Bethesda could have gotten GOTY with 3 star systems instead of the slop we were given. All Bethesda games are slop for sure, but the ES series from Morrowind to Skyrim have this sort of hot garbage charm that Bethesda hasn’t been able to replicate. Where did it all go wrong?
>Where did it all go wrong?
Morrowind -> Oblivion
>cheating and lying
Citation needed
The stuff they said about radiant air is a good example of outright lying.
Bethesda games are the ultimate walking simulators. They're great for when you just want to smoke some weed after a hard day at work and bumble through a few mindless quests before bed.
The problem with Starfield is that you can't wander aimlessly because every time you go somewhere you need to get in your ship and make a decision. Loot collecting is also ruined because encumbrance limits are too low, so you spend too much time thinking about inventory management.
Basically the game requires too much concentration to play while high, but it's not an interesting enough game to justify that amount of concentration.
Morrowwind is a PC game, Oblivion is a console game. I knew this as a 15 year old, are you just now figuring it out?
>Where did it all go wrong?
forgot quote
Bethesda got old and pozzed. Look at the devs during the trailer presentations. It's all dudes in their fifties with mortgages and normie women.
No one in Bethesda cares about videogames, pure and simple. They're all people who play mobile games once or twice a week and call themselves gamers. Why would you expect anything else from those developers other than the most barren, absolutely generic sci-fi and game design imaginable?
It also reeks of no real design oversight or QA, like they had no idea whether to fully commit to making a fully proc-gen galaxy explorer/crafter or just make a city-based typical bethgame.
As expected, they decided on neither, tried to be both and failed at making either of them good.
>pozzed
The majority of characters in Fallout 3 are black Anon, a 2008 game.
and that was a trash game
No matter what you think about the game putting blame on how you feel it's bad on political culture war BS is insane.
>The majority of characters in Fallout 3 are black Anon, a 2008 game.
[citation needed]
Have you not played the game?
Anyway, here's the Fallout 3 npc list.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_3_characters
And yes, even all of the human companions are black.
Did play it, but haven't played it since it was new. Definitely don't recall the "majority of characters being black", that sounds like an exaggeration to me.
Have you morons never been to Washington DC before? It's mostly black.
Why are you calling me a moron? You're agreeing with me.
Morrowwind was designed for mouse & keyboard. Oblivion for controller.
I ignored the rest of your comment because you are a homosexual.
this is correct, and has always been the case
if you actually look at the locations in morrowind/oblivion/skyrim, most of them suck ass and are generic and uninteresting
people only pretend otherwise because the games are big and it gives them this big feeling of exploration, even though none of the places you explore are worth exploring, nor are any character decisions you make impactful in the slightest.
They could get away with it in the past before massive game worlds became common, but now it just isn't enough, people see right throw it to the soulless MMO like quests and shitty combat.
you can't deny that tes has so many congruent systems that there really is freedom to roleplay. Simple and janky sure, but even as an adult a good sneak and lockpicking session just feels right. No other game really hits the same when I wana steal and fence shit.
no, anon
there is freedom in roleplay in the sense that you can make it up in your head, but attributing that to some sort of game system is pure nonsense
I hate that argument. A good game should ENABLE your roleplay by making the world react to your actions and character builds. Take your own example. Say I break into some guy's house in Whiterun, steal EVERYTHING, and he catches me red-handed. Guards come, I serve my time.
Later, I run into the owner I stole from again, in town. Not only does he not comment on what I did, but he treats me exactly the same as before. It's like nothing happened. You can see the same sort of thing when you try to play a Dunmer in Morrowind. Nothing changes because Bethesda is lazy as frick and everyone just magically knows you're an outlander.
So no, anon. I do not think the game is particularly good for roleplay. You could quite literally just walk into people's homes in the Witcher 3 and steal some shit (no one cares or comments on it) and it's as 'roleplay'-y as in TES.
>Later, I run into the owner I stole from again, in town. Not only does he not comment on what I did
anon you're asking too much from a video game. That's unrealistic and you know it. Maybe when radiant AI becomes standard in games that will be more plausible... but yeah come on.
>you're asking too much
it's literally adding a flag to an NPC and recording a couple of extra lines
it's unironically 5-10 minutes work.
bethesda has conditioned you to accept this garbage, in the same way they conditioned you to accept that like 6 voice actors for hundreds of NPCs is acceptable.
