An opinion you're probably all alone with?

[warty goblin]

I mean there's also that the problem with the idea that outright misses are absolutely essential to making the game mechanics, skill progression, etc, work. You could just as easily have a system where you basically always hit but the character skill directly scales damage. Or a system where you always hit at some (lower) base damage level, but you roll your character's skill to upgrade those base hits to varying levels of critical hit and your stats determine how much better a crit is than a base hit. Or a system where you always hit but sometimes based on an enemy's armor your strike bounces off of the armor, putting you on a longer recovery cooldown - with chances and cooldown length determined by skills and stats.
.

Age of Wonders 3 did exactly this. The prior games all had miss chances based on defense and cover, which meant there was a lot of missing, though AoW 1 at least made up for this with absurd lethality. AoW 3 just went to a straight damage roll, reduced by cover and armor. So long as you had LoS and range, you did damage. Worked quite well, and, by reducing variance, sped up the battles a good bit.

[NichG]

Where's this data from, out of curiosity? From what I've seen the Skyrim modding community is just as active as ever. Somewhere between 30 and 50 mods uploaded a day.

Is this data only taking into account LE and not SE/AE?

Its based on Nexus mods, and this does not include SE. But the daily numbers at the end of the curve (e.g. now) for LE are in the 10-20 mods per day range. When Skyrim first came out, activity was in the 100 mods per day range. For Stardew Valley it has gone up from an initial peak of 5 mods per day when it came out that quickly decayed to 1-2 a day, but its now o on the order of 15 mods per day and growing. For Oblivion, it was 10-20 a day pretty steadily until the Skyrim release date, after which it dropped down to like 3-5 a day.

I'm currently trying to gather Morrowind data, but Morrowind pre-dates the Nexus so the data is going to be really spotty in the important immediately-after-release phase. Might see if the people running Morrowind Modding History will just send me an index file of everything they've archived with dates...

[veti]

And if my attack with a greatsword goes through the unprotected neck of the enemy bandit I expect a decapitation. And yet it takes only 1% of the enemies health in Oblivion. Is that better?

This exactly. I enjoyed Oblivion - bits of it, at least - but there's a reason it's the one of the three games I never play any more.

To the argument, there are always many, many points in a video game where intuition and outcome are at odds. For instance, in Fallout you can take a bullet to the kneecap, and ten seconds later be running and jumping; there is simply no medical intervention in our real world experience that would account for that, let alone one that can be self-administered in the field with a near-weightless kit. Yet no-one complains because we know it's just a game, and things work differently there. Layers of abstraction. Months of painful and uncertain healing are reduced to an instantaneous shot.

Or fast travel. Morrowind had its own public transport network, which was great - it followed rules, it was immersive. But in Oblivion (and pretty much every subsequent game) you just emerge from a dungeon and boom, four seconds later you're back in town selling loot, without even the figleaf of casting a spell.

Beside such nonsense as this, "not automatically succeeding in hitting one's target" seems to me a very small fish to swallow.

[Vinyadan]

About swing and ignored hits, STALKER had a mechanic that was worthy of an evil genius: when you shot a stalker in the torso, he would bend foward in pain to show that you had, indeed, hit him. During the animation, he couldn't shoot, which would have made him fundamentally dead... except he turned invulnerable until the animation was over, unless you shot him in the head, which was an assured kill. However, the movement made the head rock forward and it took some skill to hit it, and experience to learn how it worked, until it became something of a minigame.

STALKER also had odd things like stricly limited ranges for your weapons, as well as a fixed percentage of bullets that would inevitably miss (possibly tied to xp rank), plus IIRC two bullets too close to each other would cause one not to work. It was one of the reasons why it was so hard. Now it's commonly modded with an overreactive AI and extremely high damage per shot on both sides, but without random misses.

[Rynjin]

Beside such nonsense as this, "not automatically succeeding in hitting one's target" seems to me a very small fish to swallow.

This really isn't that complicated. It's an interfacing issue.

When you select an option from a menu (eg. fast travel) and then the function is executed as you command, you are happy. Becaus ethe game is working right.

When you connect with an attack, you expect to actually connect with an attack. Your input should produce a perceivable output.

