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[Mothra]

Making Friends (In Morrowind)

[Royal☭]

Voice actors, graphics, open-world, you people are focusing on petty details when the major problem with the game was that every one of my combat scenarios ended with me backpedaling while firing arrows at an opponent that always ran forward, regardless of whether it was a goblin or King of the Vampires.


And then I'd go sleep in a bed and wake up with a hellbeast where I once thought was a wolf lived.

[Rico]

However, once you get the mods in (or just download a pack like OOO?) Oblivion is a pretty enjoyable game. Or, really, just a mod that makes leveling of yourself and enemies actually make any sort of sense, which is such a running theme that I find it hard to believe it hasn't been reasonably fixed in development yet.

[Misha]

combat was definitely my least favorite part of oblivion, so I had most of my fun in it (not counting the fantastic thieves guild quest line) after i  assembled a bunch of chameleon equipment and started being invisible to every enemy.

[Norondor]

Voice actors, graphics, open-world, you people are focusing on petty details

That's only because i don't at the moment feel like focusing on literally the entire game at the same time.

[Classic]

I like a lot of the ideas behind Oblivion and the elder scrolls in general...
Its leveling system among them. But it doesn't really excuse the time "I" spent casting a training spell sneak-running in the corner of the fighter's guild to train up my stats.

I feel like Oblivion combat would be good if I could just pause occasionally and get a good idea of the length of my swing. Melee combat is a weird unintuitive puppet-show. Ranged combat is, as described previously, super boring.

The ubiquity of ranged combatants in Fallout3 helps alleviate this, but every time I used a knife in VATS (because I honestly have trouble hitting shit at that speed and keeping track of what's going on in the world) I'd think, Man, if I could VATS a hit or two in Oblivion I'd be super happy.

Too bad VATS is also retarded and will more-often-than-not put you into the mouth of a deathclaw or something.

[Smiler]

Too bad VATS is also retarded and will more-often-than-not put you into the mouth of a deathclaw or something.

Greatest game engine ever

[Bal]

Dear Bethesda,

The Elder Scrolls is a terrible series, with a terrible setting, and there is nothing you can do to save it. Instead, might I suggest you continue to have Obsidian make Fallout games for you.

P.S. Don't use Gamebryo ever again

[Brentai]

Bethesda games in general would be better if the combat was made tense and infrequent.  It's never been the main draw of the games and Skyrim already looks like it won't improve much, so really they should stop throwing in these FPS-like dungeons and just make it more like a classic fantasy/post-apoc adventure, where the main focuses are travelling and meeting people and once in a while you have to defend yourself or run from something.

[François]

Very well; I shall find something else.  Ogre Battle is pretty great but also takes a very long time to play any of and I can't keep track of the plot, characters, or what the items do.  (Is OB64 any better about any of those things?)

It's been a while since I played, and I've never touched other OB games so I can't really compare, but I seem to remember OB64 having a comprehensive in-game help system that's pretty damn amazing for a console game. There's also an exceptionally well-made journal that keeps track of characters and plot events, and it allows you to replay cutscenes at will.

It does take a while to play, though.

[Büge]

It does take a while to play, though.

You also have to plan and micromanage like crazy if you want to do well.

[Rico]

It's been a while since I've run through 64, but I don't remember there being much micromanagement at all. The alignment/town morale thing makes it pretty easy to make groups specifically to take good/neutral/low towns. Equipment is a little awkward but you also don't need to individually equip every slot of every unit since the game automatically takes care of quite a bit when you classchange.

And then there's the bit where the best part of the series and why I always cry about there never being another one is that large-scale combat allows for a lot of strategy but completely removes the Korean requirement from that other genre which I should theoretically like but can't actually stand.

[PhoenixUltima]

I can't help but think that Oblivion's combat would have been a lot better if the enemies scaled more slowly with your level, e.g. gaining one level for your every two. That way at level 20 the enemies would all be level 11; enough that you can't just immediately kill them with a stern look, but you'd still have a much easier time of beating them than you did at level 5, which is how it should be. Enemies that are supposed to be tougher than normal (bandit bosses, trolls, etc) could have a static number adder to their level so a random bandit boss would be (your level/2)+5, and really powerful main story bosses (that guy at the end of the evil cult paradise, say) would still scale equally to you because they're supposed to always give you a hugely challenging fight.

