Skyrim - Why It Might Not Be Worth Your Time

Indeed, the Gothic (and Risen) are kind of Oblivion-light

Uh..um....I'm not really sure what to say about that. Are you sure? How do you consider some of the best regarded RPGs of all time the lite version of a game generally reviled by the RPG community for it's lack of RP aspects? Especially since Gothic 1&2 came out before Oblivion and Gothic 3 was developed at the same time ( and Risen is Gothic 2 with updated graphics, yeah, I went there ).

That's kind of like saying sour dough is the lite version of white bread.
 
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From the article:
"After all, most people see Oblivion as one of the best Western RPGs ever made. Or that's how it seems at least; the game's received near universal praise since its release almost five years ago."
This is not true. Oblivion has received near universal praise only upon its release (speedtrees & bribery ftw), it´s changed quite significantly since.

Morrowind stood the test of time much more favorably and rightfully so - quality of Oblivion´s features ranges from mediocre to abysmal, whereas in the case of Morrowind the range is from excellent to subpar.
In Morrowind, there´s nothing as extensively gamebreaking as Oblivion´s level scaling and in Oblivion there´s nothing as brilliant as Morrowind´s art direction, settings or lore depth, for example.
 
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For me, the biggest difference between Morrowind and Oblivion is that you don't need mods to enjoy Morrowind.

Sure, mods can make it even better for some, but they weren't a necessity for most PC gamers like they were in Oblivion.
 
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Uh..um….I'm not really sure what to say about that. Are you sure? How do you consider some of the best regarded RPGs of all time the lite version of a game generally reviled by the RPG community for it's lack of RP aspects? Especially since Gothic 1&2 came out before Oblivion and Gothic 3 was developed at the same time ( and Risen is Gothic 2 with updated graphics, yeah, I went there ).

That's kind of like saying sour dough is the lite version of white bread.

You know, you might read the whole chain of posts and quote the whole sentence. You removed the "but they really don't have anything in commons."

wolfing considered Morrowind to be similar to the Gothic games, yet between Morrowind and Oblivion, Oblivion is the game closer to that series (action combat, dialog system, etc), but the Gothic games have a lot less of everything that you find in Oblivion (fewer quests, fewer armors/weapons, fewer dungeons, fewer cities, fewer type of enemies, etc).

And the Gothic games have RP aspect??? They are action games with awkward UI and controls. I actually like the Gothic games by the way, but there is not that much RP to do in them…
 
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I feel like rambling

I understanding having concerns over the content, tone, and gameplay of Skyrim if you felt they went in the wrong directions in certain respects with Oblivion. That's about as strong of a prediction as is currently justified about the game based on the insanely little that is known about its actual content. Based on how one felt about the previous two games it is a little unreasonable to be expressing any stronger sentiments about a game that does not yet exist than "concern."

Sure it's perfectly reasonable to have formed strong opinions about the games released already though. I mean... they're out you can play them. Given the incredible differences between some of the Elder Scrolls games from one installment to the next - as ell as the very different experiences one has in playing any of the spinoffs- any talk of a truly meaningful "trend" beyond the technological one is something between soothsaying and blowing hot air. Obviously though if you haven't liked their recent games compared to how you liked their older games, why wouldn't you be more pessimistic than optomistic right? What is ridiculous is to proclaim "it wil be crap because..." and pretend the words that follow "because" provide any more support for that prediction than the simple fact that you hadn't liked their more recent products. I mean the only thing anyone is really able to argue honestly right now is whether or not they think they themselves are likely to like it using what ammounts to the same supporting evidence - whether or not they thought recent Bethesda games were better/worse than their predecessors and whether or not they liked the last bethesda game or two they bought. K- so basically

There's actually nothing wrong with that in the thread. That's the basis for the entire original article above - except they seemed to be giving excessive credence to the fact that they liked Morrowind better than Oblivion as the basis for predicting a downward trend. I wasn't a particular fan of Ultima VI over the previous games -besides the vastly improved graphics. This in no way predicted how I would feel about Ultima VII, which remains one of my favorite games of all times. Heck the parts of Ultima VIII I most took issue with and disliked provided no useful prediction for the principal reason I absolutely hate Ultima IX. Having played VIII I was having high hopes for the direction the story and tone had taken. Ultima VII, SI, VIII, and UW II all represented fairly novel stories and villains compared to previous Ultimas and I appreciate the dark tone the games took even if VIII took the gloom a little too far.