A random miss chance system does not model this. And it's something that is FREQUENTLY criticized in all sorts of other games. In the case of Morrowind it's intentional, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating than when it's unintentional, such as in bad action combat games where you'll just whiff sometimes, or an FPS that uses truly random bullet deviation instead of a predictable spread model.

[Ignimortis]

Another good metric of "was this a good mechanic" is "how well would it fit into other games of a similar style". Can you imagine how awful Morrowind's RNG Skill based hits would be in a game like Dark Souls? Both are games that are open ended, don't hold your hand as you explore a large and fantastical world, and have piles of stats. Can you imagine if it was a case of until you improve one or two of your stats, and if your stamina is under a certain amount, you only have a 50% at best chance to actually hit the foe. How infuriating that game would be if it had Morrowind's RNG hit mechanics. And I mean beyond how frustrating and off putting Dark Souls is by default. Dark Souls already has a huge skill investment requirement, tossing in piles of RNG for if your attacks actually did damage would be a straw that would have meant the game would basically have died at launch. Or imagine Monster Hunter, but until you did 100 hunts with a weapon, you always had a chance to miss.

Morrowind is not a game of a similar style to Dark Souls. TES in general is not very similar to Dark Souls. What Morrowind fails to convey is that it's actually closer to Baldur's Gate in first person than an Action RPG. There is about the same amount of skill involved in piloting a BG character and a Morrowind character.

Something as simple as a 1 second animation of the Morrowind target leaning slightly aside would maybe have helped. A visual cue that your attack missed, with the foe reacting to your input, would have taken a lot of the sting out of the misses. Even if its as simple of they lean back for a second, and plays the miss woosh sound that's already in the game, might have helped. Everyone can understand invul frames, and having a visual "oh he did a dodge" even if the sword still flies through their body, would mean the misses aren't just "but i hit, they didn't react, what happened", but a thing you can observe and appreciate when your skills improve to the point they stop dodging. There's a mental difference between "oh they dodged" and "i missed", and by putting the blame on the foe, rather then themselves, players would be a lot more accepting of the disconnect of their sword phasing through the target with no damage. Which, funny enough, adding a tiny animation by mod, would be more true to the original game then removing hit chance. But I guess getting the nightmare of scripting when to play said animation turns off a lot of modders.

There's a sound that plays when you miss, though. It's not very distinct, because it's the same that plays if you swing at empty air, but it's certainly distinct from the sound that plays on hit.

I mean there's also that the problem with the idea that outright misses are absolutely essential to making the game mechanics, skill progression, etc, work. You could just as easily have a system where you basically always hit but the character skill directly scales damage.

And the thing is, Oblivion did exactly that. Skill affects weapon damage directly, same as Strength - it's just that the formula is shabby and assumes very bad TTK and terrible scaling instead of Morrowind's basic scaling of "at 60+ skill, you're mostly killing everyone in three to four swings". Oblivion's formula easily improves enemy HP from 50 to 500, but weapon damage at 50 STR and 40 skill (reasonable chargen values) and weapon damage at 100 STR and 100 skill does not increase tenfold, even if you switched from an iron sword to a daedric claymore in the process. In fact, here's the damage formula:

Damage = BaseWeaponDamage * 0.5 * ( 0.75 + Strength * 0.005 ) * ( 0.2 + BladeSkill * 0.015 )

Base damage of an Iron Longsword is 10. Base damage of a Daedric Claymore is 26. At 50 STR, 40 skill, Iron Longsword does 10 x 0.5 x 1 x 0.8 = 4 damage. At 100 STR, 100 skill it does 10.625 damage - around 2.5 times as much. Daedric Claymore does 2.5 times as much again, around 27.5.
Enemy scaling, however, is not correspondent with this. At level 1, which is when you'll have 50 STR, 40 skill, you'll face Stunted Scamps. Those have a fixed 40 HP, so you kill them in 10 hits (already ridiculous, frankly, no starting common enemy should take that much). Fully upgrading would mean you kill them in 2 hits, which is, supposedly, good growth (5 times quicker!).

