Always wanted to make this thread, but could never find time for it until now. Discuss lore, art, modding, headcanons, C0DA and other stuff related to the games.
Not a fan of TES series, cuz Bethesda design philosophy, but leveling skills by using them is such an immersive, roleplay friendly and obvious thing. You like certain playstyle, or certain character build, and you progress through it by just playing it. Genius. Makes me wonder why most RPGs keep sticking to standard "stab 500 goblins to get better at oration" approach. I really dislike it because I dont like playing a murderhobo, I like roleplaying, in particular I like to avoid hurting animals in games, but XP-for-kill mechanic incentivizes towards becoming one man extinction event. Which as a rule carries no moral weight, game portrays you as a hero even though you are effectively some kind of life-force vampire, murdering everything around you top get stronger. Undertale genocide run is just default setting of wast majority of RPGs.
>>27948Finished Morrowind before the current userbase was born. Played the rest afterwards.
If I was pressed I'd say:
Morrowind > Daggerfall > Redguard > Arena > Battlespire > Skyrim > Oblivion
(I haven't played the mobile games)
however, it's worth noting that Skyrim and Oblivion are uniquely awful in their own ways. The only saving grace Oblivion has is that it at least alludes to the Colovian high culture and Nibenese intrigue.
I will NEVER forgive that cunt for ruining the lesser aedra and dragons in particular.
Reject Bethesda, embrace Team Rebuild Tamriel.
OpenMW is a beautiful vanilla mod, I love seeing the original game, looks great simply by using a fresh engine with far draw distance.
>>27911Morrowind is about awakening to your godlike powers, it fits
>>28065The features you are alluding to miss have long since been added by excellent projects like daggerfall unity.
Criticizing a game for perceived antiquities is trite critique. Here especially, considering Oblivion plays worse regardless. Arena has terrible writing granted, though about as bad as Skyrim gets.
>>28058I don't think Redguard and Battlespire can really be compared to the other games, and saying either of them is better than Oblivion or Skyrim is ridiculous.
>ruining the lesser aedra and dragons in particularWhat changes did you dislike? ESO has some ehlnofey characters in one of the High Rock and Valenwood zones iirc.
>>28074My main issue with Arena is that end-game fights turn into the same potion-chugging battles of attrition as in the later titles. The last dungeon specifically is a slog because they filled it with liches and called it a day.
>>27910Only chinlets like medieval fantasy rpgs
Real communist like futuristic scy-fy ones
>>28102I am fervently unqualified to say anything about cgi but I have a term I like to call natural contrast. Basically it’s the idea that the colour variation of most levels should general adhere strongly to a single colour at a time because most of the light is coming only from one source whose frequency naturally shouldn’t change(unless it’s like exciting a material but even then you don’t need to go that deep with graphics).
When natural contrast is prioritized sets look boring but not visually overloading to the player but when it’s ignored it’s very distracting
>>28066They basically remade the Morrowind engine from its precursor without any of Bethesda's original source code. Best of all, it is somehow even more stable and extensible than the original, especially with the shader and script support in recent versions and upcoming dehardcoding of gameplay mechanics as well as support for .bsa and .nif formats of future games.
Btw, if anyone wants a point to get started with OpenMW, there is modding-openmw.com that got various modlists for either quick modding, complete overhaul of the game or simply a better looking vanilla experience.
>>28058Also do not forget how they cut down the varieties of Daedra in Skyrim. Not including Scamps and Hungers is a downright criminal offense.
>>28111Enemy model variations.
Bethesda has a thing for faking diverse enemies through procedural algorithms
>>27914>Makes me wonder why most RPGs keep sticking to standard "stab 500 goblins to get better at oration" approachOne benefit of skill point buying systems is you have much finer control over the growth of your character and don't need to take time away from actual gameplay grinding out a single skill (although players might end up grinding character levels rather than individual skill levels regardless). It's particularly hard to raise skills like mercantile or, in Daggerfall, passive skills like medical or languages in a way where they'll keep up with the rest of the player's skills, so more often than not they end up on the chopping block/merged with other skills in later games to fit with usage-based leveling mechanics. Adding in skill trainers can help somewhat and cut down on grinding but it defeats the whole point of needing to use skills to level up, it's just point buying but as a money sink.
In the future I hope they use some kind of hybrid model where you can allocate perks by using the skill as normal and leveling up, or by completing quests and earning perks/levels which you can distribute as you see fit.