If were to use my opinions of these games and any apparent trend in tone, design, and theme over the course of that portion of the series I would never have imagined my playing of Ultima XI would be plagued by a constant sense that Care Bears should appear at any moment to assist the avatar in vanquishing the guardian with beams of saccarine sweet light and an important reminder of the the value of caring. Really at the end there I was half expecting the sillouttes of carebares to appear behind the symbols of the vitrues. Still if I had said I would probably not like IX as much as VII since I did not like VIII as much as VII and VII SI or UW II I would not have had reason to think the statement foolish.

The most empty and useless predictions though are those about the engine and how it will impact game quality since the development process of the Skyrim engine diverges from both Morrowind's engine development process and Oblivion's engine development process. That and we don't know anything about it whatsoever besides that it's not gamebryo and it's also probably not the Infinity Engine. I'm pretty confident about that prediction being accurate although it is useless. Anything more than predicting the obvioust is likely to be about as accurate as my post is likely to be concise and coherent.

If they are indeed developing a
new engine from scratch… just imagine how many bugs it'll have on release……… just another reason to not get excited about this.

Hard to relate faults in Bethesdas recents games which used a heavily repurosed 3rd party engine with a collection of 3rd party extensions to make it suitable to those games with potential problems in a 1st party engine designed from the ground up with the game in mind. The fact that the games most often cited as evidence of the buggyness and incompleteness of Bethesda games used 3rd part engines from the same developer while this one does not does not imply that this one will by virtue of not using the same or similar 3rd party engine os inherently more likely to have problems does not make sense.

This reasoning would similar to the following. A Homebuilder has contracted to the same subcontracting group to o wire the last couple of houses he built. Those houses all had creaky floors, poor paint jobs, and faulty wiring. The homebuilder decides to find and directly hire an electrician who will just install wiring in houses this homebuilder builds. What you are saying is like concluding that now that the Homebuilder has hired his own dedicated electrician his homes will get worse than they were before. That does not follow at all. In the same vein this does not imply new houses will not have the same paint/carpentry issues as the ones he already has built nor is the new electrician a guarantee that these houses will not have faulty wiring - though it seems a reasonable attempt at least that one issue.

Really now- if they said they were going to develop a seperate interface and menu system for the PC rather than just use a tried and true reskinning of the Oblivion interface/menu system in all platforms... would you be back to say how this will simply introduce more glitches?

Some of the problems were common across multiple gamebryo (and its predecessor) implementations (from RTS games to games like Fallout 3) including memory leak issues and problems integrating physics systems and other technologies that had to be coupled to it which were neither developed by the Gamebryo team nor by anyone at Bethesda.

That being said there have been a host of bugs unique to the Bethesda created Gamebryo games (this is the bad paint and creaky floors from my house example)- though it would be silly to think any significant number the programmers who made those games had very much at all to do with the actual creation of this new engine. Beyond "being able to code" the skillsets involved and experience required for creating an engine from the ground up are quite different. There's that and the fact the the programmers who were responsible for repurposing and modifying the gamebryo engine for Oblivion were busy working on Fallout 3 for most of the first couple years that Skyrim had been in development.

Considering Bethesda has not had to develop an engine for an Elder Scrolls or any of their other AAA titles for upwards of 15 years - and existing staff with even any experience heavily modifying an engine (those who did so for morrowind and fallout 3) were otherwise occupied, the team that developed the engine for Skyrim is either a new bethesda project team or a collection of software engineers from other Zenimax companies for the purpose of building the engine. It is impossible to know what technology this engine would be built on for certain (though Zenimax does own the id Tech engine and some other less likely candidate technolgies.) What is possible to be certain of is that the people involved with developing the new engine had, as a whole, very little if anything to do with Morrowind, Oblivion, or Fallout 3 or whatever pet peeves you have with those games.

There is no reason as of yet to be able to say anything about how good the engine will be since this is the first engine this team has developed for Bethesda - with the unlikely exception being if Bethesda scoured the globe to round up mostly laid off development team responsible for the Gamebryo engine. This is almost impossible though since most of the Gamebryo layoffs did not occur until late 2009 - far too late for Bethesda to have pounced and reassembled this game-engine-developing version of the A-Team (yes- sarcasm.) I suppose maybe the rounded up the original team responsible for developing their last in-house engine - though that would probably require dragging a few old programmers out of retirement at gunpoint. Well that or dragging a few executives out of their comfy offices and forcing them to program again.

