farms don't exist, but their lack of ubiquity exemplifies a problem with Oblivion in general, which is that its world in general pushes Bethesda's regular compressed scale into the nonsense territory. Leyawiin blocking the river despite supposedly being a checkpoint for trade from the Imperial City shows this off the best imo.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I just scanned the coast and there were 3 settlements on the coast, one was just filled with necromancers, one has an isolating witch inside of it, and the last one is literally called Water's Edge and has small gardens instead of a farm. I don't know where you got your info from.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Anvil, the IC, Bravil and Leyawin are coastal, Cheydinal and Skingrad are close to two major rivers.
2 years ago
Anonymous
homie those are cities, not settlements. Even then, Anvil has 1 plantation near them (which you can stop production of during a quest), Skingrad has grape farms for wine and a couple sheep, Leyawiin has village with a tiny farm down the road from them, Cheydinhaal has a village with a tiny farm near them, Bruma has a village with a tiny farm near them, and Bravil, Kvatch, and Chorrol have jack shit. There isn't nearly enough to support the cities let alone support exporting shit to the Imperial City apart from wine. Sure some of them can fish (and technically the IC has 1 fisherman) but that's like saying an entire city is surviving off of hunting.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>There isn't nearly enough to support the cities
That's why I said if you give the Fallout games a pass then you should also give Oblivion a pass because there's no way the puny farms in Fallout can sustain their settlements either.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Except it's Skyrim and not Oblivion that meets that minimum that those same Fallout games reach. Skyrim's farms may be minuscule, but at least they put an effort to show that each large city has some local producers.
Oblivion on the other hand has one farm related to a major settlement, a couple vinyards, a village with a couple gardens, and some farmsteads in the wilderness.
i know it's a meme, but when fo3gays unironically use this town to defend megaton it frustrates me.
like this town being on a peninsula that's submerged at high tide while still being surrounded by french farmland on the mainland is exactly the same as megaton having zero places where it either produces food itself, or gets food from literally anywhere else in the wasteland.
Trade just adds a middleman since the game doesn't bother explaining where those traders get their food either. Which is why 3gays over a decade and a half later still can't answer where Megaton gets its food, because the answer doesn't exist in the game.
But yeah, Bethesda didn't bother trying to explain their world and just tried to mindlessly copy the tone of the original Fallout without caring about the substance of that game's setting.
this entire argument just proves how butthurt nv trannies are. they literally have to cherry pick mundane garbage to find reasons to shit on the game.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>asking what largest settlement in the game eats is cherrypicking
Are 3gays all the kind of people who think food magically appears in supermarket aisles? If it's just cherrypicking mundane shit then what does Megaton eat?
Molerats aren't an answer, the Wasteland Survival Guide implies they see them as pests, and Moira is distressed her stick killed them. Quite the odd response for someone who supposedly lives on Molerat meat.
Trade isn't the answer either, that's just adding a middleman since there's nowhere in the region for the traders to get food.
You can't argue this is cherrypicking when the first settlements you come across in every other Fallout game explain how the settlements get their food. Or do the farms and gardens of Goodsprings and Shady Sands just not exist?
What does Megaton eat?
>no one there knew him or comments on him being missing >no chance to find a family member and tell them you saw his death
Bethesda writers let so much potential just slip by them it's kinda sad.
I like to think of Skyrim NPCs the 3D equivalent of an NPC from a 2D 16-bit RPG. They just walk around and shout a phrase at you when you interact with them.
buildings in gta are just towers not even actual buildings and that's not mention the amount of scripting or npcs you have to deal with
gta is moronic by comparsion to skyrim
>15 minute cutscene of dumb nord bullshit >thankfully i'm about to be killed so it finally stops >oh wait they didn't kill me >dumb nords keep being dumb while the imperial is saving children >dumnfrick nord actually wants me to follow him
god they are so fricking stupid
the actual answer is that they had to do that so they could make solitude its own seperate worldspace separate from the overworld
I assume you already knew that though
Perhaps the culmination of all town design is daggerfall scale with Skyrim personalization, only possible by the joint effort of devs laying the foundation and then mod makers adding the personalization. Sort of like real life, each person customizing their life's landscape = a large personalized world. Or maybe I'm tripping on skooma
>games that simulate a country should include things that exist in countries
Shocking I know. Skyrim does this fine, no one wants the entire gameworld dominated by farmland. Just something that implies a world that exists outside the player.
>location used as landmark to reach other destination
Beside Vivec and Caldera I find little reason for staying in another town. At least in Oblivion there's Skingrad but the Count is a blood sucker
The Mama Dolce factory is the source for the food in megaton.
The Chinese infiltrators are so indoctrinated they maintain their cover even ghoulified.
They produce food and restock the various stores in the DC area.
>AE content means you need even more patches with your mods >gays still leave them as optional files rather than including them as a seperate fomod installer
but there has to be something
the problem with most other games is that you can't do anything related to your class whatsoever outside of battles. And no side quests have anything to do with being, for example, a druid. I would even be content with imagening most of it.
I'd much rather have whiterun than novigrad.
Whiterun is home, novigrad isn't. I can name every npc in whiterun, and there are like 50.
I can name 2 people that live in novigrad in the witcher.
Sure, novigrad ks more realistic, but realistic doesn't = immersive, sometimes the less realisitc option is the one that's going to suck me into the game.
Ordinator for perks
if you youtube "syn gaming best first person mods" you'll get some mods that make first person combat a little better without turning into 3rd person soulsshit
thats basically it though. everything else is a janky piece of shite
why did they even bother namedropping whatever the frick this is in the intro? you can't even call it a settlement
why not just have him say "I'm from windhelm" or something that resembles an actual town
I have no hopes that TES VI won't be a streamlined mess, and judging by most of the comments in here it seems that's what you all want. Let the franchise die, we still have Daggerfall and Morrowind.
All of Bethesdas towns are like that. A small smattering of houses and "It only looks like that cause engine limitations!". That said, Oblivion has the best towns, even though most of them are the same. Aleswell, Weye, Hackdirt, all are just a few houses. Bethesda couldn't make a proper town in a modern game if you put a bomb in their offices.
It doesn't. Morrowind does.
Vos, Suran, Gnisis, Pelagiad, literally all the Telvanni towers. These are far better than towns that all have the same architecture and have a single gimmick related to a quest. Weye isn't even a town, it's a house and an inn.
I just think they're neat to be honest. Entertaining side quests more often than not. Little tidbits of worldbuilding and shit. Personal favourites are the burned down alchemists house/store, Cropsford because you help build it up, and Borderwatch. Even without the Sheogorath quest it's a cool little village. Always steal the cheese for my rare items collection.
I've tried about 2 dozen times now to get into Morrowind. Furthest I've made it is the first Dwemer Ruin. I don't know exactly what it is, I just can't keep at it.
Okay so then don't say "Oblivion has the best towns" if you haven't even played the other games substantially
2 years ago
Anonymous
I mean I've played the game a lot despite not sticking to it. I've been through a lot of its towns. Most of the game is grey or brown and all the characters walk like they shit themselves.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>all the characters walk like they shit themselves.
this is because all food in morrowind is canonically poison
I just realized the reason the nevarine was sent to Vvardenfell by the emperor was because the circumstances of his birth were fitting for a Blade and would thus make him more suitable for infiltrating houses. Your handler even encourages you to do this.
Morrowind cities are garbage tier, mainly because of the NPCs >Walk into town >Talk to an NPC >They do nothing but regurgitate repetitive garbage >Have to keep repeating this process until you find quest givers
Nice game
Ah yes, latest rumours, where the majority of NPCs spout the same repetitive drivel, nice argument.
Use the dialogue filter in openmw. I find that dialogue options are varied enough that you're likely to at least stumble on a few NPCs with generic dialogue you haven't heard before simply due to acquiring new keywords and backgrounds which generate responses being fairly varied. Most of the time its helpful hints, flavor, or interesting lore tidbits. The fix also highlights responses which interact with your journal. (quests)
I do, it's still annoying to walk into a tavern with a bunch of named NPCs and have all of them say the same shit.
>it's still annoying to walk into a tavern with a bunch of named NPCs and have all of them say the same shit
Just click on them and if everything is greyed out talk to someone else lol
It's just annoying, especially since the game does it for every npc. At least latter games just had them say something and walk off without locking you into a dialogue.
>nice argument
Black person, some of the latest rumor quests would be set to appear before literally anything else so you were guaranteed to see them. most misc quests would be introduced to you via the NPC's greeting. >I do
then what the frick is the problem moron? you realize you don't HAVE to walk around town and talk to every single last NPC in existence if it pisses you off, right? goddamn some spergs just can't control themselves.
Because I like exploring and talking to NPCs. Walking into a new place and everyone turning into robots when I talk them makes the world feel dead as shit
>At least latter games just had them say something and walk off without locking you into a dialogue.
What? >Walking into a new place and everyone turning into robots when I talk them makes the world feel dead as shit
Is this your first RPG? What RPGs give every single NPC unique dialogue, and unique dialogue worth reading?
2 years ago
Anonymous
Disco Elysium that's technically a rpg.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yes I'm sure it has a world as big as Morrowind's with just as many NPCs.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Okay now you're just moving the goalposts.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>why does this game with 100x more NPCs not make each one unique like the other game? such garbage.
Your moronic infantile expectation you forced on the game is garbage.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Ah excellent you took the bait, now why do you love Morrowind so much?
2 years ago
Anonymous
DE is small and dense, with time/sequence gated areas. That style only works in certain situations.
>It's just annoying, especially since the game does it for every npc. At least latter games just had them say something and walk off without locking you into a dialogue
I guess? With the way dialogue is set up there is still a chance you will find something unique and it doesn't ever lock you into dialogue. You can exit dialogue at any time.
>nice argument
Black person, some of the latest rumor quests would be set to appear before literally anything else so you were guaranteed to see them. most misc quests would be introduced to you via the NPC's greeting. >I do
then what the frick is the problem moron? you realize you don't HAVE to walk around town and talk to every single last NPC in existence if it pisses you off, right? goddamn some spergs just can't control themselves.
Use the dialogue filter in openmw. I find that dialogue options are varied enough that you're likely to at least stumble on a few NPCs with generic dialogue you haven't heard before simply due to acquiring new keywords and backgrounds which generate responses being fairly varied. Most of the time its helpful hints, flavor, or interesting lore tidbits. The fix also highlights responses which interact with your journal. (quests)
>Why did you side with the Dawnguard/Vampires
Dawnguard because frick vampires. >was it worth it?
No, because most of the expansion was just a road trip with Serana anyway. I basically kept forgetting the Dawnguard even existed until the plot forced me to go back to their castle.
>chad DVNMER
Dungmer are beta b***hes of the setting
besides, I play Animer, which are almost exclusively just Nords with makeup, so I don't get shit form the guards
Some fan made map that was made after watching the TES VI trailer, they were speculating that VI would be High Rock, Hammerfell, The Reach and Orsinium.
