An Elder Scrolls Retrospective

With the release of the fourth chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga last week, UGO has put together a piece looking back on the long and successful history of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. From the article: "Some RPGs take the restricted world premise so far that they are practically on rails. Thankfully, the team at Bethesda Softworks decided back in 1994 that that wasn't the way things would be for their series The Elder Scrolls. Now at its fourth installment, we have decided it was about time to take a look back at the series that broke the mold on what an RPG should be and that gave players the most important ability of all - the ability to choose how to play the game. So ready your horse, grab your finest set of gauntlets, and prepare to embark on a journey through the history of the series that brought the amazing world of Tamirel to life, and don't be afraid to slay an orc or two in the process."

Re:I hate that line...

[9mm Censor]

Its in reference to video games. Video game RPGs specificically. For that Genre TES did break the mold.

Daggerfall stank

[Dark Paladin]

Sadly, while Morrowind and so far Oblivion have been filled with goodness (I'm working on an Oblivion quest wiki in my meager spare time), Daggerfall was - blech. Crashes, needed patches, the whole "randomizing" dungeons just made it too hard to go anywhere and know what the hell was going on - and the map system was this 3d thing of horror. Towns were full of people, most of whom were just empty bodies, and there was hardly any way of keeping track of quests.

Luckily, they learned from their mistakes - the only thing I need in Oblivion to make it "near perfect" is the ability to write notes on the map and in the journal myself, like "to do: check out that little island at location X".

Re:Daggerfall stank

[ivan256]

Now all it needs is a way to resize the map, zoom in and out on the map, have the map on the game screen, allow you to drag items out of your inventory without closing the menu, get to your inventory from anywhere with a single button, drop things without having to close and re-open the menu several times because you happen to be standing close to something, have tool-tips or some easy way to figure out what on-screen status icons stand for, not say 'Loading Area...' every six seconds in huge-ass text, have font sizes that scale with resolution, allow you to haggle in shops without 4 clicks and a dialog between every attempt, select all items in a stack by holding shift, select one item in a stack by holding control, converse and persuade people without having them repeat the same four annoying lines over and over again, have a conversation history on screen while you're talking to somebody, and... [gasp for air]... Oh, hell. Just give me the Morrowind user interface back please.

The Oblivion interface is remarkably deficient. It's as far from perfect as it can get without crashing (and it does that sometimes too. Don't hit shift too many times in a row.)

Re:Daggerfall stank

[masklinn]

Oblivion still has quite a lot of room to improve, and some parts of it are actually worse than Morrowind.

• The leve system should've been dropped a long time ago. It doesn't really make sense anyway, just grow the stats from the attributes. And because of the redesign, to get the ability to improve the statistics you need enough to not make the game too hard (especially if you're a magicka-oriented character) you have to make primary skills the skills you will NOT use. That is annoying.
• The interface is much worse than Morrowind for a computer user. It's good for console, it's not too bad for a computer (except that it's far too big, the font is frigging huge and stuff), but Morrowind's was mostly better
• Water was better in morrowind. Strange, but quite a few people feel like that, it felt more natural (if you had a card handling shaders that is)
• In Oblivion, the ennemies level with you. So do the merchants (most of what they could sell is locked, they sell only a selection that is considered "interresting" for your current level). This completely breaks the immersion.
• So does the fact that Oblivion's dungeons respawn. It's probably due to a limited save size on Xboxes, but it's still extremely annoying.
• Seems like they removed the levitation thingie.
• Fast travel is idiotic.

• You could probably find a lot more, but that's a basic list of my own gripes with Oblivion.

  In a word, Oblivion is real good, but still not enough to be called "near-perfect". By far. For a PC game that is, for consoles it doesn't have any contender anyway.

Re:Daggerfall stank

[Vo0k]

All in mods to come or already present.

> Now all it needs is a way to resize the map, zoom in and out on the map

UI improvement mod, already present remedies some problems by making visible area of the map WAY bigger.

> get to your inventory from anywhere with a single button,

F2.
Get to your stats, inventory, spellbook and map with F1-F4 (Read the Release Notes goddamnit!)

>drop things without having to close and re-open the menu several times

Shift-click.

"Loading" sign removal mod available already.

Haggling is way better than in Morrowind where you had to haggle over every single item. Here you set "haggle level" per shopkeeper.

> Don't hit shift too many times in a row.

Hit shift 5 times in a row WITHOUT Oblivion running (just plain windows) then disable that junk that pops up and shot the designer at M$ who invented it.

TES

[ShakaUVM]

Daggerfall is still the most ambitious of all of their titles. I played through the game, then went back to look at some of the spoilers for it, and... WOW. There's a gajillion things you can do in the game that I hadn't even touched upon. Not only could you become a vampire, but they had 12 different clans of vampires, with different abilities, inter-clan politics. The most detailed character generator yet, which just played up to the powergamer in me (fear of animals flaw FTW). Werewolves. Unique Artifacts. Quests for different religions, guilds, etc. A crazy awesome magic item creation system (My top gear only worked during the full moon, to keep costs low. I spent a lot of time sleeping.)

And I thought that my flying horse was pretty cool.

Sure, they used a "dynamic map" system of pseudo-random generating the dungeons and towns, but you know what? I liked the fact that there was 20,000 dungeons in the world. Every so often, I'd hop down into one for a nice randomly-generated-ala-diablo-2 experience. The sucky part was when you'd get quests to fish items out of the dungeons -- the dungeons were litterally huge, and could take hours to complete sometimes, especially if you couldn't find the one secret door behind the double-hairping corridor turn. So if I was doing quests for the mages guild (which I spent maybe 75% of my game time doing), I'd just drop any dungeon fetch quests and request a new one.

I wish they'd do a "digitally-remastered" version of Daggerfall, kinda similar to what they did with FF1&2 (improved the graphics, added a lil' bit of new content). If it looked as good as Oblivion, I'd never leave my computer.

The trouble with TES games is the fact that Bethesda doesn't believe in that whole whacky "quality assurance" thing. Daggerfall wouldn't run on my computer. Period. Until the 18th patch or so -- had a Cyrix CPU in 1996, remember those? Battlespire was almost a great game (online multiplayer with real working castles, catapults, drawbridges!) but was so buggy I had to stop playing. Redguard wouldn't run for more than 5 minutes without crashing. Morrowind once corrupted a section of the world (forcing a reinstall), and another time ate one of the quest items I needed to complete the game (had to go into the TES Construction set and drop a new one on the ground for me). Oblivion crashes every time I quit (ironically enough), but then also if I alt-tab, hit the windows key, reload too fast, click too fast, hit the keyboard too fast... or basically any time your hard drive can't keep up to speed (I have a Raid0 hard drive, so it rarely happens). It did crashed once on my girlfriend after she'd spent an hour without saving, which is really the only way I got to get my computer back from her after she spent her entire spring break on my own computer playing Oblivion. =) I was relegated to doing work with an old laptop.

Oblivion is great though. Maybe not as big in scope as Daggerfall, but damn. It looks awesome if you have the rig to run it, the quests (and the quest system) are about 100x more interesting than Morrowind's. All in all, it's one of the better RPGs I've played (and I thank the lord it's not an interactive movie like FFVII or FFX), and if the only time it reliably crashes is when I quit... well, I can deal with that.