An opinion you're probably all alone with?

[Gnoman]

I also greatly appreciate the Quest For Glory series. It would be even more epic win if the games were not infected with Ken William's "If someone completes your game, you as a game designer have lost"
philosophy. Thankfully its not QUITE as bad as some of Sierra's other work. (**** Police Quest 3 which I played not that long ago, and its EXTREMELY easily missable courthouse segment that softlocks you during the later game when missed.)

I was really happy to find Quest for Infamy. And to find out they finally revealed how to access the secret boss battle.

That wasn't really a philosophy. The deaths were in there to pad out the game (and, often, because the designers thought they were hilarious), but most of the worst offenders were accidental - the games didn't get playtested enough (often, especially early on, not playtested at all) and when they were tested it was often by Sierra staff. Who were either the designers themselves, had talked about the game with the designers, or at least knew the designers quite well personally and knew how their twisty little minds worked. So there were a lot of puzzles that made perfect sense to the designer, and the other testers were able to follow the same path. This is one reason that the absolute worst offenders are Kings Quest games. Those were Roberta Williams's territory, and what she used for logic was an almost Osaka level of "not like you". There were also technical issues that slipped by due to testing practices that seemed perfectly reasonable. The worst offender is in Leisure Suit Larry 2.

Spoiler

Show

Near the end of the game, you have to make a Molotov Cocktail out of an airsick bag, a bottle of hair tonic, and some matches. Except the parser can't understand you unless you get the exact phrasing - just typing "put bag bottle" ( a fairly standard way to do things) will generate a "No idea what you mean" error.

Because right before the game shipped, a programmer solved a stubborn bug. Al Lowe added the bugfix to the game, played through it to completion, and certified it ready to go. And then they started getting huge "how do I solve the final puzzle" responses.

You see, the programmer realized he could solve his bug if he redefined the word "bag" as a verb, as in "bag groceries", instead of a noun. So when you type something like "put bag bottle" the game reads it as a verb verb noun sentence that makes no sense. This did not show up in Lowe's test because he tested everything with complete sentences on the principle that this would give the parser the most trouble. So he typed "Put the bag in the bottle" or similar, followed by "light the bag with the matches". This worked because Sierra's parser was smart enough to identify the word "the" and determine that the word after it was a noun no matter what the internal wordlist said.

[/spoiler]

Spoiler: Puzzle solution

Show

'Behind part of the boat' is correct. To be precise, it's in the prow of the boat on the right, and does not have a visual representation on the screen at all. You are intended to use the game's 'look'/inspect type commands, which IIRC if you trigger the correct response will alert you to 'something shining on the ground' or similar. Then you have to go to the correct specific part of the screen and 'look ground' in order to actually collect the item.

Oh, it's way worse than that. You see, you're leaving out a couple of really important steps.

Spoiler

Show

To get to the island at all, you have to get swallowed by a whale. This requires you to swim until you find a screen the whale is on, then sit there for several minutes until it gets around to eating you. The only thing you find in the whale is a Space Quest ad, but if you manage to clime the whale's tongue (very difficult, because it is an invisible maze), and tickle the whale's uvula with a feather it vomits you out. Oh, you did happen to find the feather first, didn't you - if you didn't there's no way out of the whale and it is a dead end. But if you do work this out, it vomits you on the island in question. So you manage to escape the whale and find the critical bridle. Now you have to get off the island that is too far out to swim back. Oh, you just drop the dead fish you're carrying and a bird on the island helpfully carries you back. You did get the fish, which requires you to fish multiple times until it randomly works instead of failing, right? No? Oh, sorry. Dead end for you! And once you leave the island, there's no way back. Fail to get the bridle? Dead end! And if you take too long in the game and the sun sets, the whale will never appear. Guess what? Dead end!

Have you tried Hero U? I heard it was a modern successor to Quest For Glory, and even had some of the original creators, but haven't gotten around to trying it out.

Not "some of the original creators". It's made by Corey and Lori Cole, who are the ones who came up with Hero Quest in the first place!

[WritersBlock]

I was speaking just of the softlocks. For me seeking out the different, hilarious ways your character can die in point and clicks you can die in is just part of the game.

Spoiler: spoiler

Show

To better explain the police quest 3 softlock, Near the endgame you come to this locked house you to get a search warrant for so a swat team can get you inside, to do that you need to have the courthouse unlocked. To unlock said courthouse, you have to make a traffic stop several days earlier (I think day 1 or 2) and you must write a ticket, because the driver will contest the ticket in court. It does not matter if the case if thrown out or if the ticket stands, what matters is you get the ticket contested and go to the court hearing so the courthouse is unlocked from that moment on.

