No.24325
man, i just can't wrap my head around whether I like or hate bethesda's rpgs. There's so much to love, but the challenges feel so arbitrary. Like, u have so much freedom for choosing the difficulty that it feels like you're tuning the challenges of the game, not the devs, you know what I mean? Like, you can savescum if you want, you can disable quicksaves, you can disable autosaves; you can make it so the hardest enemies take one hit to die, you can make it so sewer rats take 500 hits to die; you can grind for dozens of hours and become a god; you can (probably?) beat the game naked, using ur bare fists.
So in the end, none of the elder scrolls have an iconic combat moment. Like, when you're talking about elder scrolls games, u'r never like "hey, remember that fight? wasn't it sick?! wasn't it crAaAaAazy, dude?!!?"
there are some fire quests, though, and I rly like the vibes and the soundtrack, and the environments
also check out my pimped out oblivion
No.24328
>>24315Would’ve posted but I’ve been playing fighting games so consistently I haven’t posted anything bethesda related in weeks
Can’t go back to single player combat just isn’t as deep for me though the casual environment of oblivion is very relaxing despite this
No.24333
>>24325> So in the end, none of the elder scrolls have an iconic combat moment. Like, when you're talking about elder scrolls games, u'r never like "hey, remember that fight? wasn't it sick?! wasn't it crAaAaAazy, dude?!!?"I personally played elder scrolls oblivion becouse of it’s world building and rpg style the combat was there and I must say it’s better then Skyrim .
As I just beaten the main story I migth either do the side quests or begin my play on Morrowind .
Either way it’s better then eny new rpg I played so far …… Minus the NPC’s
No.24338
>>24325I feel the irony in all their games is that even though there are massive flaws those flaws are often overshadowed by the scale and overwhelming scope the games themselves saturate the player with. By the time you start seeing those flaws, its already been around 100hrs and by that you can't really say the game is entirely shit because it had kept you invested in it for that long.
That, coupled with the fact that Bethesda rpgs are trail blazers in their own right, that they release alongside a completely in-depth editor that comes free with the base game, and that they are made very accessible to a wider audience through console ports covers a lot of their flaws.
No.24339
>>24333Oblivions combat is alot more balanced compared to skyrims and morrowind a
And also daggerfall and arenas
No.24393
>>24328 very cool
>>24329 very cool
>>24333 kinda agree
>>24334 i love that doom guy soyface. I mean, yeah, dof can be pretty cringe, but it's a guilty pleasure of mine. I'm using just enb series
>>24338 >By the time you start seeing those flaws, its already been around 100hrs and by that you can't really say the game is entirely shit because it had kept you invested in it for that long.TRUUUUUUUUUUUE!!!! it really is a complicated thing. But I really do appreciate how dynamic and free ES games feel. Before playing oblivion I had never played any game where you can just go into any building you want, talk to anyone you want, interact with almost any object you find, read books and shit, become whatever you want and so forth. The scope of bethesda rpgs is pure insanity. Makes me cautiously excited about Starfield
No.24395
>>24393I feel like the freedom of Elder Scrolls comes at the expense of other aspects of the game. For Morrowind it was any semblance of balance, while for Skyrim and Oblivion its structure and sense of progression. You can go anywhere and do anything at any time, so everything has to be the same. You level up, so to match your enemies do too, its all just numbers going up with no qualitative difference in gameplay.
Honestly, New Vegas ruined the Bethesda experience for me, showing that these games do not have to have a dept of a paddling pool.
No.24404
>>24395Bethesda's game design in general does not pay much attention to inner workings of their games, focusing on flashy environments and lush world-building rather than gameplay.
