Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Kail]

Like Ingmar mentions, there has been mention of Dragons before.  In Daggerfall, there were "dragonlings" and you'd get quests to go hunt a "dragon" (only to find out it was a dragonling).  My favorite character from Daggerfall was a Dragon Hunter, I geared him up to fight dragons and searched all over trying to find one.  And I think the Emperor in Oblivion turned into a dragon at the end or something (or was that Mortal Kombat: Annihilation).

But, yeah, their lore pretty much sucks.  On the up side, there's relatively little of it, unlike something like WoW, so it doesn't get in the way as much.  If you're looking to explore archaeological sites or whatever, I can't even think of an archaeological site or historical event that isn't plugged into the main plot for whatever game it's in.  What really hurts my head is the whole "What happened at the end of Daggerfall?   Er, shit, um... okay, it turns out that the world split into a bunch of parallell universes, but only around Iliac Bay, and each of the endings happened in a separate one, and then they all kind of recombined into a world where they all happened but none of them actually happened."  Thanks, chief, you really sorted that one out.

[WindupAtheist]

remove the ability to save anywhere

Modded back in by absolutely everyone before you can even say boo.

[Stormwaltz]

(killed by Cliff Racers )

Fucking cliff racers.

EDIT: Found a wiki with a pertinent article.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dragons

[tgr]

to remove the ability to save anywhere... oh shit, the SCREAMS. LIKE THE TORTURED SOULS OF HELL.

If the alternative would be some sort of console-inspired save-points, there would be screams. Screams of frustration.

The closest to "not save anywhere" I would agree upon would be a requirement to be able to setup camp or something before saving, or I would hack it back in like WUA says.

[Ingmar]

The idea of changing the save game system just because you don't like the way other people are playing a single player game is a little pants-on-head I think. You can always self-impose whatever sorts of silly save game rules you want on yourself.

[Sheepherder]

They were considered extinct in Tamriel (killed by Cliff Racers ) and greatly reduced in Akavir, but still believed to be around over there. But they've been part of the TES back story for a while.

Tamriel is the continent including all of the games made so far, since there are no cliff racers anywhere else, I assume you mean Vvardenfell.

Like Ingmar mentions, there has been mention of Dragons before.  In Daggerfall, there were "dragonlings" and you'd get quests to go hunt a "dragon" (only to find out it was a dragonling).  My favorite character from Daggerfall was a Dragon Hunter, I geared him up to fight dragons and searched all over trying to find one.  And I think the Emperor in Oblivion turned into a dragon at the end or something (or was that Mortal Kombat: Annihilation).

But, yeah, their lore pretty much sucks.  On the up side, there's relatively little of it, unlike something like WoW, so it doesn't get in the way as much.  If you're looking to explore archaeological sites or whatever, I can't even think of an archaeological site or historical event that isn't plugged into the main plot for whatever game it's in.  What really hurts my head is the whole "What happened at the end of Daggerfall?   Er, shit, um... okay, it turns out that the world split into a bunch of parallell universes, but only around Iliac Bay, and each of the endings happened in a separate one, and then they all kind of recombined into a world where they all happened but none of them actually happened."  Thanks, chief, you really sorted that one out.

The Dragon Break didn't only occur at Iliac Bay, and it wasn't strictly speaking parallel universes.  Hero removes powerful macguffin artifact from the aether, breaks time, I'm my own grandpa.

I rather like the lore.  Even when it goes full-on freaky shit.

EDIT: Found a wiki with a pertinent article.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dragons

The first text quoted never appeared again after Arena, and the second is one of the developers deliberately fucking with people.  I think Ted Peterson actually explicitly singled out the latter one and said "Yes, we're fucking with you."

[WindupAtheist]

But, yeah, their lore pretty much sucks.  On the up side, there's relatively little of it, unlike something like WoW, so it doesn't get in the way as much.

Ahem. Speaking as the guy who can fag up pretty much any thread on the board with a lore discussion at the drop of a hat, I have to say... lolwut? Elder Scrolls has metric shitloads of relatively complicated lore. Not only that, but it's presented in a refreshingly mature sort of way, as mythology and history, full of biases and ambiguities. I loved the two biographies of Barenziah in Morrowind, an official one painting her as a saint, and an unauthorized one portraying her as a slutty khajit-yiffing burglar. The slavery/abolition stuff? All the Vivec shit? There's tons of lore.

The difference between Elder Scrolls and Warcraft is that the Elder Scrolls lore is relatively unobtrusive. It's there if you want it, but they don't really give a shit if you just skip it. It's background color. By comparison, Warcraft lore is nothing but 100% monster fights and soap opera. If it doesn't revolve around marketable characters and make a good comic book, it didn't happen. Azeroth has no folklore, or religion, or color, or real history. It just has a timeline of superhero battles.