If you do not do this if you try to go there when you need the warrant and backup, the game will give you the "You have no reason to stop here" message. And here is where it gets REALLY bad, there is a very good chance this driver you have to stop will not show up. Well, at least he didn't when I played. It could very possibly be a "right place on the driving map at the right time situation. I would say it is tied with that king's quest 4 island sequence as one of the worst "zombie state's" in an adventure game.

[Aeson]

Sounds like Morrowind without all the things that made it good and unique. Hope there's a way to turn that nonsense off so I can just play Morrowind but with a decent UI.

Morrowind's UI is far and away superior to Oblivion's console port nonsense.

[GloatingSwine]

It's not that I dislike the genres these games are in. I'm not over the moon for Diablo clones, but RTS and class based shooters are totally my jam. I can't think of an RTS I want to play less than Starcraft. Not because it has some design feature or other I hate, but that it has no features I can invest in enough to hate; all the fun has been sucked out by the balance-vampire.

This seems like an odd take unless you're exclusively talking about ladder, because campaign and co-op (the bits of Starcraft 2 people actually play, less than 20% play ladder) it's not balanced at all. Campaign has all sorts of overpowered unbalanced nonsense in and co-op pushes that even further.

[Bohandas]

Sim City Societies was a good game, despite its dissimilarity to the main Sim City series

[Velaryon]

I've got one I bet no one else will agree with:

Pokemon games would be better if they dispensed with IV's and EV's entirely, and made every copy of the same Pokemon statistically identical. Making it so that 99% of a particular Pokemon are useless for anything beyond casual play and you have to engage with a long, dull breeding minigame in order to be able to compete vs. other players sucks all the fun right out for me.

No Man's Sky was okay. Not great, not terrible, just another game.

I think people were right to be pissed at the game as it existed at launch. They promised a ton of features that were not in the game. All of that and more has been added so the game is a lot better now, but it's also the second glitchiest game I have ever played (the first being the PC version of Final Fantasy 7, which was literally unplayable because it crashed so frequently it was impossible for me to progress past the beginning of disc 2).

Blizzard games are too-polished soulless husks that make me feel empty inside. Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Diablo 3 (particularly Diablo3), Overwatch, they all evince the same curious sensation of hollowness in me.

It's not that I dislike the genres these games are in. I'm not over the moon for Diablo clones, but RTS and class based shooters are totally my jam. I can't think of an RTS I want to play less than Starcraft. Not because it has some design feature or other I hate, but that it has no features I can invest in enough to hate; all the fun has been sucked out by the balance-vampire. Same with Overwatch, I'd rather mess around with installing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from disk and hunting down the patches to run around as an anonymous dehumanized alien robot corpse in a bot match than play Tracer for 30 seconds. At least the alien robot corpse can do weird fun things.

I can't speak for the other games, but in the case of Overwatch it doesn't help that the people in charge of balancing have no idea what they're doing. It's been about a year since I last played, but at that time the balancing was worse than when the game launched. I blame it on a combination of using the wrong metrics for judging balance and catering way too much to elite players at the expense of the average player's experience. Since I've seen no signs that their philosophy has changed, I'm not even interested in checking out OW2.

[Lord Raziere]

I've got one I bet no one else will agree with:

Pokemon games would be better if they dispensed with IV's and EV's entirely, and made every copy of the same Pokemon statistically identical. Making it so that 99% of a particular Pokemon are useless for anything beyond casual play and you have to engage with a long, dull breeding minigame in order to be able to compete vs. other players sucks all the fun right out for me.

No, I find this completely sane. heck, competitive players find this completely sane, as the strat for competitive players is/was to cheat their team into their stats rather than waste their time, at least at one point. like I watched a youtube video where a guy tried to do the whole process of making a competitive pokemon team and it took like, a ridiculous amount of hours compared of just cheating them up. oh and many unofficial tournaments are done on pokemon showdown because it just allows you set your stats to optimal without needing any hassle at all.

[warty goblin]

This seems like an odd take unless you're exclusively talking about ladder, because campaign and co-op (the bits of Starcraft 2 people actually play, less than 20% play ladder) it's not balanced at all. Campaign has all sorts of overpowered unbalanced nonsense in and co-op pushes that even further.

I haven't played Starcraft 2. I found 1 extremely boring, and 2's art style virulently ugly. None of the charm of the original game's sprites (which weren't the most characterful either) just chunky and unpleasant.

I can't speak for the other games, but in the case of Overwatch it doesn't help that the people in charge of balancing have no idea what they're doing. It's been about a year since I last played, but at that time the balancing was worse than when the game launched. I blame it on a combination of using the wrong metrics for judging balance and catering way too much to elite players at the expense of the average player's experience. Since I've seen no signs that their philosophy has changed, I'm not even interested in checking out OW2.

