While many of your dislikes I can agree with more or less, this one I really don't. Loot needs to be even more randomized, which is a very good thing. If every dungeon and chest and monster dropped exactly the same items every time through, on every character, that would be frickin' horrible. Little enough variety or randomness in the game itemizationn, as it is. Each playthrough should be different, not just more of exactly the same as the last one.

Hi there Smokeyman! Has this Wednesday been to your liking? I sure hope so.

You bring up an interesting topic. I woudl disagree with you as every single cchest ideally should contain handpicked goods. I'm sure you've found puzzling money in abandoned dungeons, armour that just doesn't befit the place, etc, all of which are factoid-like byproducts of loot randomization. But sInce there are hundreds and hundreds of containers in SKyrim, devs have opted for an automatized solution. Yet, If you really think randomized loot is a necessity in order to prevent repetition and boredom why not go all the way through and revert back to Oblivion's computer generated scenery? It's because devs have learned their lesson. Genereated scenery simply isn't interesting enough. The same goes for randomized loot. However, I will conceed that it's just too time consuming to handpick goods for every single container. But, by all means, do re-write the randomization algorithm.

In the end it all comes down to lack of development time and what they did with the development time they put themselves up with. To me it should have been spend differently and they should have never put up that ridiculous deadline.

There are a few annoying things in this topic as well. Time for a clean up.

21 posts (and those that quoted them) have gone away. OK, here is the deal, derailing a topic with personal arguments is not accepted on these forums, nor is flaming other members, so those who have lost posts had better take care as if this happens again - ever - it will not be just the posts that go away from here.

-snip- double post

I also think it's the fact that with the money they have they wanted as many sales as possible obviously. So they gutted a lot of the meaningful Things like backstory and speech which isn't vital for the sale of the game so they cut them to save time and therefore money.

Indeed. I do think backstory and speech (amongst many other things) would have been allot deeper and complex if Bethesda decided to actually take their time with this game. To me it seems like they focused on what unfortunately matters the most these days. Graphics and plug & play game mechanics.

I agree I have sympathy for some Bethesda employees because they probably want to make a game like morrowind again but they aren't allowed to.

true, unfortunately this sells more than any well articulated RPG with old school mechanincs, and it won't get better in the future. I guess we are lucky to have perk trees.

HI again.

I just don't feel the need to attribute this or that design misstep to a plot to make more money. Where is the evidence of that? On the contrary, voice acting has gotten more attention and, I would imagine, a bigger budget. Unfortunately, this appears to have not translated into better voiced dialogue. In what way was this premeditated? Can anyone watch a Todd Howard interview on Skyrim and detect any trace of cold-blooded calculism? I really don't think so. I have many dissatisfactions about Skyrim but none seem to have sprouted from a large scale conspiracy to deceive long time fans. Todd just happened to make a few bad calls, that's all.

Todd is told by Bethesda publishers and then from Zenimax what do regarding finance and such. He then has to figure out what to spend things on. Oh and look at his comments on the PS3 version to see his complete [censored] lying mentality. He said many times that the PS3 version was as good as the Xbox version when in fact if had a much worse frame rate and worse graphics.

The flaw in your theory, is that handpicked = samo samo, every time. The only thing that encourages replay value of a game, is the chance at interesting variations in your experiences. Good lord, the samo samo quests with absolutely NO variation, no matter how many times you do them, is bad enough. The 'handpicked' unique items always being in the same place, gotten thru the same way, every single time you do them, with no random uniques to be found anywhere else in the world, is bad enough. Having 'handpicked' loot too, always the same, every single time, from every single chest and dresser and monster in the game?? Just shoot me. Next game...

which is why taking the great morrowind uniques and having them be located in random spots with every new game would be great.

Now we're heading in the right direction....

the proof is in statistics, in the later years came out that the more a game is simple and its interface more "pick up & play" the more it sells.

Bartoman, do you know how many written lines of dialogue were in Morrowind? I don't. I only ask because you throw number like 37,000 and 60,000, but I don't have anything to compare them to. I don't know if those numbers are very big, or very small for a game like TES.

Also, do you know what counts as a "line?" In morrowind, some of the "lines of dialogue" were several paragraphs of text. In Sky/blivion they are usually just one-off comments. Can we compare the number of words?

Fair enough. It's a good point. But, for Heaven's sake, people at BGS, please completetly re-write the algorithm. It currently outputs spurious loot after spurious loot. Why is there tons of gold, jewels and what not stashed around in abandoned dungeons? In fact, why are there lit candles all over the place? OT, Have you seen the latest Dragon's Dogma pictures? http://www.gameinformer.com/games/dragons_dogma/b/ps3/archive/2012/04/10/beasts-attacked-with-axes-in-new-dragon-39-s-dogma-screens.aspx . I just love truly dark dungeons. Sigh.

this whole idea that the true rpg mechanics of old are incapable of selling in today's world is complete speculation.

the advancements made in gaming since the year 2000 have been huge. as well, the mainstreaming of video games to the general public has been huge.

Mhmm. LCD*. There are a lot more LCD's than smart gamers, and they seem to have a lot of money... and they like simple, LCD interfaces and controls. And those kind of interfaces and controls are easier to make, so it's a win-win for the devs.

R.I.P., interesting, complex games.

*-lowest common denominator

Thank you for cleaning up the thread Rohugh.


On a side note... @imseeingred


The only real difference I saw in graphical/storyline revamping in was in a game published in 2005. Maybe I'm not as bright and nerdy as I thought I was :l

The best situation, as with most things, is compromise. Splitting the difference between hand-placed uniques and randomly generated uniques tends to make more people happy. Eventually the BGS pendulum of fan reaction will swing the other way, let us just hope it doesn't swing back too far.

There are good things and bad things about static worlds, and good things and bad things about leveled and randomly generated worlds. The only way to get the good from both is to have both. The only way to offset the bads from either one is to have the other. I think the conclusion here is obvious.

Exactly. The most recent game to do something like this was probably Dragon Age: Origins, and it was wildly popular and sold well. There's no reason to think that a well-made, Elder Scrolls game wouldn't perform even better.

Just look at the World of Warcraft interface and menus, and the complexity of the whole game. Sure, it has been simplified a lot over recent years, but it's still 100 times more complex (and, IMO, fun) than Skyrim, in those respects. And that complexity didn't seem to hurt its sales and subscriptions too much.

Hello, again.

I have a hard time swallowing that theory. Devs at BGS are passionate gamers as well, I'm sure. It's both their job and their hobby, or so I would imagine. The core team has been together since what, Daggerfall? The same people who created the beloved Morrowind are at the heart of the team that designed Skyrim. Therefore, this popular theory holds no water. They made some bad decisions which coupled with hardware constraints and software limitatons lead up to the final somewhat flawed game that Skyrim is. No need and no grounds to invoke some dark conspiracy by shallow devs.

I can agree with all that. Well said.