Hey guys, I've been a member here longer then my join date would suggest. I've been a fan of TES since Morrowind was released and I've enjoyed the two successive games as well.

I've noticed that with each game, and each games "evolution" that the series has been heading in a direction that I'm not particularly comfortable with.
I absolutely loved and adored the depth and complexity of morrowinds story line and lore. I loved seeing how the factions interacted and how the politics and religion shaped the world.

The thing that keeps bringing me back the TES is the story, its one of the most fascinating I've ever read. It saddens me to see the facet fade out.
Oblivion was sorely lacking in this regard, but still had components that were enticing, while the latest installment is almost void of anything I could consider genuinely interesting.

Does anyone else here share this view?
If not, why not?

Yes, the reason? The more things you add to the game, the less time you have to flesh them out.

Every time an ES game comes out, people cry out of X feature to be added.....Oblivion had so many new things, AI (which was huge at the time), combat, graphics, lots of dungeons and people.....and because of that, the dungeons were really dull, storries were simple and NPCs forgettable.

Then Skyrim came along, they included radiant quests (which have been asked for since Morrowind), more AI, graphics, more combat and magic features, world inraction.....and left on the wayside again was unique storylines and interesting people.....seriously, the people in Skyrim are so one faced....

But unfortunately, unique storylines don't sell games anymore, its the actual gameplay....you cant market the story (much) without ruining the game....so new features are emphasized as the selling points of the games and they therefore get the most work put into them.



And considering the sales for each ES game gets bigger, they aren't going to stop doing this.....not to mention as long as the average person can sink 20 hours into an ES game, people will buy it since its good value compared to the other games on the market.

I agree with you completely unfortunately.
Its a trend that makes me question whether or not I'll continue to purchase games in the series. Which makes me sad, as I really do love the lore and back story. I really do wish they would continue with it.

One can only hope that choices/consequences, recognition for achievements, more interesting npcs and a strong over-arching story are considerations with Skyrim's dlc. As da mage says, sales talk, but the idea that shiny graphics and an 'epic' audio-visual experience are mutually exclusive with story and character is a very strange one to me.

I don't believe that they are mutually exclusive, but I can understand how they become tags at either end of a spectrum in a development sense.

You can't compare Morrowind with Skyrim for various and valid reasons already stated in other topics (from my point of view of course) i agree on the lack of depth and choices/consequences but Skyrim was made with already in mind the Dlcs -so has to be considered as a whole only when all the Dlcs are out (collectors edition) i agree with zen1966 on that.

The "direction" taken (sadly) have payed the most in terms of sales,so the hopes for next Tes to be more "Rpg" are few i think.

All we can hope perhaps is that in the Dlcs the developers - already "quiet and relaxed" after Skyrim huge success will pay more attention to the "aficionados silent requests" here and on the net than to "the masses" scream (well,perhaps sometimes we are not so "silent " here after all )

If they do add substance to the game with DLC then I'm all for it, and its a habit they adopt then Its one I can live with for sure.

I just keep getting the niggling feeling that DLC will be something like the Theives guild quest line (probably the most fleshed out of the lot IMO) which still wasn't great. Its this niggling feeling that has me worried for the series as a whole.

I'd like to think they're at least trying to solve the problem. Radiant Story had huge potential if it had worked out... they wanted it to drive just about every quest, originally, and really play up reputation, factions, friendships/rivalries, etc. Think about it.. a story-telling mechanism that responded dynamically to what you were doing, who you befriended, who you pissed off, what groups you got in good with, etc, as well as dynamically generate quests based on who you knew and how you've played.

The stories and quests would essentially build themselves, letting the development team focus on other areas.

Something like that would've been absolutely killer... if it worked. Unfortunately, much like Radiant AI, Radiant Story hit road blocks and had to be scaled back. Double-unfortunately, they couldn't just scale it back and leave it at that (even with a scaled back Radiant AI, it's still impressive tech). The things Radiant Story controlled had to be filled in by hand late in development. You can then imagine why guilds are so short and poorly paced, and why people are so flat.

If TES continues in the directions that is going, I do not know if I will buy the next one that comes out.

I haven't noticed any such weakening of the setting; there's just as much politics going on with the Thalmor, Empire and Stormcloaks as there was with the Great Houses, the Empire and the Tribunal. The gameplay leans more to the action side, but the Elder Scrolls series has always been a hybrid of action and RPG, and it works well no matter where on that line it is (except at the extreme - either extreme, as Morrowind's clunky, roll-reliant combat system exemplifies).