Hammerfell is all but confirmed since it's pretty much completely absent from ESO. Now they're virtually making up locations, like the most recent High Isle expansion. Seems like they don't want to touch Hammerfell before Bethesda does.
>another culturally specific magic thing >hilariously and ridiculously broken in the lore >will definitely be neutered into a flashy power attack
Can't wait for the nuke-slashes to never be acknowledged and for Sword Singing to be nothing but flashy enchantment effects. yes i know that the pankratosword specifically is from an unofficial source, but there are canon sources that say sword singing destroyed yokuda
Unfortunately there's very little written about it from ingame sources. Kirkbride's Imperial Library writing are the most definitive source on Sword Singing being a powerful destructive force, but that's VERY dubiously canonical for obvious reasons.
The best source that isn't ESO is from the Pocket Guide to the Empire 3rd Edition, which is a physical book that came with some editions of Oblivion. All that says is that there are in-universe hypotheses that some form of human performed magic sunk Yokuda. That and the sinking of Yokuda was concurrent with the War of the Singers, which started the migrations of the Yoku to Hammerfell. If TES: VI is about Hammerfell then we'll definitely get more about Yokuda and how it was sunk.
Also, say what you will about Kirkbride, his writings, the ones that are actually in-game that is, are integral for making TES as unique a setting it is. Especially the more esoteric ones surrounding Vivec and Mankar Cameron.
>Also, say what you will about Kirkbride, his writings, the ones that are actually in-game that is, are integral for making TES as unique a setting it is.
Not really, even Kirkbride himself admitted that almost everything he made for Morrowind got thrown out, and that most things people associate with him were, in fact, by other devs.
the 36 sermons of vivec, and the commenatires, are barely worthwhile books in TES lore, basically easter eggs for extreme fans who like to fill in the gaps of TES lore with headcanon like people do for the souls games
2 years ago
Anonymous
>anti-kirkbride gay says the two most talked about in-game books are inconsequential easter-eggs >claims that all the conclusions from them are headcanon
You shitters are just as bad as the MKult. If you can parse the esoteric writing those two books give you some very interesting knowledge on how the cosmology of the setting works and the background on powerful figures and artifacts like Talos, Numidium, and the White-Gold Tower, the Towers in general, Mantling, the structure of Aurbis, and the Psijic Endeavor (something mentioned in other ingame books not authored by kirkbride). Just because you personally don't like those books or their writer doesn't mean those books don't have any bearing on the setting.
While there are a lot of unofficial sources that make parsing which aspects of these cosmological subjects are cosmological they are relevant to the motivatiions and backstories of multiple characters such as the aforementioned Vivec and Cameron. Discounting all of it because some vocal morons who don't understand TES's most important trope, the unreliable narrator, is just as moronic as accepting every single sentence of an author as gospel.
>another culturally specific magic thing >hilariously and ridiculously broken in the lore >will definitely be neutered into a flashy power attack
Can't wait for the nuke-slashes to never be acknowledged and for Sword Singing to be nothing but flashy enchantment effects. yes i know that the pankratosword specifically is from an unofficial source, but there are canon sources that say sword singing destroyed yokuda
I reckon they'll just add "active skills" for melee and ranged to spice things up. Like activating a berserk state or nocking 3 arrows.
Sword Singing will replace Shouting as the cool thing
>another culturally specific magic thing >hilariously and ridiculously broken in the lore >will definitely be neutered into a flashy power attack
Can't wait for the nuke-slashes to never be acknowledged and for Sword Singing to be nothing but flashy enchantment effects. yes i know that the pankratosword specifically is from an unofficial source, but there are canon sources that say sword singing destroyed yokuda
Hammerfell is all but confirmed since it's pretty much completely absent from ESO. Now they're virtually making up locations, like the most recent High Isle expansion. Seems like they don't want to touch Hammerfell before Bethesda does.
Implying that they won't just rerelease Skyrim three more times before any new releases come out.
Basically some kid ws like "LE SEASON PASS FOR FO4 SHOULD GIVE ME ALL THE CC CONTENT BUT IT DOESN'T SO IM GONNA SUE!"
Literally nothing has happened since the orignal announcement, and its gone nowhere.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Zenimax got suit over Fallout 4 Season Pass, the season pass gives you access to the DLC without having to pay for it. They're being sued because the season pass didn't cover creation club content. It's why the CC hasn't put any new content out in over a year.
holy shit, based kid
2 years ago
Anonymous
Zenimax got suit over Fallout 4 Season Pass, the season pass gives you access to the DLC without having to pay for it. They're being sued because the season pass didn't cover creation club content. It's why the CC hasn't put any new content out in over a year.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>It's why the CC hasn't put any new content out in over a year.
this is actually incorrect.
According to what trainwiz, who was part of CC, said the CC stopped putting out content because the corona hit, shutting everything down, and halting the planned distribution plan.(Cc stopped in late 2019early 2020 right as rona started getting big)
Most cut content in most games was cut because it wasn't that fun, and/or they ran into major technical problems. Even if they re-release Skyrim another time its still not going to be worth a developer's time to try to power through all the scripting issues that caused the civil war stuff to get cut in the first place, when those same devs could be working on Starfield or w/e.
This is why devs stop making DLC for games after some point. at some point enough people stop playign the game regularly that putting out Dawnguard/Dragonborn style DLC simply isn't going to make the money back that it costs to make it.
There are like, 3 people that improve stuff slightly for pc rereleases, and a team that does ports and nothing else, and has no experience doing content.
>2010s >"dude, how can this be a town? it's just 3 houses and a shack!" >2020s >"dude, 1000 empty planets, most of them without any structures! TAKE MY MONEY!"
> villains with actual motivations
Ahh yes >Dagoth Ur: I hate the imperials so use robot to smash them!
Mankar: I hate everyone use daedra to smash them!
Alduin is funny when you think about it. He's essentially the Divine equivalent of an edgy rebellious teenager who's ignoring his dad and not doing his chores. His dad who is also himself. Aludin is Akatosh having a schizo moment and sending himself, who is also one of his offspring, as the soul of a mortal to beat the shit out of himself, who is also his oldest son, to make him do his job of eating the world.
>Mankar: I hate everyone use daedra to smash them!
Actually, Mankar only hates the Divines for stealing Mundus from Lorkhan and hiding the Tower (apotheosis) from the mortals.
Am I the only one who doesn't have a problem with having small scale representations of cities? I much prefer it and it's named NPC's with voiced dialogue than something like Cyberpunk.
Why the Reclamations, of course. Not like the Divines have done anything for the Dunmer people. Harsh though they are, the Daedra have taught us all important lessons both the Empire and Dominion are quick to ignore.
couldn't the NPCs be scripted to just get food?
Give NPCs an order of priority: >buy the most expensive food >buy cheap food >buy cheap food from further away >hunt or fish >farm areas >steal food
Add in a simple price = supply/demand function and watch how rich NPCs will spend all their money and poor NPCs constantly struggle between a life of crime, hard work or "making it" by selling an apple for 5000 gold.
And it would also solve the "questmarker" issue. >quest requires you to talk to john >John lives in Rorikstead >go there >one of the following is true: >Sorry, idk where John is, he went on a hunting trip two days ago >Sorry, John is in prison for stealing apples >Go follow the Road, John now works on a farm >John moved to this mansion because he made so much money
With the F4 settlement system it would easily be possible to have people go and build villas in the countryside as they become rich or start farms in designated areas, only to drive them into a life of crime after the player character steals all their money. Maybe a slave/indentured service mechanic to reduce the overall complexity so you dont have everyone start their own farm, but instead farms that already exist hire the NPCs as farm hands.
Plus we'd get great streamer-bait out of this: Player cheats 10000 apples, crashes local economy. Player ruins beggars life by reverse-pickpocketing 10000 gold and watch him become a drunk and end up worse than before.
I guess the problem is voicelines for all the possible combinations.
I'm from that place with all the thatched roofs.
Do the yeat?
no they just yeet
I knew a bar in Helgen
skyrim is so cramped and small scale
as opposed to what game?
Genshin Impact
Pong
~Elden Ring~ anon the bestest and most hecking validating game for me and my buddies who don't fall for that sjw social engineering CRAP other game makers like shitthesda do. fromsoft is based and redpilled af
Elden ring isn't crammed because there isn't anything in it lmao
>who don't fall for that sjw social engineering CRAP other game makers like shitthesda do. fromsoft is based and redpilled af
Did you choose Body Type A or Body Type B?
>Body Type A or Body Type B
It's funny cause this non-binary shit is a small internet fad yet these huge fricking games will be marked with it forever. In 100 years someone will boot up Elden Ring and be like "what the frick? Type A or B? What is this asking?"
Daggerfall
Witcher 3
Wicher 3 cities were so comfy.
woooow so much useless clutter.
The sad thing is some people really think like this and would be ecstatic if the "city" was a corridor with window dressing.
what am i looking at
>as opposed to what game?
Almost all non-Bethesda open-worlds? Witcher, KCD, Gothic, etc.
>as opposed to what game?
why did they even get rid of attributes? I thought they were pretty fun and it's not like they're THAT normie unfriendly
Normalgays got dumber.
Widererer audience!
They were broken so they were mega nerfed in Oblivion and then turned into perks in Skyrim (if they were lucky)
morrowind has more meaningful skills than daggerfall
they cut out the useless shit like language skills and added conjuration and spears instead
Cutting out "useless shit" instead of fixing it is why everything after morrowind is substantially worse, so I'm not sure why that matters.
You're really going to sit here and tell me they should've kept the language skills?
Yes.
No, you're not, because you're just talking without thinking so what you're saying has no value.
>just le fix it
The problem isn't that the language skills were broken. In fact they were probably one of the only skills that actually functioned in Daggerfall due to their simplicity. The problem is giving them meaning which takes 100x more effort than the lazy code monkey and uncreative ideas guy put forward towards them in Daggerfall. The only skill from Daggerfall that anyone should give a shit about getting cut is Climbing, but it's obvious that it wasn't in Morrowind because the geometry was a lot more complex than literal cubes. Even with the cubes of Daggerfall you'd still end up falling into nothing or climbing through a ceiling into the void, so you'd have to fix that, then implement free climbing which is in barely any games because of how difficult it is to do (usually you just get "climbing points" like in Mirror's Edge or Assassin's Creed.)
They should have reworked the language skills into speech as well as reworked the climbing skill
Previous Elder Scroll games you tard.
Whatever open world/bethesda game the poster played first in their childhood which will have all of its faults forgiven and all its good points exaggerated to a legendary degree. The fact people think Oblivion is a good game should be proof enough of this.
>Morrowind and Oblivion both felt three times as lively as major cities in Skyrim, even places the inns a long the roads
that's your nostalgia speaking.
go back and play morrowind or oblivion, the towns are much bigger and populated
they are, but they're populated with paper mache / potato people that don't talk or speak utter nonsense
>populated with paper mache / potato people that don't talk or speak utter nonsense
whats the difference
As opposed to literal generic nameless npcs who yoy can't speak to at all, and are still less populous than in prior games where they at least all had names?
are we talking about skyrim or genshin now?