I never played enough of Overwatch at launch to get much of a sense of balance. It was just utterly dull to actually play; boring maps, genuinely bottom tier objective design, and the characters felt gimmicky and claustrophobic. It didn't help that 2016 was a banner year for shooters, and Titanfall 2 pretty much just ate Overwatch's lunch as far as I could tell. Better maps, better guns, better giant robots, vastly better movement, and better pretty much everything.

[NichG]

I think people were right to be pissed at the game as it existed at launch. They promised a ton of features that were not in the game. All of that and more has been added so the game is a lot better now, but it's also the second glitchiest game I have ever played (the first being the PC version of Final Fantasy 7, which was literally unplayable because it crashed so frequently it was impossible for me to progress past the beginning of disc 2).

I mean given the thread I suspected my opinion wouldn't be shared much or I wouldn't have posted it. But basically, what was promised in promotions around the game isn't the game, and it doesn't impact the actual quality of the game. I never cared about the hype surrounding the game or got fixated on particular must-have features or whatever, so it was just a game. There are far worse games out there, and I don't think it makes sense to hold the mental image people had of what the game could have been as the baseline to experience the game itself with if you have a choice in the matter.

The glitchiest game I ever played? Hm... Lufia 2 had entire areas that rendered as glitched tilemaps, and were essential to get through for progress. The Realms of Arkania remake was really really glitchy, with lots of character skills and abilities just not actually doing anything. When XCOM-2 (the new ones, not Terror From the Deep) came out it had some sort of low level graphical glitch that made it run at like 2fps on my machine, which easily met the listed specs. Re:Legend was pretty buggy when I tried it. Not to mention old stuff I barely remember back from DOS days, where you'd be fighting with config files and boot sequences to get the game to not pitch a fit about your sound card. So NMS probably isn't even in my top 20 glitchiest games...

Similarly, as far as games that are just bad, I'd much rather play NMS than certain walking simulator 'puzzle' games, games that manage to disrespect my time an order of magnitude worse than NMS, etc. There are a bunch of games I've managed to play 10 or 20 minutes of and never wanted to go back to.

So the depths of bad is deep enough that I can't really summon up any upset at NMS beyond maybe a bit of 'meh'. If I'm not willing to go on a crusade against something like Uagi-Saba or Staxel, it seems silly to get my blood up about NMS just because of a hype campaign. I mean, heck, I wanted to love Pyre, but when it comes down to it I'd rather play release-state NMS than Pyre.

The vitriol around NMS just seems like love disguised as hate, rather than an actual dispassionate evaluation of the game.

[factotum]

The glitchiest game I ever played?

You'd have to go a long way to beat Battlecruiser 3000AD for glitches. As an example, I'm pretty sure the game was set up so you'd get attacked by a certain number of ships every in-game hour, and that timer didn't pause when you were docked at a station--so you'd get your ship a bit beat up, take it into a station for repairs, then get absolutely mobbed by enemies when you launched afterward, completely wiping away the benefits of the repairs you just had done. Crying shame because you could feel the potential when playing the game.

[veti]

No, I find this completely sane. heck, competitive players find this completely sane, as the strat for competitive players is/was to cheat their team into their stats rather than waste their time

Which suggests that these features are already optional for serious competitive players. Meanwhile, for us more casual types, they add a bit of flavour to a game format that, let's face it, can do with a bit of help on the variability front.

Two players may emerge from the game with diametrically opposed views on the relative strengths of some pokemon, just because of the personalities they happened to encounter. That's not a bad thing. It helps to make it very unlikely that two players will face the Elite Four with identical teams, which I'm pretty sure would happen all the time if these variables were ironed out.

[Rynjin]

Which suggests that these features are already optional for serious competitive players. Meanwhile, for us more casual types, they add a bit of flavour to a game format that, let's face it, can do with a bit of help on the variability front.

Two players may emerge from the game with diametrically opposed views on the relative strengths of some pokemon, just because of the personalities they happened to encounter. That's not a bad thing. It helps to make it very unlikely that two players will face the Elite Four with identical teams, which I'm pretty sure would happen all the time if these variables were ironed out.

Not really. Bad Pokemon with great IVs are still bad, only slightly less so. Their base stats are still going to be the biggest factor, and your EVs will almost be universally trashed over the course of a normal playthrough.

They don't add any real variety to a casual playthrough, and by design of there being "one true build" for most Pokemans, don't add any variety to competitive either.

The only difference will be that a casual player is more likely to have a Pokemon that's 10% more or less ****ty than its baseline, which isn't going to sway them on whether to use it or not.

[Tevo77777]

GRAND THEFT AUTO V being the most overrated and actually the worst (next to GTA IV) title within the whole franchise, basically more or less useless gameplay-wise while focusing way too much on "great´n funny" characters and its story.

