The Elder Scrolls: The XVII Princes of Oblivion

[Lord Raziere]

I liked Outer Worlds, just as I liked all other stuff Obsidian has made. its commentary was a bit real, but overall I liked it. I'm looking forward to Avowed. even if its nothing but skyrim with a different map and upgraded graphics, I'll be all for it because thats my jam.

[Rynjin]

One of the big failings of Outer Worlds, IMO, was the lack of combat variety. None of the skill thresholds or perks actually changed your playstyle or gave you new options, and weapon variety was slim.

I got super bored by the time I was done with Monarch and never finished it.

[Spore]

Outer Worlds lacks a bit of build variety, yes. But its writing and the mesh with gameplay is where it is at. If you are in the wilds, suddenly the whole capitalism bad humor gets muted. In Fallout you are ever present with a reminder that war never changes, war is bad and there is an apocalypse happened. OW has nothing like that. If the weapon would advertise its ammo ever so often. If you had a person dying in the wilderness under a vending machine that is tended to by a Board employee because they are not allowed to interfere with customers outside a sale it would probably become more interesting.

There are times where I didnt want to go "out there", because outside of settlements, the whole criticism thing is muted. And as you said, gameplay is not varied. There is shooting, there is subpar melee, and there is playing rock-paper-scissors with your ammo types.

Now if it had more locations akin to Roseway Gardens where the whole place tells a story, I would have enjoyed it more. You enter and do the usual hubbub, but suddenly you are in an empty place puzzling together what happened. For one, the "town" is not sequestered off by a loading screen. For two, there is a mesh of gameplay and story happening. For three, there is an actual impactful choice at the end, which is a proper moral dilemma (similar to Edgewater).

But yea, I still have high hopes for OW 2. Mix up the gameplay a bit, mesh story with actual fighting a bit and you got yourself a good game.

[Fyraltari]

its commentary was a bit real, but overall I liked it.

Isn't that a good thing? How is commenting on real stuff, bad commentary, I don't understand.

I haven'tbplayed the game, by the way.

[Rynjin]

I think the bigger issue was the commentary was kind of slipshod. It had a hard time deciding whether the game was a satire of late stage capitalism or a serious discussion of the consequences of it. Some of the tonal shifts in that game are enough to give you whiplash, and it makes it hard to take anything seriously.

[Lord Raziere]

I think the bigger issue was the commentary was kind of slipshod. It had a hard time deciding whether the game was a satire of late stage capitalism or a serious discussion of the consequences of it. Some of the tonal shifts in that game are enough to give you whiplash, and it makes it hard to take anything seriously.

I don't see how thats indecisive. something can be both serious and comedic. thats a valid thing for it to be. Fallout New Vegas has similar levels oscillation between seriousness and silliness. Indeed, the silly absurdities and serious consequences of something are both valid things to point out. just because there are serious consequences to the absurdity doesn't make it not absurd and that it shouldn't be laughed, but just because something is an absurdity doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge and be serious when it has consequences. such things are a spectrum and in some ways linked. understanding requires acknowledging complexity and seriousness and silliness are two layers apart of that complexity.

[Taevyr]

I think the bigger issue was the commentary was kind of slipshod. It had a hard time deciding whether the game was a satire of late stage capitalism or a serious discussion of the consequences of it. Some of the tonal shifts in that game are enough to give you whiplash, and it makes it hard to take anything seriously.

That was actually what I liked about it: it was clearly a satirical pastiche of extreme late-stage capitalism, but it also treated it in a realistic manner. The game kind of feels like the uncanny valley in how it uses extreme capitalism: yes, it's clearly an extreme satire, but that satire still feels far too real at times.

Stuff like the moon man merchant on the big ship hub is a great example: the soul-crushing realism of being stuck in a dead-end salesman job for an abusive company, without any other prospects, drawn out into an absurdity that makes it both utterly hilarious and just a tad too real in some of its commentary.

[Fyraltari]

Yeah, that's what satire is, if you're not using the funny to comment on real life, you're just making a parody.

[Lord Raziere]

Yeah, that's what satire is, if you're not using the funny to comment on real life, you're just making a parody.

Exactly. Satire is basically commentary through comedic emphasis of criticized behavior combined with realistic consequences of said behavior. In short: what this game does. There is no conflict.