>this other game nobody was even talking about has shitty NPCs, that means you're not allowed to criticize the shitty NPCs in Skyrim!
skyrim has the most intricately designed and detailed npcs in any game besides red dead 2.
>go to Winterhold
>like five shacks across the bridge from one of the most respected schools of magick
>the jarl lives in a literal hut
>the rest of the "city" conveniently fell into the sea of ghosts and no one bothered to rebuild any of it at all
By contrast
>go into Skingrad in Oblivion
>all sorts of places to go and different, proper houses with NPCs with daily schedules
>The Count lives in a fricking mansion castle with all sorts of shit and servants and officials in it
Even Bravil, which is supposed to be a shithole, is more populated.
>what NONSENSE >:(
I recently played Morrowind for the first time. Can confirm that this is your nostalgia speaking. The entire game is populated by nothing but MMO quest givers and walking word documents
Get the graphic overhaul for it. Doesn't change the NPCs but it makes the game bearable to look at.
The issue is major cities in morrowind and oblivion are simply awful so Bethesda just gave up. Like vivec is better than ANYTHING in Skyrim but it is objectively awfully designed and painful to navigate.
I'm replaying morrowind now with the goal of seeing every dialogue option and reading every book. One thing that helps a lot is installing openmw and enabling the feature that greys out dialogue options you have already seen. The dialogue in Morrowind is surprisingly robust, characters have a lot of interesting things to say and unlocking key words unlocks even more dialogue options with characters you have previously spoken to, it's just buried under massive amounts of options. It really helps a lot.
Go to the Skyrim Mission in Ebonheart and talk to Bedraflod. You will die of old age before you can finish reading all of his dialogue. No joke, these are all of his topics.
Something interesting I have observed about the way dialogue is handled in this game (a series of generic responses generated by background values + unique responses per NPC) is that this allows for a wider variety of dialogue on a per NPC basis. Comparatively the branching dialogue in Skyrim created in an attempt to emulate bioshit is much more intensive in terms of what has to be written while only giving the illusion of choice and hard locking you into dialogue trees, which leads to less AND worse AND repetitive writing, which in turn leads to less NPCs. Bethesda is really ass backwards.
Only brainless struggle to understand vivec. I'm a zoomer who first times morrowind last year (I like retro games) and if you ask any of the locals about the city layout they'll tell you everything you need to know
It's not about understanding, its about the city being a huge pain in the ass to traverse. After 2 decades of going through Vivec I can accept that not everything about Morrowind is perfect. The great tragedy to me is that nothing really surpasses what it does and fills that same niche, despite being a very flawed game. I like Morrowind. I want more of it. I want to see games that improve on what Morrowind did. This applies to vidya as a whole, but ES is especially bad because successors are generally just hacking away at what the game built without really improving anything.
It's easy to know where you're going in Vivec, but that doesn't mean it's not poorly designed. I'm one of those insane people who actually doesn't mind the aesthetics of the Cantons and even I admit that they just suck to traverse and walk around. You can kind of tell that the designers wanted to do more with the city, but even for the time the stripped down Vivec was pushing what most computers and consoles of the time were capable of.
>enabling the feature that greys out dialogue options you have already seen
im doing my first vanilla morrowind playthrough and this is the one non-vanilla feature that has carried me through. i can't believe they didnt think to implement this in the original.
t. moron homosexual
vivec is awesome
This is what they wanted it to look like.
That's already what it looks like. This is what they wanted it to look like.
This version of vivec is no longer in the game and I dont think the files survived for us to see that layout.
I don't think there ever were any files. It's just a mock-up made of placeholder assets and other assets they already finished for other things. A seasoned 3D modeler could make all those assets in a day or two. Also fun fact, I think the reason the ministry of truth has ropes hanging from it is cause climbable ropes were originally a planned feature for the game. Possibly to replace the climbing skill from Daggerfall.
Which is funny, because most of Vivec's interiors in online are small as shit, and ruin the aesthetic of the original. Why Redoran designs all throughout Vivec? Makes no sense.
Because it is a shitty MMO.
Vivec IS a homosexual
an unabashed homosexual, who enters into open relationships with gods of rape and bites their dicks off when he gets bored of it
It was the self insert of the closeted homosexual that wrote him.
KCD has open cities without huge performance hits (not any worse than skyrim had at launch anyways) and it doesnt even have things like vertical movement compared to Fallout 4 or Morrowind.
KCD is an awful game, though.
And Skyrim isn't?
Fair.
Compare to Skyrim it's a masterpiece.
It actually tried to make all builds viable rather than handicapping all non barbarian and sneakthief builds.
> rather than handicapping all non barbarian and sneakthief builds.
Amazing how in 2022 people are this bad at skyrim they say shit like this
Glitches and exploits dont count.
Bethesda admitted themselves they didnt want magic to be stronger than the physical playstyles.
No one said shit about using gltiches and exploits m8.
>conjuration in general
>paralysis spam
>enchanted gear paired with high level alteration buffs that makes you invincible
>ice magic against melee enemies
Conjurer/Alteration mage is one of the strongest things in the game. Also melee stealth is entirely viable with good gear and perk investment, you're almost invisible and with DB boots you're silent. Melee stealth executions are a hell of a lot more satisfying than watching a slow mo arrow ragdoll someone into a cartwheel for the billionth time like you're playing Archer Elite.
magic is so unfun compared to what it once was its depressing, I'm not sure how you can post this in good faith
It was good in Morrowind. It was genuinely just as dogshit in Oblivion if not worse. The hairdryer "flamethrower" and elemental equivalents you start with are genuine dogshit but it's pretty fun to shoot an icicle straight through somebody's face. That said mods make magic more fun in skyrim than unmodded is in Morrowind.
Skyrim's magic would be good if anyone at Bethesda regularly played Mage. When it comes to cutting features magic is always first because Todd is well known for playing mainly Barbarian-type characters, and the meme Stealth Archer playstyle was apparently played by most of the staff.
Skyrim's magic is the base of a fairly robust magic system without any of the customization that would make it anything but underpowered and sidelined by people who prefer being smashtards.
The summon magic is fun though, I like raising the dead and shoving high quality weapons in their arms.
Actual necromancy was one of the legitimately good additions Skyrim made to magic and is something the series had desperately needed up to that point. The different types of Destruction spells were also a really good addition that varies up the kind of combat magic you can do.
Too bad it was built off arbitrary cuts to Alteration and the complete dissolution of Mysticism because no one can think of mystical shaman-style spells.
I find it quite fun that a good chunk of Conjuration spells basically makes you a Necromancer/Warlock hybrid, summoning demonic creatures and raising the dead is so much fun!
Just pirate the CC content, its quasi official and adds a bunch of new spells to each school that make up for how dogshit magic was in the base game.
Pretty much eliminates the need for magic mods
>That said mods make magic more fun in skyrim than unmodded is in Morrowind.
I know for a fact that they do not. They simply cannot interact with the world in the same way. And not just in obvious ways. Like I can't just make a ring that permanently sets me on fire that does zero damage and use it as a light source in Skyrim, but I can in Morrowind.
There is no magic in Skyrim.
You're nuts. The game is impossible with light armor. You get into a group fight and you're fricking dead unless you pussy archer them from your horse. Sneaking around camps and executing people was kino though.
It really isn't. It's a completely historically inaccurate game who's entire selling point is being historically accurate, so now we get a shallow open world game with Netflix tier writing, which redditors mistake for being deep and soulful euro jank because it's slightly clunky.
Never forget that Imperial City in Oblivion was originally intended and designed to be bigger, but had to be shrunk down because QA testers kept getting lost exploring the larger version (of course this is on top of Xbox 360 hardware forcing them to split the city into 5 separate world spaces).
This experience with having to shrink down their largest city in any of their games informed their future city design (basically, that was what they've largely used as a measuring stick for when a city/settlement is "too big" so they've never gone larger than Imperial City since then).
My point here is that QA testers are a bunch of drooling morons and they're a significant part of the reason that Bethesda games don't have larger cities and towns.
I fricking hate human cattle
>QA testers nuke a larger imperial city because they got lost a couple times
>also can't find major gamebreaking bugs before release
Do Bethesda's QA testers even have brains? Is the reason they keep including Super Mutants in their Fallout games because they're representing their employees?
its been known across the industry that only complete morons can be hired for QA. bethesda's games are far from alone in this, half life 2 is a major example of every game getting nuked because of brainlet testers not being able to figure out the most simple "cube shaped toy goes in square shaped hole" puzzle.
QA finds almost every single bug. Management doesn’t care. The term it as a known shippable and do nothing.
>had to be shrunk down because QA testers kept getting lost
>still incredibly easy to get lost (without the map) because it's very samey, flat, and you can't see over the walls to get an idea of where you are, only the tower that looks identical on all sides gives you an idea of where you are
Putting the cities in separate load zones was already where they died as far as I'm concerned
He's wrong. Bethesda only shrunk cities after Fallout 3 when people complained about being lost in Rivet City
So it was shitters yet again that ruined the quality of a game. Rivet city wasn't even that big and it's not hard to remember the way if you've explored for a bit.
Morrowind
Lively
Pick one. The vast majority of NPCs are statues that wait for you 24/7.
Morrowind has the most souless and lifeless cities in the series.
Nah, I would say a good portion of the towns nail it. Balmora feels like your typical shitty suburban US town with a bar, a church, a strip of stores and services, and a bunch of shitty apartments that keep them all on life support with NPCs that fill out all the appropriate roles, as well as some intrigue behind the scenes. I could care less than they don't occasionally go to the inn to stock up on mazte before they go back home to binge drink. That would just make finding and interacting with people confusing.
Have you seen the cities in Tamriel Rebuilt?
They use the same engine, and yet the city designs are absolutely incredible and BTFO everything in the original game, especially in the Indoril areas where they also use verticality to pad everything out and make everything seem bigger.
What doessome random mod have to do with the point Morrowind has souless and lifeless cities?
homosexual zoomer take. I'm going home, frick you.
>one npc in screenshot
>it's a beast outside the city
what did you mean by this?
NPCs don't render far away also the buildings are taller than the NPCs
Take a better picture then, moron. Do you understand your whole premise rests on showing that morrowind cities are lively?
not him but don't be stupid
the size of the towns and number of buildings is obviously part of the argument
Most critical NPCs thankfully have fairly static positions in Morrowind but generally it's pretty hard to take a picture of the busier places and not capture a few NPCs walking around. I do sort of wish there were more NPCs doing things outside in some places though.
I didn't post it. That's not even the vanilla game anyway, that's Morrowind Rebirth I'm pretty sure. But I do enjoy Morrowind cities more than the other TES game's cities. There's just more to see and do, and them actually being out in the world and not behind a loading zone helps immensely with believability too. Vivec City has 100+ quests that either start there or take you there.