I also stopped playing it at that "Submarine-Mission" where i had to travel for miles (...again!) until anything more interesting could have happened, other than just driving for miles, so in fact that game focusing on "driving for miles from A to B" without actually doing anything else than "just driving" while looking at the scenery in my opinion, and GTA V does making me do this way more often than i remember in any other games of the franchise.

That same problem was already happening with GTA IV but at least they got me that kewl´n fancy "character-switching" with 3 different characters, which at least blew some slightly new wind into the franchise, but still...compared to GTA SAN ANDREAS it was rather a let-down with the franchise rather moving backwards.

I could as well just step into my own car, driving for miles looking at the scenery, that would also be more exciting since a crash would actually cause more trouble than in GTA V.

Now some claim the same with RED DEAD REDEMPTION II, but as even i am surprised by myself...i was enjoying that title way more than that rather "mess" of a "GTA V".

San Andresis is way better. There is nothing to do in V, nothing to buy, no one to rob.

Most of the experience is in the cash-grab online version.

C&C Renegade was brilliant multiplayer, was a decade ahead of the game for hero shooters, and comparing the amount of customization and modding possible to modern platforms makes me weep with rage.

Basically everyone who knows what C&C Renegade is, agrees with you.

Speaking of which, the Red Alert version was a lot of fun..... Tempted to download that again.

[Lord Raziere]

Which suggests that these features are already optional for serious competitive players.

Yeah...."Optional".....thats certainly a word for avoiding 49-60 hours of grinding, RNG manipulation, buying vitamins, battling, and so on. or 101 years of soft resetting just to get the necessary Groudon.

[NichG]

You'd have to go a long way to beat Battlecruiser 3000AD for glitches. As an example, I'm pretty sure the game was set up so you'd get attacked by a certain number of ships every in-game hour, and that timer didn't pause when you were docked at a station--so you'd get your ship a bit beat up, take it into a station for repairs, then get absolutely mobbed by enemies when you launched afterward, completely wiping away the benefits of the repairs you just had done. Crying shame because you could feel the potential when playing the game.

Never played it, but that does sound difficult to beat. Maybe some incomplete Angband variants? Hm...

[Rockphed]

Pokemon was a bad game and we should all feel bad for having ever given it the time of day. I speak truth because I care.

I really don't have that much else to add to this conversation; the last game I paid for was Crusader Kings 2. I don't have that much free time to play games these days, so I am unlikely to form any new opinions. Such is life.

[Ignimortis]

Morrowind's UI is far and away superior to Oblivion's console port nonsense.

Ayup. The only thing Oblivion's interface is good at is being large enough so that you can see things on your TV screen three meters away. Morrowind is far better for PC players, with every element being visible at once and interactions never taking more than three clicks (usually two).

Is Morrowind "bad design" or "20 year old design"? There are a number of games that I love that I can't bring myself to play, or find incredibly frustrating, because of old game UI quirks. Quest for Glory? Man, I wish I had WASD control there. Dark Sun? I'd love an update even to the Infinity Engine. Pool of Radiance? Just a decent save system would make it WAY more fun for me. Leave everything else, even limit me to 8 saves, but let me name them so I can tell where I am.

I don't think Morrowind has a genuinely bad control scheme or game design... it's just OLD, and some of the conventions we take for granted today weren't in use.

Morrowind is perfectly fine, and I say this as someone who played Oblivion first and only got into Morrowind in 2008 or 2009. It is a shame that Bethesda explicitly deleted every part of Morrowind that could prove unwieldy or somewhat restrictive in their next games - without refining the game design to suit the changes. Oblivion's combat system is quite literally low-level Morrowind with TTK equal to low-level Morrowind, but with a 100% hit chance. Skyrim is a bit better about it, but it's still running on Morrowind's bones without any of its' subtleties, and it shows.

Here's a somewhat tepid take: the closest thing to Morrowind on a Bethesda engine would be New Vegas, despite not being made by Bethesda. The same kind of almost-unlevelled world with clearly denoted danger areas, rare loot having value at any level, faction warfare that makes it impossible to be at the helm of everything, and even the clunky-but-not-annoying mechanics.

I can go play Morrowind right now and I won't be having the same trouble I'd have with the original Baldur's Gate or Gothic. It's pretty intuitive as soon as you understand the general ideas of "you're only good at things your character is good at" and "being tired makes you bad at everything".

Final Fantasy VIII is the best Final Fantasy I've played. Perhaps it helped me become invested in the story that I first played it as an angsty 13-year-old, and therefore quite sympathised with Squall. I also loved the Junction system despite its clunkiness, and I think VIII hit the complete epitome of ridiculously over-the-top combat animations. Whether it's Squall making the blade of his sword clear the stratosphere, Zell running around the entire planet to wind-up his punch, Quistis throwing planets at people, or Selphie murdering enemies by literally throwing an end credits sequence at them. Amazing.

