Skyrim is shit btw. Oblivion forever (oblivion is worse than Morrowind, but Oblivion was my entrance to the games so I love it)
Enlightenment is when you know they are all shit and its whatever brings you joy…
Also pirate and mods
Bethesda certainly have a lot to contend with in the Fromsoft era of realtime combat and the BG3 era of RPG.
I expect them to produce Starfield with an Elder Scrolls reskin for the next game but with some AI npc interactions. The first 2 months will be everyone defending it followed by the realisation that it’s dogshit just like Starfield.
ES6 being complete dogshit is the free space on my 2032 bingo card
I have zero hope for this game
Yeah I agree ECMAScript 6 sucks
2032? Mighty optimistic are we?
Did it even take two months for people to come around to starfield being shit? Felt more like a week or two at the most.
There was definitely a small crowd who were immediately negative but it took the people who paid for it a while to accept
at least it’ll be open-world. i’m expecting more like fallout 4
“Legendary Bandits bastard-grip short sword of obsidian”
They’ll make planets into Daedric Realms or Pocket Realms of oblivion you visit full of randomly generated repetitive slop.
Yesssss you know i’m right
Bethesda hasn’t put out anything above average since Oblivion
Oblivion was overall not good, but it had some moments, mostly involving Shivering Isles
But Oblivion was basically them rejecting everything that made Morrowind such a classic
No unique setting (Cyrodiil was supposed to be fairly Mediterranean if I recall correctly), weak villain and plot (boy, it would be great if I actually did something other than escort Sean Bean to his death) and it was the beginning of them paring down all the crunch that makes RPGs fun
No unique setting (Cyrodiil was supposed to be fairly Mediterranean if I recall correctly), w
The empire was meant to be the collision between Roman (Colovian) and Aztec (Nibenay) culture. Roman centurions with face tattoos and feather capes. Mediterranean on the coast. Jungle inland etc.
Thanks!
I knew there was supposed to be something more to it than rolling green European hills
Elder Scrolls is not The Simpsons, I can tell you that
I just loved exploring in Oblivion. There was something really wonderful about stumbling around in the woods, finding some village and figuring out what its Deal was. I still remember my first playthrough where I ended up ass-first in that painting quest. There were so many of those experiences. I can acknowledge Morrowind is the Better Game, but the nostalgia just doesn’t hit the same.
Did not get the same thing with Skyrim. It felt so formulaic.
Skyrim feels like the perfect RPG for the “Epic Bacon” crowd
Every character can do everything, you routinely piss off every other Daedric Lord, and you have the whole Romans Vs. Vikings Vs. Dragons thing
There are little moments that feel alright, like they’re building up to something good, but immediately undercut themselves
Like the whole Parthunaax Dilemma, where the Blades are like “We won’t help you fight the actual big bad until you kill the one dragon who doesn’t kill for fun” and you can just ignore it. There’s no punishment for not doing it and no real benefit to doing it, it’s the epitome of their design.
Just a big and wide with zero depth
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I will admit that Oblivion was mostly my introduction to Elder Scrolls, so there is some nostalgia bias. But I feel like Oblivion was overall good and is a medium between Morrowind and Skyrim, and has some strengths of both, and I am an Oblivion defender.
There are some upsides and years ago I would have said Oblivion is better because of how slow and obtuse some of the Morrowind mechanics are if you are new to it. Especially if you just couldn’t look up solutions to things on the internet (I keenly remember many hours of wasted searching just because an NPC gave wrong directions to the dungeon). These days I do think Morrowind is better because of the world building and the depth involved. It is the only one I am still replaying occasionally.
Oblivion had a lot of streamlining of the mechanics that made it a lot easier to get into the game and got rid of a lot of the drag of the games and some non-level parts of the grind. But as bad as the Oblivion main quest could get, I still remember how much of the main quest in Morrowind was getting a book for Caius Cossades and that being the impetus for me mostly ignoring Elder Scrolls main quests and just wander and dungeon delve. And even though a lot of things were getting simplified and flattened for this, Oblivion still wasn’t anywhere near Skyrim’s levels yet. And even if the main quest was boring, several of the side quests before Shivering Isles were good. I still think that the Dark Brotherhood questline was one of the best Bethesda questlines and even the Mages Guild setup of getting approval from every hall, which each specializes in a different school of magic, was a good choice of requiring the character to have some amount of proficiency with magic without a direct stat requirement (yes, you could just buy scrolls and staves to do everything if you were high enough level, but it is better than Skyrim’s where a barbarian with a small handful of scrolls could be archmage in a week). Even though the “every hall specializes in one school of magic” conceit just reeks of a bad GM’s world building, Oblivion does pull it off.