But you never see Stunted Scamps ever again after level 7. Instead, by the time you have 100 STR, 100 skill and a Daedric Claymore - maybe level 25 - you will only encounter Xivilai (12 HP * your level, unbound, so 300 at this point), higher-rank Dremoras (170+ HP with enough armor to double EHP), Daedroths (fixed 280 HP plus 20% DR), Storm Atronachs (fixed 350 HP), and maybe a Spider Daedra (fixed 300 HP, can heal self for 40 whenever). So you never actually face anyone you can kill in less than 10-12 hits again. And if you have fallen behind of your expected progression, your TTK only increases further. This saps any and all sense of progression, because at the end of the day, you're not actually better at fighting. You would be, if the world didn't insist that you need a constant "challenge" that chases you as you level. Like Morrowind does. You do not need 100 STR or a Daedric Claymore to utterly destroy 95% of enemies in Morrowind in three to four swings. Any mid-level weapon and 70+ skill will do, even if your STR is still 50.

Skyrim is slightly better about this than Oblivion, but it still drops 1k HP Draugr Deathlords and Scourges and 500+ HP armored Bandit Marauders like candy at higher levels, when your weapon does maybe 80 damage unless tempered heavily).

Funnily enough, New Vegas got this exactly right again. There are no enemies in the game that take long to kill with an Anti-Materiel Rifle, but the game is not balanced around you ever getting one. It's perfectly beatable with a .44 Magnum, which you can get in Novac maybe three hours into the game, or That Gun, obtainable at the same point, same time, or a .308 Hunting Rifle, which is just there for the taking in Boulder City. You aren't even to Vegas yet and you can have weapons you'll finish the game with if you like them, because most enemies are not bullet sponges and will die from a couple headshots with a .44. It's amazing and I wish more RPGs did things like this instead of Diablo-style loot that self-obsoletes in five levels or TES/Bethesda Fallout scaling which invalidates most weapons by midgame.

[Taevyr]

Funnily enough, New Vegas got this exactly right again. There are no enemies in the game that take long to kill with an Anti-Materiel Rifle, but the game is not balanced around you ever getting one. It's perfectly beatable with a .44 Magnum, which you can get in Novac maybe three hours into the game, or That Gun, obtainable at the same point, same time, or a .308 Hunting Rifle, which is just there for the taking in Boulder City. You aren't even to Vegas yet and you can have weapons you'll finish the game with if you like them. It's amazing and I wish more RPGs did things like this instead of Diablo-style loot that self-obsoletes in five levels or TES/Bethesda Fallout scaling which invalidates most weapons by midgame.

Obsidian (or more precisely, Josh Sawyer) is known for focusing very hard on game balance that allows for such things, to the point where Pillars of Eternity's system was deliberately designed to avoid any "trap" options that players could fall into while still allowing some great synergies. Don't know if Outer Worlds followed the same philosophy, but I'd be surprised if it didn't.

[Rynjin]

Outer Worlds actually does have a bit of an issue with "incremental loot". There's like a couple dozen total weapon types (if that) and a few different qualities of each with incrementally increasing stats.

Nothing super egregious but noticeably different than eg. New Vegas, where there is at most a Unique version of a weapon type that might be a bit better.

[NichG]

And the thing is, Oblivion did exactly that. Skill affects weapon damage directly, same as Strength - it's just that the formula is shabby and assumes very bad TTK and terrible scaling instead of Morrowind's basic scaling of "at 60+ skill, you're mostly killing everyone in three to four swings". Oblivion's formula easily improves enemy HP from 50 to 500, but weapon damage at 50 STR and 40 skill (reasonable chargen values) and weapon damage at 100 STR and 100 skill does not increase tenfold, even if you switched from an iron sword to a daedric claymore in the process. In fact, here's the damage formula:

Base damage of an Iron Longsword is 10. Base damage of a Daedric Claymore is 26. At 50 STR, 40 skill, Iron Longsword does 10 x 0.5 x 1 x 0.8 = 4 damage. At 100 STR, 100 skill it does 10.625 damage - around 2.5 times as much. Daedric Claymore does 2.5 times as much again, around 27.5.
Enemy scaling, however, is not correspondent with this. At level 1, which is when you'll have 50 STR, 40 skill, you'll face Stunted Scamps. Those have a fixed 40 HP, so you kill them in 10 hits (already ridiculous, frankly, no starting common enemy should take that much). Fully upgrading would mean you kill them in 2 hits, which is, supposedly, good growth (5 times quicker!).