I feel like character/skill level-based progression is sorta dated now but any other system I can think of basically reinvents it. You either end up perpetually short on perks or as a jack of all trades able to unlock everything. Or maybe they could take a page out of Runescape's book by deriving character level from combat skills only, but now I'm getting way off topic. >>28110based free software gaming enjoyer
OpenMW could be a good basis for more action RPG, much like how the Quake engines are still used for lots of games, even commercial ones (licensed freely, at least the code)
>>28111Join:
https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/ and their dicksword
They'll give you plenty to do.
Daggerfall… home.
>>28118It's helpful to know what you're in for when playing Daggerfall, I'd compare it more to Dwarf Fortress adventure mode than the later titles in the series: the adventuring is much more self-directed and slower paced and the world design means you won't just chance upon interesting locations while exploring. Most of the worldbuilding is done through books rather than factions and quests so there isn't a lot of storytelling or intrigue to hook players who like that sort of thing. Dungeons are generated procedurally in blocks, which is why they can feel samey and easy to get lost in. It's not for everyone but I like it a lot, it's a strict improvement over Arena and I come back to it more than I do Oblivion, plus the mods in the last few years have been great both for quality of life and replayability.
>>28216Also, would be remiss of me to not mention that some of TES' best ideas come from RuneQuest, which is also great though I prefer Kirkbride's and Kuhlmanns prose myself.
Anyway, that as a sincere answer to your bait question. Satisfied? Learned something?
It's interesting that the series survived where so many western CRPGs (and the game studios that made them) died or faded away all around the same time in the late 90s/early 2000s: Wizardry, Ultima, Might & Magic, Bard's Tale, hell even Fallout which was resurrected by Bethesda themselves. The ones that DID survive like Bethesda and Bioware fully embraced more action-oriented real-time combat and consoles. There doesn't seem to have been a similar reckoning in Japan, I wonder what caused it.
>>28171In-game lorebooks probably get people interested, and the lore has had multiple writers and influences over its almost 30 years of existence. Plus Kirkbride's writing (both in-game and in quasi-official sources like the imperial library) is so strange for a lot of people that they end up digging deeper to find out more. The 36 Sermons are pretty much straight from Crowley/Thelema and he apparently believes in and practices gnostic mysticism stuff. In pic related he's cautioning someone against reading one of his imperial library posts too carelessly because it's magical.
>>28220 (me)
I was reading more into it and I guess there was a wave of consolidations around that period that saw a ton of studios go under or get acquired for their IP and dissolved by bigger players. There's an interview from 1998 with one of the founders of Sir-Tech (the company behind Wizardry) as it was partially shutting down, in which he said the level of investment and negotiating power needed to create and market new titles was increasingly out of reach for mid-size companies, he even mentions Bethesda in particular as one he expects to go under in the near future. Bethesda founded Zenimax the next year and probably got enough money to stay afloat from that, and ended up with a lot of well-connected people on its board of directors like Donald Trump's brother, Robert.
Full interview if anyone else finds it interesting:
https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/10/16/sir-techs-last-words >>29354I definitely prefer Simon's to EnaiSiaion's stuff, the latter is just way too out there for me. SPERG is nice and simple too.
Requiem is sort of in a league of its own, development is going along at a glacial pace and just getting everything to work is a pain in the ass. There are so many different versions and tools needed out there for all the different modpacks (Wildlander, Serenity 2, etc) that it's easier to just use Wabbajack at this point rather than trying to put it together yourself. I appreciate what they were going for but it takes a while to get your character decent and I can't keep interested after level 20 or so when it loses the challenge. And it's a shame that so many of their features are tied into the overhaul, a lot of their extra spells are cool and I wish they could be easily used without Requiem.
Also, OpenMW 0.48.0 has gone stable:
https://openmw.org/2023/openmw-0-48-0-released/Lets see what will come out of it. The Lua script engine thing is pretty lit, as is the built-in post-processing/shader thing. Not as powerful as MGE/MWSE yet, but very close to leveling the field and some MWSE mods might be ported over to it soon.
>>29397OpenMW-lua isn't anything to write home about yet. Even says so in the release article. The lack of a video is going to hurt them, much like TR reports going from monthly to bimonthly is hurting that project.
>Not as powerful as MGE/MWSEOpenMW is already "more powerful". OpenMW-lua specifically doesn't have
feature parity with MWSE.
