'Go Back and Play Morrowind and Tell Me That's the Game You Want to Play Again' — Former Bethesda Veteran Delivers His Verdict on Potential The Elder Scrolls Remasters - IGN
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Pretty spicy take, imho.
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What? You guys don't have phones?
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Yeah combat aged very poorly but it does a host of other things someone should take and expand on.
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Why not go and make something new?
Because it's too risky. Shareholder want reliable income not a gamble.
Remastering old shit is more or less guaranteed money. -
The gameplay sucked but what makes Morrowind a far superior game to Skyrim and Oblivion is Morrowind is weird.
Bethesda is only capable of making boring big budget fantasy epic setpieces these days, gone is the feeling of going into a random shop and reading a random book, gone is the feeling of "what the hell is over the next hill!?".
You always know what you are going to get with Bethesda, they won't take ANY risks. Bethesda will never again present a vision of fantasy that doesn't simply meet the expectations of well worn fantasy tropes, as far as they are concerned that would be bad for business to do otherwise.
If you showed me of a picture of dragon from Skyrim, a dragon from Harry Potter and a dragon from Lord Of The Rings I don't think I could tell them apart, the same cannot be said for almost any aspect of Morrowind down to basic things like the architecture of its buildings.
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I somewhat agree. I think Morrowind would need a proper remake (not just graphics remaster) to iron out some mechanics but also expand on some of the content/areas where stuff got a little thin.
Even so, there's a 95% chance they'll face a lot of disappointment unless they nail it perfectly, and I don't know if they can capture that lightning in a bottle again.
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Skywind is going to be the last Bethesda game I ever play lmao, get fucked
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Well fuck me and my heavily modded OpenMW
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I have gone back and played Morrowind. Multiple times. Because it is, in fact, a game I want to play again.
It’s almost like that’s the reason people are asking for a remaster.
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Elder Scrolls 1 or 2? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
Elder Scrolls 3+? Hell yes.
Elder Scrolls 6 would be the release that I much prefer.
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I would rather they build a quality engine before any game.
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Yeah combat aged very poorly but it does a host of other things someone should take and expand on.
The combat is great. It just doesn't sit right with people that it's not as action RPG as it looks (swing and miss) and it never tells you how important stamina (fatigue) is.
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IMO, Morrowind is one of the greatest games ever made. I play it regularly and it holds up. The problem is that it's not intuitive if you don't know how it works.
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Yeah combat aged very poorly but it does a host of other things someone should take and expand on.
Combat always ages poorly, because anything happening in real time requires muscle memory. As developers develop new combat mechanisms, it is constantly getting incrementally better. It's like trying to compare a modern performance car to a Model T, or an '89 honda accord. The 65 Shelby Cobra doesn't have bluetooth or antilock brakes or passenger airbags, but there are many enthusiastic fans of the car today. The modern Shelby Mustang is essentially a remake with modern tech trying to capture the spirit of the original.
That's what we want. We want Morrowind, but better. The classic is still the classic, so we don't need that again. Modders can reskin the game with better graphics.
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What? You guys don't have phones?
God, I immediately thought of Blizzard talking about how "No one wants to play Classic WoW" and yet... here we are...with like 7 versions of WoW Classic because, yes, people do want to play that shit.
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The gameplay sucked but what makes Morrowind a far superior game to Skyrim and Oblivion is Morrowind is weird.
Bethesda is only capable of making boring big budget fantasy epic setpieces these days, gone is the feeling of going into a random shop and reading a random book, gone is the feeling of "what the hell is over the next hill!?".
You always know what you are going to get with Bethesda, they won't take ANY risks. Bethesda will never again present a vision of fantasy that doesn't simply meet the expectations of well worn fantasy tropes, as far as they are concerned that would be bad for business to do otherwise.
If you showed me of a picture of dragon from Skyrim, a dragon from Harry Potter and a dragon from Lord Of The Rings I don't think I could tell them apart, the same cannot be said for almost any aspect of Morrowind down to basic things like the architecture of its buildings.
I wouldn't say that Oblivion or Skyrim has much better gameplay, honestly. Yeah the weird dice-roll mechanic is gone, not that dice rolls necessarily make for a bad game (see the entire Baldur's Gate franchise, including the latest installment) but the combat in Oblivion and Skyrim isn't exactly good. It's floaty and feels really weird.
Oblivion retains more of Morrowinds roleplay mechanics, too. Skyrim is just a flat, empty game. They leant really far into this garbage faux viking aesthetic, complete with rubbish accents (as a Swede, we don't sound like that here in the Nordics) and there's nothing really memorable about it. It plays and feels about as drab as it looks.
Like to-date, there are still aspects of Oblivion and Morrowind I recall fondly. One of my favourite wow-moments in Oblivion was the quest with the woman who tasked you with finding her painter husband. That's a fun quest. Skyrim has nothing like that.
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I think Morrowind is one of the best games that Bethesda has made in terms of being the following: Weird, has a fairly strong story that makes you think about what it means, characters misremembering directions, hand placed loot. It's a game that I keep revisiting and love it to bits, I still need to explore some storylines; combat might be the weakest part of the game, but, I adjust after starting yet another replay. It's also one of the amusing games to pull off serious cheese in, as there is no upper limit. It also makes combat trivial if you cheese just right, but I consider that part of the fun.
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Yeah combat aged very poorly but it does a host of other things someone should take and expand on.
Morrowind was a terrible action game, and a fantastic hand-crafted world to explore.
Oblivion felt like a huge step back to me. Sure it looked a lot better, it was technically bigger, it was entirely voiced over, and its physics... err... existed.
But it was so bland. Completely generic environments, copy-pasted dungeons and buildings everywhere, almost any encounter a leveled rando with no personality.
And then everything they did to make the game more modern only made it more boring. Voiced over? Sure, enjoy everyone having one sentence of dialogue. Looking for stuff? Nobody's got time for that, just follow the magic compass.
I understand why they did those. But despite how janky Morrowind could be in some aspects, nobody can convince me Oblivion was the better game.
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I wouldn't say that Oblivion or Skyrim has much better gameplay, honestly. Yeah the weird dice-roll mechanic is gone, not that dice rolls necessarily make for a bad game (see the entire Baldur's Gate franchise, including the latest installment) but the combat in Oblivion and Skyrim isn't exactly good. It's floaty and feels really weird.
Oblivion retains more of Morrowinds roleplay mechanics, too. Skyrim is just a flat, empty game. They leant really far into this garbage faux viking aesthetic, complete with rubbish accents (as a Swede, we don't sound like that here in the Nordics) and there's nothing really memorable about it. It plays and feels about as drab as it looks.
Like to-date, there are still aspects of Oblivion and Morrowind I recall fondly. One of my favourite wow-moments in Oblivion was the quest with the woman who tasked you with finding her painter husband. That's a fun quest. Skyrim has nothing like that.
(...) complete with rubbish accents (as a Swede, we don't sound like that here in the Nordics)
If you want a better viking game with much better Nordic sounding accents, Banner Saga is out there. Though there is only like 10 minutes of voice acting per game - but what is there is good! They used an Icelandic VA studio to make sure it's authentic.
The best swedish accent I ever heard was that one blonde knight in Witcher 3 - Blood & Wine. Which is funny as I don't think it makes sense for the setting at all, but accent voice direction in that whole expansion is a complete clusterfuck with zero consistency.