But you never see Stunted Scamps ever again after level 7. Instead, by the time you have 100 STR, 100 skill and a Daedric Claymore - maybe level 25 - you will only encounter Xivilai (12 HP * your level, unbound, so 300 at this point), higher-rank Dremoras (170+ HP with enough armor to double EHP), Daedroths (fixed 280 HP plus 20% DR), Storm Atronachs (fixed 350 HP), and maybe a Spider Daedra (fixed 300 HP, can heal self for 40 whenever). So you never actually face anyone you can kill in less than 10-12 hits again. And if you have fallen behind of your expected progression, your TTK only increases further. This saps any and all sense of progression, because at the end of the day, you're not actually better at fighting. You would be, if the world didn't insist that you need a constant "challenge" that chases you as you level. Like Morrowind does. You do not need 100 STR or a Daedric Claymore to utterly destroy 95% of enemies in Morrowind in three to four swings. Any mid-level weapon and 70+ skill will do, even if your STR is still 50.

Skyrim is slightly better about this than Oblivion, but it still drops 1k HP Draugr Deathlords and Scourges and 500+ HP armored Bandit Marauders like candy at higher levels, when your weapon does maybe 80 damage unless tempered heavily).

Getting rid of enemies that scale with the character would help a lot with this, as would adjusting the end-points. The harder consideration would be what you want to have happen if someone decides to power-level their weapon skill first, versus level skills in a balanced way, vs pick up a new weapon late-game, vs ...

But if you have good answers to those questions, it shouldn't be any harder to make a system that hits those points not using misses than one that does it using misses. The harder thing to hit if you can't have misses is if you actually want things to feel swing-y, or if you want something where even if you are taking many swings to get there it feels like one hit kills most things - but I think that's a lot more relevant if you want to have sniper-style gameplay, and in that case landing the hit has a higher player-skill dependence than melee, so not sure how relevant it is... Even then, I think you could do a lot of interesting things by making cooldowns and attack animation timings much more reactive rather than mostly static.

When someone blocks your melee with a shield in Skyrim it really has a feel that 'hits' the player as well, in that it might mess up the player's attack cadence and things like that. An event which causes attack cooldown to double for one strike is basically mathematically the same as a miss. And if you can do something in that off-balance moment, its potentially interestingly engaging too... So you could basically have something where armor does far less damage reduction and has a much bigger effect on cooldown, meaning that surprise attacks can still be really chunky and take off a lot of hitpoints so blows feel powerful, but if you don't have the skill to back it up you're going to be on your back foot and exposed to enemy attacks for longer.

[Anteros]

I think the thing that's being missed in this example is that in actiony games like Morrowind, getting close enough to do the click while avoiding getting hurt back is part of the challenge. Successfully doing that, and then failing despite it clearly showing otherwise, is bull****. In XCom, you ARE "just clicking", because it is a tactics rpg.

You see how these are different, right?

Gloatingswine has clearly and repeatedly asserted that the difficulty of the task is irrelevant...so no. Also, it's Morrowind. Like I said earlier. They walk up to you and stand there consuming the majority of your screen. You can't actually miss clicking on them.

Because those little known flops Skyrim and Oblivion never get mentioned anymore.

Look I'll come at this from a weird perspective, but if you look at the writing queue for a gaming website you know what you'll ALWAYS find? A Skyrim article of some kind. Along with Minecraft.

And I don't mean this like it's in there with every other game under the sun. No, these two games go into the queue as strong Evergreen material because people search for it. They search for Skyrim and Minecraft content so much that notoriously trend-chasing schlock sites will actually take the time to write articles about it. Skyrim and Minecraft articles are there next to whatever the flavor of the month is in terms of popularity.

Because people like these games, and have not forgotten about them.

You can despair over it all you want, but the choice was made 20 years ago to move the game in an action combat direction, and people liked it. And let's be clear: the combat sucks in both following games. But it still sucks a whole lot LESS than Morrowind, which suffered from having a severe identity crisis in the shift from Ultima Underworld-clone to "ground breaking open world RPG".

(I'm also not going to touch the classification of modding as "cheating" except to say: no.)

I don't think people really remember Oblivion that fondly, and Skyrim is still being released every year, so that's hardly fair. Looking at releases since Morrowind we have Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4. Quality has definitely trended downwards over time.