>very close to leveling the field (with MWSE)lol. Here's a tip: don't write so much about shit you don't understand. You could've just posted the article with something along the lines of "Neat, there's a new version of OpenMW!" Would have spared your face from the egg.
>>29399Appreciate the reply, that took guts.
I agree. OpenMW benefits from an inherently better position over wrappers/injectors. It really is only a question of *when* it will take off in the mod scene. See also TR (and by extension PT) waiting on cell based water height (among other things).
>>31151Starfield lead writer got laid off just after the release so I am not surprised now tbh. They clearly do not even care about the lore anymore as can be seen with BGS releasing a Fallout Shelter clone with a painfully generic fantasy aesthetic.
>>31153Someone in the team really does not like cat people. Pellitine is not much better tho and registers with cat toilet filler for me.
>>32893The abolitionists are dunmeri. The imperial ties you allude to are circumstantial, and inherited from the Hlaalu-Empire relationship.
The slavery dichotomy isn't even "yay" vs "nay", but naked chattel slavery (Telvanni, Dres) vs indentured servitude and serfdom (Hlaalu, Velothi).
>>33033I dunno man, maybe take a fucking gander at the popular mods before you start making wild claims.
What a dumb fucking post.
>>330532011 (Skyrim) was 12 years after 1999. 2024 is 13 years after 2011. Skyrim's release is closer to the 90s than to today.
Btw Morrowind and Oblivion came out between Skyrim and the 90s and only TESO has come out since Skyrim and today.
>>33068I wanted to have a go at it to see their version of Elsweyr, but apparently that questline is paid,and honestly from what I have seen they did not do good job at portraying the province. The cultural conflict between nomadic.northern and sedentary southern Khajiit is one of the interesting parts of their lore and ESO seems to sideline it heavily in favor of a dragons, Jagar Tharn's grandgrandma and cat daedra outbreaks. I am also not a fan of the game's rather boring art direction that looks like a crappy in-between of Skyrim and Oblivion to me, but sure the old SWTOR adds into it too.
As a heads up regarding my project thing, I am currently practicing my drawing skills and trying to pull myself to make a concept art library for it and anything else I would plan or would like to contribute to.
>>33095Not sure if you are serious with your assessment, but…
The thing is that the.humans being portrayed as good guys here is acknowledged even in-universe as the works of Imperial hegemony while also showing multiple points of view on every major backstory event (just check out Battle for the Red Mountain lol). None of races in this setting is really inherently good or evil nor there is a rigid alignment system that keeps them in that way unlike D&D that you mention. Most of the ethnic conflicts happening in the series come off more as result of societal elites vying for more power, wealth or following some ideology than result of the supremacist ideologies being true, which for me is already better than most other fantasy universes that barely flesh out their peoples and do not bother with writing multiple PoV story pieces.
>>33109 (me)
Also the shock cloak spell with associated perks is great for a melee character, it effectively reduces every enemy's health pool by 15% via disintegration and the range increases massively when dual cast and using buffs.
>>33113Depending on what you mean by actual RPG, Requiem should be fine. It doesn't change the bad storylines from vanilla but it does add better character progression. Only thing I don't like is there's a lot of game knowledge you need to know up front to build your character properly. It does require a bit of work to set up and tweak to your own tastes plus there are a lot of mods/patches for it (like 3Tweaks and Expanded Grimoire) that are worth using. It's a major overhaul so any mods will either need to be made specifically for Requiem or have patches to work properly with it. Other than Requiem I also enjoy SimonRim (although it's about 20 mods under one umbrella), it's more like vanilla+ than an overhaul but adds a lot of build variety and flavor to the game.
If you don't want to bother with hunting down mods and patching them you can use a premade modlist with Wabbajack:
https://www.wabbajack.org/The only downside with using Wabbajack is if you don't pay for Nexus you'll be stuck clicking "download" for a while depending on the modlist size (from one hour to many hours), but after it's done you're good to go. There was a good one for Requiem called Serenity 2 but it doesn't look like it's available anymore. I've also heard good things about Wildlander but haven't tried it, nor have I tried any of the SimonRim modlists.
>>33152This one gives you a +5 bonus no matter what whenever you level up:
https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/2691When I play Morrowind I like using a mod that just has attributes increase naturally as you increase related skills, but I've never tried the Oblivion equivalents so I dunno if they work or not.