/ramble

[NowhereMan]

Yeah the background lore in Morrowind was one of my favourite aspects of the whole thing. You could just skip it all and speed run to punch Dagoth Ur in the nutsack and it wouldn't really make the thing any harder or more complicated not knowing any of the back story but having the conflicting historical accounts and question marks made the whole thing far more interesting to me. I like not really knowing  if I'm on the right side or not (or at least if my allies are really as good as they make themselves out to be) and I like being able to find titbits about the history of conflicts I'm getting drawn into. It is at least much more interesting than having an NPC go 'blah, blah, blah dragons, ash-demons, blah, blah 1066 and all that. Now kill me some rats'. I don't think I ever really felt there was as much richness in Oblivion's world but that may have simply been the design itself feeling more generic since there were certainly plenty of plays and novels around to read.

Hopefully part of the problem was just the generic feel of the setting and putting it in Skyrim will actually force the designers to be a bit more creative in crafting the world/culture. That alone would probably go a good way towards making this a must-play for me though it's probably almost as big an ask as improving the gameplay.

[Ironwood]

Also, actually READING the lore and whatnot occasionally led you to a hidden shrine where you found, as written in the scrolls, a fucking awesome Soul Gem that totally broke the game for you in a fun way.

Indeed, I think ALL those items were in little books hidden about the place.

Top Notch.


Oblivion sucked balls though.

[Lantyssa]

Also, actually READING the lore and whatnot occasionally led you to a hidden shrine where you found, as written in the scrolls, a fucking awesome Soul Gem that totally broke the game for you in a fun way.

I stumbled upon it just exploring, but yes.  Sometimes you found the place first, sometimes you found the reference which led you there.

WUA talking about Daggerfall is making me want to go play it though.

[tgr]

WUA talking about Daggerfall is making me want to go play it though.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/

go go go.

[Polysorbate80]

I loaded up the Daggerfall.  I'd forgotten the fun little things like:

 the third monster in the starter dungeon being an imp that you can't hurt with your starter iron weapon

 starting with just three spells in my book, none of which I can actually cast

 getting randomly diseased or poisoned or some such in a fight with an archer with no warning until after I'd saved my game (and no way to cure it)

And still having some fun despite all that sort of shit (and the horribly low-rez graphics)

[KallDrexx]

WUA talking about Daggerfall is making me want to go play it though.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/

go go go.

Try this instead.  It has a ton of unofficial bug fixes and a nice windows installer.

[WindupAtheist]

Other than the primitive graphics and sound, it's the best game in the series to date. I've done nostalgia trips through old games, but I've never played one this old for the first time and had it impress me this much. Even the latest version has the occasional bug or quirk, but nothing serious, and nothing that won't be rendered moot by the meticulous multi-file saving regimen a game like this pushes you into anyway.

And the occasional quirk is a small price to pay for a game this ambitious in scale. Sure it's procedurally-generated, low-res, and thus kind of samey, but I'm still staggered by the sheer fucking size of the world they give you to run around in. I can be doing a bunch of shit up north in the snow with the stereotypical fantasy white people, then go so far south that it's tropical and everyone's black. It's the only RPG I can think of with a world so large that I can actually leave pseudo-England and go somewhere else.

[Ingmar]

Isn't Daggerfall just two provinces? I thought it was Arena that let you wander all over the whole continent.

[tgr]

[Ingmar]

Ah, so it's just two provinces, at Ridiculous Scale then. Gotcha.

[Sheepherder]

Procedural generation is great, isn't it?

[WindupAtheist]

Ah, so it's just two provinces, at Ridiculous Believable Scale then. Gotcha.

Fixed. Let's face it, there are 478 incorporated cities in the state of California, but if it were an average RPG province it would have like eight cities and maybe two dozen places of business.

[dusematic]

Ah, so it's just two provinces, at Ridiculous Believable Scale then. Gotcha.

Fixed. Let's face it, there are 478 incorporated cities in the state of California, but if it were an average RPG province it would have like eight cities and maybe two dozen places of business.

To be fair, comparing modern California, with something like the 9th largest economy in the world -- to typical RPG populations is unrealistic.  Worlds with medieval levels of technology can only support a few villages, hamlets, towns and the occasional city.

[Sheepherder]

To be fair, the average developer fucks it up anyways.  But they'd rather concentrate on the villains than the villeins.

[WindupAtheist]

To be fair, Daggerfall's world is about 2/3 the size of the UK but supposedly "only" has a population of 750,000.