>Morrowind's character progression system was pretty solid on paper, but on practice it turned out to be very hackneyed, with a lot of stuff being attached to RNGesus and one wrongly leveled skill leading to a wasted level. Pretty frustrating, but forgivable for an otherwise great game. >Oblivion then tried to trim the fat and untied certain actions like persuasion, combat and lockpicking from dice rolls, but leveling formula remained the same, most enemies being the same level as the player killed the sense of progression, persuasion became a bizarre game of "Simon Says" and combat while being responsive also was quite raw. Mixed bag, but still okay to this day.>Finally, Skyrim pushed the streamlining pedal to the fullest, removing attributes and replacing them with direct magicka-health-stamina upgrades, while character progression has become relegated to purchasing perks for points that were given every level like in Fallout 3. The whole character progression system became extremely barebones, while the general combat gameplay mechanics still have not changed much except for the introduction of shield bash and removal of all mobility skills. The dialogues became simply picking an option from a menu, pretty much every character is a flat slate without much character to them and the overall world feels more scripted and static than Oblivion ever was, so there is not much compensation for the dumbing down of the gameplay either. A huge letdown once the novelty of the setting wears off. No.24411
>>24395i keep hearing that morrowind was broken, but i don't know what people mean by that. back when i played it as babby on my first thinkpad the game seemed very hard to me
No.24414
>>24411There is quite a lot of exploitable mechanics, especially Enchantment and Alchemy. Potions that fortify the Intelligence attribute for example can be abused to get into an incremental Intelligence boost loop that would obscenely increase the Alchemy skill and thus let you make potions that would make your character unstoppable with high magnitude status effects that last pretty much indefinitely. Even funnier, these potions cost an absurd sum, which also lets you to get very rich quick by selling them to merchants for whatever money they have.
No.24415
>>24411You could break that game very easily by accident. When I played it I found one of the best armors in the game near the beginning of the game, thus shutting down any progression in that respect. Even amateur mage could make shit like spell that turns you invisible for 1 second, thus allowing you to just rob mercants in plain sight. Or max buff your speech and trade skill for a single moment just before entering conversation. I made 1 visit into daedric ruins and completelly broke the game economy because of how insanely expensive stuff from there sells, thus allowing me to train my skills so high it made the game trivial. My sneaky character could just turn invisible and stab enemies with inpunity because they could not retaliate. Then there is clunky combat that combines 1st person view with old school dice roll system. And dont even get me startes on leveling, like who in the development oked it and why?
No.24418
>>24411Make a blade with an enchantment that casts invisibility on yourself every time you swing so that you hit your enemy and they instantly forget where you are and can't hit you
No.24433
>>24395>You can go anywhere and do anything at any time, so everything has to be the same.>You level up, so to match your enemies do too, its all just numbers going up with no qualitative difference in gameplay. Yeah I hate that shit. Why not just break the game into areas so some areas are low tier areas and some are high tier areas? Or ok, anyplace that has a city should be reachable, in a believable world, but you can still make it so dungeons are low-medium-high tier. So you can't survive a top tier dungeon before you are top tier or the same with dangerous areas of the map. And you wouldn't have to do any of that enemies level up bullshit. Just make more of them and better ones in hard areas.
Why can't RPGs ever do it right? The way I'd do it, kinda like Mount and Blade where you need to get companions (and soldiers, but in a DnD type game, you could drop the soldiers part) but instead of them being your permanent companions, they should choose to leave or do their own thing, so they feel like they're their own person instead of your robot slave. You could also have the tradeoff be that you have to share loot with them by a percentage of their level to yours.
No.24522
Periodic reminder that Gnostic Race War is inextricably part of the setting
>>24521It's a lot of fun so far and has signature CK weirdness, like half of Morrowind ending up the Skaal religion and every ruler being some odd mix of dark elf, kothringi, orc, and nord
No.24527
>>24522Can I purge all humans in Tamriel? I want to send the invading genocidal settler colonizers back to Atmora
No.24528
>>24527Yes probably you weirdo.
No.24530
>>24527The Mer are just as much of colonialists as the Men, with basically the only possible native Elven races being the Bosmer and the Dwemer, while native humans on the continent consisted of the Kothringi and the Nedes, latter of which though are speculated to be the descendants of the very first Atmoran expeditions who ended up settling in Cyrodiil just in time to be faced by an Aldmeri one that just wiped out the bird-people of Topal Bay and get enslaved by them.
No.24538
Some of the combinations I was talking about. Pic 1 is half kothringi (silver-skinned people)/half altmer, pic 2 is two half nord/half dunmers, pic 3 is half orc/half dunmer with a half orc/half yokudan husband. House Indoril converts to the cult of Clavicus Vile every time I play for some reason.