You should also get a mod that reworks the ridiculous level scaling. I tried this one a while ago and it was good:
https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/49194 >>33152Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul kind of deals with the leveling if I recall correctly. Can be also be safely combined with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, a earlier mod with similar aims.
https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/42780https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/46199Also can suggest looking into the Ascension mod.
https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/50237Make sure to use Wrye Bash after installing these mods to eliminate any possible conflicts through merging the conflicting changes into a patch .esp.
>>33375Imga are still around. The Akaviri of all forms are still around, including the Tsaesci heading the Blades.
Falmer are a Todd-era invention and therefore irrelevant.
Black March inclusion is just idiotic in general. Might as well include the whole continent at that point.
Reject Todd revisionism, embrace C0DA canon.
>>33377>Falmer are a Todd-era invention and therefore irrelevant. What are you smoking man? They have been part of the setting since Daggerfall and Bloodmoon.
https://www.imperial-library.info/content/king-edward-part-x<"Such shy folk … I tried," Lucky faltered. "I did try. The ice elves were very hard to find, and not that friendly when I did find them."https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Bloodmoon:In_Search_of_the_FalmerSkyrim only introduced the dumb idea of them being turned into literal CHVDs by the Dwemer.
>Black March inclusion is just idiotic in general. Might as well include the whole continent at that point.Well they did include the whole continent already and shat all over the lore to the point that UESP and even Imperial Library are not really reliable anymore if you consciously look to reject all of the shitty new lore.
>>33378Half of that is ESO bullshit and half of that is anti-Argonian slander to pin the blame for the extermination of Lilmothiit and other natives of Imperial-occupied parts of Black Marsh on them.
>>33378The not retarded ones are either MIA, or still around just not recently recorded.
Reject Todd revisionism.
>>33380The King Edward series is of dubious canonicity. Assuming it is veracious: the ice elves and snow elves are not the same thing. Specifically, the elves of the Fall of the Snow prince are implied to be a native culture of Solstheim that first empire men retroactively grouped with their mythical ice elves. It's a propaganda piece. Note the quests suggestion that the "Falmer" and "Riekling" are the same - it is not incidental.
I did forget Morrowind coined the term Falmer though, so my bad.
>shat all over the lore to the point that UESP and even Imperial Library are not really reliable anymore if you consciously look to reject all of the shitty new lore.I have observed this too. The UESP has gotten significantly worse after the Morrowind faction of the staff gave up.
Luckily, the Project Tamriel team has their own wiki which is supposed to include non-stupid lore and their own additions.
https://wiki.project-tamriel.com/wiki/Main_PageStill pretty thin, but it has pages on the Masser colonies.
>Well they did include the whole continent already fair lol
First for OpenMW VR is very good.
>>34236>OblivionPossible to underlevel, but difficult
>MorrowindYou have to be retarded to fuck it up with so much static stuff in the world. Halo kiddies who got it with their xbox hueg console could handle it.
>>34772The snake thing makes too much sense to ignore. Would the Akavir->Yokuda migration take place around the other side of Nirn then? You a round-Nirner, anon?
I've been toying with the idea of Yokudans as analogues for the Roman Empire's foederati, where warring states of Hammerfell increasingly relied on their services (with gold and land as payment) until eventually they dominated the region militarily and started taking castles and forts for themselves when their patrons couldn't, or wouldn't, pay. For Nords I suppose they could stay the same. Or giving Nords the new Redguard backstory and having Redguards stay the same. I'm just wary of including TWO martial cultures with their own sacred cultural magic escaping from a doomed continent and killing all the elves they can find.
>>35965I think its because people are starved for genuine sandbox games. Within RPG genre, what else is there?
Semi-off-topic, anyone here played Dread Delusion? Its been on my radar for some time and finally came out of early access, clear Morrowind influence.
>>36089>I think its because people are starved for genuine sandbox games. Within RPG genre, what else is there?Capitalism doesn't like wide open sandbox RPGs because the average player is not going to see most of the content, which means that it's a "waste" to put all that effort in. The suits don't care about the art or about the fun, only the return on investment. That's why games tend so much towards being cinematic and on-rails.
The only way you can get away with something like Daggerfall in terms of scale is if you do it by procedural generation. Which is what they did back then. Today you could make it more hand-crafted, but the economics forbids it. And consumers aren't going to be as interested in exploring a procedurally generated open world, so even doing it that way would be hard to convince them would sell.