Modding the game to make it easier such as making it impossible to miss an enemy when misses are a build in part of the difficulty is obviously and explicitly cheating. The idea that it's not a cheat just because it's a mod and not a code you type in is absurd.

Because those are indirect interactions.

There's a layer of abstraction between the input and the action which breaks the expectation of outcome.

And this isn't just me saying this, this is how human brains work. It's part of how our brains have adapted as tool users. Go and ask someone to describe the process of how they drove to work today, and either none or almost none of what they tell you will be the physical steps of operating the car. Because the tool-adaptation of the human brain removes those layers of action if there is a direct link between input and outcome.

There's a layer of abstraction present in Morrowind as well. You not applying it is a personal thing. I'm perfectly capable of doing so, as are others.

Leaving aside the philosophical debate of whether or not it's even possible to cheat in a singleplayer game, I'd love to hear why you consider my mod that removes Fallout: New Vegas's pervasive stutter and crash-to-desktops a cheat.

It's a good thing I never said that then. Comparing a mod that increases game stability to one that fundamentally changes the difficulty to make it easier is silly.

[JNAProductions]

Is setting the difficulty to easy cheating?

[Rynjin]

I don't think people really remember Oblivion that fondly

I think we exist in very different circles of the internet the

and Skyrim is still being released every year, so that's hardly fair.

Ha.

Looking at releases since Morrowind we have Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4. Quality has definitely trended downwards over time.

Three great games and one okay one does not a downward trend make.

Modding the game to make it easier such as making it impossible to miss an enemy when misses are a build in part of the difficulty is obviously and explicitly cheating. The idea that it's not a cheat just because it's a mod and not a code you type in is absurd.

It's not a cheat, it's a game mechanic change. And is at most a shortcut. It can be circumvented by just base grinding, because you eventually hit 100% accuracy anyway.

Downloading the mod is a faster and much less tedious way around grinding the skill to 100 before you're allowed to actually play the game.

It's the same reason I feel zero guilt over mashing the console to max Smithing and Enchanting in Skyrim. Maxing neitehr skill is hard, it's just time consuming. Why the **** would I bother spending an hour or more of my precious time spam-crafting Iron Daggers when I could do it in a few seconds instead?

[Aeson]

The harder consideration would be what you want to have happen if someone decides to power-level their weapon skill first, versus level skills in a balanced way, vs pick up a new weapon late-game, vs ...

What do you mean by leveling skills in a 'balanced way?' Even if every skill you use is a class skill in the TES games where that's a thing, the overwhelming majority of your low-(character-)level skill advancements probably come from maybe three or four of your ten (Morrowind), seven (Oblivion), or eighteen (Skyrim) character-leveling skills, because an offensive skill (weapon of choice or magic), one or two defensive skills (armor of choice or magic, maybe block), and perhaps a combat utility skill (probably magic) are about as much as you're likely to use in a fight and out-of-combat utility skills tend not to see very significant use in the 'normal' fighting-enemies-while-dungeon-delving gameplay loop.

[Anteros]

Is setting the difficulty to easy cheating?

Of course not. It's designed that way by the devs as the intended experience.

Modding an easy mode into a game that didn't have one would be cheating though.

It's not a cheat, it's a game mechanic change. And is at most a shortcut. It can be circumvented by just base grinding, because you eventually hit 100% accuracy anyway.

Downloading the mod is a faster and much less tedious way around grinding the skill to 100 before you're allowed to actually play the game.

It's the same reason I feel zero guilt over mashing the console to max Smithing and Enchanting in Skyrim. Maxing neitehr skill is hard, it's just time consuming. Why the **** would I bother spending an hour or more of my precious time spam-crafting Iron Daggers when I could do it in a few seconds instead?

That's....complete nonsense. Of course it's a cheat. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. It's a single player game. I'm not above cheating away tedium myself. I do it all the time. Some games are greatly improved by cheating, and as long as you're not ruining someone else's experience there's nothing wrong with it.

It's still a cheat though. By that logic why not just use Chim and enter the literal "cheat code" to set your skill to 100 and achieve the exact same result?