Spoiler: Outer Worlds example

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Another example is the whole quest you do on the second planet: the woman on the space station sends you down to some research facility to figure out and get whatever they're developing figuring that ti must be valuable somehow. you do this, you go there, you find things going wrong, you figure "huh the experiment must've gone out of control or something" so you brace yourself for whatever mad science experiment is being done THIS time then you get to the alive scientist and what they're developing is......diet tooth paste. Wut? So if your like me, you don't pick up on the hint here and figure this must be some sort of joke on corporations developing a product no one asked for or needed so they can convince people its something they want like corporations did with soap or a joke on how much people are demanding easy ways to diet or something and not think much of it at first.

I do the quest, investigating more, turns out some criminal stole the research and when I get to her she reveals that the tooth paste if altered a little can be rocket fuel which is much more profitable than diet tooth paste. So maybe it was a joke on corporations developing products without considering their full use to push something specific they want it to do? I went back, sold it as rocket fuel and completed the quest.

It wasn't until the reveal with famine being near that it suddenly made sense. the diet toothpaste while a funny concept on its own, makes perfect realistic sense in context. Of course the corporations would develop something like that, they're trying to figure out ways to making people eat less so as to conserve food. So a quest that you initially do thinking its just a comedic situation and ridiculous actions over diet tooth paste, turns out to be a bunch of people trying to profit off a product without knowing the actual reason its even being designed for and how it could affect the entire rest of the system, and through your ignorant actions of being a normal rpg player seeking the most benefit they can out of this, takes this solution away and turns into something that is of questionable help: what use is rocket fuel when you need to solve a food shortage?

the whole situation is a retrospective comedy of errors that only occurs because The Board kept secret about the famine thing in the first place. Without anyone knowing the real reason behind the diet tooth pastes development, they just see something to profit off of while screwing over the man or use to get a promotion. its both ridiculous yet honest about what peoples priorities are when you keep secrets from them about something they need to know- player included.

[Rynjin]

Yeah, that's what satire is, if you're not using the funny to comment on real life, you're just making a parody.

The issue for me is that it's not really...funny? The Outer Worlds humor kind of reminds me of this little skit:



Having a mix of serious and silly is fine, but you've gotta know when to do each or it all just falls flat. It's just one of those games where everybody has to be the butt of or root of a joke first, and character second, but then it tries to make you...care, I guess? And I just never could.

[DigoDragon]

TIL there's a spot just south of Stillborn cave where you can jump around the mountain and accidentally land inside the city zone for Windhelm. This of course crashes the game when it tried to load the city interior, but realizes that you didn't walk in through one of the proper entrances. XD

Also for some reason a snow leopard spawned inside Windhelm. The city guard took care of it, but never saw that before.

[veti]

TIL there's a spot just south of Stillborn cave where you can jump around the mountain and accidentally land inside the city zone for Windhelm. This of course crashes the game when it tried to load the city interior, but realizes that you didn't walk in through one of the proper entrances. XD

The thing is, the only version of the city that exists in the outside world is the version designed to be seen from outside. It's got the walls, buildings and ground, and that's about all. No people, nothing interactive - including no working doors, which would be a problem if you did get in, because there'd be no way out. (OK, fast travel would probably work, so not that big a problem.) And quite possibly not even all the walls. Faces that are always occluded from outside may not be defined at all.

On the other hand, you could try it with Open Cities - that might make it a viable shortcut.

[Grim Portent]

The front gates still work don't they? They can be interacted with from both sides of the open world, if you somehow get inside the cities placeholder variants.

[LibraryOgre]

*sigh* This makes me miss Morrowind, where you could jump across the landscape like a demented kangaroo, and levitate into towns without a screen change.

[Grim Portent]

FO4 kind of has that, with the ability to enter at least Goodneighbour by dropping in through the skybox as I recall.

When they get around to a future ES game I imagine it'll carry a lot of the general improvements from Fallout 4 forwards, which might lead to them trying to involve a bit more verticality in the game. After all, if jetpacks work in Fallout why can't levitation work in Elder Scrolls?

[LibraryOgre]

FO4 kind of has that, with the ability to enter at least Goodneighbour by dropping in through the skybox as I recall.

When they get around to a future ES game I imagine it'll carry a lot of the general improvements from Fallout 4 forwards, which might lead to them trying to involve a bit more verticality in the game. After all, if jetpacks work in Fallout why can't levitation work in Elder Scrolls?

Most settlements in Fallout 4 aren't locked behind walls... Covenant (maybe? Can you jet pack in?), the Fens, and weird ones like Vault 88.