I wouldn't go as far as "the best FF I've ever played", because XIV exists, but VIII is certainly up there on my list. I certainly appreciated it more than VII or X. Then again, I was also an angsty (or at least trying real hard to put on such an affectation) 14-year-old who was starting to wonder about love and stuff.

[Vinyadan]

For me, it's pretty easy to say what steps Oblivion took that were a welcome change from Morrowind, because that's how I ended up modding my Morrowind installation:

No silly misses, fatigue regeneration while running, immediate casting without having to assume a spellcasting stance, magicka regeneration without resting, only showing items you can sell while trading.

These weren't always well-implemented. Oblivion enemies were bullet sponges, and magicka recharged too fast and the pool was too small (which meant that combat turned into just holding block until you could cast again).

Outside my mod list, in Oblivion you will be notified without being arrested if you try to use an owned bed, and NPCs can travel through cells. And AI packages made the cities feel alive, but also made being a thief more interesting.

On the less mechanic side, I think that the voiced dialogues could have had a huge impact, if the writing had been better. No surprise that the more charismatic lines are well remembered (Uriel's and the guards). Unfortunately, many of the guild NPCs didn't have much character (compare Traven to Trebonius). New Vegas did a much better job.

Other changes have both advantages and disadvantages (for example, simplified magic items and body slot systems).

[GloatingSwine]

The chance-to-hit going away was probably the best mechanical change between Morrowind and Oblivion.

Pick either player skill *or* character statistics to determine whether a thing happens.

[Ignimortis]

For me, it's pretty easy to say what steps Oblivion took that were a welcome change from Morrowind, because that's how I ended up modding my Morrowind installation:

No silly misses, fatigue regeneration while running, immediate casting without having to assume a spellcasting stance, magicka regeneration without resting, only showing items you can sell while trading.

Misses were necessary for the combat system to work. Without them, both Oblivion and Skyrim suffer a lot from damage-sponge enemies that can quite possibly take 10+ hits to kill. I would agree that it were an improvement if the combat system was actually redesigned to account for it (it wasn't).

As it is, Morrowind's system is seemingly clunky at first - but it also reflects your character's mastery of their weapon in a way newer Bethesda games just don't. A skill 100, AGI 100 character basically never misses, and the damage of good weapons+high STR is high enough to kill even the hardest enemies in maybe three-four swings. In Oblivion, killing a run-of-the-mill Xivilai could take literally 30+ whacks at max skill and max STR. Some of the higher-level enemies in Skyrim also suffer from this unless you temper your weapon (thus forcing your blademaster to also be a great smith basically by default).

Fatigue and immediate casting - sure, I can get behind that. The latter is in my modlist, no reason for it to be that way ever.

Magicka regen is a bit more interesting, since Morrowind spells are massively more powerful point-for-point, to the extent that Oblivion magic is strictly small-fry compared to Morrowind magic exactly because it regenerates and thus can be potentially used over and over again (and with no failure chance, either). So they scaled magic down hard in exchange for making it a bit more user-friendly. Not sure it was worth it, especially with extreme HP pools of Oblivion enemies contrasting reduced spell potency. I tend to mod in magicka regen for Morrowind, but I fully understand that it's not really something that the system expects you to have.

Outside my mod list, in Oblivion you will be notified without being arrested if you try to use an owned bed, and NPCs can travel through cells. And AI packages made the cities feel alive, but also made being a thief more interesting.

Eh. Being unable to sleep in an owned bed even if the owner is nowhere to be found (or is currently swimming in a pool of their own blood) is a bit weird. Though I also don't understand making sleeping in an owned bed a crime, ahaha.

NPCs being able to travel around cells and having basic AI packages was great. Sure, it was far from what Bethesda promised, but people walking around, doing basic tasks, talking to other people - it really does bring the game to life.

On the less mechanic side, I think that the voiced dialogues could have had a huge impact, if the writing had been better. No surprise that the more charismatic lines are well remembered (Uriel's and the guards). Unfortunately, many of the guild NPCs didn't have much character (compare Traven to Trebonius). New Vegas did a much better job.

Other changes have both advantages and disadvantages (for example, simplified magic items and body slot systems).

The writing is a massive downgrade for the most part. I think that voiced dialogue generally impacts the quality of the story downwards, unless the authors are willing to let go of the "all or nothing" mentality and have some unvoiced dialogue. The voice acting in Oblivion is also...not great. It's too hammy and sometimes almost self-aware of how unnatural it sounds. Which might explain why it fits so well with the Shivering Isles.

In general, I detest that Bethesda deals with any potential issues they find in their games by discarding the mechanics.

