» Fri Jun 22, 2012 8:08 am
The fundamental problem here is design ethos. As Todd has stated repeatedly, they start over with every game. Since he took over, that has led to the unrelated mish-mash that The Elder Scrolls series has become. To wit:
Arena- Pretty basic GURPS mechanics CRPG......except that, unlike any other CRPG of the time, you left the dungeon. In 1st person. That was a milestone. You had an entire continent to play on. Yes, yes, it has 1994 256 color graphics, but =for it time=, it was something impressive. And there was a sense of history, there. Even then it wasn't J-Random Euro fantasy. It was Tamriel.
Daggerfall- Something that, unfortunately, has yet to meet even a competitor, never mind a rival. Gameplay mechanics had increased by orders of magnitude (and you can see in the resource files where there were even more than were removed at the last second or deactivated for some reason). You had a main quest that had 6 possible endings, depending on your choices in game. You had 180,000 square miles of game area, and you could walk over every inch if you chose. No matter what guild you joined, you had to work your way to the top. You could customize your character out the wazoo. There was a reputation system that could, would, and did get in your way with certain factions; only makes sense that if you piss off the underworld by svcking up to the nobility, well, you don't get work from the scum and they send assassins to kill you. Of if you wallow in the gutter, the nobles won't look twice at you, and the shopkeepers are....hesitant....to deal with you. Yes, you could power level....right up until you got one of the first 5 skills to 100, and froze yourself out of leveling any further no matter what you did (aside from hacking the game, naturally).
Was it perfect? Not by a long shot. DF suffered from 3 major problems.
1) Technology. They were pushing DOS hard, and the system resources to play the game were brutal for the time.
2) Time. They simply ran out and had to go gold, leaving a lot of things unfinished.
3) Code. The code base of the time simply wouldn't support some of the things they were working on. If it had, we would have had mounted enemies to fight. Festivals on holy days with dancing, lights, the whole shebang. A prosttutes guild to go with the others (at least as a quest source), sailable and ownable ships and boats, and other cool things. But it was still 180,000 miles of worldspace, enough dungeons that you would never do them all in any reasonable time, enough lore to choke a dozen horses, and with the creation of tools by some of the original Daggerfools, you could create your own quests and storylines.
(I am deliberately bypassing Battlespire and Red Guard, and they are ES Adventure titles, not part of the main series)
Morrowind- This was Todd's first time at the helm, as well as the first time they had to design the game to allow porting to console. This was a critical point, as it limited the game's ability considerably. Like it or not, that is a fact. The original Xbox was running a customized Intel P-3 Coppermine core, with a grand total of 64 megs shared system ram (and the P4 had been released a year earlier, so it was already -well- behind the power curve). The limited, shared system ram severely limited the possible size of the world space; we went from 180,000 miles to slightly over 6-ish. The full changeover to 3D was accomplished here, so that was a plus. The graphics of the time were rough, so they compensated with better writing and more thought out storylines.
Oblivion- This was the end of the 3rd age.....and the first attempt to cut the corners and automate themselves into a corner. Radiant AI was touted as the next coming of Lord British....and it didn't work. Major features there had to be switched off to avoid game chaos (might be cute watching all the NPC's slaughter each other, but only once, you know?). The shift was heavily towards graphics; speedtree and the bigger memory pool the 360 has (not big, you understand, just bigger). sixy looking Ayleid ruins everywhere with no real reason to exist (particularly since, as the continental capitol, that space would have been -used-). They blew the design by having the aforementioned capitol of a continent spanning empire being a joystick shaped outpost in the wilderness, with no evidence of the coming and going needed to manage same. No legions, no barracks, no evidence of the local food crops needed, etc. There was a greater emphasis on voice acting over text.....and the limiting of choices in quests started to show more. They did pay attention to atmosphere in having things that could mess up the world affecting the world.....although most of the damage went away far too quickly & cleanly (they didn't even bother with the gimmick of having you wake up in hospital afterwards, unconscious for days, after the Grand Battle™. It just....went away).
Skyrim- One hell of a tech demo masquerading as an Elder Scrolls game (this despite the fact that the tech in question is at least 2 generations out of date). The world is static and unchanging.....despite the fact that, as this is supposed to be The End of Days (Armageddon, the Big Kiss-off, The Oh sh-T we're gonna get ea--!!), the environment doesn't reflect any reaction to the kind of power suddenly running loose. The animation system has really improved. Radiant AI seems to work better. Radiant story apparently inherited the gong from AI, as it doesn't seem capable of generating a FedEx quest worthy of Daggerfall, never mind a game 15 years its senior. You have choices that are no choice. Nothing you do affects you in the game world......and what you imagine between your ears is irrelevant. There is no urgency to the main quest whatsoever. Alduin engineers the escape of his greatest threat. And does nothing. You can honk around for a thousand game years, and nothing changes whatsoever to indicate that there is danger. You get the elder scroll and use it to kick Alduin's butt, and he goes away to chow down in Sovvengarde. And you can stand there another 10,000 game years and the bloody beast never returns. Does he eat so many souls in nordic heaven the aforementioned butt gets too big to squeeze through the portal back to Mundus, or what? You can sell your body and soul to Nocturnal, and none of the other daedra lords notice? Where are all the Vigilants of Stendarr that should be after you every second for being such a monster? I could go on, but these are sufficient examples of the way bling won over substance in this outing. There is no sense of theat from the main quest, most of the secondary questlines are far too short for the supposed payoff, and the few that are nice and developed and involving all walk on the dark side. Almost seems like they actually spent time on those quests because of subject matter, and figured Radiant Story would handle the nice guy stuff, doesn't it?
I am completely fine with 10 quests if necessary, quality over quantity.
how many prefer it at a good videogame/movie/entertainment product for masses ?