So since the people who developed the engine for Skyrim could not have been the development staff at Emergent (hint- that's the company that developed the engines for Morriwnd, Oblivion, and Fallout 3) as they had not been laid off yet; and they could also not have been primarily involved in the repurposing of the general Gamebryo product for Fallout 3 or Oblivion (look at the credits). Most of the staff who had worked on modifying and re-purposing the outside developed Gamebryo engine for use in Oblivion and did not also move on to other jobs at other companies were doing the same for Fallout 3 during most of the first several years that Skyrim was simultaneously under development.

Basically - regardless of the severity of the engine-related problems in other Bethesda games produced in the past those problems are wholly unrelated to the new engine. Heck, the new engine can't even be based off of gamebryo technology as Emergent is still offering the exclusive ownership to that technology and its further development for sale so this engine can not be the continued development of the Gamebryo engine.

Unless it is a flat out lie to call this a new internally developed engine there is simply nothing we can compare it to yet to predict how great or awful it will be. It makes about as much sense to guess at the quality of the new engine based on experiences with past Bethesda games as it would have to make predictions that someone who bakes mishap-pen and bland apple pies couldn't possibly tend to a successful orchard.
 
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And the Gothic games have RP aspect???
Of course they have.
For one, you have to develop your character and gather sufficient resources to be able to progress in the game.
You don´t have to do that in Oblivion, btw.
 
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Yes, but check out the average age of the posters on the official forums compared to here; it says a lot!! :)

I've never really paid attention to age... but I suppose there is some merit to your comment. I'll pay attention more to age from now on.
 
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Of course they have.
For one, you have to develop your character and gather sufficient resources to be able to progress in the game.
You don´t have to do that in Oblivion, btw.

What ever you do in Oblivion, you will raise your skills and that's Oblivion character development system. You can always under level to exploit the level scaling, but your skills will still increase and you will still get better at what you do despite never gaining a level. And good luck playing the game without ever buying, looting or repairing anything (no gathering of sufficient resources).

And level 1 character isn't able to progress in the main quest, you need to be level 2.

Also, "able to progress" doesn't mean RP and role-playing isn't just about character progression.
 
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I take issue with the criticism that Oblivion and possibly Skyrim will be inferior to Morrowind because of a "generic quasi-medieval setting". The material culture and geography are second to how Bethesda will use the history, religion and politics of the province to make you experience that province's immaterial culture…

Fantastic comment, very well said.

To sum it up, Morrowind was a much better RPG, but Oblivion had much more engaging gameplay. Which is better? Well, when I think back on both, Morrowind strikes me as this rich, deep, real world that I visited. Oblivion strikes me as a great experience that I don’t remember much about. So when push comes to shove, I’ll take Morrowind’s rich environment over Oblivion’s better gameplay.

But ideally, we shouldn’t have to pick lore vs. gameplay. Here’s hoping TESV is a good mix of both. (Although I doubt it since the dev’s purposefully dumbed things down for TESIV and there’s no indication they’ve had a change of heart (and why should they with Oblivion reviewing and selling so well?).)

As an interesting side note, the theme music for TESIII and TESIV can be used as a metaphor for quality of both games. TESIII’s theme music was so rich and deep and powerful. TESIV’s theme music was technically great and strong but somehow lacking in vibrancy and emotion. That just about sums up both games.
 
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You just gotta remember that in this games climate with consoles making the big bucks theres really no reason for Bethesda to try to do anything Fallout:NV didn't do.

F:NV got like a global 90% rating. Why would they change the formula here? It ain't broke. They're making millions of dollars. If EA published it you'd see "Oblivion 2011", "oblivion 2012", etc, and thats really not too far off what to expect.

And that really is what people want! You hear people here saying they loved morrowind but when they played oblivion and it wasnt morrowind they went and raged on the ES forums and uninstalled it. Publishers know this. I think in the future every sequel will just be another map with DLC maps. Its like how people expect Diablo4 to be not a FPS, but a diablo clone. So if its called ES expect ES. IF the last ES reviewed well expect the same thing. When bethesta come out and say they have a whole new IP then maybe something genuinely interesting is brewing and we'll see some oldschool innovation come back into play in the AAA market.

