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That’s sort of the problem with Bethesda, there are clearly talented writers there who write creative, compelling lore and stories, but then that just gets shunted into background texts and the sort of still-life scenes they did a ton of in Fallout, while the actual story that the player engages with is whitewashed and watered down into something sterile, generic, and uninteresting, with a tendency to only give the players one or two really stupid choices to progress a story.
i think theyre aware, but choosing to pander to chuds who are not, because they saw too many “liberty prime so based lolol gommubism get rekt” memes crop up, so they decided to lean into that.
3 is also nowhere near as self aware as the originals, but its pretty apparent they at least tried in that one
:this: the lore and world is genuinely amazing. the issue is that the games suck at delivering that.
morrowind was good for its time, but it does not in any way shape or form hold up as a game. all of the wonder of the game is in reading text.
it sucks to say that cause i love morrowind, but its the truth.
I’m really interested in TES lore but every time I try to dive into it I bounce right the fuck off because of how dense it is.
What would you recommend as a starting point?
The coolest part about each culture having different interpretations of history and their own versions of the different gods with their own names for them is that every interpretation is true. All different interpretations of the god of time Akatosh that you mentioned are all true, all exist, and are all the same being and unique separate beings simultaneously. In the elder scrolls universe if a large enough group of people all believe something it becomes true.
I played Skyrim for maybe a couple days and it was really good…and then it was just the same dungeon over and over and got really boring. There was too much to do too soon and I ended up doing bits of disconnected nonsense. I had no idea what was going on in the story and there was no direction in the game play. Exploration wasn’t all that fun I think because there was no ‘walls’ there was nowhere I wasn’t meant to go…nowhere that felt secret or undiscovered…nowhere that took effort other than go to place.
I think RPG’s either need to be heavily story driven or they need to be open ended but restrain how the player character develops in some way to make you craft your own story and make your choices make sense.
As I get older I keep thinking more and more that I’d probably enjoy tabletop games more than video games but I have no irl friends and I suck at math lol so I look for games that try and capture the feel of a DnD session.
We have a DnD 3.5e West Marches game going on if you want to join
Exploration wasn’t all that fun I think because there was no ‘walls’ there was nowhere I wasn’t meant to go…nowhere that felt secret or undiscovered…nowhere that took effort other than go to place.
Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact both understand this problem in the open world.
In BotW the game is filled with mechanics that slow the player down tremendously, things that make travelling the world impactful and not just “run in straight line to location”. Even annoying mechanics exist specifically to force the player into accepting they’re in a world with conditions that change that they must plan around. Weapons break in the game specifically to force the player to constantly adapt and be creative, the mechanic exists to force the player to stop doing the same thing over and over and over again. By the same token the rain slipping and preventing the player from climbing cliffs exists to force the player to take a different route, to force the player to adapt and do something different to what they might normally want to do because the conditions aren’t right for them to do it. Further things like stamina function for the same reason. Temperature management too. These are things to make the world complex to traverse so that getting to things actually feels like exciting exploratory victories.
Many people find these things annoying but they unmistakeably contribute to these games being good. Excellent game designers understand this, terrible ones do not. Limiting the player is a good thing. Players should be limited often and always but provided with a large variety of tools and options with which to attempt to overcome their limitations. How the players achieve something is irrelevant, merely that they feel good from having overcome a challenge.
Skyrim presents no challenge. It presents walking from location to location, collecting quests, then travelling to them and performing the exact same method of running the dungeon they always do (usually stealth archer). Then taking the quest back to the quest NPC. Big YAWN.
It’s an outdated. Boring. Old and highly sterile method of open world design. As per usual Nintendo has pioneered a path forwards out of this shitty niche the open-world RPG genre has been stuck in for ages.
Exploration wasn’t all that fun I think because there was no ‘walls’ there was nowhere I wasn’t meant to go…nowhere that felt secret or undiscovered…nowhere that took effort other than go to place.
There is a cool youtube channel called Camelworks who has videos exploring basically every nook and cranny in skyrim that’s pretty interesting.
I can’t wait for all the copium overdoses when the next one comes out on the same engine they’ve been using for 230 years.
Not a fan of TES but some of the porn mods for Skyrim are great
I had a ton of fun with skyrim at the time. It was real cozy to sit back and just explore a big world with all sorts of sidequests and caves with stuff that might be way stronger than you. The sounds, lighting, music, and pace of exploring and questing created an ambience that drew me in, and i enjoyed the bit of jank too. Fond memories of barely surviving a five minute battle alone with multiple enemies only to have J’zargo casually jog out from some trees a few seconds later chastizing me for being a little bitch and telling me I should be grateful he was there to save me.
The mmo was a huge let down for me. I guess i should have known better, i wanted multiplayer skyrim but what i got was WoW with a reskin.
