Daggerfall manages its massiveness the way Morrowind manages its NPCs, by signalling to the player what is important via context clues and leaving everything else to kind of disappear into a swirly mass of Lots Of Stuff.
It’s mostly only fun to break and to follow the main quest; everything else is too samey to recommend. Of course every time I play it I do like one step of the main quest and spend the rest of the time grinding Mages Guild missions so I can summon Hermaeus Mora and get his artifact so who am I to say
I’ve never listened to all of MBMBAM and don’t think it’s remotely necessary. Just listened to the newest each week and scattered episodes people recommended to me. If you wanted to do a binge just take the number of the current episode and cut it in half and start there or something.
This same problem kept me away from Uhh Yeah Dude and Stop Podcasting Yourself for a long while though so i get it. (Well, that and i thought the names were stupid sounding)
So like, where did the McElroys come from? It feels like I suddenly became aware of their existence, and the hours and hours of Content they produce every week, and now everywhere I look, there them boys are.
what oblivion did to the imperial province I blame on the lord of the rings movies. just like when chronicles of riddick came out and the riddick universe went from being off-world blade runner to gondor in space.
somebody should take that and mod it into a remake of bethesda’s terminator
this was already mentioned but the problem with all the bethesda games is that the virtual constructs are never really able to support the scale and scope of the fiction they are based on. well, that and they’re still using that engine that makes the roboticness of their actors painfully obvious. the other problem is that the fiction the games are based on isn’t all that interesting either.
i don’t mean to imply i think these games don’t have value or creative worth. i think they do!
oblivion was my first “wrpg” and it came at a time in my life where i was growing bored with japanese games for some reason i can’t remember. the ps3 really rubbed me the wrong way and i got an xbox 360 instead. and hey, there was this game with shiny graphics and you could be anyone you wanted to be in a massive world? woah. i dug into it.
in some ways i feel like bethesda games have become a slightly more structured second life to many. they are worlds made for projecting yourself into. they’re mechanically uninteresting spaces but after a while they do have a kind of comfort. you can arrange books in your house. you could spend a whole afternoon doing this! i think that’s also part of the fun in those games: making that world into one comfortable to your character and yourself: building/buying a place to live, collecting powerful weapons, armor, and money. the difficulty plateaus at a certain point and you can just kind of dip in to hang out with your virtual companions.
I dont think this is true at all! Oblivion was mostly a miss here (far less interesting lore tucked into odd corners) but even skyrim had the suggestion of a much better game buried under generic viking adventures. At its best, the setting is hugely accomodating of offbeat takes on commodified fantasy, but ever since morrowind their best efforts are tucked away in a tiny smattering of in-game books and maybe a few vistas.
Skyrim had this ongoing problem where it openly discussed the political climate of the hot/cold war between the fascist elf dominion and the bloated decadent colonialist empire and it even underpinned the civil war plot in skyrim, but you barely got any hints that such a thing was happening in actual gameplay and the whole civil war quest was consistently disappointing.
It felt like they planned out the story for the next entry in the series to be about this but had to all but abandon it because “vikings and dragons are popular”
More that they farm out the good writing to the same two people they hired for morrowind but dont let the good writing get anywhere near the visibility of anything you would see outside of an in game book. The other piece of evidence I have is that one of the constant background conversations in oblivion was about the trouble brewing on the elf island (whatever it was called) so it seems obvious that setting the 5th game in elfland during the fascist takeover was at least an idea at one point.
Whatever it is, Skyrim, at times, feels like a palimpsest of a much more interesting game. Like they scraped away a page full of crabbed text about the political realities that can be extrapolated from this overwrought D&D setting and replaced it with a 12 year old’s drawing of a viking riding a dragon.
Yeah, I remember thinking Oblivion was pointing to Altmer as the next setting.
By the time of Skyrim my residual Morrowind love had worn down long enough that I stopped the main quest, disgusted, after the mountain climb and Proclamation of Hero.