• Medium Armor is unpopular (because you barely made any in the original game, and the ones in the expansions are either super locked or cost thousands of septims)? Delete it.
• Spears? What spears?
• Mysticism being a weird mash of effects that don't exactly gel with other schools? Delete it along with most of its' effects.
• Unarmed combat doesn't work as well as it could (because the damage at max skill+STR is equivalent to a low-level sword)? Delete it.
• Acrobatics and Athletics allowing players to bypass certain challenges by jumping up ledges and across ravines? Drop them.

Etc, etc. And it doesn't look like they're gonna ever stop, because Fallout 4 is even worse (with F3 having a surprisingly decent RPG system that NV refined and that could be refined even further rather easily), and Starfield also seems to be very one-dimensional so far.

[Aeson]

NPCs can travel through cells. And AI packages made the cities feel alive, but also made being a thief more interesting.

I don't understand how being a thief can possibly be more interesting in Oblivion than in Morrowind when there's basically nothing worth stealing in the game. Useless clutter in Morrowind could still be sold for at least one gold, but it's literally worthless in Oblivion, it makes up the majority of the crap you'll find in houses, and even if it had value you likely couldn't sell it anyways due to how stolen items are handled; there's also very little level-inapporpriate equipment in Oblivion and a number of the pieces that do exist are hidden in inaccessible merchant chests or are available for anyone to claim without resorting to trespass or theft whereas robbing the right places in Morrowind offers significant monetary and practical rewards for low-level characters. Beyond that, the combination of NPC schedules and Oblivion's lockpicking mechanics essentially removed any risk of being caught, especially since NPCs aren't aware of anything that happens outside of the cell that they're in.

Personally, I regard wandering NPCs and AI packages as mostly negative. Nonessential NPCs who wander between cities have an annoying tendency to die off-screen, most shops are only open for around half of the day (usually opening and closing in lockstep with the other merchants in town), and the opportunities that NPC schedules create for theft are largely irrelevant since there's pretty much nothing worth stealing. Outside of trading and quest-related activity, there's very little reason to be in a town in-game, and NPC schedules make both of those activities more inconvenient.

[NichG]

There's a fantasy RPG heartbreaker in here somewhere combining the best of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. And every single person would pick different elements I suppose. I guess mine would be:

- From Morrowind: Unreal alien fantasy environment
- From Morrowind: None of this 'levels with the player' stuff, different areas have different fixed levels of danger, and some items are just powerful. Rely less on an upgrade cycle and more on a wider array of individually narrower powerful things to collect (like getting the Grandmaster alchemy devices, particular powerful enchants, etc)
- From Morrowind: Stats system
- From Morrowind: Most dialogue is not voiced. The reasoning here for me has to do with modding actually. The barrier to make mod content that seems like it belongs in the game is much higher for Oblivion and Skyrim than Morrowind, leading to more 'mechanical mods' or 'static location mods' in those games within the first few years of release, versus more elaborate quest mods that Morrowind saw. Of course given a decade, Skyrim has caught up on questing content. Alternately, just use a modern neural network based voice cloning text-to-speech system that allows intonation for the dialogue.
- From Morrowind: 3d maneuvering as a fundamental part of the game design - allow and anticipate things like jumping, levitation, teleportation.
- From Morrowind: Factions interact, advancement in factions is not just gated by quest progress but also by character ability, factions tend to have lots of optional handcrafted quests everywhere and a few main quest advancements, versus samey radiant quests from a central location. Makes 'exploring this city as a mage' an interesting proposition, versus 'doing the mage questline'.
- From Morrowind: Weather that matters. Skyrim should have had this!
- From Morrowind/Oblivion: Open-ended spell creation blending effects is interesting and I'm sad that Skyrim lost that. It would be good to find some compromise between spell creation and interesting one-off spell effects.