I hope they bring Levitation and Jumping spells back.

[veti]

The front gates still work don't they? They can be interacted with from both sides of the open world, if you somehow get inside the cities placeholder variants.

I haven't tried the experiment, but it seems unlikely. The front of the gate is an activator that triggers a scene transition (unloading the outside world and loading the city space). The back - I wouldn't expect to have any defined behaviour. The best I'd hope for is that maybe the front activator has enough depth that you can reach it through the gate, in which case you'd find yourself walking in at the front of the fully functional city - but that would qualify as a glitch.

I hope they bring Levitation and Jumping spells back.

When they did away with those in Oblivion, they took the opportunity to increase railroading. It's much easier to insert "encounters that must be triggered in the correct order" if you remove that extra degree of freedom. Skyrim doesn't lean so heavily on that mechanic, so perhaps they could allow a bit more flexibility in future.

On the other hand, it'd mean a more demanding platform spec, which would be an abrupt reversal. Arthmoor talks a big game about how "Open Cities" has no performance hit, but it absolutely does.

[Spore]

The front gates still work don't they? They can be interacted with from both sides of the open world, if you somehow get inside the cities placeholder variants.

Placeholder cities, skybox areas you can go to and other stuff where you can pull at the seams of the game and realize it is all a big hoax creep me out. Does anyone else share the sense of dread and fear when they drop through the floor? Touch some invisible deathplane (heck even the name death plane is creepy).

I know as a rational being that games need boundaries, and you cannot calculate the whole game world in every direction, but my monkey brain goes apeshift when I realize I have been conned into believing this illusion.

*sigh* This makes me miss Morrowind, where you could jump across the landscape like a demented kangaroo, and levitate into towns without a screen change.

Me too. Weirdly enough this was one of my biggest complaints in Oblivion. You go from Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights with dedicated city zones to Morrowind. You're awestruck with the immersive and seamless world...

And with the new game they just axe all that work? Why?

[Ortho]

Weirdly enough this was one of my biggest complaints in Oblivion. You go from Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights with dedicated city zones to Morrowind. You're awestruck with the immersive and seamless world...

And with the new game they just axe all that work? Why?

Tech issues. The Xbox 360 just isn't powerful enough to render a city, its NPCs, and the surrounding wilderness all at once. The simplest solution is to stick the city behind a loading screen.

[Keltest]

I haven't tried the experiment, but it seems unlikely. The front of the gate is an activator that triggers a scene transition (unloading the outside world and loading the city space). The back - I wouldn't expect to have any defined behaviour. The best I'd hope for is that maybe the front activator has enough depth that you can reach it through the gate, in which case you'd find yourself walking in at the front of the fully functional city - but that would qualify as a glitch.

Typically, with the Elder Scrolls games at least, the entire object can be interacted with in that manner. I know occasionally ive gotten glitched to the wrong side of a door in Oblivion and been able to use it to rescue myself.

[Rynjin]

Tech issues. The Xbox 360 just isn't powerful enough to render a city, its NPCs, and the surrounding wilderness all at once. The simplest solution is to stick the city behind a loading screen.

I think a lot of people forget that Morrowind was largely an empty brown expanse of nothing outside the cities, so it's easier to run on low spec hardware than Oblivion, which has actual like...terrain, flora, and fauna.

[GloatingSwine]

Tech issues. The Xbox 360 just isn't powerful enough to render a city, its NPCs, and the surrounding wilderness all at once. The simplest solution is to stick the city behind a loading screen.

Also Oblivion has a lot more interactable greebles that have physics, and loading those fills more memory. Culling them by separating out item intensive areas like cities was a reasonable compromise, even if it meant losing levitation.

[veti]

I think a lot of people forget that Morrowind was largely an empty brown expanse of nothing outside the cities, so it's easier to run on low spec hardware than Oblivion, which has actual like...terrain, flora, and fauna.

I remember quite a lot of terrain, flora and fauna in Morrowind. True there are areas of blasted waste, but that's kinda the whole point of the game. Elsewhere there are trees, flowers, rocks, pools, giant mushrooms, cliff racers, nix hounds, pools of lava, daedric shrines, cliff racers, ghouls, scribs, kwama, mines, forts, cliff racers, kagouti, netch, silt striders, naked Nords, fungi, mudcrabs, slaughterfish, dreugh, and let's not forget cliff racers.

