I've always wondered why does Bethesda leAve features from their older games out of theirnew games. In morrowind there were crossbowes and staves, in oblivion their was am arena and a few more creatures and more conjugation spells. Why leave it out when it could make the game better? Some one tell me.

They have time to competently build a certain number of features. They like to change which ones they build. Daggerfall had houses that cost 500k (minimum!), ships that cost 100k or 200k and banks! You could also pack up your wagon in your inventory and carry it over city walls. Those were cool and are now gone, but it's ok, just like the lack of an arena in Skyrim.

They've decided to put their developement time into other things. For example, Bethesda spent time improving the bow mechanics rather than having two different sorts of bows.

Its mostly about time. Im sure that the next Elder Scrolls will have crossbows and spears, it will also be next-gen.

That doesn't really explain why they don't use the same mechanics as in previous games, they only needed to implement crossbows into Oblivion rather than make them from scratch.

no matter how much they add to their games, there will always be something left out

eg

ducks
sliced bread (for said ducks)
television
a circus
fat cars
fat women

It's not that simple. Morrowind had minimal physics and most objects weren't effected by gravity - so they couldn't simply lift the mechanic out of TES III to put into TES IV. Even if they could would it make sense for bows to have a new, deeper mechanic and not update crossbows?

Is everyone forgetting the unarmed skill!?!? I really can't fathom why an unarmed perk tree was left out; the unarmed kill animations are so cool.... That's my only gripe about this awesome game.

Just bring it back. Please bring it back.

I only used the bow anology because it was the one you used, although I don't think crossbows would have been that hard to make from the bows they already had,
slower reload time + heavier arrows and your halfway there, I was more referring to things like spell creation, unarmoured, unarmed, spears etc. For example although spears may have not realistically represented spear combat in MW they were still a nice feature

Megaexpensive houses are not features. But a huge stronghold, like the Morrowind ones but bigger, would have been cool.

But I agree. The only things I want though are things like the Levitate, Divine Intervention, Mark + Recall, Open/Close Lock, and "Jumping" (like how the Hagravens can teleport around, imagine a spell like that in combat) spells.

There's no reason why they couldn't have kept/added those spells. (I know the consoles were blamed for it, but even the original xbox could handle that stuff when it was on Morrowind.)

Because they've learned that you can cut all of the content they want and people will buy the game regardless.

Consoles needed a lot time doing optimization in order to keep up with the market's "visual standards" without crashing all over the place from memory problems. Didn't help the ps3 much though.

So then you start cutting things; but when you start cutting core features, you need to keep enough things so people will still call it fun. And have to decide which play style will cater to the biggest audience...

As a console player, I don't think it's entirely fair to blame the consoles for things being cut. What contributed to things being cut, and more importantly what contributed to having things already IN the game being left unpolished/incomplete/glitched, was the 11.11.11 schtick, and the desire to have a huge world with comparatively nothing in it. I do applaud them for making a world that feels far more alive than it ever had in Morrowind or Oblivion though. If not for the glitches with the quests, issues with the factions (short quest lines, forcible joining, etc.), and nothing having an impact...Bethesda did a very good job.

The world feels more alive, but at the expense of being less interactive is the bottom line for me.

I don't think anything can be less interactive than unmodded Morrowind. Although the Oblivion NPCs did a good job of reacting to the player.

Huge difference though. The original X-Box had a hard time running Morrowind, or at least if you can believe all the people complaining about the load times. The game was also different, to quote Cartman "the animations are all crappy" there was no radiant AI, no people walking around. No random occurences at all, nothing changed between different playthroughs, combat was horrible. The entire engine was much, much simpler. In order to advance in certain area's they probably had to cut in others in order to make the game playable. Part of this has to do with consoles because they are quite frankly old.

In order to cater to a larger audiance they also "dumbed down" the game, because let's face it... No matter how many people on here constantly say Morrowind was a great game, I doubt it would sell even half as well as Skyrim if released today with Skyrims graphics and animations but the rest was all Morrowind. People would complain the world felt flat and boring that they would have to read so much, there would be constant complains about how hard things are to find. How directions when given can still svck quite often. This might be in part because of consoles, but a large part of the computer audiance would complain about it as well...

The only thing that can probably really be blamed on consoles (in general instead of the specific consoles we're on now) is how the menu's look, and let's face it, even though they aren't my favorite it's hardly the biggest problem with Skyrim.

At least the guilds acknowledged you as leader and the dialogue changed based on events.

Because you're looking at it from a consumer stand point in which things should never change. Developers scrap ideas because you have to take a spear balance it, model it, texture it, animate it, give it unique skills and different versions only to have it play slightly different than a two handed sword. At that point is it worth it? They have to make a deadline and is it really worth it to add spears when they're not all that unique. One could argue that they should have pushed back the release but I'd argue that a game is never finished. Ask a artists if they ever feel a piece is finished or perfect and they'll more often then not say that it isn't. Deadlines are given because when this is your craft you'll spend hours tweaking and fine tuning it never actually getting to your end goal of completion.

That aside I hate this idea of "dumbing" down the game. It's insulting and pretentious to assume that a mass audience couldn't enjoy your ideal version of a game. It's as if you cannot move on from the stone age and still use maps because they're so much more detailed than a GPS which is just a dumbed down version of a map.

I've always missed "You have found a nasty knife" from Zork...it's a shame we left that simplicity behind.

Times change, games change. Yes, it probably would be nice for some people to have something from an earlier release in a game, but in all reality how many people who played those original release games are actually still here today? I would suggest that in comparison to the number of copies of the game sold that the figure is very low.

UNARMED

It's in all caps not only because I'm screaming this into the computer screen, but also because it stand for a clever acronym that goes a little something like this:

http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DuhBiNx749Zw&rct=j&sa=X&ei=rHEWT7XUF-qfiQKAhaHzDw&sqi=2&ved=0CCoQuAIwAA&q=unarmed+badass&usg=AFQjCNGi1mKKuA2C446fUJ4NZ_Of75yRAg

http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DuhBiNx749Zw&rct=j&sa=X&ei=rHEWT7XUF-qfiQKAhaHzDw&sqi=2&ved=0CCoQuAIwAA&q=unarmed+badass&usg=AFQjCNGi1mKKuA2C446fUJ4NZ_Of75yRAg

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBiNx749Zw

If that was true all swords in the game would be a steel longsword that changes its stats as you level up, whats the point in coding a different appearance and coming up with a new name?
If it was just recoding and retestexturing a longsword as you said it wouldn't really take much work at all.

Deadlines should also be chosen based on the time estimated to get all the features in and flesh out the world, not because 11/11/11 is a cool release date.




On the contrary I think the mass audience could enjoy my idea of an ideal game, Bethesda doesn't.
And a GPS has all the features of a map and more unlike Skyrim which has taken a few features out and improved on others, it's pretentious to assume anyone who enjoyed Morrowind more is just nostalgic and wants to play Morrowind with better graphics.


I played Daggerfall close to the original release, and the only reason there is more fans of newer games over older ones here is because instead of making games in the mould of Daggerfall and letting their fanbase grow they made a game that would appeal to a large fan base that already exsisted.

The question is another "Why work on a game that you can sell only with his name?"

They adjust graphic and some animation and nothing more and they can make a good game, then why working more on this when they can sell with low effort.

Also because else people would've complain about the game being the same as the others with no new stuff, so they removed something and added something else like shouts and dragons.

Or they could have just added new stuff and not gotten any criticism?

and make the game like three discs? yea, they could, but they didn't, and I dig that, I hate multi-disc games (I have an xbox360)