As for consequences for your actions, how much of that was there in Morrowind, aside from "kill this character and you can't complete the main quest"? Raven Rock, which was only in the second expansion?

I'm fine with the way TES is heading. Sure some things should be better but they can't make everything perfect.

I already know that unless some effort is made to make TES6 more like what made Morrowind and Daggerfall fantastic, Im not going to buy it.
Certainly not if the trend started in Oblivion and continued in Skyrim, one of less options, less story, less rpg and handholding is expanded upon.
Spellmaking is also an absolute must.

Yeah.
Skyrim has its good points, but it just does not give me that TES fix I crave.

I like the progress in life simulation, wilderness, topography, dungeon designs... I only hope they will put more emphasis on stories, questlines, disposition/reputation and radiant a.i. next time. The technology/graphics part has gained a predominance that wouldn't bother me at all normally, but I associate it with a percievable decline in storytelling, viable character builds, faction life and quest variation. They say you can't have it all, but this is Bethesda and I want it all.

The thing is, all those politics are just an assumed front. There is no depth to any of it. There is no way to investigate any of it further, I mean the whole quest line behind each of the great houses was designed around this facet.

I understand your "fears",but i've to say that i'm 50% confident that in the Dlcs we will see good stuff (well its no difficult improve Skyrim from this standpoint you would probably say ) the 50% is due only to the fact that after all we are not talkin' about a "real expansion" like Shivering Isles was for Oblivion,in fact the developers have said that the first Dlc could be more similar to Point Lookout in size if i'm not wrong.

But sincerely, if they gave us only the 50% of what Shivering Isles was in this first dlc i will be already satisfied.


I think that the true landmark from which take inspiration in that regard is Fallout New Vegas ;and even Red Dead Redemption for depth of contents and story

If they add 20 more levels,new enemies,challenging dungeons/puzzles and -most of all -a good story in the Dlc i think that even the most demanding Es fans will see the whole Skyrim from a new perspective.

Who has played the Fallout games (the last two) knows well that the Dlcs could even improve the game,is that what i mean (well, ok..not all of them probably e.g. operation anchorage) but i'm still confident that we could have good stuff for the above mentioned reasons.

Of course its a shame that the vanilla game is more oriented to "size" (the more the best ? ) than "depth" (the less but better) but this could be even a strict choice to reach the largest number of players/people,who knows.

A wise choice judging from the success of Skyrim.

The thing is though, Skyrim sold due to its epic marketing campaign and off the the reputation of previous games.
Nothing Bethesda has done WITHIN Skyrim had granted it its success.

I don't agree with you on this.

The previous games are probably in evident minority in terms of sales -even if we compare both to Skyrim; In fact,i think that Skyrim could bring more players to the past games than the contrary. but this will require a concrete research on this aspect.

The "marketing campaign" was more or less the same of others well-know products/brands of the industry of our days,nothing more

I know what you mean. It saddens me that the series that I love so much is basically becoming more of an action open-world game with RPG elements. Lets just hope that with the next generation of hardware and software, the Elder Scrolls will go back to its roots.

Bantha. Friggin. Poodoo.

Yes, there are reasons for old-school Morrowind-TES lovers to be upset with some of the liberalizations the series has taken (even more so for those guys who've been stickin' it out since Daggerfall). But Skyrim was successful because it distilled what most people loved about Morrowind (The sheer unbridled sense of ADVENTURE) and packaged it into a format that a wider audience could enjoy.

Diffuse that IED of dishonesty. Skyrim was a great game.

"Was"? I don't know whether you intended to put the most recent TES game into the past tense, but it certainly brings to mind an idea I have about this.

I would wager that most of the people who are complaining about the direction of the series are folks who see even the older games in the Present Tense. The great thing about these games has always been their replay value. As role-play environments, they don't tend to go stale. The ongoing simplification of the series is going to be the loss of that sort of infinite-replayability.

Casual players who pick up a game for a while, play through the story, and then move on to some other game, will not "get" what the long-time fans are talking about. It's like we were talking past each other, in different languages.

Until there is an official announcement (and not rumors/conclusions jumped to) then all discussion for a possible future ES game will be kept in the "Beyond Skyrim" topic.