Until then I wont be getting excited. :p
 
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The most empty and useless predictions though are those about the engine and how it will impact game quality since the development process of the Skyrim engine diverges from both Morrowind's engine development process and Oblivion's engine development process. That and we don't know anything about it whatsoever besides that it's not gamebryo and it's also probably not the Infinity Engine. I'm pretty confident about that prediction being accurate although it is useless. Anything more than predicting the obvioust is likely to be about as accurate as my post is likely to be concise and coherent.



Hard to relate faults in Bethesdas recents games which used a heavily repurosed 3rd party engine with a collection of 3rd party extensions to make it suitable to those games with potential problems in a 1st party engine designed from the ground up with the game in mind. The fact that the games most often cited as evidence of the buggyness and incompleteness of Bethesda games used 3rd part engines from the same developer while this one does not does not imply that this one will by virtue of not using the same or similar 3rd party engine os inherently more likely to have problems does not make sense.

This reasoning would similar to the following. A Homebuilder has contracted to the same subcontracting group to o wire the last couple of houses he built. Those houses all had creaky floors, poor paint jobs, and faulty wiring. The homebuilder decides to find and directly hire an electrician who will just install wiring in houses this homebuilder builds. What you are saying is like concluding that now that the Homebuilder has hired his own dedicated electrician his homes will get worse than they were before. That does not follow at all. In the same vein this does not imply new houses will not have the same paint/carpentry issues as the ones he already has built nor is the new electrician a guarantee that these houses will not have faulty wiring - though it seems a reasonable attempt at least that one issue.

Really now- if they said they were going to develop a seperate interface and menu system for the PC rather than just use a tried and true reskinning of the Oblivion interface/menu system in all platforms… would you be back to say how this will simply introduce more glitches?

Some of the problems were common across multiple gamebryo (and its predecessor) implementations (from RTS games to games like Fallout 3) including memory leak issues and problems integrating physics systems and other technologies that had to be coupled to it which were neither developed by the Gamebryo team nor by anyone at Bethesda.

That being said there have been a host of bugs unique to the Bethesda created Gamebryo games (this is the bad paint and creaky floors from my house example)- though it would be silly to think any significant number the programmers who made those games had very much at all to do with the actual creation of this new engine. Beyond "being able to code" the skillsets involved and experience required for creating an engine from the ground up are quite different. There's that and the fact the the programmers who were responsible for repurposing and modifying the gamebryo engine for Oblivion were busy working on Fallout 3 for most of the first couple years that Skyrim had been in development.

Considering Bethesda has not had to develop an engine for an Elder Scrolls or any of their other AAA titles for upwards of 15 years - and existing staff with even any experience heavily modifying an engine (those who did so for morrowind and fallout 3) were otherwise occupied, the team that developed the engine for Skyrim is either a new bethesda project team or a collection of software engineers from other Zenimax companies for the purpose of building the engine. It is impossible to know what technology this engine would be built on for certain (though Zenimax does own the id Tech engine and some other less likely candidate technolgies.) What is possible to be certain of is that the people involved with developing the new engine had, as a whole, very little if anything to do with Morrowind, Oblivion, or Fallout 3 or whatever pet peeves you have with those games.

There is no reason as of yet to be able to say anything about how good the engine will be since this is the first engine this team has developed for Bethesda - with the unlikely exception being if Bethesda scoured the globe to round up mostly laid off development team responsible for the Gamebryo engine. This is almost impossible though since most of the Gamebryo layoffs did not occur until late 2009 - far too late for Bethesda to have pounced and reassembled this game-engine-developing version of the A-Team (yes- sarcasm.) I suppose maybe the rounded up the original team responsible for developing their last in-house engine - though that would probably require dragging a few old programmers out of retirement at gunpoint. Well that or dragging a few executives out of their comfy offices and forcing them to program again.

So since the people who developed the engine for Skyrim could not have been the development staff at Emergent (hint- that's the company that developed the engines for Morriwnd, Oblivion, and Fallout 3) as they had not been laid off yet; and they could also not have been primarily involved in the repurposing of the general Gamebryo product for Fallout 3 or Oblivion (look at the credits). Most of the staff who had worked on modifying and re-purposing the outside developed Gamebryo engine for use in Oblivion and did not also move on to other jobs at other companies were doing the same for Fallout 3 during most of the first several years that Skyrim was simultaneously under development.

