Surely, it can't be that I'm the only one who noticed this. I mean in TES I: Arena, you had the the whole region for yourself, millions upon millions of quests, outrageous number of dungeons and so on. Then in TES II: Daggerfall, they made it into only two parts of the region(High Rock and Hammerfell, as I recall) and they cut some minor content from TES I: Arena. Afterwards, TES III: Morrowind came along, with only one part(Morrowind, obviously) and some content was chopped off and so on. Basically this wierd trend continued from TES I: Arena up until TES V: Skyrim. I personally find this very worrying, and I'm wondering what aims or goals are Bethesda trying to achieve by this? Leave your opinion in a post and tell me what you think.

Wow.

There were a million quests in "Arena"?

I've never played it but that is seriously impressive.

So we went from Morrowind, which was a province to Cyrodil... which was a province... to Skyrim... which is a province...

How does this lead you to conclude that Bethesda's games are shrinking?

Azrael
The Nord with the Sword

Skyrim has so much more than Oblivion, it equals or even betters Morrowind IMO.

And Arena and Daggerfall were randomly generated, because that's all the technology could do at the time. However they were also more generic and a lot less interesting, hardly anything was hand placed. You can't compare them.

And wasn't EVERYTHING in Arena and Daggerfall randomly generated?

there are few factors that can contributing the increasing developing cost.

a ) game normally set a certain price similar to other game so people won't find this game "too expensive", this indirectly causing budget on developing
b ) graphic design is expensive
c ) voice actor hiring also can be expensive
d ) complexity of the engine and open world
e ) the open world gaming implementation is still not matured yet, a lot of works required on debugging, and developing

as a software developer myself, one thing i know for certain. the more fancy stuff you put, the more chance you breaking your code and causing bug. but as you know, gaming industry require lot of fancy stuff to attract customer...

Skyrim has more quests than Oblivion, but sadly 95% of the quests are boring as all hell.

Daggerfall expanded on Arena. Significantly.

Yeah but in all fairness arena and daggerfall where for the most part randomly generated and there was hardly anything between the locations so do they really count?

yeh this trend is terrible Morrowind was like 1/100 the size of daggerfall, so by that logic Oblivion must have been 1/100 size of morrowind, and skyrim must be even smaller than that, we wont even have room enough to move in the next few ES games

The truth is its pretty much the same with most games, ever since dlc became main stream.

It won't change has long has dlc are a profitable area

just my view point based on the trend over all with most games.

But alot in daggerfall was randomly generated if I recall right.

Also another thing to factor in is the console market you can't always make games to big.

And lack important gameplay options for different character types. More linear than a Bioware game. For shame.

Elder scrolls quests have always been more linear than a BioWare game.

Although I am deeply criticising Beth for many things they haven't done too well in Skyrim and Oblivion, I have to contradict you here. Arena was the start of it all but from my memory (I only played it twice), I do not remember it as too crowded with hand-placed and coded things. My "real" start was with Daggerfall, a HUGE world but almost all filled with random questing and occurences. Redguard was fun, but a completely different game. I did not play Battlespire, but that was similar to Redguard. Morrowind, my favourite, was crammed with content with love for the details and great stories, as well as Oblivion. Do not forget Morrowind being smaller because the landscape was hand-placed! Daggerfall was all random, except the towns.

I hated Oblivion for being bling-bling-consoly-kiddie - but what you surely can't say is, that there has been a DECLINE. The stories were placed an other way, there were fewer guilds, that is true. But the overall content was okay, given the fact that the land mass was hand-placed again.

Skyrim is bling-bling-console again, even worse than Oblivion but they have put a lot of love and patience in presenting the world, it is just an other way to do it. I would certainly love to see more guilds or an other way to present the quests, but if you do console games (and Skyrim IS a console game) you have to do things this way. The times when Bethesda did PC-games are over. But there are many hand-coded quests, nothing random and everything is uniquely place into the landscape. The price is that the game differs more from the previous ones. I bet even BioWare will do things differently as they did at NWN1/2. The times of Baldur's Gate are over, too *sigh*

Daggerfall days and Morrowind mornings won't come back - as well the love for personal computers at this company. 50% XBox consumers this is a strong and clear statement.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened to the game industry if the increase in processing power had been used for increased branching instead of photo-realistic graphics and filesize overbloat by making everything voiced.Today's computers could handle Daggerfall sized cities and populations with nearly unique personalities, I think, if we weren't so insistent on hair blowing lovingly in the wind during idle time animations. Without having to spend all that money on voice actors, famous or otherwise, teams of writers and coders could be hired to script realistic, natural dialog and that, for me, would make much better games.