[factotum]

I think I agree with you. Although I'm still not a fan of the Morrowind/Oblivion style of character leveling (where you mostly have to pump skills you really DON'T care about to max your stat points so you can actually succeed at the things you care about without hitting super-scaling bandits)

Super-scaling bandits was strictly an Oblivion problem, because they didn't put any limits on how high the enemies would scale with you. In Morrowind, dungeons generally had a level range associated with them, so if you went in to the dungeon when you were below its minimum level you'd have a hard time of it, whereas if you were above its maximum it would be a cakewalk--in between those extremes the enemies would attempt to match your level. So it was always possible to find challenges or else find places where you could feel like a superhero as you mowed down enemies with abandon. That, to me, was the sweet spot, but obviously it required more work on behalf of the dungeon designer and we couldn't have that, could we?

[NichG]

What do you mean by leveling skills in a 'balanced way?' Even if every skill you use is a class skill in the TES games where that's a thing, the overwhelming majority of your low-(character-)level skill advancements probably come from maybe three or four of your ten (Morrowind), seven (Oblivion), or eighteen (Skyrim) character-leveling skills, because an offensive skill (weapon of choice or magic), one or two defensive skills (armor of choice or magic, maybe block), and perhaps a combat utility skill (probably magic) are about as much as you're likely to use in a fight and out-of-combat utility skills tend not to see very significant use in the 'normal' fighting-enemies-while-dungeon-delving gameplay loop.

For example in Skyrim someone who grinds Smithing, Alchemy, Enchanting to 100 before doing much casting or combat can get 20 levels off of that stuff. A different player could be getting most of their advancement from weapon+armor. A different player could use magic for the first half of the game, find that it starts to struggle to keep up, and switch to One-handed quite late. Another player could mix and match, leveling a couple magics, using a bow for some fights and switching to melee for others, sneaking everywhere, doing a bit of crafting, etc.

Combine with a parallel stat system that goes with level, along with gear upgrades, and there are a number of different situations that could occur.

As a matter of design you should at least know what you're going for in those different cases. Do you want character skill level to matter so much that switching your weapon late-game is untenable? Do you want it to matter enough to feel it, but not so much that it would be unplayable? Where do you want a starting character specd into weapons to be compared to one who isn't?

[Rynjin]

That's....complete nonsense. Of course it's a cheat. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. It's a single player game. I'm not above cheating away tedium myself. I do it all the time. Some games are greatly improved by cheating, and as long as you're not ruining someone else's experience there's nothing wrong with it.

It's still a cheat though. By that logic why not just use Chim and enter the literal "cheat code" to set your skill to 100 and achieve the exact same result?

I probably would, honestly, but having a .bat to do it for you is some added convenience.

Regardless, I don't consider it a cheat precisely because it's something you can achieve in-game anyway with no particular skill or challenge involved. It's just a time saver.

In a game where you could nit achieve a 100% hit rate by normal means, I'd agree with you.

Pegging down examples of cheats for Morrowind is difficult because you can make an absolutely cracked character anyway.

Regardless I agree eith you that cheating is fine in a single player game anyway, I just have a different conception of what makes a cheat a cheat.

[Vinyadan]

It's the same reason I feel zero guilt over mashing the console to max Smithing and Enchanting in Skyrim. Maxing neitehr skill is hard, it's just time consuming. Why the **** would I bother spending an hour or more of my precious time spam-crafting Iron Daggers when I could do it in a few seconds instead?

I think skills like smithing shouldn't be increased by training. Instead, there should be a tree whose perks become available as you reach a certain level.

That's....complete nonsense. Of course it's a cheat. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. It's a single player game. I'm not above cheating away tedium myself. I do it all the time. Some games are greatly improved by cheating, and as long as you're not ruining someone else's experience there's nothing wrong with it.

Reminder that both player and actors (creatures and NPCs) miss, and deactivating that feature makes both groups more effective at attacking and worse at defending (unless you use a mod that doesn't just remove missing and also adds other mechanics to still give your skills their due relevance, which still would work for PC and NPCs). Other things can be cheats, sure. Robinhood. Greedisgood.

[Ortho]

Modding the game to make it easier such as making it impossible to miss an enemy when misses are a build in part of the difficulty is obviously and explicitly cheating. The idea that it's not a cheat just because it's a mod and not a code you type in is absurd.

Do you know, the exact mod you describe was the only thing that actually made me play Morrowind for more than a few minutes.