Basically - regardless of the severity of the engine-related problems in other Bethesda games produced in the past those problems are wholly unrelated to the new engine. Heck, the new engine can't even be based off of gamebryo technology as Emergent is still offering the exclusive ownership to that technology and its further development for sale so this engine can not be the continued development of the Gamebryo engine.

Unless it is a flat out lie to call this a new internally developed engine there is simply nothing we can compare it to yet to predict how great or awful it will be. It makes about as much sense to guess at the quality of the new engine based on experiences with past Bethesda games as it would have to make predictions that someone who bakes mishap-pen and bland apple pies couldn't possibly tend to a successful orchard.

My prediction is based on a very simple fact. Making engines is darn hard especially multi-console engines. To be the first game of a completely new engine is going to mean hitting a lot of bugs no matter what team is developing it.

Imagine the engines on the market they have been tested by 100ndreds of games and for each game some new bugs was found and fixed in the engine… so if you now release a game using one of the established engines you have a version which has had iterations and fixes from 100ndreds of releases and a dedicted team of experts who have been working on this engine for 10 years and knows it extremly well. Now imagine a newly developed engine never tested before in retail…. imagine especially on PC the 1000's of different possible setups and configurations and drivers… which you have no possibility to test without retail…. I think that gives a small picture of how incredible hard it is to launch a game with a new engine without a significant amount of issues……
 
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Also, "able to progress" doesn't mean RP and role-playing isn't just about character progression.

So? You asked for RP in Gothics, I gave you an example - character development.
I haven´t said Oblivion has no character development, just that it is largely inconsequential, unlike in Gothics.
Similar with loot/goods ("resources").
In Gothics it´s you who has to adapt to the world, which puts a lot more weight on char dev system, unlike in Oblivion where the world adapts to you (I know there are few exceptions but they´re just that, exceptions).

You said Gothic games are action games, but that´s only half of the truth, they´re also action RPGs. Their char dev systems (and the way they´re contexted with the other games´ aspects) alone make it so.
That´s not to say there aren´t other RP aspects, like factions, for example.

And level 1 character isn't able to progress in the main quest, you need to be level 2.
I see..
 
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My prediction is based on a very simple fact. Making engines is darn hard especially multi-console engines. To be the first game of a completely new engine is going to mean hitting a lot of bugs no matter what team is developing it.

Gamebryo, used on more than 300 games, is probably the most bugged game engine on the market despite being around (in various version) for more than 10 years. In fact, I think I see a lot more games released with 3rd party engine with these type of problems, then those released with in-house engines.

I haven´t said Oblivion has no character development, just that it is largely inconsequential, unlike in Gothics.
Similar with loot/goods ("resources").
In Gothics it´s you who has to adapt to the world, which put a lot more weight on char dev system, unlike in Oblivion where the world adapts to you.

Inconsequential??? You never played Oblivion, might be a good idea to play a game before saying a few things, you know.

The level scaling might be crappy, but without levelling (or raising skills) your character you can't access a few things in the game like spells (need specific skill level) and gear (they appear based on your level). Also, the game get harder as you level, especially if you have limited combat skills in your major. That's why people do things like under levelling, that's the "easy mode" cheat of the game. Also, you need a lot of money as well in Oblivion, repairing your gear, recharging magical weapons, buying stuff you need (repair hammers, spells, scrolls), etc. It's a lot more resource dependant than the Gothic games, because everything is a consumable.

As for the Gothic, I know that they are "action RPG", just like Oblivion is, but "stats" were not the RP aspects I was talking about. I'm not saying that Oblivion is better in these aspects, I'm saying Gothic is just as limited (if not more…). But I totally forgot that the new generation only think about raising levels and nothing else when you say RP. Blah.
 
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In fact, I think I see a lot more games released with 3rd party engine with these type of problems, then those released with in-house engines.

That is indeed an interesting theory? perhaps your example would be something like stardock which made their own engine for their game elemental? that went really well didn't it?

Anyway if you have a sample it would be very interesting………..

Blizzard and Rockstar… yes? but keep in mind that they have been using their engine for many years for several of their games on top of that they are giants....
 
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As for the engine it`s quite possible they`ll use the one from Rage - I seem to recall some rumblings regarding "unifying resources" and some such corporate musings after ZeniMax swallowed them.