There are homeless khajits outside and they smell bad. I'd rather stay home and drink skooma all day.
Is so funny to me that people pretend NPC's walking in circles and sleeping once per day is this super immersive thing and totally not a ginmick lol
>I saw a mudcrab the other day.
>*Sniff*
>I saw a goblin the other day.
>Goodbye.
>Hello!
>I saw a mudcrab the other day.
>HOLY SHIT ITS SO LIVELY ITS LIKE IM REALLY THERE
Oblivion was empty because their shit engine crashes with more than 20NPCs on screen at once and Morrowind felt dead because NPCs just sat in yhe same spot all the time
What. Oblivion and Morrowind had larger cities compared to Skyrim with even more NPCs in a single area too.
It was a design philosophy that changed. Almost any NPC that was not part of a quest was never put into the game. The cities were small because only a few dozen people would live in each city. The rest of the game was spent on condensing the world so when you immediately exit a city you would be greeted with unique locations where the developers hoped players would rather spend their time.
They did the same thing for Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. The good thing about this design philosophy is that you're more likely to meet quest givers, the bad thing is the world feels small.
Oblivion has less NPCs than skyrim. It is truly awful.
No it doesn't. Oblivion has more NPCs in it's largest city then Skyrim. Morrowind has more NPCs in it's largest city then Oblivion.
Oblivion has about 800 NPCs, Skyrim has about 1000. The city is irrelevant because it is insanely awful and one of the worst parts of the game.
>The city is irrelevant
shifting the goal post
>quest in the imperial city
>it takes you into the sewer
I like the one with the graverobbers but it makes no sense since you rob graves constantly
You get used to the inconsistency if you roleplay your character as someone with brain damage who does whatever he feels would be appropriate for his current opinion of himself for the day.
Its just funny that Jensine will buy zombie flesh but acts like Gilgondirin is the problem
The merchant quest makes more sense if you think of Jensine as the leader of an informal merchant mafia who's only reason to go after the bosmer guy is that he's not price gouging customers and undercutting her bottom line.
>That one quest where you snitch on a guard
>Have to do all the legwork since Hieronymus Nosex is busy trying to find a master theif by patrolling in broad daylight.
>Finally gather the evidence and send the guard to the slammer
>HE BREAKS OUT AND TRIES TO MURDER YOU
Kino
even better
>breaks out using the same route you did at the start
Reminds me of a similar quest in Morrowind
>find some guy out in the middle of nowhere
>tells me his "contact" hasn't arrived yet to pick up a shipment of weapons
>agree to take them to his contact in Ald'Ruhn for him
>sell the weapons at some random vendor cause they weigh too much and I'd get a better price for them that way
>sometime later visit Ald'Ruhn and he's waiting there on the fricking silt strider platform and he tries to murder me for fricking him over
Quests like this are always great
as big as the imperial city is in oblivion it's a fricking ghost town
oblivion really is my favorite, but when i went back to play it was really fricking astonished at how much was covered over by nostalgia
at any time most towns have like 8 npcs tops, four are guards and the rest just walk a patrol path and say like three phrases
they weren't
you were just younger and a nostalgic frick
>Oblivion
>lively
frogposters continue to be moronic
It is lively though, NPCs talk to each other, interact with objects, NPCs even commit crime. Bethesda should have further improved upon the rumor dialogue system and radiant AI instead of giving it up completely
Yes, we know Todd, Radiant AI sounds very good on paper. Oblivion's been out for 15+ years now and we know how shit and dull it is in execution.
>how shit and dull it is in execution.
It isn't
It's a massive fricking stretch to call any of the cities "lively." The cities are usually pretty sleepy or otherwise dull, usually because of their size and lack of "lively" details. Look at this fan art of Suran. This is fricking lively. If you walked into town and saw this, I'd say yeah, that's lively as shit. But you don't, you walk into town and see one guy walking around with his shirt of talking about the end of the world. I don't even mind the cities being more sleepy and dull, but the fact that NONE of them feel lively is because of engine limitations and not some purposeful artistic decision to make huge cities feel like every inhabitant is a zombie waiting for the next shipment of coffee beans that's several months late.
>is because of engine limitations
It has frick all to do with engine limitations, it has to do with game design.
Elder scrolls game's have small cities with low NPC counts because Bethesda does a lot of things other games don't do that zaps away alot of system resources that other games use for larger towns.
1. In most games NPCs, and their clothes/armor, are modeled, textured, and rendered, as a single object. This is because you can't take them off, so there's no reason to render them a separate objects. In Bethesda games every single piece of armor, clothing israeliteelry, etc is rendered as a separate object to allow for the dynamic removal of NPC items
2. In large cities in most games NPCs are all controlled by a singular AI system. There is almost no individual AI scripting for any singular NPC. In Bethesda games not only does nearly every single NPC in towns have their own AI script, but all of these scripts are running all the time, even if you aren't in the same cell, so that way, if your in Riften, and get a quest to kill someone in Solitude, the game can keep track of where that NPC should be at that time of day in the city.
3. Most games don't let you pick up, move around, destroy, or interact, with world objects at all. And in the case of something like breaking a bench in GTA it gets repaired the moment you leave the view. In Bethesda game every cabbage, fork, spoon, etc is its own object, with physics, and every object that gets moved get saved into memory until the cell resets(this was the cause of the poor performance on the PS3)
People made GTA style cities in the engine as far back as Morrowind, and they worked fine so long as you built them like a GTA style city, and not like a Bethesda game world. These issues are why other games like Witcher 3, GTA, etc. don't even let you attempt to do these things. The game would kill itself if it tried with towns that big.
These issues are also the cause of rather infamous things like dead bodies getting cleaned up in Read Dead 2 every time you go through a doorway. The game is desperately trying to remove ANY changes to the game world to cut down memory use becuase it would run into these same issues.
Its really not an engine problem, in so far as every engine would have the same problems if they tried to do these things and have big cities. Its a design issue on Bethesda's part for wanting these highly detailed worlds/individualized NPCs rather then a big cardboard city with random NPCs that just walk around the block all day.
>it's not an engine limitation, it's a limitation of the engine
Okay, well Kingdom Come had more lively cities with all this stuff and they were bigger and there were no loading screens.
>but that's 2017
Fair, but regardless, Bethesda doesn't go the extra mile to make cities feel lively. They have repeatedly shown they don't know how to compromise between their AI/NPC systems and giving the player a feeling of scale/liveliness. And I appreciate the benefits of what you see is what you get with NPC inventories, and that the radiant AI system at least is unique in what it's trying to do, but it's not helping the city atmosphere. You know what they've wanted to implement for years but never have? Holidays. Those could help a lot, but they're focused on Dwemer Ruin #625 or Ayleid Ruin #216 or Draugr Ruin #796 or forgettable quest #21096 or forgettable dialogue #82060
>Holidays.
That would be an absolute waste of time IMO because players can spend days of game time out in the wilderness and are almost certainly going to miss them unless the know about them beforehand.
And like, unless you spend A LOT of time creating tons of decorations, dances, special bard songs, etc. to make it feel like a real holiday, its just going to be some banners added to houses, and like 1-2 lines of dialogue changing. But doing all that is a minor novelty, that most players will never really care about, when you could be making Swner ruin 625, or Aylied ruin 216, or Dragur Ruin 796, and actually provide more content to the players
>players can spend days of game time out in the wilderness and are almost certainly going to miss them unless the know about them beforehand
So don't make them last 1 day or have an announcement or have a town NPC that likes you send you an invite with a courier, also stop making so many quests send people to shitty dungeons and actually use the towns more
>So don't make them last 1 day
Most holidays last only one day IRL otuside the winter holidays. At this point your just trying to artificially inflate in-game holidays to being much longer then they should simply to justify having holidays in the first place. That's fairly shitty reasoning.
>also stop making so many quests send people to shitty dungeons and actually use the towns more
>stop making quests that have you explore the world
>in a massive open world game where exploring the world is the main draw
Seems to me you don't really want an open world game.
>ignores the other points about having announcements/invites
>heh, if you don't like shitty copy pasted content, why are you even playing an open world game kiddo?
Frick off
>ignores the other points about having announcements/invites
I didn't ignore it, its just fricking dumb. Are most holidays "announced" like its some thing most people don't already know is happening the same time this year as it does every year? Why would you be invited to any of it in the first place? Are you "invited" to Presidents Day?
Gee I don't fricking know, every year christmas just comes and goes and no one talks about it unless it's literally December 25th! FRICKING WEIRD HUH?
>Why would you be invited to any of it in the first place?
BECAUSE AN NPC LIKES YOU AND WANTS TO SEE YOU THERE YOU DUMB Black person? BECAUSE YOU HAVE A HIGH SKILL IN HORSE FIGHTING OR SOME SHIT AND THEY WANT YOU TO PARTICIPATE IN A COMPETITION ABOUT IT?
>Are you "invited" to Presidents Day?
YES BECAUSE EVERY HOLIDAY IS FRICKING PRESIDENTS DAY. YOU ARE SUCH A DUMB CLUELESS BRAINDEAD FRICKING Black person. have a nice day
Hit submit too fast
>And like, unless you spend A LOT of time creating tons of decorations, dances, special bard songs, etc. to make it feel like a real holiday, its just going to be some banners added to houses, and like 1-2 lines of dialogue changing. But doing all that is a minor novelty, that most players will never really care about, when you could be making Swner ruin 625, or Aylied ruin 216, or Dragur Ruin 796, and actually provide more content to the players
Have some repeated quest/quests happen. Have a cook off you can participate in. Have a randomly generated easter egg hunt for some prize. Have a mock horse combat battle in an arena. Just something to make the towns not feel so dead. I would sacrifice half or more of the shitty quests and dungeons in these games if they did more shit like this.
>Have a cook off you can participate in
Shit like this is a novelty most video game players don't give two fricks about. And is worse because it would come at the expensive of the rest fo the game world most people do care about.
The player doesn't have to participate, but the knowledge that something is happening other than "do you get to the cloud district very often" contributes to the feeling of being in an actual fricking town. Also, so what if its a novelty? It's a fricking holiday. What holiday isn't a novelty at this point?
>Fallout 4 had Christmas events in Diamond City
>literally no one who played the game gave a shit outside of the first mention
>That would be an absolute waste of time IMO because players can spend days of game time out in the wilderness and are almost certainly going to miss them unless the know about them beforehand.
And? Lots of games have timed content that players can miss if they're too busy just killing random shit and ignoring the world around them. There can be meaningful content that isn't delivered via dragging the player by the ear till it's right in front of their face.
>And? Lots of games have timed content that players can miss if they're too busy just killing random shit and ignoring the world around them.
timed missable content is one of the single most complained about things in video games, and almost no devs does it otuside of indie gay CRPGs trying to play off of the nostalgia for BG still do it because its so universally reviled.