As it turns out, a low-level character in Morrowind has great difficulty achieving anything because of the high chance of failure. Swinging your sword and missing 90% of the time through no fault of your own is not good gameplay. And you can't easily level up either, because you need to succeed on the dice roll to gain xp!

You call it a cheat, and I call it an accessibility option. I can only assume that Baldur's Gate kicked off some sort of dice fad in the early 2000s.

It's a good thing I never said that then. Comparing a mod that increases game stability to one that fundamentally changes the difficulty to make it easier is silly.

Well, you did say that, and it was silly (or at least it was easy to read your post that way). But I'm glad we've at least cleared up that misunderstanding!

Though I'm still not entirely clear on where you draw the line between a mod that's fine and one that's a 'cheat'. Are graphics mods ok? HUD mods? Mods that add a hat into the game? Extra content mods like Tamriel Reborn? Where would Skyrim's multiplayer mod fall on this scale?

[InvisibleBison]

Modding the game to make it easier such as making it impossible to miss an enemy when misses are a build in part of the difficulty is obviously and explicitly cheating. The idea that it's not a cheat just because it's a mod and not a code you type in is absurd.

What definition of "cheat" are you using? Looking at some online dictionaries, I'm finding "to practice fraud or deceit; to violate rules or regulations", "to break a rule or law usually to gain an advantage at something", and "to practice fraud or trickery; to violate rules dishonestly", none of which strike me as accurately describing the process of installing a mod.

[WritersBlock]

Enemies, always scaling to your level without limits is why Oblivion is in my Opinion, near worthless trash. Arkved's tower at higher levels is horrifically stupid for example. (Clannfear that take a billion hits to kill and take you out in 2 or 3 hits.)

An RPG where enemies always scale to your level is a bad RPG. I prefer to get stronger as I level up, not weaker.

[veti]

I think skills like smithing shouldn't be increased by training. Instead, there should be a tree whose perks become available as you reach a certain level.

Oh gods no. Level gated perks was the main reason I rage-quit Fallout 4 (and, frankly, have never even for a moment regretted it).

Three great games and one okay one does not a downward trend make.

Whoa. Curious which of those games you consider merely "okay"...

Oblivion was definitely, unequivocally worse than Morrowind in almost every conceivable way. Fallout 3 was contemporaneous with Oblivion, and suffered many of the same problems, although they were mitigated by other game features such as the inherent lethality of the weapons and the inbuilt level cap.

Skyrim, in my opinion, was the game that Oblivion wanted to be. It's the example I look to, to reassure myself that Bethesda is capable of learning from its mistakes. Gone were the weapons made of nerf and the out of control scaling. It had - has - issues of its own, but they're much less obstructive than Oblivion's.

Downloading the mod is a faster and much less tedious way around grinding the skill to 100 before you're allowed to actually play the game.

It's the same reason I feel zero guilt over mashing the console to max Smithing and Enchanting in Skyrim. Maxing neitehr skill is hard, it's just time consuming. Why the **** would I bother spending an hour or more of my precious time spam-crafting Iron Daggers when I could do it in a few seconds instead?

I would say that "developing the skill" (and you don't have to get it anywhere near 100, misses in Morrowind become a rare occurrence by about 40, and by 50, they're all but unheard of) - is the game. If you want to play an infallible deity, fine, but I find the process of getting to that point is the fun. Once there, I generally quit and start a new character.

Maxing smithing in Skyrim (and the reference to iron daggers suggests this is something you haven't attempted in the past nine years, because iron daggers are a very inefficient way to level the skill as of quite an early update - certainly pre-Dawnguard) makes you a demigod already. Maxing enchanting as well is just gratuitous. And both require a lot of materials that you have to gather somehow. So yes, it is hard.

[Anteros]

I'm not going to sit and play word games about why modifying the game files of a game to make it easier is cheating. I'm just not doing it anymore. It's a single player game and you can do whatever you want. If you try that nonsense in a multiplayer game though you'll get banned. Because it's cheating.

[Rynjin]

Whoa. Curious which of those games you consider merely "okay"...

Oblivion was definitely, unequivocally worse than Morrowind in almost every conceivable way. Fallout 3 was contemporaneous with Oblivion, and suffered many of the same problems, although they were mitigated by other game features such as the inherent lethality of the weapons and the inbuilt level cap.