Reactivity is not difficult to achieve. Devs just don't bother because they know players like you will just make it up all up in your head and excuse it instead.
Is it also too much to ask for races to have literally ANY content to them beyond one generic humanoid taunt voice line? Or guild questlines to matter and change literally anything? Or cities to be more than 6 hovels? Or for the people I run into out on the roads to not be the same 4 random events with the same exact lines every single time?
Plenty of us played Morrowind in 2002 on a PC with mouse and keyboard, and then saw the drastic difference in interface and control schemes when Oblivion came out a few years later. You live in a fantasy world of strawmen you've created to knock down where everyone you want to argue against is either a zoomer who wants to LARP like a boomer because they watched a youtube video.
Furthermore, you don't even play games, you just post about them.
>muh tabs reeeee
If you think Morrowind's multi-window feature was usable back when 800x600 was considered high resolution, you're in for a big surprise.
>If you think Morrowind's multi-window feature was usable back when 800x600 was considered high resolution, you're in for a big surprise.
Are you an actual zoomer who didn’t play this back in the day but is now lecturing me about the past? The interface was fine, and 800x600 was not high resolution when the game came out, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 had been common for years.
yeah i remember it being a massive leap playing UT04 on 1024x768 and then going up to 1680x1050. Morrowind was surprisingly clean on a CRT back in the day.
Here, I'll humor you, here's even an 800x600 screenshot.
First, note that everything is an actual window that can be dragged around or freely resized. The interface overall is clearly designed to be used with a mouse, and would be a nightmare on a controller. The majority of it is multiple columns of text and cleanly laid out, everything doesn't have to be dumbed down with just a big icon, with the exception of the inventory. Note that the any of the windows can be toggled to be persistent by clicking on the button in the top right (look at the minimap for instance) which is a cool feature, although not particularly useful except for adding your choice of a global or local minimap to your HUD, which is extremely handy. Note that Oblivon and Skyrim cannot do a minimap vanilla, not only without mods, but also without a script extender mod to allow mods to call functions outside of the vanilla engine. We used to have the technology, but now it's lost. You can assign any of the number keys 1-9 as hotkeys (0 is reserved for switching to fists for hand-to-hand combat) and the game remembers what was in that slot. If you set a key to repair hammers and use up all your hammers but then bind more, that binding still works. You also have a 'switch to magic' weapon like switching weapons in a FPS and cast spells by clicking when desired.
Picrel is a screenshot from Youtube because it's nearly impossible to find screenshots of the vanilla interface because modding the interface is one of the first things anyone does when they play Oblivion on PC.
First, notice how everything is huge, even at high resolution. Now, a big 3d model (rotateable and zoomable of course) takes up half the screen, while before it was a modest 3d paper doll that scaled to the size of your inventory. The menus are designed to be navigated with a controller, up down left right yes no, not a mouse. Now, stats and skills are one window, inventory is one window, magic is one window, the map is another window, you can't peruse all of them at a glance or resize or reorganize them as you wish. Minimap is gone, of course. The hotkeys have been reduced to 8, rather than 9, because now they are a graphical ring of icons, and the UI designer thought 8 was prettier than 9, apparently. The hotkeys also no longer remember what was there if something is used up. Say you have 10 torches in your inventory, hotkey torch, and CONSOOM a torch. When it's used up, the hotkey for torches is broken, and you have to go back into the inventory and reassign a new hotkey to a new torch, even though you have 9 more of the identical item in inventory. Also, magic has now been reduced to "push X to cast spell" much like shooters were dumbed down from grenades being another weapon in your inventory to "push G to throw frag" or whatever.
>shooters were dumbed down from grenades being another weapon in your inventory to "push G to throw frag"
Most moronic opinion ITT, especially baffling when just a couple lines before you were pointing out the importance of good hotkeys.
>hud_fastswitch 1
>bind q lastinv
Name a more iconic duo. I'll wait.
>hud_fastswitch 1
Only needed because of bad defaults, completely unnecessary in other games.
>bind q lastinv
A neat bind, good thing many other games offer it too.
Neither of these is a proper replacement for a quick use bind for nades, and nades without a quick use bind are as stifled as C4 with its detonator on a separate slot (frick you, New Vegas).