Your argument at this point is
>Do the thing literally everyone hates!
>players complain, remove it
Hi Todd. Also it'd be annual, you wouldn't miss it forever
Daggerfall had a ton of holidays. Some did stuff, some were just flavor text, but they were a nice extra layer of world building.
>games are made to be fun
>no one likes thing
>WHY DID THEY REMOVE IT!
hmmm. Hell, even the original Fallout patched out one of the game's two big time limited because everyone hated it.
It'd be annual you autist, you wouldn't miss it forever. Read homosexual
>no thats still bad because... because it just is!
Its bad because its something that the vast majority of people don't care for, and because it would take away time and development on more worldspace stuff people do care for, just to sooth your specific form of autism.
Gaming was held back so fricking badly by consoles in the late 7th gen it was unreal. Skyrim was a 2011 game that had to run on fricking 2005 hardware, and they still got another 2 years out of that gen after that.
I hope we never experience something like that again.
we still are right now. its never stopped.
We will as long as consoles exist
>1000 Planets?
>Too vast! Give me all content close by!
Anti bethesda gays will never be pleased, it's a useless fight with them.
I can recognize skyrim's flaws, but at it's time the open world was impressive.
>more draugr dungeons good
With 998 planets being filled with absolutely nothing
homie the game released in 2011 it was designed for Xbox 360's they couldnt exactly make a modern open world at the time
unless you want to rewrite time and make it so that the ps3 was the only console and make it more powerful and cost 799$
there's no way to make skyrim bigger besides mods which means you're no longer playing the same game
Thats what happens when you confine games to consoles.
>not modding Skyrim into the perfect game
Being a consolegay must really suck
There is not a single mod that makes skyrim a better game.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/9279/
>Fixed seams on vulva
bruh
People still mod Bethesda games? I know the degenerates and freaks from tesg are into but do actual fans mod the game?
I don't think mods have been necessary to fix a Bethesda game post Morrowind.
isnt tesg just 3 people talking about porn mods and mmo discussion
In my brief foray it was all waifugays and degenerates. From what I remember someone really liked fat women. Like a fricking lot. I don't remember anything about lore being discussed.
Have not ventured back since.
is there a mod that makes the game less cramped and tiny?
I remember there was a cat at the bar I had gay sex with in VR with at that town, good times. Though I had some forest mod so it was all covered in trees
>tfw something around there give me a major fps hit for a little while
No idea what a mod did but it hasnt crashed the game so whatever,
Any news on the new Elder Scrolls 5 remaster?
Nothing I'd like to talk about
So, anyone knows any mods to remove main quest line and make it more "freeroam" or something like this?
I remember there was one years ago called "You are not the Dragonborn" that might be up your alley?
You could probably make a mod like that easily enough.
>"You are not the Dragonborn"
kek
I already beat it once
stop being lazy
Skyrim unbound, in the menu pick the non dragonborn option.
It lets you start in a custom way unrelated to helgen or the main quest
Sounds nice, thanks
Why do you need a mod to do this? Literally just walk away after you escape Helgen. That's the fricking point of TES, do what you want
What do they eat?
There's literally crops all around the town.
Now dawnstar on the other hand...
Dawnstar is an active port that isn't frozen over at least.
Winterhold is what is truly perplexing, it supposedly used to be the capital of skyrim but it was always a frozen shithole and there's no evidence of it ever having a port (and even if it did, it would be frozen)
Wasn't that Windhelm, not Winterhold?
No, winterhold used to be the capital.
every "city" in the game used to be a capital
going by that picture, dairy products, vegetables and grain, maybe even meat...
You're moms pussay
They have some guy on doordash pick up stuff from whiterun
Rorikstead
As in homestead
As in...
Farming
Ranching
Beekeeping
Hunting
Gathering
Fishing
Trapping
God dammit you just made me hungry for some cooked soup and a sweetroll.
Which one of the four buildings is he from?
He was the town hobo.
Ok but which street?
Also, what do they eat?
I love how this question is in every thread ever like Ganker users all get a hole in their head and cant conceive of a town shipping in food from another town
It's even funnier for shit like Skyrim where the wilderness is teaming with wildlife, the pastime for nearly every Nord is hunting, or there's just a straight up farm outside.
The problem is that most nords seemingly subsist on a diet of nothing but meat, sweet rolls, and beer. There is also various produce littered around with absolute zero explanation as to where it comes from. It's also strange that Skyrim has less than half as many NPCs as Morrowind despite being more than twice its size. Everything in the world is kinda just empty and dead, and nothing feels real or cohesive.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure there's not a single bakery in the entire game.
>the pastime for nearly every Nord is hunting
Illegal, all wildlife belongs to the jarl
towns should have a reason to exist. If they're shipping in food then they better be raking in cash from some other industry.
Its just good worldbuilding.
Why is the town there if it has to import food? Is there some significant landmark? Natural resource? They just built a village in a barren land to import food to for fun?
There are actually a number of reasons, as you said it might have access to some landmark or resource of importance (mining towns spring to mind).
It may also be a strategically important location (border city/town that guards against neighbouring forces, center of commerce or government, etc).
There are TONS of reasons why a city or town might pop up in a strange location and need regular imports.
>We will never get an all around good ES game with the world of Morrowind, Quests of Oblivion and whatever Skyrim has over those 2 games all put together.
feels bad man
>Throws up
>Don't blame Bethesda for having to make it run on that piece of shit 360
And yet SE and Anniversary still have the same LOD quality.
Not him but.... why would they have redone the LOD for skyrim Anniv in the first place?
>still have the same LOD quality.
You can adjust it in the game files Anon. And if you're feeling bold and you want to set your PC on fire, adjust the UGRID
Not all cut content is complete. Fallout 3 had a metric ton of cut content, from riding giant mole rats to all of the Enclave content.
>to all of the Enclave content.
there was never any Encalve content cut from Fo3.
The only thing cut form Fo3 that involved the Enclave was that the very original plan for the game involved the Enclave attacking Rivet city, and the people having to be evacuated to the citadel. But that was never even in actual devlopment at any point
>from riding giant mole rats
this was also never cut cotnent.
cut content is content made for the game that got removed from final release. At no point during Fo3's development did they ever actually intended or try, to make giant rideable mole rats. That was just some concept art one of the artists did.
Thats concept art someone made into a mod to showcase how it would work idiot
concept art is content that cut before it even made the game 🙂
That's not how cut content works or is defined.
The wannamingos in this video, also a mod.
I* was thinking they could've put another house there
>calls the police
Literally Oblivion
Oblivion but more rocks
can't be, the mountains don't look like kneaded clay
Hey remember how Rorik said he bought the land during the great war so that's why it's named after him, and then you read a book saying Rorikstead is 1000 years old?
He lied
because Rorik is a daedra-worshipper and a liar
Yeah, Rorik is not talking about the civil war
no, he is talking about war that ended 25 years ago
do you need that
>Rorikstead is 1000 years old
line to be run past you again?
why did he do it bros?
I am always upset that theres no unique NPC you can talk to in Rorikstead that knows the thief at the beginning of the game and you can break the news about his death.
its a great thing i turned skyrim into an uncregonizeable uncanny valley mess thats more fun to play than any bethesda game both modded and vanilla
and now ive been stalling playing again since im having issues getting my custom follower turned into a legit mod through racemenu
>spoiler
are you doing the nifmerge thing because I always had shit tons of trouble with that too
fricking yes, its destroying my model, i think its only because the first time around in the nifoptimizer i forgot to click "head parts only" but its enough to make me set it aside for another day, im using the high poly head to make things worse.
I'm not sure if it was a placebo effect or what, but what I started doing is creating an NPC in the ck and I would make their face as similar to the facegendata I exported from RM as I possibly could, then I merged the nifs. It seemed to turn out reasonably well.
Don't know if thats any help.
interesting, in every tutorial its not needed at all since you just replace the facegen files from CK with the racemenu follower ones. It might just be me needing to enable an esp with HPH.
These are the notes I had written for myself back when I made a few followers for the site, after a few long weekends of watching youtube tutorials figuring out how to make this shit work
Ideally you should never need to put any other plugin as a master .esp outside of body physics, and it sounds to me like you're messing up something with the merge itself (I solved the same issue by double checking that the number of parts actually matched); the HPH model itself should be included as a body part and nothing more
I'd almost offer to make it for you, but I don't wanna fall back into that spiral just yet
You know if you've got the aptitude, you should join the mage's college in winterhold
>put 4 houses
>call it a town
skycucks will defend this
Who? Where?
>"ruins of the great collapse"
>its 3 destroyed houses
Great job Todd
Alright, what if
>shitty late 90s graphics
>no voice acting
>all the saved space is used to make a bigger, fuller world with more NPCs, interactions and consequences
Would you play this hypothetical RPG?
sure why not
Chronicles of Myrtana has a reasonably sized port city with all buildings enterable with no loading screens and majority of named characters are involved in several quests.
They are still voiced though.
I think the graphics/size/population balance is pretty damn good here.
wait, no the only voices are bits used from base Gothic 2
the dialogues are text only
Archolos is fully voiced though in eargrating polish.
yes but no one will make it
VA and grafx are not limiting factors for AAA game companies. The game you are looking for is Dwarf Fortress, or maybe Rimworld.
But they are limiting factors for my funny little hard drive.
>Would you play this hypothetical RPG?
I'm already playing it anon.
Tamriel Rebuilt - mod for morrowind adding mainland morrowind (about 45% so far) and in the future (maybe 20 years or so ) ALL provinces of Tamriel.
< 20% of an Imperial town.
When i'm done with my current run i'll make a guide thread how to set up Morrowind and TR.
Abandoned fort in the middle of nowhere full of undead
Ordinator in mourning in Necrom
Some Telvanni tower and town
they really did a fantastic job with TR. im still playing through the main game but i cant wait to finish seeing all of the original game and go to the extended lands
my personal favorite town is almas thirr. i'm an absolute dunmergay, so having a vivec canton town with some substance along with an incredible temple questline was quite the treat.
>they really did a fantastic job with TR
Finished the main game (this is only my second full playthrough) and started TR about a week ago.
I expected this to just be another decent attempt at a mod but holy shit i did not expect this to put bethesda to shame.There is so much great stuff in TR it's unreal , what is also great is the fact that when (in 20 years) they recreate all the provinces they will be lore friendly (as of morrowind time line anyway).Can't wait to explore the jungles around the Imperial City built in the Akaviry architectural style
> The year is 2079
> TR rebuilt is 30% done overall, Morrowind and Skyrim are complete
> The MP mod has been fully integrated into OpenMW and the OpenOBL branch has finally hit 1.0
> Finally the MMO everyone dreamed of.
