Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.
There’s been no shift, we’ve just been ignored and under-served for around two decades. But, sure, keep ignoring us.
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You’d think the sensible business decision would be to see an under supplied gap in the market and fill it, but God-forbid they do something sensible.
“Streamlining” has been their mantra since Oblivion. TES6 is going to be even more watered down than everything else, but also crammed full of useless things. I’m willing to bet they’ll let you build a town. But the town will do nothing and won’t have any impact at all in the game.
It will do something. It will be a resource sink for a while, and then it will become a resource faucet. Nothing more interesting than that.
The Magic System was simplified, but was made more reactive with things like igniting oil spills
Man, fuck oil spills. You walk into the first dungeon, you set fire to an oil spill with a spell. Then you’ll try dropping one of those laterns, which are always conveniently placed above the Exxon Valdez. And then, that’s it, the fun is over, the joke is told, that’s all you can do with oil spills.
I’d also really like to know what other examples there are of it being more reactive. You can’t freeze the ground to make enemies slip. You can’t zap a river to fry some fishes. You can’t set fire to wood.
It really feels like some dev thought to themselves, we’ve got oil lamps, maybe we could have some of that drip out, and then the Sweet Little Lies guy said fuck yes, put lakes of oil into every dungeon, so I can claim we’ve made the magic system more reactive or some shit.
The larian games have some interesting interactions beyond just oil. You can make people slip on ice.
The old Magicka game also had some fun interactions that more games could learn from.
Yeah, playing Magicka when I was young certainly set me up for disappointment. I thought by now, all sorcery games would have ways of combining spells. Alas, the need for high-fidelity 3D graphics has nipped that in the bud, because creating good-looking animations for so many combinations is nigh impossible…
Skyrim turning star-signs into shrines was a brilliant move. Didn’t oversimplify their effects, didn’t put the quiz before the lesson, didn’t give you any reason to delete a character and start over. And by making them in-world objects, at disparate locations, you couldn’t just open a menu and rewrite yourself. So much streamlining, especially in the Elder Scrolls, paves over interesting systems in the name of approachability. But occasionally they nail it.
Skyrim had good, smart devs. Starfield didn’t. Skyrim 2 won’t.
Oof. I liked character stat screen in morrowind. I hate tjat newer bethesda games hide it.
Baldur’s gate 3 characters aren’t even that complicated. You pick stats at the start from a limited range of options, and then make very few choices when you level up. Some levels you don’t pick anything at all. This ain’t path of exile.
I got a mod for bg3 that gives you a feat every level and holy shit did that make it more interesting.
To WotC’s credit, making character choice really shallow is probably why the game succeeded so well. A lot of people don’t really want a lot of choices, especially when some are traps.
Personally, I find that to be good news. I prefer ES’s “just do the thing to get better at it” approach over arbitrary experience points to get better at whatever you decide to upgrade when you level up.
It also doesn’t mean there won’t be stats. The engine still depends on stats whether or not Bethesda makes UI for it or allows granular control of it. FO4’s perks, for example, set various attribute and hidden skill points in the background to hard values because that’s how the game handles the extra “power attacks” you can make. Instead of how it was displayed to the user in Oblivion, where you get these extra attacks at 25, 50, 75 and 100 points in a skill, you just upgrade the perk and it sets those values to the necessary milestone.
None of these simplifications stop it from being a good action adventure game. I think at this point if you still consider them to be RPGs first and not straight up action games, you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment. They haven’t been good RPGs since Oblivion first shifted the series to being more action-oriented.
I’d say the focus in Bethesda games has always been exploration and world building. I don’t care too much about the roleplay system so long as exploration and looting feels good.
Stats are incredibly boring. People want to see upgrades that actually do something, stuff like perks. Those are far more interesting and tangible than leveling your CHR stat from 32 to 33.
Pfft, just give us stats that improve by doing the thing (eg. agility that improves by jumping around and visibly improves jump height every time it increases). I’d rather that nuance over a block of text with a witty name that gives a massive instant boon. Tangibility is right, but the numbers aren’t the boring part.
This was by far the worst part of the RPG systems in their games. This sort of design always encourages really dumb and counter intuitive play.
The last time I felt that wad in Morowwind
Tell me about it. Skyrim for all its accolades kind of fails as an RPG in the sense that your character can do pretty much everything, but your run speed/jump height is static.
Increasing health/magic/stamina was a really lame way to handle levelling IMO.
It would be a shame if they streamlined the RPG systems even more for TESVI
Nonsense.
“constantly be jumping while conjuring a skeleton” is pretty stupid and counter intuitive for an optimum thing to do, but it that’s what you should do if you want to level those skills up.
Morrowind also had some bizarre optimum behavior if you wanted to get the +5s on stats when you leveled.
You don’t just spam jump, you wedge yourself under an arch or something so that you can trigger more jumps per second.
Obsession with character sheets comes from the misapprehension that the R in RPG stands for “roll” and not “role” imo.
Obsession with character sheets comes from pen and paper and a desire to simulate every aspect of the world. Without the tools to tweak your ability to interact with the system you can pretend to be a master thief, but unless the game reinforces that with its behaviour you’re just pretending. Like you can pretend to be a vampire in Skyrim, sure, but it’s more fun when you’ve actually got the curse and the game reinforces that.
Fundamentally a stat sheet is just a way to tell the game what your character is like in a way that it understands and can reinforce that’s more granular than definition by class or by what skills you’ve used. And every game has one, whether you can see it and change it or not.
It’s why “everyone” ends up as a stealth archer in Skyrim. Because stealth and ranged attacks are something every character would try to do, Skyrim’s design means if you as much as try something it makes you better at it, even if you want to be a clumbsy barbarian.
Which ironically makes it so you can’t just roleplay, you have to avoid trying anything that isn’t what your character is best at. It means you can’t hide from a patrol you can’t handle, you have to just charge in and swing, because the game will change your character otherwise and you can’t tell it not to.
Well it’s good to have confirmation TES ended with Skyrim and we won’t have to port oblivion to yet another game, ever, for any reason.
Water down the orange drink, Willie.
I’ve watered it down as much as it can go, it can’t take no more!
Just cancel this game or give it to larian studios already, I don’t want elder scrolls 6 anymore
So aside from Baldurs gate 3, who’s actually making good RPGs these days?
Owlcat is.
Wrath of the Righteous, and Rogue Trader are great RPGsFor a generous definition of “these days”, check out the pillars of eternity games. They’re very good and clearly a love letter to Baldur’s gate. Unfortunately the team is now making a Skyrim-like for some reason, but I hope they come back and finish the main game story sometime.
There’s also that solasta game that’s DND 5e but on a smaller budget from a few years ago.
Inexile though its been a bit since wasteland 3 and owlcat games.
Falcom usually doesn’t disappoint.