- From Oblivion/Skyrim: No gear durability/repair. I actually like Smithing as a crafting system.
- From Oblivion: Get rid of miss chances. You can work them into the damage scaling of melee vs skill in a mathematically identical way to avoid bullet sponge enemies. Or just make skilled enemies more erratic in their movements and have more timing-based ways for enemies to interrupt the player's attack animation, with player skill level factoring into recovery time and resistance to being interrupted. Skyrim shield block dynamics would be the starting point for this, but there are ways to improve further.
- From Oblivion: NPC schedules, interactions, etc. Its simple, but I'm sad that things like the poison apple - NPC eats at a certain time of day interaction was basically removed from Skyrim. Would be good to double down on this and make more things be sustained by NPC actions in the world - shops need deliveries and the couriers can be ambushed, etc. Abstract away whatever is not loaded in the player's area, but if the player intervenes propagate the effects.
- From Skyrim: Spellcasting feel, especially the lower level instant-cast channeling spells. Just feels better to play.
- From Skyrim: Stat gains on level-up should not depend on timing your skill-ups (ofc Skyrim just got rid of stats entirely, so this would be more like Morrowind/Oblivion mods that fix the stat gains at +4)
- From Skyrim: Fluidity of motion and presence of the character in the world is better than the previous games
- From Oblivion/Skyrim: The visual technology is better and it did matter. That said, the art design is oddly bimodal here with Oblivion being super-saturated and Skyrim being almost monochromatic in a lot of cases, and I'm not sure I'd want to keep strictly to either of those aesthetics...
- From Skyrim: Dungeon design should generally include short-cuts to leave once the dungeon is completed. This is repetitive when you notice the pattern, but it's so good compared to the feel of backtracking that it's worth it.
- From Skyrim: Perk selection is a nice advancement system. Though drop the 'X is 20% stronger' perks, give that kind of stuff to stat and skill advancement, and make perks all qualitative impacts on play.
- From Skyrim: Enchanting where the power of the enchant increases as you skill up versus the success chance of Morrowind is so much nicer, and makes it something you don't have to save till end-game to get involved in.
- From Morrowind (Skyrim hybrid-ish): However, being able to enchant items to cast spells is also pretty neat and I'd like to see that return in some form. Maybe as a way to reduce casting time or otherwise convert spells to instant-cast?
- From Skyrim: Very thorough coverage of random dungeons, such that each place has at least some kind of little bit of story or thing going on beyond mobs + loot crates. This was really well done, but I had to play the game through like 5 times and still find plotlines here and there to seriously appreciate it.

- Skyrim/Morrowind hybrid: Remove quest compass/markers as a default state, but do include spells like Clairvoyance, modernized versions of the Detect line of spells that work through walls, level-up perks that provide that functionality.
- Skyrim/Morrowind hybrid: Remove automatic fast-travel, but increase the number of ways that the player can self-provision fast travel: mark/recall spells, allow fast travel if on horse-back, etc. Basically make fast travel a fairly early thing that a player can invest in and earn because it feels very good to unlock.

On the fence about this:

- From Morrowind: More player-driven dialogue rather than conversation trees. I think I prefer the keyword unlock stuff to most NPCs just having a bark or a transactional conversation, but I also do like if each NPC has things unique to themselves that they will talk about. Feels like there's an opportunity for a new and better metaphor for interaction here that none of the games hit perfectly...

[Taevyr]

Yeah...."Optional".....thats certainly a word for avoiding 49-60 hours of grinding, RNG manipulation, buying vitamins, battling, and so on. or 101 years of soft resetting just to get the necessary Groudon.

It's one of the things I like the most about certain fangames: making EV's/IV's visible and changing certain items to make EV grinding a few minutes work for each pokémon at most. One of the main reasons I play fangames is for the challenge, and games such as Reborn going the length to make EV training easy so you can keep up/they can up the challenge without requiring hours of grind is great.

IV's are just a hassle though, even if visible: mostly luck of the draw through a ****-ton of breeding.



Beyond pokémon, I can't quite think of anything that hasn't been said yet, like DA2 being quite a bit better than it's generally regarded as being. The one thing I can think of is that it's a waste that ME2 decided to abandon the more lovecraftian/thriller elements that were so prevalent in ME1 (the Thorian, Rachni, the reapers still being decent eldritch horrors) to essentially make a sci-fi heist movie. The gameplay between the scenes of said heist movie is pretty damn great, but that could've just as easily been part of a more cosmic horror/mystery-oriented story.

[Ignimortis]

There's a fantasy RPG heartbreaker in here somewhere combining the best of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. And every single person would pick different elements I suppose. I guess mine would be: *snip*

I can't find a single point to argue against here. That theoretical RPG would be so good. Hire some prolific modders to do game design for you, Bethesda - Enai Siaion in particular has made several overhauls that I consider 100% essential to having a good Skyrim experience, like Ordinator, Apocalypse, Wintersun...

[veti]

For me, it's pretty easy to say what steps Oblivion took that were a welcome change from Morrowind, because that's how I ended up modding my Morrowind installation:

No silly misses, fatigue regeneration while running, immediate casting without having to assume a spellcasting stance, magicka regeneration without resting, only showing items you can sell while trading.

I would disagree with almost all of those.

No misses? Why? A novice weapon user is going to miss a lot. Even a proficient one is still going to muff it occasionally. Why not let the system reflect those things?