So I think that Oblivion was actually quite good, even if it wasn’t at Morrowind’s level. And it did introduce a lot of mechanics that were a wrong turn made more obvious after Skyrim (e.g. unkillable NPCs instead of the “persist in this doomed world” message, the entire world levels with you and gives good loot no mater the quest or area).
I agree with some of your points, except the Dark Brotherhood quest
The individual missions are good, each one showcasing different aspects of a good assassin
But the actual quest is not that good when you consider that it’s very obvious that both the player and their character realizes that they’re being mislead but are given no recourse to do anything about it. You can’t warn Armand or track down the perpetrator until after you slaughter all these fellow assassins or anything
Yes, yes, I know that there’s the whole thing with Sithis and the Dark Mother and how they just love killing no matter what, but by all accounts, it’s just railroading for the sake of railroading and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth
The railroading sucks, but I liked the story and the Agatha Christie quest. Also killing all your buddies is a real knife twister, which is a rare experience in a game for me.
Dishonoured was good.
Arkane developed that one, Bethesda only published it
I should have specified Bethesda Game Studio, because as a publisher they did pretty alright for themselves
Skyrim is great at a lot of things, being a good RPG is not one of them.
I hear it’s good at being a porn mod. I tried downloading one when I was about 17 though and it just kind of looked flat and unpassionate, so Not For Me.
Copious amounts of porn. Is there any game that has been pornified as much as Skyrim?
The Sims
probably not in-game but if source filmmaker is allowed then it’s overwatch
Legends say that it is only with the widespread falsehood of “Fallout 2 > Fallout 1” that will harken ashinadash’s return.
Skyrim would have been a great game, if it was built on the principles of socialism, which is sort of was with the mod community, unfortunately it was built on the principles of liberalism using the wealth and experience acquired from the previous projects.
Once you get to this point in life you only have two choices, no matter what you’re doing, are you willing to invest the money back into human beings? They tried to do something with mods irrc so why not invest capital into establishing a school for devs? Literally could have ended up having the most interesting looking, polished, well run, videogame ever made.
Instead we get this lovable half-assed broken mess carried by both money thrown at advertising campaigns and the mod scene. Yet another example of how short sighted libs are, all the awesome stuff people manage to build is an exception that proves it. All that effort displayed by wondering adventurers would get multiplied if they worked together. I mean what was that Baldurs Gate sort of shows it. Now imagine if a Game company had 1.000-10.000 workers in-house, guaranteed employment, 8 hours of sleep a night, lunch breaks, shared goal, instead of what they have had.
Although gamers don’t deserve it, so scratch that. The developers do tho’
Once you get to this point in life you only have two choices, no matter what you’re doing, are you willing to invest the money back into human beings? They tried to do something with mods irrc so why not invest capital into establishing a school for devs? Literally could have ended up having the most interesting looking, polished, well run, videogame ever made.
Wouldve been the biggest PR move ever too but the capitalist worldview made them see the modding community as their enemies lol
Ever since Blizzard allowed their game’s mod to spawn League of Legends every developer seems to have gone to war with modding to different extents.
in fairness to blizzard there, mobas are horrible
forever missing ash and her posts
We’ve lost so many posters over the years. Like tears in the rain.
yeaa, she was great
we have lost entirely too many wonderful people throughout the years
i just hope they’re only gone from here and not…more generally
Yeah.
I often wonder which of the hexbears whose posting I loved but who disappeared, actually only changed names and maybe posted less frequently, which of them simply moved on from the site, and which of them had irl events (either good or bad) that superseded their continued input here. It’s especially noticeable when I read years old threads and see names (some of whom I might have forgotten about otherwise) that hit me with a rush of nostalgia and think “damn, they were such an awesome poster! I wonder what ever happened to them…”
i feel you. one of the hardest parts of socializing on the internet is that people really can just vanish and you’ll never learn anything more about it. i like to imagine good things happened for all of them but…well, we live in the reality we do, after all.
What happened to her?
unfortunately i can’t say for certain. last time she was posting iirc it was pretty self deprecating so she may have stopped out of a sense of having embarrassed herself? even though she was (to my understanding) almost totally adored
Damn, that sucks. The vibes have been incredibly horrendous at times here, so I don’t blame her for feeling judged, if that’s what it was
agreed, but sadly i think it was more internal than external for her, at least from what i gathered at the time and can recall.
the best scrolls game is the one you played in your teens because it was fresh enough and you were young enough that your imagination and the novelty filled in all the gaps for you
for me and my peeps it was morrowind because we are all in our 40s but most of us arent online as much anymore and the next generation of young people’s voices are more prominent online so now its oblivion and one day you’ll be beat down with life and half the people you know will have died or be super busy and people will be saying skyrim is best
mark my words
Next you’re going to tell me ska isn’t actually that good
ska is actually good
Pick it up pick it up pick it up
elbow flailing increases
I always wonder what happened to Kirkbride. All the stuff he did for Morrowind was so far out there and then he just sort of fell off the face of the earth. He’s just been doing managerial positions in game dev ever since. My favourite is the Knights of Pelinal stuff for oblivion. The image of a time travelling cyborg medieval knight stepping out the dense jungle with his Minotaur nephew before a bunch of tribal Cyrodillians is probably the only thing that has stuck with me from Oblivion.
