This is a design-created problem, too. They chose to take on the work of making every NPC named and with custom face and dialogue, rather than Morrowind’s abstraction of townspeople who lack unique responses and indicate such.
Idiotic decision, because it means
a) they have to reduce the amount of NPCs in the world to comically small numbers because they can’t possibly make a sustainable community for each village,
b) these masses of ‘content’ can’t possibly be any good, so instead of breezing over people with no reasonable interaction with The Hero you spend hours in banalities
c) they no longer have the shorthand for important people: custom art, custom dialogue. Every character is brought down to the level of the lowest-investment townsperson
It was interesting if not unsurprising to watch this video series and see how much of the commentary is announcements of the sheer quantity and size of stuff. Videogames have been obsessed with bigness and linear tracks of aesthetic progression, correlating aesthetics with technical improvements, for forever. For me it just goes back to my bloated tech-demo criticism. Over 9,000 Painstakingly Modeled Objects, Voices Filling Half of the DVD, Several Types of Texturing On Every Surface True HD True Dynamic Soft Shadow, etc. “What can the future of games be?” Apparently it can be even huger. As you get further along in the videos there is more nuance to the commentary but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the main developmental excitement (and probably terror) here derived from the project’s scale and the tech that would assist in making that easier to manufacture.
Okay, now. This is as insulting to Monet’s stuff as Kinkade’s assumption of the moniker “Painter of Light”, and I will not let it slide. Bright colors and copious bloom are not an equivalent to a painting by Monet.
aesthetic progression in this particular game was a given, seeing as how their principal differentiation from most other wrpg’s is the first-person immersion. graphical advancement is extremely important in this context! also, morrowind looked kind of ass even on launch day. bad animation and meshes and draw distance - from day 1, there was an obvious realm of improvement that could be tackled as tech allowed. natural progression.
in terms of bigness, i mean yeah. daggerfall was big to the point of absurdity (and way bigger than oblivion!). it’s a central focus of the series, that sense of scale - i don’t think their pursuit of bigness is lamentable or unexpected, it’s more or less a theme. as such, i don’t think it neatly slots into the sort of industry sequelitis you’re tying it to
Daggerfall was my first elder scrolls game, now that I think about it. I wanna say I was a vampire then I fell through a dungeon floor and accidentally saved, so that was that.
mm i kind of enjoyed skyrim once i finally figured out how to play it, which is essentially by loading the whole thing with dozens of thematically clashing mods to the point where you’re falling over poorly rigged dinosaurs and skeleton horses and 10x size mudcrabs and unique named weapons and enormously overpowered vampire assassins every minute or so. even then it’s never worth talking to anyone though. i do not know whether oblivion’s weird second-life vibe at this juncture would make that stuff better or worse. maybe in a few years there’ll be some kind of mid-00s open world convergence where someone will just load the entirety of the san andreas map into the oblivion engine and you can just creep around blocky fake los angeles concrete slab zones with a sword out while being stalked by a troll. unless this is fallout 3…??
i like these games a lot, tho the awful dungeon design in oblivion made it difficult for me to stick with it. quests are better written than skyrim for the most part? i wish morrowind was actually enjoyable to play but it really hasn’t aged that well. i dunno if i could recommend it to someone in 2017, despite how much i loved it years ago.
skyrim is like, inexplicable comfort food for me? sometimes it’s just chill to look at mountains and fight some skeletons in a cave??
this was my extremely unintellectual post about a series of games i have spent entirely too much time playing, but somehow can’t come up with a coherent defense of. thank’s
Daggerfall isn’t a game I could ever play for a sustained period but its incomprehensibly huge overworld and truly labyrinthine dungeons are fascinating. It’s like a ridiculous hypothetical brought to life in the crudest form. In a way, I think that is a sort of failure – here’s a thing I’m interested in, but the interest derived from a prohibitive model of design. Like Dwarf Fortress, it’s a thing I want to experience but am preemptively mentally crushed by. I guess one of Oblivion’s successes is that it is way more playable and accessible than the prior two games, even if the landscape maybe relies too much on the compass’ points of interest and the fast-travel ability (I wonder if there would’ve been a way to keep the mechanic while justifiably limiting its use more than “fast-travel only to places already visited”).
Though my comparison doesn’t really work – it’d have to be a 1:1 project, same assets, same tech, etc. But I like that idea. Rebuilding something that so often feels arbitrary, overly alike, and in doing so discerning why exactly, and getting a better sense of how to blend memorableness with dense, knotty naturalness