I`m not actually too worried bout` bugs et al coz thanks to me-being-shifted-in-time strategy I`ll probably play it somewhere in 2014, when hardware will be approachable, game modded and patched.
 
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Inconsequential???
Yes.
Play some Gothic to understand what meaningful character development and item mechanics mean.

As for the Gothic, I know that they are "action RPG",
You said: "And the Gothic games have RP aspect??? They are action games with awkward UI and controls."
I´ve proven you wrong. Case closed.

But I totally forgot that the new generation only think about raising levels and nothing else when you say RP. Blah.
Ad hominem and a strawman. Good work.
I´ve never said Gothic games are as multifaceted in RP department as, say, Arcanum, you know. Just that they do have RP aspects and that these are well implemented.
 
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Yes.
Play some Gothic to understand what meaningful character development and item mechanics mean.

I played Gothic 1, 3 and Risen (that some like to call Gothic 2). They were damn hard at first (learning the combat timing) and had great ambiance, but I never found them to have a meaningful character development and item mechanics. You can pretty much raise all the useful skills to max level.

Also, Risen was the pinnacle of useless character development with that final boss.
 
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I played Gothic 1, 3 and Risen (that some like to call Gothic 2). They were damn hard at first (learning the combat timing) and had great ambiance, but I never found them to have a meaningful character development and item mechanics. You can pretty much raise all the useful skills to max level.
You can maybe "max" all skills useful for your chosen class, but not all useful skills in the game, because there are some restrictions imposed by faction mechanics.
But that´s kinda besides the point anyway, important point is that if you do take your time and raise skills relevant for your character high enough, you´ll have an easier time dealing with the in-game world. In Gothics, you can encounter enemies which will easily kick your ass early, well, you develop your character elsewhere, return to them 10 levels later and voilá, now it´s you who´s kicking their asses!

In Oblivion, even if you level efficiently it´s quite likely it´ll take you longer time to clear a dungeon at level 20 than if you´d tackled it at level 2 because the level scaling is not only rigid but also badly balanced. Basically, I´d say that, when compared to the world around, your character is actually stronger at level 1 than at level 20 and that seriously undermines character development (and verisimilitude as well).
And efficient leveling means you have to raise skills outside your character class, that´s another bad design decision, btw.
The way Oblivion´s character development interacts with the other game systems is illogical and counterproductive and that´s what makes it largely inconsequential, imo.

Also, Risen was the pinnacle of useless character development with that final boss.
Risen´s final boss surely was a slap in the face of character development, but there´s also the whole game before it where character development matters.


I´d better add something to the OT now :).
Well, I don´t think Skyrim will repeat Oblivion´s mistakes, at least not to the letter - Oblivion´s shortcomings are widely recognized and I don´t think Bethesda could get away with them for the second time, even with their robust PR/marketing.
Fallout 3 was already an improvement in some crucial areas, Fallout: New Vegas sold well…
Here´s me hoping Skyrim actually might be worth my time.
 
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See, I can agree the Morrowind setting was more interesting but the combat (and stealth) were dreadful for me. The most un-reactive first-person action combat I've ever played. Oblivion's combat has more weight and the stealth was pretty good. I also felt the side-quests were far more creative; there's nothing in Morrowind as enjoyable as the Brotherhood quest chain in Oblivion.
I never got far in Morrowind for this reason. When a giant rat is nibbling my knees with an almost religious fervour, and I'm aiming down at it and holding a longsword, I expect to hit it. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense that my blade goes through it with no ill effect. How can I play the game if the combat doesn't even work properly?

Oblivion worked, and despite its issues it was playable. It was also more accessible, especially for people new to RPGs, and I think it had that in its favour. Morrowind didn't have that accessibility or that ease of use. Combat was beyond terrible, you were kicked out into that first village with no real sense of direction, and that was it. It didn't guide you through a small area (Like many, many RPGs do) to get your bearings, and it was just a very cumbersome game.

I'm hoping Skyrim will be a much more polished and varied experience than Oblivion. Oblivion was good, but it had so many flaws that really hindered it (Especially once you've played FO3/FO:NV and got used to the engine changes) to the point where it could become an unplayable mess.

I'm not getting my hopes up for Skyrim, but I do think it'll be worth my time and the time of many others. Bethesda seem to have this corner of the RPG market, and they really need to work on making a game that has the same cultural impact (In the RPG genre, at least) as Morrowind. They can do it, but it's more a case of will they do it?
 
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