Anyone dicked around with Tamriel Rebuilt content? If yes, how is it?
Iâm curious to just talk about it a little bit, but what were PC rpgâs of the western variety like between Morrowind and Oblivion? something in me wants to say itâs because maybe they figured going with a less stereotypical medieval fantasy angle wouldnât sell well
the lord of the rings movies came out is what happened
Even so, Lord of the Rings, being itself, is way less generic than Oblivion
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Morrowind, and by extension TES, probably has the richest fictional universe of any videogame/series I can think of. In depth and texture it is unsurpassed. I guess Ultima (especially in its 7 form) might come close, but itâs a little too top-down and schematic - everything fits into Lord Britishâs Sin+Virtue cosmology. Morrowind feels so much more fragmented, haphazard, redundant, and real.
It does a thing thatâs incredibly rare in fantasy videogames, which is to make magic feel magical instead of like a technology. All videogames attach numbers to magic which makes it knowable, including Morrowind, but - first, the system is complicated and customizable, granting legitimacy to the idea of hermetic mages experimenting with magic in a shack in the woods somewhere; and second, thereâs an entire metaphysical layer that the player canât directly interact with, containing spirits and gods and primeval forces that are always beyond your reach and reckoning.
The plot of Daggerfall is mostly Game of Thrones-style high court intrigue and explicitly political. This is already pretty exemplary for a WRPG. But by the end it becomes about using the Numidium, not a traditional fantasy device of power but rather a thing that can warp time itself. Morrowind contextualizes the events of Daggerfall as âthe Warp in the Westâ - a temporal event of little understanding that nevertheless left ripples throughout the western Empire (opposite the continent where Morrowind takes place, and so of little importance there). The idea that these kinds of events are always lurking and influencing from the shadows or the stars the vast sociopolitical intertwinings that you do directly influence - thatâs what makes the world of Morrowind special.
Itâs also that stuff that was utterly deleted in Oblivion and beyond. Some specifics of âworldbuildingâ were also changed for the worse, but by and large Oblivion+ do maintain a lot of the factual richness of the earlier games. But it doesnât feel mysterious because they got rid of the mysteries. Instead, everything is a waypoint and a quest and a checkbox. It videogamized the world and for that Bethesda can never be forgiven.
Theyâll also never fix or change it, not with the money they make; so your only opportunity to engage this world is to just play Morrowind, and wish its kinesthetics were better (man, the fact that even Skyrim still feels so bad in a post-Souls world is just shameful).
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If King of Dragon Pass didnât exist, I would agree with this. As it is, theyâre competing with a setting that has an 800 page encyclopedia dedicated to it, thatâs been in near constant development since the 1960s, and feels more complex and diverse than Morrowind pretty much every step of the way (I wouldnât be surprised if someone at Bethesda circa the early 00s and the 90s really liked Runequest)
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I imagine the rise of Western action-adventures and action-RPGs on consoles shaped the development of Oblivion a fair amount (citation-less cynicism: blame Snowblind Studios).
I also figure that the various guild/NPC quest lines being separated into more discrete story arcs (with distinct writers) has a lot to do with the shifts seen in the stuff Cuba described. Daggerfall quests are largely template-generated outside the main plot and branches, and what Iâve read of Morrowind makes it seem like more of a web of interconnected scenarios, mainly due to the Houses.
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the way ive heard morrowinds quests described actually has me really wanting to play it again
how far did those mods like morrowblivion ever get, or is better to just get a morrowind beautification package? im curious about trying this game out and I can see myself having the time to set aside and dedicate to this after DSIII
donât bother with either.
1990âs rpg graphics are an aesthetic I left behind in my youth
Itâs a good thing Morrowind is early 00s RPG graphics then
yeah but it is blockmans and flatfaces videogame graphics and I donât know if I can deal with another weirdo early pc rpg set in a barren wasteland rn
Late 90s PC graphics are definitely the most hideous because that was when software rendering for 2D stuff basically had all constraints taken off â no limited palettes, no gouraud shading, and no dedicated sprite hardware like on consoles to maintain some design consistency. Heroes 3 is everyoneâs favorite homm game but 2 looks so much nicer because it was only 8-bit colour.
Early 3D acceleration is a lot more endearing even if it was pretty muddy for a good while
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homm 2 also looks nicer because it was actual sprite work instead of pre-rendered 3d converted to sprites
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i think both homm2 and 3 are pretty ugly, personally. prefer the look of 3âs map tilesets, either way.
thereâs a bunch of âBetter Whateverâ packs you can get for Morrowind that generally improve the quality of the models. theyâre still kind of bad but theyâre less bad. (Better Bodies, etc)
though i seem to recall one of those packs being randomly anatomically accurate and i didnât really need that
I should actually figure out what mods are worth using with openmw sometime
Your division of late 90s PC and early 3d acceleration confounds me, given that they are kind of the same thing? Unless by early 3D you mean when 3D cards became required, and not simply optional/recommended.
[quote=âmauve, post:35, topic:2002â]
though i seem to recall one of those packs being randomly anatomically accurate and i didnât really need that
[/quote]Better bodies has options for both, that are clearly marked for install or maybe even download, IIRC. And unlike later games, it pretty much stands alone as the body mod.
Though maybe if you installed some greater amalgamated mod package it just ran with the one option and offered no choice?
yeah, I shouldâve been clearer. I meant that both early 90s 2D and 3D, when both were done in software, were neat, but late 90s are both ugly in different ways, with 2D software rendering in that era being particularly indefensible, and hardware accelerated 3D being endearing ugly.
Powerslide aged pretty well.
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Also, as a longtime TES nerd I always recommend naked ass body mods, because why not make a TES game feel even more like a Boris Vallejo painting.