>>24527It'd take too long within the game's timeframe to convert every county's culture, but you can take over their lands. If you want an "indigenous driving out the colonizers" playthrough pick one of the north Nedic cultures. There's the Reach culture, Ket-Keptu in Hammerfell, and the Galen who only have one county in the Abecean but are native to High Rock. You get a formable empire for the Reach, and Hammerfell and High Rock get special names if their native cultures get the title. There's also decisions to revive extinct cultures (even the Ayleids!) that are part of your culture group, if you really want to wind back the clock. If you're a furry you can also play the Lilmothiit in Black Marsh.
No.24540
>>24538My BF is playing as the fox boys right now. I am much more interested in this than in the vanilla game cause when it's real history it's like… oh ok, do I want to help the Muslims kill the Christians or the other way round, who gives a fuck. Do I want to help some random culture claim back their ancestral lands? I dunno, no, not really. Who would give a fuck about that other than a hyper-reactionary. It makes me feel a little dirty to even think about investing in it. BUT, when you give me the liberation struggle of the foxboys to avoid their extinction, that I can get into.
No.24543
>>24540Canonically I think the all the fox people got the flu and died, but I know what you mean. The culture system as it is encourages that sort of retvrn/purity/genocide mindset as they've got strict boundaries and aren't all that flexible, but unless the CK3 devs switch over to a pops system and have more dynamic of cultural intermingling and development, it won't change. Having people return to a land they've been gone from for thousands of years and pretending they're the same as the old culture is goofy (or even pretending the culture at the game start is the same as at the end 600 years later), it's like modern-day Assyrians declaring a new Assyrian Empire and claiming direct continuity with the old one.
The mod does make you think about the setting more critically
though. How are provinces occupied by imperials for hundreds of years at a time but there are still strict racial boundaries for non-beast races? Colovians and bretons came into existence in the distant past but apparently there's been no interbreeding since then. At the very least you'd think the nobility would be significantly mixed as they secured marriage alliances through the generations.
No.24548
>>24530Aldmeris is just a concept, Elves are indigenous to Tamriel
No.24550
>>24543>Canonically I think the all the fox people got the flu and died, but I know what you mean.Well they said the same about the Native Americans.
No.24551
>>24548>Aldmeris is just a conceptThat's pretty interesting. I have heard of this in lore discussions before, but not much. Care to explain?
>>24543>Colovians and bretons came into existence in the distant past but apparently there's been no interbreeding since thenI blame the usual fantasy worldbuilding logic and post-Daggerfall Bethesda's almost comical reluctance to approach anything related to sexuality with a ten-foot pole, except for the funny lizard book and an odd G-rated ribald reference.
No.24552
>>24551Damn I love @TheRealBarenziah
No.24553
The game usually checks to make sure beastfolk, goblinken, and dremora can't have kids with men and mer, but sometimes characters slip through the cracks and you get monstrosities. Apparently there are submods that make it possible to have kids and not get fucked up human textures stretched over argonian models, might check it out later. The inability to have kids with other races seems to be what keeps Elsweyr and Black Marsh largely independent from other rulers except through conquest.
>>24540I should have added last night, the game is most fun if you don't worry about the cultural or religious aspects. Your primary concern is your dynasty, so you make whatever cynical dealings are possible to see it survive and thrive. Abandon your ancient faith or adopt a completely different culture? Sure, if you can get a marriage alliance out of it and keep your dynasty alive. It's opportunistic and completely indifferent to the needs of your subjects, and I think it nails that part of feudal rulership pretty well.
No.24621
>>24551>I have heard of this in lore discussions before, but not much. Care to explain?Theory goes Aldmeris is the distant memory of all of elven-kind of the period where they were a united force either as the world-spirits which existed on Nirn pre-mortality or even before when they were Aedric essences, so partially a "place" but more in the sense that it was "a place in time", since it was pre-codification of time though it is both impossible to date to any period and exists as a kind of shared memory between all elves. "Returning to Aldmeris" is, essentially, returning to a unified state of being through shedding their mortality and Mundus itself and returning to that state.
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