He works as an external consultant for Bethesda every now and then. He’s been involved in pretty much every game although with less degree.
Much less degree. C0DA and its various related writings are the sort of things that should have been included in the game (ESO doesn’t count, death to MMOs). Bethesdas race to the most marketable game possible isnt suprising its just that Kirkbride hasn’t established himself like say Chris Avellone (an extremely overrated writer IMO) as a recognisable RPG writer. Instead he’s spent most of his time working at TellTale, which I always kind of thought was a waste.
I mean it’s just upto him. Working in Game Studios is not very fun especially if you work at big name AAA studios.
Roleplaying in Skyrim is a skill issue
My favorite Skyrim RPG build is that of the ambitious Vampire Hunter, the victim of vampire nobles who killed his family; he swore eternal vengeance against all rich vamps
He crosses the border to join the Dawnguard before the main quest sidelines him. In his eyes every quest is simply an opportunity to acquire another weapon to destroy his vampiric enemies
He joins the Companions to improve his combat skills and jumps at the chance to become a Werewolf for obvious reasons
He travels to Winterhold College to learn spells that counter the art of Lifedrain
He searches for Words of Power because “If it can bring down Dragons, it can bring down Vampires”
At his lowest moment he forsakes his ideals and seeks the aid of the Daedric Princes, acquiring dark weapons and darker powers
But then, He stumbles upon the mysteries of the Dwemer and impressed by the mechanical power on display, he realizes it’s not demonic magic he needs, but Knowledge, he learns everything there is to know about Dwemer technology, gets himself some poisoned exploding Dwemer bolts and a Dwemer Crossbow and becomes the stealth archer he was born to be
I’ve found that Skyrim is good for roleplaying if you only use diagetic fast travel (wagons, boats) and you pretend you have no idea where any of the particular quests and items are.
Walking town to town collecting odd jobs, sleeping in inns by the road and collecting rumours as an adventurer is neat.
To be entirely fair, you can do this kind of roleplaying in any video game. You don’t have to be Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2. You could be a civilian imposter that just looks like him.
Roleplaying in RPGs should intersect with the mechanics of the game, usually limiting you via stats and gameplay options. Your vampire hunter is dedicated to weapons so they’re less charismatic, or whatever. That creates interesting gameplay scenarios, connects you to your character more and encourages you to replay the game to experience what you traded off in one playthrough. It’s about limits as much as it is about choice.
Since Skyrim, Bethesda has started to lean into ‘infinite leveling,’ which means every character will eventually become the same ultra-competent bandit slayer. They also very rarely restrict content depending on your characters choices.
Roleplaying in RPGs should intersect with the mechanics of the game, usually limiting you via stats and gameplay options. So, if your character is a vampire hunter, for example they should be more specialized in weapons that vampire hunters use. Your character’s dedication to weaponry would mean they’re less, idk, charismatic or whatever. That creates interesting gameplay scenarios, connects you to your character more and encourages you to replay the game to experience what you traded off in one playthrough
Funnily enough this is precisely how I play the character, in the most common iterations the Vampire Hunter starts out naive and stubborn; he wants to get into the meat of the fight and trade blows with the Vampires, but as he matures (and heals constantly), he learns his skills aren’t in hand-to-hand combat, the Vampires are simply too strong
So he’s forced to adapt, slowly trading a sword for a bow (which plays into the infamous combat mechanics of Skyrim)
Instead of becoming an all-powerful hypermage, he finds he only has magical talent in casting Runes, Vampires are fast after all, and laying down a Rune trap while he pulls out his bow or crossbow is simply good sense learned through experience.
In some iterations after learning he’s not as physically adept as he wished, he becomes a master of alchemy, rendering the Vampires helpless through ingenious poisons that rob them of their speed
It takes a degree of restraint to play this way, but for me overcoming the limitations of the vanilla game is simply part of the fun
You’re imagining your own limitations that the game doesn’t want to impose. That’s the sort of roleplaying you can do in any game. I used to do it all the time when I had run a game dry, but it’s a poor measure of how good a game is as an ‘RPG.’
I guess it depends on what qualities one believes a ‘good’ RPG should possess; for me personally, the lore and how it inspires character versatility and diversity of themes are more important for what I consider a ‘good’ RPG, most games never come close to accomplishing that. If limitations aid those qualities, I’ll take them or make them up as long as they gel with the lore; if not I’ll ignore them until the game breaks my patience or suspension of disbelief
the thing that makes an RPG and not some other kind of games is the systems, and when people evaluate the RPG quality of RPGs they’re generally looking at the interactions with what the game systematizes and not some media studies deconstruction where some movie and a deck of cards is your favorite rpg because you can watch the scenes out of order.