>>36089>Semi-off-topic, anyone here played Dread Delusion?I played the demo. It was the definition of style over substance, extraordinarily barebones. The art direction was really good, and the only thing keeping me from dropping it. Everything else felt like a design by checklist open world.
>>36136We can hope that after Starflop they'll course correct and start making deep mechanics again right?
>>36155Here's what I've currently got loaded:
Attend Me
Persuasive Speech
Pursuit for OMW
CHIM - Movement and Stamina
Friendly Wildlife
NPC Schedules
Sensibile Races and Sensible Birthsigns
Also waiting on a good "survival" mod, a la ashfall. Frostwind doesn't do it for me.
>>36260In that case it's probably my own mod. You can easily make your own by opening your editor of choice and changing the fight and alarm values to your liking.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:NPCs#Characteristics>>36176I have over a 200 loaded, so way too many to list. My recommendation is to go look around on the nexus and grab whatever seems interesting.
>>36275Didn't see it explained in game but then again I haven't read many of the books. The wiki says the following:
>Morrowind:Glass>Glass weapons and armor are an ornate design: light and flexible, although very difficult to make and expensive. Glass armor is a lightweight armor created using rare metals studded with volcanic glass. The result is stronger than steel due to its ability to absorb and distribute shocks very well.>Lore:Malachite>Malachite, commonly known as glass (and not to be confused with common glass), is a rare, volcanic, milky translucent green crystal that absorbs magicka under the right conditions. It is most often used in creating strong, yet lightweight metallic armor and weapons. The material is similar to ebony, but is less durable and more lightweight. It bears no relation to the common, brittle glass used in windows and ornaments, as it is far stronger and has a much higher melting point. It is most commonly found in Morrowind on the volcanic island of Vvardenfell, but ore veins can also be found all across Tamriel.>The knowledge of using glass and moonstone to craft elven armor started with the Altmer in Summerset, and was once a closely guarded secret on the isle, but a Dunmer slave Ulvul Llaren, who worked under the isle's master smith escaped and as an act of revenge, revealed the secrets of its creation to the rest of Nirn. Thanks to his contribution, it is now known that glass armor is made using rare metals such as moonstone in order to give it the right strength, and is studded with malachite to create an armor stronger than steel due to its ability to absorb and distribute shock. The use of malachite among non-Altmer, however, predates Llaren's contributions, both among the other mer and men. Glass armor is considered the pinnacle of masterful Dunmeri light armor design. Similarly, Elven-made glass weapons feature extravagant use of rare metals and cutting edges made from crystalline volcanic glass to produce blades of virtually unparalleled sharpness and light weight. Glass weapons wear down quickly, however, and require frequent repair.I figured it was justified in the lore but the fact that it's better than all(?) medium armour seems like a mistake gameplay wise. I suppose the trade-off is that it's relatively rare, expensive and the wiki says weapons wear down quickly which I've definitely noticed but not sure if that applies to the armour too. Still left thinking that theres no good reason to pick medium armour over light or heavy other than the fact that Orcish armour looks badass
>>36275Glass is refined ligament of a long dead god wot scattered over Nirn. That is why there is relatively much of it on Vvardenfell.
>>36276When sourcing the UESP on Morrowind, don't use general lore pages. They contradict each other. Better yet: just cite books directly from the Imperial Library.
>>36155This site has curated modlists suited for different tastes if you want to check it out
https://modding-openmw.com/lists/Other than what
>>36164 said, I always use NCDGMW (
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/53136) which ties attributes directly to skills because I hate the vanilla attribute increase system.
>>36176Daggerfall Unity has a lot of quality of life options already built in, although the options can be difficult to interpret right away and you don't know what you'll find annoying before you play. UESP explains what each setting does here:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall_Mod:Daggerfall_Unity/SettingsThe ones I'd recommend for everyone are swap health and fatigue, click to attack, and smaller dungeons. The game isn't for everyone and I think it'd be better to figure out whether you like the base before you start expanding on it.
I've been looking at some of the earliest mods for Morrowind and it's funny that the same mods that we're recommending today (non-hostile wildlife, leveling rework) had their own incarnations not even a month after the game's release:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161103135754/http://mw.modhistory.com/download-37-7453https://web.archive.org/web/20161103134510/http://mw.modhistory.com/download-90-7351There's also a ton of "merchants with a million gold" and ridiculously overpowered weapon/armor mods.
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