Do morons seriously want to aimlessly walk around needlessly big cities? You either get cities like Novigrad from Witcher 3 that is big but has no depth to it, or towns that have a small scale but dense with substance and that are big enough to sell the illusion.
thats the problem with the average "i never played skyrim so this is what i think" opinions, most of the small towns in skyrim are tiny but detailed with the npcs and the stories revolving around the npcs. Shor's stone for example, tiny town but its a mining town so there's a story behind the mine + the miners and the cute wife Sjola orwhatever her name is. That seems to be the design philosphy of the game, in exchange for some places being seemingly barren, they add the detail to the NPCs.
but it hardly works vanilla because the game is literal eye cancer and once you finish quests the npcs just go back to vanilla lines so there's really no reason to revisit. I think mods should be a great way to fix that but a lot of people just don't touch the smaller towns.
>most of the small towns in skyrim are tiny but detailed with the npcs and the stories revolving around the npcs
Skyrim has theme park design. It is quite literally designed like an mmo where towns are purely quest hubs.
that doesnt really disprove what i said kek, they're literally you talk to some npcs and then leave when the quests are done. though i'd even say "theme park design" is giving it too much credit. At least there's sights to see and things to do besides ride the rides in a theme park.
Well obviously the big city crowd wants their cake and eat it too. They want the size of novigrad with the density of small town designs. Which would be great if a developer could pull that off but that developer isnt going to be Bethesda
>Do morons seriously want to aimlessly walk around needlessly big cities
I would like towns and cities like that are content dense like Khorinis and/or fleshed out like Balmora.
Yes. I want big cities with hundreds of copy paste NPCs, with some of them being unique and having quests. It's more immersive.
Skyrim has three huts, 6 named characters and one of them has a quest. It's shit.
you say that, but navigating that shit would be a nightmare
it'll be worse than vivec
Witcher did it. AssCreed did it before Skyrim.
Novigrad is cool though. That said, I really liked the Imperial City and would enjoy something like that but with more size and detail. If that means the entire game needs to be set there then I'm ok with that.
>Do morons seriously want to aimlessly walk around needlessly big cities?
Yeah realistic cities are a must have, hopefully starfield won't cater to consolegays and we'll get a proper game.
This. The Witcher 3 felt like it was made out of cardboard.
my mother told me
sumday I will buiie
galli with gud ores
sayel to distant shores
I like Skyrim for it's map design, locations are placed and distanced from each other just enough to give a sense of wonder what might be over a cliffside or a treeline or just over a hill.
Its where Bethesda excels more than anything else. Fallout 4 is the same way even if the quests, rpg mechanics, characters, voice acting, plot, graphics are all shit what is undeniably enjoyable is roaming the wasteland exploring whats around the bend.
but there is nothing interesting to find in skyrim imo
How can we fix shields?
What do they eat?
Cliff bars
Frick you
Alright.
But what do THEY eat?
My penis.
Snails, garlic, and Englishmen.
Food.
They have to in order to survive.
🙂
Rocky road.
The town clearly fishes off the castle walls for their meals every day.
oui oui hahahah
Hmm probably anything from the thousands of acres of farmland that surrounds it
i know it's a meme, but when fo3gays unironically use this town to defend megaton it frustrates me.
like this town being on a peninsula that's submerged at high tide while still being surrounded by french farmland on the mainland is exactly the same as megaton having zero places where it either produces food itself, or gets food from literally anywhere else in the wasteland.
They trade for food.
Also they probably do grow food, Bethesda just didn't think anyone would give a shit so they didn't plop a farm down in their themepark.
Trade just adds a middleman since the game doesn't bother explaining where those traders get their food either. Which is why 3gays over a decade and a half later still can't answer where Megaton gets its food, because the answer doesn't exist in the game.
But yeah, Bethesda didn't bother trying to explain their world and just tried to mindlessly copy the tone of the original Fallout without caring about the substance of that game's setting.
Yes, and in the absence of the answer, we can imply some simple ideas.
They get food somehow because they have to to survive.
This simple idea seems to really upset some people.
>megaton gets food because it exists
Not an answer, when the existence of a town hinges not on things you can see in the environment or infer based on local factions you're saying that the town exists because it does.
You can see small farmsteads in Fallout 4 dotted around the landscape which explains how people in the wasteland feed themselves. You see not only massive farms like the Sharecropper Farms in New Vegas, but also the very existence of the NCR implies that they ship in a decent amount of food from their homeland as both supplies for their soldiers and trade goods to deal with the locals.
Fallout 3 does none of this, the closest it gets is Rivet City with those experimental vegetables that you are directly told are delicate and experimental. Megaton existing because it exists is not a satisfying answer when every other game in the series has at least done the bare minimum to answer what people eat.
See what I mean by making certain people angry?
This poster literally can not accept the fact that humans need food.
Yes. Humans need food, so where does Megaton get their food?
You're acting like saying it exists because people are there so their must be food is some kind of gotcha, but it's just a self-own.
If Megaton gets food where does it come from? Fallout answers where food comes from, Fallout 2 answers where food comes from, Fallout New Vegas answers where food comes from, Fallout 4 answers where food comes from. Fricks sake, even the Elder Scrolls games barring Oblivion answer where food comes from. Why is it okay for Fallout 3 to not answer a basic fricking question that literally every other game not only in its own series answers, but also Bethesda's flagship fantasy series answers?
Pretending as if the end result existing is proof that the thing Bethesda objectively failed to show in its world actually exists is pants-on-head moronic circular logic.
>so where does Megaton get their food?
Somewhere.
They have to to survive.
>from the shop
ebin
this reminds of people claiming food comes from the supermarket kek
You can just say you don't have an answer and are just baiting for (You)s.
You already know why your circular logic is nonsense, and I've already accepted your concession.
>They have to to survive.
If self-preservation and basic survival were at the top of the list they would not be comfortably squatting around an undetonated warhead, thats surrounded by a puddle of irradiated water and living in homes with thin metal sheets that have holes in them.
Yeah I know.
'tis a silly game.
I also agree that there's no answer.
I just don't get mad about it.
>i have no standards and don't want my games to be good
I mean, at least you admit it. It's okay that you have the consoomer mindset. Just don't pretend people are wrong for noticing problems and pointing out said problems instead of turning off their brains and consooming like you do.
It's so easy to "win" when you just decide what my argument is, isn't it?
Good for you.
>It's so easy to "win" when you just decide what my argument is, isn't it?
Pot meet kettle. Besides, what you've said makes it clear what your argument is. You're somehow mentally superior to other people for turning your brain off and just accepting nonsensical shit meant to extract applause from the lowest common denominator.
>You're somehow mentally superior
No? It's not a competition. It simply isn't worth the energy when the only possible answers are "it has to".
A video game isn't real life. The NPCs get food because they do. It's not hard.
>You're somehow mentally superior to other people for turning your brain off and just accepting nonsensical shit meant to extract applause from the lowest common denominator.
I fail to see how this isn't an accurate assessment of your mindset considering everything you just said. You might be okay with games treating you like a dribbling moron, but I'd like at least a modicum of thought, care, and effort put into the games I like.
You don't have to be mad to point out absurdity or stupidity. Did you think your parents were mad when they told you microwaving silverware or talking to strangers was dumb?
It is neither absurd, nor stupid. It's a video game.
If you believe not putting a farm next to a town in a video game is absurd then I am very happy for you because apparently you have no real problems you have to deal with.
A game can follow a degree of internal consistency with simplistic aspects and worldbuilding. If every other game could address this then 3 had no excuse. You started crying when your parents told you that eating mouse poison is bad didn't you?
>even the Elder Scrolls games barring Oblivion answer where food comes from
but there are farms outside the cities
>not the capital of the empire!
probably relies on food imports just like Rome did
>actually they import all their food from the 1 farm outside of a minority of the cities
There's more world building towards where the NPCs get wine than where they get food in Oblivion.
There are farms near most settlements, many of them are coastal, if you give the 'farms' in the Fallout games a pass then you should also give Oblivion a pass
Oblivion's farms are hilariously barebones in comparison to both its predecessor and successor. Morrowind's farmland is obvious considering the Ascadian Isles, but Skyrim's farmsteads do a better job than Oblivion's farms.
Not saying Oblivion's farms don't exist, but their lack of ubiquity exemplifies a problem with Oblivion in general, which is that its world in general pushes Bethesda's regular compressed scale into the nonsense territory. Leyawiin blocking the river despite supposedly being a checkpoint for trade from the Imperial City shows this off the best imo.
I just scanned the coast and there were 3 settlements on the coast, one was just filled with necromancers, one has an isolating witch inside of it, and the last one is literally called Water's Edge and has small gardens instead of a farm. I don't know where you got your info from.
Anvil, the IC, Bravil and Leyawin are coastal, Cheydinal and Skingrad are close to two major rivers.
homie those are cities, not settlements. Even then, Anvil has 1 plantation near them (which you can stop production of during a quest), Skingrad has grape farms for wine and a couple sheep, Leyawiin has village with a tiny farm down the road from them, Cheydinhaal has a village with a tiny farm near them, Bruma has a village with a tiny farm near them, and Bravil, Kvatch, and Chorrol have jack shit. There isn't nearly enough to support the cities let alone support exporting shit to the Imperial City apart from wine. Sure some of them can fish (and technically the IC has 1 fisherman) but that's like saying an entire city is surviving off of hunting.
>There isn't nearly enough to support the cities
That's why I said if you give the Fallout games a pass then you should also give Oblivion a pass because there's no way the puny farms in Fallout can sustain their settlements either.
Except it's Skyrim and not Oblivion that meets that minimum that those same Fallout games reach. Skyrim's farms may be minuscule, but at least they put an effort to show that each large city has some local producers.
Oblivion on the other hand has one farm related to a major settlement, a couple vinyards, a village with a couple gardens, and some farmsteads in the wilderness.
Nobody except morons care about farms.
this entire argument just proves how butthurt nv trannies are. they literally have to cherry pick mundane garbage to find reasons to shit on the game.
>asking what largest settlement in the game eats is cherrypicking
Are 3gays all the kind of people who think food magically appears in supermarket aisles? If it's just cherrypicking mundane shit then what does Megaton eat?
Molerats aren't an answer, the Wasteland Survival Guide implies they see them as pests, and Moira is distressed her stick killed them. Quite the odd response for someone who supposedly lives on Molerat meat.
Trade isn't the answer either, that's just adding a middleman since there's nowhere in the region for the traders to get food.
You can't argue this is cherrypicking when the first settlements you come across in every other Fallout game explain how the settlements get their food. Or do the farms and gardens of Goodsprings and Shady Sands just not exist?
What does Megaton eat?
Fish!
Island cake
Winner
For me its Mchicken
Clams, oisters and dicky
Omelettes
>Goof go spoofy
>no one there knew him or comments on him being missing
>no chance to find a family member and tell them you saw his death
Bethesda writers let so much potential just slip by them it's kinda sad.
What are some kino coomer mods for my first PC run of skyrim?