>Only needed because of bad defaults
Half-Life 1 had more than ten weapons, and so could not use the traditional 1 through 0 keys. It divided them into five categories (numerals 1 through 5) and you'd press 2 to select the second category, before selecting a particular weapon within that category.
>Neither of these is a proper replacement for a quick use bind for nades
This was quite a few years (1998) before any games came out with a quick-throw key for grenades, that I am aware of. That was a product of the shooter genre becoming dominated by consoles, rather than its PC and keyboard (and later keyboard-and-mouse) origins, much like Oblivion shifting to "press X to cast" rather than "press whatever to whip out your finger-wiggling hands and then click to cast".
IIRC you don't select categories in HL, you always select a weapon within them: the problem is that by default selecting a weapon doesn't immediately switch to it, you have to left click or something to confirm the selection and actually switch.
I've seen similar control schemes in a few other vastly different games, and they never work well.
As for grenades, your opinion is still wrong.
Just look at Arma 3: PC exclusive, milsim, default binds take up more than half the keyboard, even right mouse has 2 binds on it depending on it being held or tapped (and like 5 more binds with modifiers and contexts), and it STILL fully dedicates the G key to quick use for nades because it's that important for nades to be employed without delay.
Your reasoning with regards to Oblivion spellcasting doesn't make sense either: you still need to use hotkeys or menus to switch between spells, having a third use button in additon to left hand and right hand isn't casualization it's just a shitty control scheme.
And surprise surprise, Skyrim went back to spells as standard hand slot equips, because that way the basic controls take up 1 less button (big deal for controllers).
>IIRC you don't select categories in HL, you always select a weapon within them
I just reinstalled to check. For categories with multiple weapons, the behavior with fastswitch on and off is identical, the only difference is if it's a category with only a single weapon. Fastswitch off you hit the number and then have to click to switch to it, fastswitch on you simply hit the number and it switches without having to click.
>Arma 3
Haven't played it. Does pressing G automatically throw a frag, or simply switch to it (and require a click to throw)? How does it handle, say, a squad leader with both frags and smokes?
Last game in that series I played was the original Operation Flashpoint, in which grenades were simply another weapon one switched to. Of similar games, the same is true of Red Orchestra. Red Orchestra 2 split the difference and you can either select grenades or hit G to quick throw. In Squad, grenades are just another weapon to select. In Hell Let Loose, grenades can be selected either from their slot or with G, but must be thrown with a click. Several of these games are contemporaneous or quite a bit newer than Arma3, so I don't think it's reasonable to say that all tactical shooters went to "push G to quick throw nade" and that entirely separate from the broader PC consolization trend.
>you still need to use hotkeys or menus to switch between spells, having a third use button in additon to left hand and right hand
It's the same number of buttons. Morrowind you pushed a button to switch to the magic 'weapon' and then cast the spell with mouse1. Oblivion you pushed a button to quick cast. IMO the former is more accurate and precise, while the latter is faster.
>Skyrim went back to spells as standard hand slot equips, because that way the basic controls take up 1 less button (big deal for controllers)
Precisely my point. Post-Morrowind, TES interfaces were always console-centric.
In Arma 3 G automatically throws your selected grendane, H cycles selection between available grenades.
With the giga-realism mod ACE 3, you also have shift + G to select a nade without throwing it and then get fancier options for throwing style and strength.
oh yeah I forgot how nice those menus were. Very easy to drag around. Probably the biggest example of ui downgrade that came with the console shift. It's a shame they couldn't have put the effort in to customize each version.
Oblivion UI is so much better is not even funny. Morrowind has 3 different icons for the 300 items you will have in your inventory. Making you having to go over one by one with the mouse pointer if you want to know what the frick is that item and what it does. Tedious as frick.
Oblivion inventory not only shows you the name of the item at all times, but it also lets you organize the item list in whatever way you want.
Not going to deny oblivion UI is designed for consoles, but that's HOW shit morrowind UI is if a console version interface is more comfortable to use with mouse and keyboard than the "pc version" one.
Bethesda UI needs to be modded before playing, every game. I would not play these games I put hundreds of hours into if I had to use their console garbage UI.
The greatest irony is that every day he cries and posts threads complaining that the board is full of TES discussion and then he does his damnedest to bump every single TES thread obsessively. By volume, he's probably the single biggest Bethesda poster on this board.