Sadly, as it is my level 53 wood elf with 100 in all stats and skills and full enchanted gear has to have the difficulty slider turned down a few notches just so random nobody goblins don't fuck his shit royally over the course of a 5 minute battle.

[TA]

The problem with Oblivion's combat isn't really just that enemies scale to your level.  It's that enemies scale to your level, and your level has little to no relation to your combat capacity.  How hard things are to fight should be scaling to something related to your combat capacity, not how good you are at crafting and talking because those are the Major Skills you gained ten levels working up.

[Classic]

On the other hand, it's kind of a "thing" with elder scrolls games that past level 25 or so the flavor text implies that you're "slowing down" relative to up-and-coming fighters. Additional levels represent a refinement, but are also warning you that your personal powers are waning.

Whether or not this excuses or makes interesting aforementioned goblins wrecking you bullshit is up for debate (i.e. it is not up for debate and does neither of those things).

[Rico]

The problem with Oblivion's combat isn't really just that enemies scale to your level.  It's that enemies scale to your level, and your level has little to no relation to your combat capacity.

And that enemies scale pretty evenly regardless of whether it makes sense for them to scale up or not.

[Norondor]

see, people talk about lots of things about why oblivion is so bad but i submit it's not merely the scaling, or the bad combat, or the stupid leveling system or bad dialog or ugly graphics or stupid quests or any specific single thing. I'm sure i've used this phrase before, but what i like to say is that the game is fractally horrible. every element of the game, examined closely, is exactly as bad as the entire game taken as a whole. it is an infinitely recursive exercise in overbudget, poorly planned, amateurish valueless bullshit from the moment you start it up to when you throw the disk into the garbage disposal in disgust.

this is why i say that it's kin to FF12: both games are so horrible that their horror forms a tight mesh, and no single element can be pulled apart from the whole, or improved to "save" the game.

[François]

OB64 doesn't seem to emulate too well on anything, so this thread motivated me to dig up my N64. The motherfucker still works good as new after almost a decade of disuse. God bless the cartridge-based system, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to him.

Might as well finish Majora's Mask while I'm at it.

Oh and hey, here's one I keep thinking about but never have the presence of mind to note:

RPG dungeon design that is X iterations of a fork, one side of which leads a dead end with a treasure chest, while the other leads to either a boss or another similar fork.

EDIT: oh snap 2k posts dang

[Thad]

Why limit it to RPG's?  Half-Life is pretty notorious for creating the illusion of branching paths when it's actually just really good at tricking you into always picking the branch that doesn't dead-end.

...course, that's not really unforgivable, it's actually pretty decent design even if it limits replayability somewhat.

I think the attention to scale in modern RPG's is part of the problem.  Brent once commented that FF10 had all the dungeon complexity of Super Mario Bros, and really it's down to the fact that it takes a lot longer to walk from point A to point B if your character is proportioned like a tiny human in a giant cave than if he's, say, the same size as the towns on the world map.

Course, there've been plenty of lazily-designed RPG's with the classic not-to-scale character designs, too; some devs are just lazy.

[Brentai]

FF12 certainly didn't use that as an excuse.  Of course the excessively huge areas were just another thing that made the game drag on forever in the end.

Surprisingly, FF13 has some pretty good dungeon design.  A lot of it is of the "straight path punctuated by encounters" style but there are some pretty open areas like the Citadel too.  Of course I'm still only barely past the tutorial...

For FPSes it seems like there's a suspious lack of middle ground as far as map design.  Everything nowadays is either Half-Life (wherein the commentary nodes actually tell you, specifically, about the travel-puzzle-fight pattern) and Far Cry.  I think this is why people are looking forward to Human Revolution so much.

And then there's the game I'm currently playing, F.E.A.R., where every dead end is symbolized by a door blocked by a filing cabinet.  Even down in the sewers you keep running into doors blocked by filing cabinets.  I like to pretend that, instead of a secret super-soldier, you're actually playing the world's most frustrated OSHA inspector.