I don’t know; I’ve tolerated god-awful gameplay mechanics and systems for the sake of the lore and storytelling, Dragon Age: Origins and KOTOR come to mind readily
origins has excellent mechanics if you dig into the companion programming, and kotor is just d20 which is fine but not horrible
I had a blast doing a playthrough as Rincewind from Discworld.
Skyrim seems like the kind of place he would turn up.
That’s a satisfying-looking character. I’ve never seen the wizard hat, cape, or Dwemer bot before, are those mods?
Yes. So is the quarterstaff. I think the robe was, too; that mod added unenchanted variants of various robes from the base game, including a heavy armor variant of the Vigilant of Stendarr robes. That’s what I’m wearing there; it was basically a 2H maces build with wiz[z]ard aesthetics.
wow that’s so cool are those mods?
Yes
Lmao
EDIT: it’s funny to me given the context of this whole thread.
Raw-dogging vanilla Skyrim is kind of like fornicating with a cheese grater. It’s fun once.
You gotta explain to me how the cheese grater thing would be fun even once
I mean I can do that, I’d just much rather do it in a game that is focused on helping me have that experience rather than Skyrim. Much like how I can reskin D&D to be a TTRPG for political intrigue and diplomacy, but I’d much rather just play a system that encourages that, instead of one where the focus is on something else entirely.
The challenge just makes it more spicy and helps build more self-confidence in one’s own imagination
If you enjoy it all the more power to you. I just prefer playing systems that encourage the style of play I want, rather than wrangling some vacuus monster into a shape somewhat resembling what I’d like.
edit: Like what Certified Sinonist says - You can do that with basically every game you play
Yeah it’s definitely not for everyone
Like what Certified Sinonist says - You can do that with basically every game you play
Can’t say I agree with that idea, most games simply don’t have the worldbuilding and lore to support in-depth roleplaying like the kind I described, every iteration and build I play is canon-friendly and supported by the cumulative lore of the series, otherwise there’s no narrative heft or consistency to the internal logic of the character and it becomes arbitrary daydreaming
Wether you follow lore or not isn’t really what I mean when I speak about the RPG as a system. The limitations you give yourself are artificial and self-imposed, you’re working around the system, not with it. The game isn’t doing the work for you, the game isn’t reacting to you being a vampire hunter outside of the vampire hunter dlc, where you will always be a vampire or vampire hunter, depending on what you choose.
I can role play in Crusader Kings, but I wouldn’t say thats a good RPG system either.
As long as the system allows the role-playing to be lore-consistent and character variety compelling, then my criteria for ‘good’ has been fulfilled. Obviously that’s not my criteria for a “GREAT” RPG, but “good enough” can, under a lot of conditions, have a quality all it’s own
Im old enough to remember having the same opinion but of oblivion comparing it to morrowind. Somehow Bethesda keeps falling forward.
Skyrim has terrible combat and I think that is part of why people like it.
I have hated every bethesda game that I ever played except for call of cthulu which I didn’t finish because it was riddled with bugs.
Starts fallout, I guess the character creator is kinda cool, walks around a bit, exits fallout. Rinse and repeat with various games of the series every other year or so.
oblivion is shit morrowind forever
morrowind is shit daggerfall forever daggerfall is shit arena forever spoiler
actually i’ve never met an Arena defender
Isn’t more like
Skyrim is shit, oblivion forever Oblivion is just fine, morrowind forever Morrowind is good, not great, daggerfall forever WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU KIDS TALKING ABOUT? 
there are definitely daggerfall heads who hate morrowind.
Never played it. Do they have any merit in their hate?
it’s different and bigger. like crazy procgen map bigger. idk if i’d call it better, i’ve found i like stories people tell about their TES playthroughs more than the actual act itself, but somebody who wanted “another dagerfall” has room to legitimately not have gotten what they wanted out of the subsequent games.
there’s a unity port of it that has a lot more modern qol, it’s worth a playthrough if you have time. maybe watch half of a challenge run and see if you’re interested in how it is without spoiling too many quests.
That sounds really cool, thanks!
the only political compass you need (no i won’t tell you what x and y represent)
Lmao in the blurred picture it looked like it was beavis & butthead
Redguard is centrist, obvs
unironically probably the best narrative bethesda ever made, hidden in a truly awful game
Morrowind is ancap, got ya
Unsure about daggerfall, but Oblivion is deeply monarchist so fits top right, Skyrim is centered on a national liberation movement against imperial authority and genocidal elves and so fits bottom left, and Morrowind is a colonial territory with chattel slavery and a colonial trading company so it fits bottom right.