[Rynjin]

Notice that a lot of those, like the mushrooms, are very simple and static models. No leaves or grass, for example.

Morrowind is a good example of doing a lot with a little, but it had serious limitations bof its own

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Notice that a lot of those, like the mushrooms, are very simple and static models. No leaves or grass, for example.

Morrowind is a good example of doing a lot with a little, but it had serious limitations bof its own

None of the alchemy plants you could loot updated when you harvested them either, IIRC.

Tangent, I hope we get more customizable map markers in ES6. I’d like to be able to mark things like alchemy plant locations, sleeping spots and so on.

[GloatingSwine]

IIRC alchemy plants in Morrowind were actually containers not objects.

[Grim Portent]

Harvestable items (rather than chests shaped like plants and things) were added in Oblivion I think, but they didn't change appearance when harvested until Skyrim. I actually remember being pretty excited that whole patches of flowers would change when I first fired up the game back in the day.

[Spore]

Tech issues. The Xbox 360 just isn't powerful enough to render a city, its NPCs, and the surrounding wilderness all at once. The simplest solution is to stick the city behind a loading screen.

I think a lot of people forget that Morrowind was largely an empty brown expanse of nothing outside the cities, so it's easier to run on low spec hardware than Oblivion, which has actual like...terrain, flora, and fauna.

Well, Morrowind ran on the OG Xbox, so that is not an argument. The question is where you put the focus. Graphical fidelity or actual connected feel of the world. I say in this case either choice is feasible, but I felt Oblivion did precious little with the ressources granted.

I remember the Ghostgate from Morrowind, the shoreline between Balmorra and Seyda Neen, I remember the desert city of Gnisis (reminding me of bug infested Mos Eisley), the magical towers of Tel Vos. I remember the tribal camps, Vivec and Ebonheart.

Conversely from Oblivion I remember the Imperial City, the place where you close the first Oblivion Gate, the mountain where the Blades reside and loads and loads of boring meadows. Ah yes, and the generic fantasy towns where I had to go to become a mage's guild apprentice.

[Resileaf]

Reminder that Morrowind has artificial fog for the sole purpose of making the game look bigger.

[Imbalance]

Playing Morrowind now for the first time in years, last loaded up Skyrim about a month ago, years since Oblivion A-bombed on me. I'll say there's a lot of old tech that the nostalgia glasses can't overcome, yet it feels...like going home.

Yes, alchemy plants are more like single use containers with zero outside indication of contents. They do respawn, but it seems to take forever.
I can move past a cluttered shelf without everything getting knocked around, though.
Gods, the natural skill curve. I've been trying to force myself to play it organically, following the quest paths and leveling up without gaming the bonuses, but things like firing thirty arrows before one hits or not being able to jump over a pebble are testing my resolve.
The draw depth and fog were complaints even back in the day when I was still real close with my N64, but when I think about the fact that Oblivion's white tower is visible from nearly every high point in Cyrodiil it just seems so...lazy. The sun pushing through in a lot of cases is downright gorgeous, though.
I still turn off shadows and autosaves, like, instinctively. I don't know if that's still necessary.
I spent entirely too much time looking for that damn cube. Again. Arktnghand is the only place I've fallen through the floor this run, so far, but I didn't fall off the world. This *will* happen, though, eventually, because iirc it has mostly to do with player carry weight and I just can't leave stuff lie around. I don't remember the exact formula to calculate how many jugs of sujama I'd need to drink to make it back to town with fifty Dwemer cogs like I used to.
I'm planning to avoid permanent spell effects exploits, but I'm not above reverse variable magnitude enchantments and I've already got a few modified SR-71 recipes in mind. Only going to do vampire quests if I contract it, but I'm pretty sure I'll be on Solstheim before long, in large part because one of my all time greatest joys is fighting Vivec as a werewolf. Oblivion sorely needed a werewolf mode. Unlike my last Skyrim run, I'm not going to try and glitch into being both in Morrowind.
I am curbing the wanderlust a bit, partly because I'm not exploiting and want more of the story, but also because I'm surprised how much I've forgotten and how fresh it feels again. This is a game that had scads of replay value even when I had it practically memorized, but now I have to set aside all assumptions because I erroneously ended up in Vivec, not Balmora, when I used Almsivi Intervention, and the map is truly unhelpful when so little is filled in.

It's a really old game, and looks it, but man, am I having fun.