Fatigue regeneration while running? Look, I know walking is boring. But it's also the reason Morrowind's world and scenery is, like, 400% better than Oblivion's despite the inferior technology and graphics. In Morrowind there are so many ways to get about faster - flying, teleporting, public transport, Boots of Blinding Speed. They're all different, they're all acquired in different ways, they give you choice and flavour and a feeling of accomplishment when you've mastered them. And at the very end of the main quest, Azura's reward is essentially the ability to regenerate fatigue while running. It's a Big Freakin' Deal.

Fatigue in general is something Morrowind handled vastly better than either Oblivion or Skyrim. As someone said, it makes you bad at everything. If only it could be tied to the rest/sleep system somehow...

Immediate casting? Okay, I don't have such strong feelings about this one. But as has also been said, Morrowind's magic is just so much stronger than Oblivion's that it would be way, way overpowered if it didn't have some constraints. Heck, by mid-game (about level 12) in Morrowind I can reliably kill at least two ogrims with a single mana point.

Magicka regeneration without resting? No, no, a thousand times no! Apart from the OP magic, I love the feeling of being far from home and having to husband my resources. And while Intervention spells always give a safe escape if needed, they don't guarantee I can actually reach my goal on this trip.

Only show items you can trade? - uhh... okay. To be honest I'd forgotten that was even a thing. Sure.

Edit:

- From Morrowind: Most dialogue is not voiced. The reasoning here for me has to do with modding actually. The barrier to make mod content that seems like it belongs in the game is much higher for Oblivion and Skyrim than Morrowind, leading to more 'mechanical mods' or 'static location mods' in those games within the first few years of release, versus more elaborate quest mods that Morrowind saw. Of course given a decade, Skyrim has caught up on questing content. Alternately, just use a modern neural network based voice cloning text-to-speech system that allows intonation for the dialogue.

Yeah, I've been saying this for years. Voice acting even in the core game is not that good, and it's what lets down a lot of otherwise-promising mods. The voice-cloning technique is starting to become more widespread now, but the process to get an acceptable result is so laborious that - well, let's just say, many published mods that use it still sound like crap.

On the other hand, there are a handful of mods with really amazingly good VA - better than the core game in some cases. Which is nice. But they're definitely not the majority.

[Rynjin]

No misses? Why? A novice weapon user is going to miss a lot. Even a proficient one is still going to muff it occasionally. Why not let the system reflect those things?

Because it's stupid and tedious in a game with action combat. If I wanted random misses I'd play a turn based game. You cannot sit there an d tell me when I can clearly see the weapon hit the enemy that I missed. no, I didn't miss. the weapon turned intangible for a split second and slipped through the enemy.

One of the most bafflingly stupid game design decisions ever made.

[WritersBlock]

This is a huge problem in the first person fallout games. Even with maxed out gun skills and an accuracy mod or 2 you still have so many problems getting the bullets to go where you point and shoot. And yet enemies have perfect deadeye accuracy while running and sidestepping to where they can hit you with every single shot they take. Even strafing with the speedmult cranked to ridiculous levels does not make them miss a shot.

And for some reason they decided to shoehorn in cover based shooter enemies into fallout 4 compounding the problem even further.

[MCerberus]

One that I've been thinking over: the kind of account progression systems that were popularized by CoD4 have been a complete and utter disaster for the tone and socialness of gaming, especially since it corresponded with the rise of p2p matchmaking and the decline of dedicated servers. It actively shifted rewards away from the social category and more towards collecting. Meanwhile the anonymization of players turned online playing awful... er towards people.

I may be showing my age but even in a single console generation RS:Vegas -> halo 3 -> CoD4 -> Modern Warfare 2, the quality of communication dove right off a cliff. The dedicate server structure required to keep the progression systems from being exploited made things an administrative wasteland where you couldn't even block individual players from showing up in your teams.

and I miss the old C&C mIRC client lobbies dad gummit.
I mean we're at a state where it's so bad that one console maker deliberately made their chat system unusable while it's getting more popular to restrict ALL player interaction to canned emotes.

[InvisibleBison]

- Skyrim/Morrowind hybrid: Remove quest compass/markers as a default state, but do include spells like Clairvoyance, modernized versions of the Detect line of spells that work through walls, level-up perks that provide that functionality.
- Skyrim/Morrowind hybrid: Remove automatic fast-travel, but increase the number of ways that the player can self-provision fast travel: mark/recall spells, allow fast travel if on horse-back, etc. Basically make fast travel a fairly early thing that a player can invest in and earn because it feels very good to unlock.

I see no reason not to include fast travel and quest markers as an option. Sure, there are plenty of people who don't like them, but they can just not use them. If you take them out of the game, though, the game is made worse for the people who do want to use them.

[Lord Raziere]

I see no reason not to include fast travel and quest markers as an option. Sure, there are plenty of people who don't like them, but they can just not use them. If you take them out of the game, though, the game is made worse for the people who do want to use them.

maybe those things should be a feature you can turn on or off.....