>literally nobody played morrowind on xbox
Couple of my buddies in football did. Poor bastards.
> Poor bastards
indeed. anybody in the know would never even consider it. I was identifying as PC Master race by 9 years old.
I accidentally called myself a homosexual.
dumb homosexual
even if that's true it doesn't change the fact that I learned about morrowwind from PC Gamer and Computer Gaming Monthly.
>Poor PC sales
They couldn't understand it's genius obviously. It will always be better on PC
>where getting caught stealing incurs penalties
>well yeah I guess stealing is illegal and the guards will arrest you and confiscate your contraband and make you pay a fine and go to jail, but that doesn't count
>or yeah I suppose merchants recognize when you're trying to sell them their own shit that you just stole from them and turn you in to the guards, but that's not really a penalty either
>in fact, if you ignore the penalties that stealing incurs, there's basically no penalties for stealing
>hey, did you know these new games have more detailed mechanics than these 20 year old games?
>I'm a totally reasonable and level-leaded person too btw, I'm not just a lying homosexual who's here to argue about old games that I really care a lot about for some reason
This, i find it weird how people are trying to compare larian slop which doesn't have real time combat, an open world, and much less npcs, for a more dialogue heavy game, like no shit there will be a lot more detail in that regard its literally all the game has.
>Guess it's time to move on then
Yes. Been saying it for a while. It's time for you to get over it and move on with your life, anon. You are the most Bethesda-obsessed poster on this board, and you don't even realize it.
>see Bugthesda thread
>morrowgays inevitably derail thread and make it all about them
>post obligatory pic of the greatest game of 2002, a game morrowgay minds cannot comprehend
>dont elaborate any further
>leave
Played and enjoyed both. Next?
NO NO NO NO NO you can only like ONE
What I don't like about AF is that its basically 1 giant dungeon crawl pretending like it isn't one. Which is fine and honestly clever worldbuilding wise, but I'm not much of a fan of just pure dungeon crawls. I like to have an overworld inbetween my dungeons, kind of a pedantic point, I'll agree. But that is just how I like it.
Morrowind -> skyrim are quite literally the only good fantasy western rpgs aside from the witcher games, quite literally the only games I play when I want to take a break from jap games
Notice how anti-Bethesda schizos are always sub-humans; tranime homosexuals, tourists, cuckarpiggers/gay-sex-speech-checks simulator slurpers, and illiterate gypsies.
Outing yourself as someone who hates crpgs is not doing your kind any favors.
Those are not RPGs and are made specifically for moronic sodomites such as you. Get AIDS and die.
Badhesda is only good at very small scale diorama level of story telling/world building, they know exactly how to make a guy falling from the sky interesting, but they are lost when it comes to a larger scale than that.
all of their interesting quests across all of their games could fit into five to ten dungeons.
all of morrowind could have been squeezed into Vivec city and made a hyper cozy single city setting
>Badhesda is only good at very small scale diorama level of story telling/world building, they know exactly how to make a guy falling from the sky interesting, but they are lost when it comes to a larger scale than that.
>all of their interesting quests across all of their games could fit into five to ten dungeons.
I am midway through a retrospective replay of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and I completely agree with this. In a different timeline where they learned from their mistakes, I would've liked to see them have 75% less "content" and focus on making it better. You could easily remove an absolute majority of the dungeons from the games and lose nothing of value.
>all of morrowind could have been squeezed into Vivec city and made a hyper cozy single city setting
Absolutely disgusting, you n'wah. Go play Cyberpunk or something.
>I would've liked to see them have 75% less "content" and focus on making it better. You could easily remove an absolute majority of the dungeons from the games and lose nothing of value.
Replayability and being able to explore a huge world on your own is a strength of Bethesda games. If that's not someone's thing, it's better to play games with a different approach.
I am mildly traumatized by recently 100% clearing every dungeon in Morrowind, and am rationalizing not doing so in Oblivion and Skyrim. My current headcanon is "clear every dungeon with a quest associated it, but do not feel obligated to clear the entire map just because it's there"
>It's sold 300k PC copies
How up to date are these numbers?
Also, console numbers are inflated by anyone who bought the base game and then the GOTY edition for the expansions. OnPC it was quite possible to buy the main game and then each expansion.