[Sheepherder]

You talking about Daggerfall reminded me I had it on my hard drive.  Which reminded me that it was the other hard drive.  Which caused me to seek a download and (independently) stumble onto that easy-does-it install pack KallDrex linked.  Which got me to roll a new character.  Who got one-shotted by the Imp in Privateer's Hold before it had occurred to me to save.  Which reminded me why I never got very far with this game.

[eldaec]

<daft picture>

Elite had a bigger game world.

So did Lords of Midnight.

Possibly also MULE, scale was never entirely clear.

[Ironwood]

Lords of Midnight shocked me at how small it is when I look back on it.  Also, how frigging cleverly coded it was to suck out so much of my childhood.

Doomdarks Revenge was much, much bigger.

I would cheerfully kill people for a remake of LoM that recreated the feel of the original.  Alas, no-one has the magic formula for Nostalgia Glasses.

[tgr]

<daft picture>

Elite had a bigger game world.

So did Lords of Midnight.

Possibly also MULE, scale was never entirely clear.

Technically, Elite had a bigger game world (scale-wise) even if purely on the basis of having more than one solar system

But I remember getting into the biggest freighter ship in the game, loading it to the brim with hydrogen and a fuel scoop (to scoop more hydrogen from the stars/gas giants) and travelling as far as I could get, only to fuck up and save 1 or 2 jumps before my jump drive died due to lack of servicing.

[Azazel]

Sky, I think his point was the opposite.  He hates stumbling upon a dungeon while exploring, sneaking in, and discovering he out leveled the 3 demons ages ago and everything in the dungeon is trivial.

Well, the theory there is easy. Not sure how hard to implement it would be, but random "world" dungeons, etc simply check your level when you first stumble in, and lock to that level range for the rest of the game. That way you get the "level appropriate" experience when you go in, and if you piss off elsewhere and come back later more geared and levelled you can also ROFLSTOMP the place.

edit - spelling

[Sheepherder]

It wouldn't be hard to have your monster spawner object inherit data from your zone object, which could in turn inherit data from your region object.

Thing is, you're just trading one set of problems for another.  Some people will rail against any easy-mode dungeons being in their game.  Some people will be pissed that a high level dungeon is sitting right next to a low level one because they visited it at level one but not the other, and if you're not careful to construct your inheritance tree is such a way as to make multi-zone dungeons one object you'll end up with dungeons that have a massive jump in difficulty between zone breaks just because the player stopped exploring at that point.

[Sky]

It could work for smaller flavor instances, but I think the main instances need to be what they need to be. A kobold fort should be a kobold fort, sorry you didn't make it there earlier, Charley.

[Azazel]

Hey, it's Just SolA being next to SolB. Or Droga and Nurga.

And besides, it means that you know that any non-story-based dungeons you enter will be level-appropriate. If you want to gimp them by sticking your head in all of the doorways, that's your own business/problem in a SP CRPG. Yep, Sky, that's what I meant when I said "random world dungeons". Main quest type stuff could still be queued for specific reqs/levels. Those are much more likely to be that temple with the glowing runes outside, or the Kobold fort, etc

Also, that map shown above made me want to play Just Cause 2.

[Sheepherder]

And besides, it means that you know that any non-story-based dungeons you enter will be level-appropriate. If you want to gimp them by sticking your head in all of the doorways, that's your own business/problem in a SP CRPG. Yep, Sky, that's what I meant when I said "random world dungeons". Main quest type stuff could still be queued for specific reqs/levels. Those are much more likely to be that temple with the glowing runes outside, or the Kobold fort, etc

If you're only scaling random encounters down, and never scaling them up, what's the point of leveling them at all?  Just so that when you first bump into a randomized non-story cave at endgame that it's not some shitty little kobold hole?  That's not actually a problem that needs to be solved.

[Lantyssa]

Maybe we need more games without levels.  Make some enemies easy, some not.  Difficulty is then a shallow curve with new abilities and new items, but not so much that caused by having a twenty level spread and all the gnashing of teeth.

Say a merging of TES and Deus Ex.

[Lucas]

Straight from E3, gameplay walkthrough with Todd Howard (6m56secs:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-elder-scrolls/714852?type=flv

It's mostly about combat and dragons, though.

[Hawkbit]

I watched about two minutes of it, only to confirm that I will be all over it at release.  I like the UI, really slick and minimal.

[Pringles]

Straight from E3, gameplay walkthrough with Todd Howard (6m56secs:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-elder-scrolls/714852?type=flv

It's mostly about combat and dragons, though.

That video.