Just go to Lovers Lab and find what you like. I don't know what kneads your dough.
osex or whatever its called now thats still updated
if you find the e-girl shit post it
ATF still has that stuff, doesn't it? I'm not into it so I never got it but I recall that being where people were going for it.
animated hugs
Cute.
and headpats
and motorboating
>defined muscles
Patrician taste, anon. Did you use cbbe muscle definition/normalmaps?
MODS!
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/29620
she in particular uses SNU
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/61908
>SNU
>not TBD
you're missing out Anon
SNU is a CBBE texture, not a body replacer, anon
I CAN give it a TBD shape if I want, because 3BA - which I use - has sliders for it
the world needs more muscle girls
>muscle girl
>obscene amount of hideous fat hanging from her
lol
that's the second best part
sometimes i get the urge to start another game with devious devices
and then i remember how fricking long it takes to mod skyrim and how annoying the nexus and loverslab are and i just say forget it
right now I just have Sexlab SE and Defeat SE
i know but i can't play without satisfying my bondage and piercing kink
this is the type of female I would let sit on my face not that I would have much of a choice
>Yes, I'm a Breton (headcanon Reachman)
>Yes, I love gray, blue, red eyed pussy
>No, I won't elaborate further
>Yes, I love gray, blue, red eyed pussy
Just install masterstroke or something. coomer mods are a patching nightmare.
Masterstroke is for bdsm trannies.
What a nine-forsaken backwater
I have now fixed your town for free. Thank me later Todd. See you on Creation Club.
and now you need to patch any mod that conflicts with your mod
I like to think of Skyrim NPCs the 3D equivalent of an NPC from a 2D 16-bit RPG. They just walk around and shout a phrase at you when you interact with them.
>he doesnt get to the cloud district very often
RADIANT AI
SAY IT
RADIANT AI
if GTA can put you in a huge city with thousands of buildings why is a city in skyrim 5 huts and an outhouse
since there are so many nords you'd think there be places for them to live in
Todd's autism requires him to name every character.
buildings in gta are just towers not even actual buildings and that's not mention the amount of scripting or npcs you have to deal with
gta is moronic by comparsion to skyrim
Can you enter every building in GTA?
Do they have fully modeled interiors and interactable physics objects and characters?
There's your answer.
>GTA V has been ported to every console except nintendo's and has been on pc since 2014
>still cant enter 99% of the buildings
absolute state
Did Skyrim developers spend more than 5 minutes of copy pasting on 99% of the buildings?
>dood copy paste
you do realize the game was meant to run on 256mb of ram?
cope
Anon look at Oblivion.
Now look at Skyrim.
Both of those came out for the Xbox 360.
We all wish Skyrim was better than it is but their hands were tied behind their backs on this.
>uhhhh just ignore majority of your customer
Black person
You didn't play the game. Most interiors are unique and tell you something about the npc living there.
>GTA buildings
>Make giant 3D rectangle
>Add skyscraper texture to rectangle
>Building done
>Skyrim buildings
>Fully modeled interior
>Physics objects inside buildings
>Actual place you can go to
There's not even a comparison in the amount of work required here.
>15 minute cutscene of dumb nord bullshit
>thankfully i'm about to be killed so it finally stops
>oh wait they didn't kill me
>dumb nords keep being dumb while the imperial is saving children
>dumnfrick nord actually wants me to follow him
god they are so fricking stupid
I modded it so there's anthro horse girls who rape my male character when I enter
Give me the goods
They dont horse around.
tfw married one of the minotaurs from that mod
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/37982
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/42990
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/28952
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/34168
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/40088
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/56731
Good shit, anon.
The capital expansion mods are legitimately good.
The others suck ass
if you got anything better please do list them otherwise I cannot find shit for towns and cities that isn't jk's bloatfest
Why did they build these massive walls along the cliffs and mountainside?
Do they not understand what a wall is for?
To stop birds
its not to keep people out
its to keep people in
>its to keep people in
Would these people jump off?
Because people are moronic
the actual answer is that they had to do that so they could make solitude its own seperate worldspace separate from the overworld
I assume you already knew that though
They could wall it off with buildings instead of walls.
Perhaps the culmination of all town design is daggerfall scale with Skyrim personalization, only possible by the joint effort of devs laying the foundation and then mod makers adding the personalization. Sort of like real life, each person customizing their life's landscape = a large personalized world. Or maybe I'm tripping on skooma
>what news from the other villages made of 3 houses?
This place is supposed to be fairly new and yet there's old songs in the game that mention it.
See how mad they get?
It drives them fricking insane.
These morons really want every city in all games to be surrounded by farms because they watched some moronic e-celeb on youtube
>games that simulate a country should include things that exist in countries
Shocking I know. Skyrim does this fine, no one wants the entire gameworld dominated by farmland. Just something that implies a world that exists outside the player.
i can see how you would think that if you had zero creativity
>location used as landmark to reach other destination
Beside Vivec and Caldera I find little reason for staying in another town. At least in Oblivion there's Skingrad but the Count is a blood sucker
The Mama Dolce factory is the source for the food in megaton.
The Chinese infiltrators are so indoctrinated they maintain their cover even ghoulified.
They produce food and restock the various stores in the DC area.
Mystery solved
>AE content means you need even more patches with your mods
>gays still leave them as optional files rather than including them as a seperate fomod installer
guys, which game let's me LARP as the class I am playing as good as Skyrim?
Is there anything even coming close?
Seriously need some substitut
There's no game where you can play both a necromancer and a vampire or even a werewolf at the same time so no
but there has to be something
the problem with most other games is that you can't do anything related to your class whatsoever outside of battles. And no side quests have anything to do with being, for example, a druid. I would even be content with imagening most of it.
That's just pathetically small.
Why are there more people who live there than houses
>only one person can live in a house
I dunno anon
Forge World.... home....
is that Halo 1?
I'd much rather have whiterun than novigrad.
Whiterun is home, novigrad isn't. I can name every npc in whiterun, and there are like 50.
I can name 2 people that live in novigrad in the witcher.
Sure, novigrad ks more realistic, but realistic doesn't = immersive, sometimes the less realisitc option is the one that's going to suck me into the game.
>I can name every npc in whiterun, and there are like 50
autism
>less realisitc option is the one that's going to suck me
I agree you getting sucked is not realistic.
is there a way to make skyrim gameplay deeper with mods or is a futile task
yes
no, you can only make it prettier
Depends completely on qhat you perceive as deeper gameplay.
No, it will never play as an action dark souls clone if that's what you wanted
Ordinator for perks
if you youtube "syn gaming best first person mods" you'll get some mods that make first person combat a little better without turning into 3rd person soulsshit
thats basically it though. everything else is a janky piece of shite
why did they even bother namedropping whatever the frick this is in the intro? you can't even call it a settlement
why not just have him say "I'm from windhelm" or something that resembles an actual town
POST MORE SNU MOMMYS
I have no hopes that TES VI won't be a streamlined mess, and judging by most of the comments in here it seems that's what you all want. Let the franchise die, we still have Daggerfall and Morrowind.
The death will be signaled by ESO going F2P
Where I'm from?
Khorinis
Khorinis is a Spirit Bomb of SOVL
>calling them bad
posergay, gtfo
Whiterun as a city was very disappointing. Supposedly a major trade hub and it's just crumbling walls and wooden houses.
All of Bethesdas towns are like that. A small smattering of houses and "It only looks like that cause engine limitations!". That said, Oblivion has the best towns, even though most of them are the same. Aleswell, Weye, Hackdirt, all are just a few houses. Bethesda couldn't make a proper town in a modern game if you put a bomb in their offices.
>That said, Oblivion has the best towns
how so
It doesn't. Morrowind does.
Vos, Suran, Gnisis, Pelagiad, literally all the Telvanni towers. These are far better than towns that all have the same architecture and have a single gimmick related to a quest. Weye isn't even a town, it's a house and an inn.
I just think they're neat to be honest. Entertaining side quests more often than not. Little tidbits of worldbuilding and shit. Personal favourites are the burned down alchemists house/store, Cropsford because you help build it up, and Borderwatch. Even without the Sheogorath quest it's a cool little village. Always steal the cheese for my rare items collection.
I'm surprised you don't like Morrowind's more considering it has that stuff + more
I've tried about 2 dozen times now to get into Morrowind. Furthest I've made it is the first Dwemer Ruin. I don't know exactly what it is, I just can't keep at it.
Okay so then don't say "Oblivion has the best towns" if you haven't even played the other games substantially
I mean I've played the game a lot despite not sticking to it. I've been through a lot of its towns. Most of the game is grey or brown and all the characters walk like they shit themselves.
>all the characters walk like they shit themselves.
this is because all food in morrowind is canonically poison
Name best grass mod.
seasonal landscapes
I CONFESS! I PICKED DARK ELF FOR THE FIRE RESISTANCE BECAUSE I'M A VAMPIRE LORD MAIN!
>MAIN
STOP LOOKING AT ME WITH THOSE CAT LIKE EYES
I just realized the reason the nevarine was sent to Vvardenfell by the emperor was because the circumstances of his birth were fitting for a Blade and would thus make him more suitable for infiltrating houses. Your handler even encourages you to do this.
SKYRIM BELONGS TO THE PERSONAL ANSWER HERE!
EMPIRE
>go to rorikstead
>nobody even mentions him or knows who he is or cares at all
bravo, todd
Morrowind cities are garbage tier, mainly because of the NPCs
>Walk into town
>Talk to an NPC
>They do nothing but regurgitate repetitive garbage
>Have to keep repeating this process until you find quest givers
Nice game
>what are guildhalls
>what are latest rumors
filtered
Ah yes, latest rumours, where the majority of NPCs spout the same repetitive drivel, nice argument.
I do, it's still annoying to walk into a tavern with a bunch of named NPCs and have all of them say the same shit.
>it's still annoying to walk into a tavern with a bunch of named NPCs and have all of them say the same shit
Just click on them and if everything is greyed out talk to someone else lol
It's just annoying, especially since the game does it for every npc. At least latter games just had them say something and walk off without locking you into a dialogue.
Because I like exploring and talking to NPCs. Walking into a new place and everyone turning into robots when I talk them makes the world feel dead as shit
>Hello, oh yeah it's a fine day now frick off
This is most NPCs in morrowind
In morrowind they just call you a Black person unironically.
>At least latter games just had them say something and walk off without locking you into a dialogue.
What?
>Walking into a new place and everyone turning into robots when I talk them makes the world feel dead as shit
Is this your first RPG? What RPGs give every single NPC unique dialogue, and unique dialogue worth reading?
Disco Elysium that's technically a rpg.
Yes I'm sure it has a world as big as Morrowind's with just as many NPCs.
Okay now you're just moving the goalposts.
>why does this game with 100x more NPCs not make each one unique like the other game? such garbage.
Your moronic infantile expectation you forced on the game is garbage.
Ah excellent you took the bait, now why do you love Morrowind so much?
DE is small and dense, with time/sequence gated areas. That style only works in certain situations.