The whole reason Oblivion exists is because the majority of Morrowind's sales were on xbox. Morrowind's fanbase has always been mostly kids who grew up with an xbox. For example, if you look at the guy that did the 20 hour or whatever morrowind review he just plays shitty old xbox games besides TES mostly, you'll consistently find that. Bethesda keeps people within as xbox ecosystems, thats why nudoom plays more like halo than doom and halo devs did its multiplayer, thats why arkane pretty much morphed into nu-2K overnight as soon as bethesda gobbled them up, its all about what dumb easily manipulated xdrones want.
Thanks for the Xbox update chief keep us appraised of everything going on in the Xbox-adjacent sphere. I’m too busy playing PC games, as I have since the early 90s.
Except you're not, you're playing xbox slop
>look at the guy that did the 20 hour or whatever morrowind review he just plays shitty old xbox games besides TES mostly, you'll consistently find that
>...
For god's sake, get a hobby and stop obsessing about bethesda lmao
Fallout is what got me into apocalyptic worlds and now it's one of my favorite setting.
It breaks my heart to see the franchise and its world be so mistreated.
Boy, this really mindraped at least one of them.
>Boy, this really mindraped at least one of them.
>the goyim have learned that I like to samegay by responding to myself with variations of "He's right, you know", so if I use my alleged "high verbal IQ" and slightly alter my phrasing, they'll never be able to tell it's me replying to myself
Schizophrenia
>Playing morrowind on a console
Why would you make yourself suffer like that? I've always playedi t on the PC.
Game is kind of comfy when you are actually doing meaningful quest content instead of exploring the procedurally generated crap. I’ve come around to some of the writing and Emil.
Mortismal, Timothy Cain and Sawyer loved Starfield. You lost, /vrpg/
Beautiful game.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but graphics will and will always be overrated. Now, don't get me wrong, good graphics does have a part to play on how "good" a game is, but once the "WEW NEW THING" dies down if all you have is graphics then the game will most likely fail.
This.
Funnily enough most top rpg classics look like shit from the point of modern graphics and were already outdated or weird at release.
Never has anyone said "man the game is great but no ray tracing? Cant touch this sadly". Exceptions may be single Guy projects that use handdrawn ms paint .bmps and even those find a playerbase. Thats a bit different though with Todslop since graphics are a safe sales point still which only needs a lot of resources on both ends and no creativity. So if your game has zero redeeming features you gotta at least get that shit right to rake in some money from the normies who buy games to consooom to walk around an hour aimlessly and then never touch them again. Bipocfield (xûr/x'kdalag) hits the sweet spot of looking like shit, having shit gameplay, no Innovation, shit tech and no story.
Gotta admire the Turdster for dropping such a burning bag full of cum laced shit on the worlds doorstep with the amount of resources Bethesda can deploy.
I have a friend who spends a lot of a gaming pc and for w/e reason he is obssessed with graphics. I can understand wanting to look at pretty things but if the story or the gameplay loop doesn't do its job to hook you, what's the point? The older I get the more I'm starting to lean heavily towards simulations like Dwarf Fort. It looks like shit but just the sheer level of simulation, detail, and content you can output now if you are willing to take a hit on graphics is tremendous. I want deeper games, I want games that make me think. I want worlds that are complex and interesting. I want real effort, don't insult my intelligence thinking that I'm some Magpie that is going to be impressed by a shiny object.
>teenagers care about graphics but can’t afford a good PC
>adults can afford a good PC but don’t give a shit about graphics
Pottery
The reliance or the obligation to have a game that looks pretty is being used as a crutch by AAA industries to be lazy and strip mechanics. If you have a high fidelity game that is graphically demanding that is going to be what 50 gigs or more of just graphical shit? Maybe more, maybe less? Game stuidos spend so much time trying to get their game to look pretty that once they are actually pretty, the mechanics are just slapped into the game as an after-thought.
>simulations
>Dwarf Fort
Unsure if bait or terrible taste: DF is to simulations what modern AAA are to graphics, a shitpile of "WOW!" elements blended together with little care and no purpose.
bad take informed by skill issue.
>s-skill issue!
b***h please, the only real challenge in DF is minimizing lag.
You should like someone who doesn't interact witht he Legends features.
Beautiful 2007 game