I wouldn't say Skyrim has less content, radiant quests give us an infinite supply and there seems to be a lot less empty space compared to Oblivion.

Less content no, less complexity yes.

know matter how tasty and nutritional a meal might be, folk won't eat it if it looks like crap, human nature 101.

Nope.

This must be the dumbest thread I have read in a while.

Half of Daggerfall and Arena were randomly generated. And much, much, MUUUUUUCH less detailed. Morrowind was (most) of a province.

Cyrodill was a province.

GASP! Skyrim is a province.

A hell of a lot of it was though. Which made more content, but it was random. It didn't have any depth, detail or interest to it.

Quality not quantity. Arena and Daggerfall were bigger, so what? It was a lot of randomly generated, repetitive stuff.

Don't know about you, but I feel constantly buried by "content" in Skyrim.


But I guess it all depends on what definition of "content" you're using.

From Morrowind to Skyrim it has been one province. The trend stopped from Daggerfall to Morrowind. Let's not forget Morrowind did not take place on mainland Morrowind it took place on Vvardenfell Island.

Out of all the things to complain about, how can content be up there???

The mind boggles...

In no other RPG out at the mo can you waste so much frigging time...

Indeed. My main is level 54 and I have tons of stuff still left to do. If people are out to "Beat the game" which is a phrase I've heard often concerning Skyrim, then yes, you'll run low of content. Take your time. Talk to everyone. Enjoy the game, and who knows... you might more to do.

Well, your thesis has a problem: Daggerfall was a vastly larger game than Arena, so in at least one case the scope increased.

However, the real issue causing the "shrinkage" of the Elder Scrolls game is the cost of creating content assets -- that is, graphics and sound.

Arena and Daggerfall were all-text. There was no video, no voice, and the graphics were rudimentary -- that is, I'd believe they had a couple of graphic artists doing textures and the world design was done by the programmers. And the world, while huge, was almost entirely randomly-generated -- i.e. boring lands of kick down door, kill random monster, collect random treasure. Most dungeons looked eerily familiar. The games sold for $60.

Morrowind had vastly better graphics, showing real attention to detail. It looks primitive now, but at the time for an RPG (i.e. an open-world game, not a shooter where you're basically on rails) it was revolutionary. All those graphics cost money to create! In addition, we had a little bit of voice dialog (though nowhere near a fully-voiced game -- the vast majority of dialog was text.) Also, this time the world was pregenerated! No procedural lands or random dungeons -- everything was set out by hand, drastically increasing the cost of development, though many dungeons did still look eerily familiar after a time. It still sold for $60.

Oblivion had spectacular graphics -- with the spectacular cost involved. I wouldn't be surprised if creating graphics took more time than programming and game design. In addition, it was fully voiced -- every word spoken by a voice-actor. This makes every line of dialog hundreds of times more expensive. Unsurprisingly, there is vastly less dialog in the game -- which also means vastly fewer NPCs, since every NPC has to say something. The recycling of voice actors was obvious, and the "eerily familiar dungeons" effect still happened sometimes, albeit less often than in Morrowind. Oh, and it still sold for $60.

Skyrim has about the same graphics quality as Oblivion, since it has to run on the same 5-year-old consoles. And it's about the same size as Oblivion; shorter mainline quests, but the addition of random quests added playtime. Still fully voiced, and honestly probably the best dungeon-crawl game of all time -- every single dungeon is handmade, and every one is unique. No more eerily familiar dungeons -- every cave, Dwemer ruin, castle, etc. is totally different, and many are filled with interesting surprises. Random content is gone -- once again increasing development cost. And... it's $60.

We're paying the same amount for all these games. But while faster computers mean we can play these games with their fancy graphics and full voice-acting on PCs that cost no more than the ones we had in 1995, it doesn't make these assets any cheaper to create! And Bethesda knows that if they made a game with primitive graphics and no voice-acting, only a tiny number of hardcoe PC gamers would actually buy that game -- the polish and flash is required to sell in the $60-game market, or to sell on consoles at all. Unless we're all willing to start shelling out $250 for games, we're going to have to accept that better graphics & voice-acting = shorter games, and there's nothing Bethesda or anyone else can do about it.