>It's just annoying, especially since the game does it for every npc. At least latter games just had them say something and walk off without locking you into a dialogue
I guess? With the way dialogue is set up there is still a chance you will find something unique and it doesn't ever lock you into dialogue. You can exit dialogue at any time.
>nice argument
Black person, some of the latest rumor quests would be set to appear before literally anything else so you were guaranteed to see them. most misc quests would be introduced to you via the NPC's greeting.
>I do
then what the frick is the problem moron? you realize you don't HAVE to walk around town and talk to every single last NPC in existence if it pisses you off, right? goddamn some spergs just can't control themselves.
Use the dialogue filter in openmw. I find that dialogue options are varied enough that you're likely to at least stumble on a few NPCs with generic dialogue you haven't heard before simply due to acquiring new keywords and backgrounds which generate responses being fairly varied. Most of the time its helpful hints, flavor, or interesting lore tidbits. The fix also highlights responses which interact with your journal. (quests)
>by killing that one guy the Empire literally decimated the population of Rorikstead
Would a 6700XT be enough for a heavily modded play at 1440p?
no
Why did you side with the Dawnguard/Vampires and was it worth it?
>Why did you side with the Dawnguard/Vampires
Dawnguard because frick vampires.
>was it worth it?
No, because most of the expansion was just a road trip with Serana anyway. I basically kept forgetting the Dawnguard even existed until the plot forced me to go back to their castle.
I wanted to frick the vampire girl so I went with vampires.
Isn't she one of the few you can't marry?
yes skyrim sucks ass and has no redeeming qualities
NEVER SHOULD OF COME HERE
Anons, how do you handle it when the guards mercilessly bully you because you didn't pick Nord?
>you didn't pick Nord
that doesn't happen
>he picks the snowBlack person and not the chad DVNMER
>chad DVNMER
Dungmer are beta b***hes of the setting
besides, I play Animer, which are almost exclusively just Nords with makeup, so I don't get shit form the guards
>he cares what the snowBlack person guards think
>he picks his race on whether or not snowBlack person guards bully him
So alpha. Pathetic n'wah.
>he cares what the snowBlack person guards think
maybe follow the fricking conversation you insecure hobo
> A nord is the true founder of the dunmer empire
I see you there todd.
I usually find that their frost resistance doesn't help them much when they're being cooked alive.
>Modded Skyrim
>Cut a guys' arm off
>He runs away
Fricking SLAVE
Anons, who do you unironically support in the civil war and why in one paragraph or more? Let us settle this debate once and for all!
sounds gay
I'll write you down as a Stormcloak supporter.
>4E 209
What is this map for? Beyond Skyrim? It's pretty cool.
Some fan made map that was made after watching the TES VI trailer, they were speculating that VI would be High Rock, Hammerfell, The Reach and Orsinium.
Hammerfell is all but confirmed since it's pretty much completely absent from ESO. Now they're virtually making up locations, like the most recent High Isle expansion. Seems like they don't want to touch Hammerfell before Bethesda does.
Sword Singing will replace Shouting as the cool thing
>another culturally specific magic thing
>hilariously and ridiculously broken in the lore
>will definitely be neutered into a flashy power attack
Can't wait for the nuke-slashes to never be acknowledged and for Sword Singing to be nothing but flashy enchantment effects.
yes i know that the pankratosword specifically is from an unofficial source, but there are canon sources that say sword singing destroyed yokuda
Nuke-slashes were never a thing in canon. that ws just shit frickbride make up
Unfortunately there's very little written about it from ingame sources. Kirkbride's Imperial Library writing are the most definitive source on Sword Singing being a powerful destructive force, but that's VERY dubiously canonical for obvious reasons.
The best source that isn't ESO is from the Pocket Guide to the Empire 3rd Edition, which is a physical book that came with some editions of Oblivion. All that says is that there are in-universe hypotheses that some form of human performed magic sunk Yokuda. That and the sinking of Yokuda was concurrent with the War of the Singers, which started the migrations of the Yoku to Hammerfell. If TES: VI is about Hammerfell then we'll definitely get more about Yokuda and how it was sunk.
Also, say what you will about Kirkbride, his writings, the ones that are actually in-game that is, are integral for making TES as unique a setting it is. Especially the more esoteric ones surrounding Vivec and Mankar Cameron.
>Also, say what you will about Kirkbride, his writings, the ones that are actually in-game that is, are integral for making TES as unique a setting it is.
Not really, even Kirkbride himself admitted that almost everything he made for Morrowind got thrown out, and that most things people associate with him were, in fact, by other devs.
the 36 sermons of vivec, and the commenatires, are barely worthwhile books in TES lore, basically easter eggs for extreme fans who like to fill in the gaps of TES lore with headcanon like people do for the souls games
>anti-kirkbride gay says the two most talked about in-game books are inconsequential easter-eggs
>claims that all the conclusions from them are headcanon
You shitters are just as bad as the MKult. If you can parse the esoteric writing those two books give you some very interesting knowledge on how the cosmology of the setting works and the background on powerful figures and artifacts like Talos, Numidium, and the White-Gold Tower, the Towers in general, Mantling, the structure of Aurbis, and the Psijic Endeavor (something mentioned in other ingame books not authored by kirkbride). Just because you personally don't like those books or their writer doesn't mean those books don't have any bearing on the setting.
While there are a lot of unofficial sources that make parsing which aspects of these cosmological subjects are cosmological they are relevant to the motivatiions and backstories of multiple characters such as the aforementioned Vivec and Cameron. Discounting all of it because some vocal morons who don't understand TES's most important trope, the unreliable narrator, is just as moronic as accepting every single sentence of an author as gospel.
>but there are canon sources that say sword singing destroyed yokuda
I always thought it was because they used it on the Tower destroying it and entire yokuda in process
This sounds like it was ripped from one of the Might and Magic rpgs.
I reckon they'll just add "active skills" for melee and ranged to spice things up. Like activating a berserk state or nocking 3 arrows.
Implying that they won't just rerelease Skyrim three more times before any new releases come out.
Skyrim SE was free and Skyrim AE only happened due to the "DLC Lawsuit" Zenimax is currently in
DLC lawsuit?
Basically some kid ws like "LE SEASON PASS FOR FO4 SHOULD GIVE ME ALL THE CC CONTENT BUT IT DOESN'T SO IM GONNA SUE!"
Literally nothing has happened since the orignal announcement, and its gone nowhere.
holy shit, based kid
Zenimax got suit over Fallout 4 Season Pass, the season pass gives you access to the DLC without having to pay for it. They're being sued because the season pass didn't cover creation club content. It's why the CC hasn't put any new content out in over a year.
>It's why the CC hasn't put any new content out in over a year.
this is actually incorrect.
According to what trainwiz, who was part of CC, said the CC stopped putting out content because the corona hit, shutting everything down, and halting the planned distribution plan.(Cc stopped in late 2019early 2020 right as rona started getting big)
I hope its better than shouts which are already mediocre as sin in the base game.
I wish Shouts and Magika had more practical effects
I don't get it really, if they keep rereleasing Skyrim, what's stopping them from restoring cut content or remaking said cut content?
Cost.
Most cut content in most games was cut because it wasn't that fun, and/or they ran into major technical problems. Even if they re-release Skyrim another time its still not going to be worth a developer's time to try to power through all the scripting issues that caused the civil war stuff to get cut in the first place, when those same devs could be working on Starfield or w/e.
This is why devs stop making DLC for games after some point. at some point enough people stop playign the game regularly that putting out Dawnguard/Dragonborn style DLC simply isn't going to make the money back that it costs to make it.
There are like, 3 people that improve stuff slightly for pc rereleases, and a team that does ports and nothing else, and has no experience doing content.
>2010s
>"dude, how can this be a town? it's just 3 houses and a shack!"
>2020s
>"dude, 1000 empty planets, most of them without any structures! TAKE MY MONEY!"
actually it's 3 houses and an inn
Oblivion and Skyrim are the result of people preferring convenience over quality. There is no defense for liking them beyond this.
Remember when we had villains with actual motivations instead of "hurr durr dragon domination" ?
> villains with actual motivations
Ahh yes
>Dagoth Ur: I hate the imperials so use robot to smash them!
Mankar: I hate everyone use daedra to smash them!
Exactly, Alduin doesn't hate anyone.
Alduin hates Akatosh and wants to desotry the world
Who cares about Akatosh though.
Alduin is funny when you think about it. He's essentially the Divine equivalent of an edgy rebellious teenager who's ignoring his dad and not doing his chores. His dad who is also himself. Aludin is Akatosh having a schizo moment and sending himself, who is also one of his offspring, as the soul of a mortal to beat the shit out of himself, who is also his oldest son, to make him do his job of eating the world.
>Mankar: I hate everyone use daedra to smash them!
Actually, Mankar only hates the Divines for stealing Mundus from Lorkhan and hiding the Tower (apotheosis) from the mortals.
All the Elder Scrolls games have bad villains since the PC spends like 5 minutes at most with each of them
Skyrim's world is designed in "shorthand'.
Am I the only one who doesn't have a problem with having small scale representations of cities? I much prefer it and it's named NPC's with voiced dialogue than something like Cyberpunk.
I agree, I like small but packed cities. I almost always play a thief, so being able to enter every building is a treat to gameplay for me.
Alright real topic now, who would you worship in Skyrim and why?
Talos because I'm a human
try reddit
Answer the question coward.
Why the Reclamations, of course. Not like the Divines have done anything for the Dunmer people. Harsh though they are, the Daedra have taught us all important lessons both the Empire and Dominion are quick to ignore.
Hermaeus Mora.
Knowledge is the most noble of purposes, and curiosity is what brought the sentient races to greatness.
the hist and whichever frickery led to the hist. argonians were an accident but a blessed accident
couldn't the NPCs be scripted to just get food?
Give NPCs an order of priority:
>buy the most expensive food
>buy cheap food
>buy cheap food from further away
>hunt or fish
>farm areas
>steal food
Add in a simple price = supply/demand function and watch how rich NPCs will spend all their money and poor NPCs constantly struggle between a life of crime, hard work or "making it" by selling an apple for 5000 gold.
And it would also solve the "questmarker" issue.
>quest requires you to talk to john
>John lives in Rorikstead
>go there
>one of the following is true:
>Sorry, idk where John is, he went on a hunting trip two days ago
>Sorry, John is in prison for stealing apples
>Go follow the Road, John now works on a farm
>John moved to this mansion because he made so much money
With the F4 settlement system it would easily be possible to have people go and build villas in the countryside as they become rich or start farms in designated areas, only to drive them into a life of crime after the player character steals all their money. Maybe a slave/indentured service mechanic to reduce the overall complexity so you dont have everyone start their own farm, but instead farms that already exist hire the NPCs as farm hands.
Plus we'd get great streamer-bait out of this: Player cheats 10000 apples, crashes local economy. Player ruins beggars life by reverse-pickpocketing 10000 gold and watch him become a drunk and end up worse than before.
I guess the problem is voicelines for all the possible combinations.