Skyrim, in my opinion, was the game that Oblivion wanted to be. It's the example I look to, to reassure myself that Bethesda is capable of learning from its mistakes. Gone were the weapons made of nerf and the out of control scaling. It had - has - issues of its own, but they're much less obstructive than Oblivion's.

Well I'll give you a hint. It's the one that wasn't even memorable enough for you to mention in this section.

I would say that "developing the skill" (and you don't have to get it anywhere near 100, misses in Morrowind become a rare occurrence by about 40, and by 50, they're all but unheard of) - is the game. If you want to play an infallible deity, fine, but I find the process of getting to that point is the fun. Once there, I generally quit and start a new character.

If the game isn't interesting or balanced enough to hold your attention past the halfway mark of leveling a single skill I'd say that makes my point pretty well about the tedium and ****ty design.

Maxing smithing in Skyrim (and the reference to iron daggers suggests this is something you haven't attempted in the past nine years

Correctamundo, because why would I? It doesn't matter what the most efficient option is, cranking out dozens of random items you have no use for just to max the skill is boring.

[InvisibleBison]

I'm not going to sit and play word games about why modifying the game files of a game to make it easier is cheating. I'm just not doing it anymore. It's a single player game and you can do whatever you want. If you try that nonsense in a multiplayer game though you'll get banned. Because it's cheating.

The meaning of a word is affected by its context. Whether or not something is cheating in a multiplayer game does not determine whether or not it's cheating in a single player game. Or does the existence of a road with a 20 mph speed limit mean that driving 55 on a highway is speeding?

[Aeson]

If the game isn't interesting or balanced enough to hold your attention past the halfway mark of leveling a single skill I'd say that makes my point pretty well about the tedium and ****ty design.

Who said anything about the game not holding interest long enough to level a single skill past the halfway point? 40 or 50 in a skill is barely past starting level for a major skill; it might even be starting level, depending on how your race and specialization bonuses stack up, because major skills start at 30, specialization bonus gives +5, and every race except Breton and High Elf starts with at least a +5 in at least one weapon skill and two (Redguard and Wood Elf) have a +15 racial bonus to a weapon skill.

You want to be good with weapons? Don't use minor or miscellaneous skills for your primary weapon skill at first level. If you design your character to be bad with weapons, you'll get no sympathy from me when it turns out that your character is bad with weapons.

Or does the existence of a road with a 20 mph speed limit mean that driving 55 on a highway is speeding?

I believe Anteros would argue that using a mod to change the game rules is more akin to spraypainting out the speed limit than to driving on a different road.

[Kish]

Or for a more precise analogy, flipping off the "speed limit 20" sign and laughing as you drive by it at 55 MPH because you (somehow, don't ask too many awkward questions about how this part works) have a guarantee that no police will ever be watching what happens on this road.

[WritersBlock]

The great thing about Morrowind is that it does not have that awful training limit that Oblivion and Skyrim have, if you have enough gold, you do not need to grind.
I like just going exploring gathering up all of the most expensive stuff I can find and/or steal to sell. And then hunt down the master trainer npc's to max out all of my skills.

Oblivion's training limit made the game far more grindy. And Skyrim made it even worse by making the master level trainers only train you to 90 in a skill. (Boy was THAT exceptionally stupid)

[InvisibleBison]

I believe Anteros would argue that using a mod to change the game rules is more akin to spraypainting out the speed limit than to driving on a different road.

Or for a more precise analogy, flipping off the "speed limit 20" sign and laughing as you drive by it at 55 MPH because you (somehow, don't ask too many awkward questions about how this part works) have a guarantee that no police will ever be watching what happens on this road.

I don't think either of those variants make much sense. In my analogy, the road with a 20 mph speed limit corresponded to a multiplayer game where modding isn't allowed. A driver changing or mocking the speed limit would correspond to... someone changing a multiplayer game into a singleplayer game? A single person playing a nominally multiplayer game without any other players? Not a particularly useful alteration to the analogy in either case, especially since neither variant does anything to push back against the actual point of the analogy, which was that different situations can have different rules.

[Batcathat]

Open question to the people in the "it's not cheating" camp: what — if anything — would qualify as cheating in a single player game? Personally, I feel like something that subverts the existing rules should generally qualify as cheating, but doing so in a single player game is obviously perfectly fine.