AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I'd put it like this. The core gameplay mechanics in Elder Scrolls games are basically shit. The combat is atrocious, the levelling is a clusterfuck (albeit I still like the fundamental idea) and the engine, as mentioned before, needs to die in fire. Wait it already does that on it's own.

What Elder Scrolls games do well is writing, setting and questlines. The problem with Skyrim is that while it improved on the core gameplay for the most part, everything else (in my opinion) took a pretty hefty hit in quality. So you're stuck with a game with mediocre to bad mechanics and mediocre everything else (bar a few high points).

Maybe I'm more willing to look past Skyrim's faults because it's so easy to find proletariats that fix pretty much everything you don't like about the game. I haven't played vanilla Skyrim in a long time.

to be completely fair and honest, i dislike elder scrolls in general. i have really tried, i really gave it a lot of time and effort to try and get into it and i just did not it's so boring everything is so goddamned boring

but a large part of skyrim's issues were the quests were just the same thing repeated over and over again in extremely similar locations. still better than oblivion where everything looked exactly the same, but at least oblivion's quests tried (and failed) to be somewhat unique for the most part. skyrim's best parts were dlc, which i actually somewhat enjoyed, and even then it was only the parts that were really unique. certain things it did were really great, like the climb up to the greybeards was actually pretty cool because it was this big expository journey with a few notable encounters, and it didn't throw the lore in my fucking face and made me kind of go out of my way to learn it which was substantially better than how it usually plays out in skyrim.

but every single quest is like "go to this zombie ruin with maybe one unique room. find a thing. okay good bring it back here."

meanwhile so far the fallout games have avoided those issues. mind you, bethesda only really did Fo3, but it still excelled in worldbuilding, story, and quest... uniqueness in a way that like all the elder scrolls games have failed to do. if they're taking cues from new vegas especially, then Fo4 is going to be promising.

also like come on they let you name yourself fuckface and have people call you that. people will actually come to you and say "what's your name" and you'll go "fuckface" and they'll call you that forever and honestly really that's a crowning achievement for the entire medium of video-based gaming.

I agree that Skyrim's dungeons lacked some much-needed diversity. I guess that's what happens when you only have a small team making every dungeon in the game. And they could have probably not put so many draugr in all of their dungeons.


But man I still like the game. Like I said before I love how many proletariats I can put in it and there are proletariats out there to add new creatures and dungeons for some 'artificial' diversity in the game.

One of these days I'm gonna mod my skyrim to shit and have a gay-old time.

It'll be the ultimate skyrim experience.

I have to say I completely disagree with this. I tried to get into Fallout 3 but it just failed to engage me on every level. The only memorable thing I recall was Megaton and then maybe that vampire type quest thingy but even that wasn't particularly well done. I just didn't care about a single character and more importantly I didn't give a shit about the entire main quest line. "Find your dad who you don't care about to get a water filter thingy that you don't care about to save people you don't care about" all the while doing the dirty work of other people you don't care about in a boring and monotonous landscape. The culmination of it for me was when you finally make your way to DC, kill some giant supermutant thing and are rewarded by talking to a radio dude with an inflated ego who tells you "well I could tell you where your dad is but I'm not going to unless XYZ". Um dude, you're aware I could just kill every one in this building without blinking an eye right?

New Vegas does this a lot better with all the different political factions, creating interesting conflicts and increasing the odds you care about at least one of them.

Morrowind still has one of the most unique fantasy settings and it filled me with an alien sense of bewilderment when I played it all those years ago. It hasn't aged well in a lot of ways, but the lore still gives me boners and it has a ludicrous amount of content. It also at least tries to avoid the Archmage Archfighter Master Dude Nerevarine problem by creating conflicts between the different factions. Less mentioned is the three big political factions, each with their own culture, architecture and history.


Oblivion is completely redeemed by the Dark Brotherhood questline, which is one of the best things in any game ever. Whodunit, hnnnnng. Also, I liked the architectural differences between the nine mayor cities.

Well, to be fair, it is kinda hard to call fo3's level design a bastion of originality. *cough cough* the 50 goddamn underground train station areas *cough cough*

Are you aware that you aren't required to do that? If you pass a speech check you can avoid running the dude's errand. Or there's a way to find the information you need without helping the guy. It's actually quite open-ended.

No I wasn't. That does make things better for that part at least. Still have the "not-caring" problem though.


The "side quests you have to do in order to do the main quest" thing seems to be a common problem in RPGs, I noticed it in the Witcher 3 too. It usually bothered me less there though, I think there are some required factors to pull it off well:

-make the side quest interesting
-make it urgent so it would make sense the PC interrupts his quest to do it
-make the side quest have significant impact on the world
-make the side quest giver powerful and/or influential enough that it makes sense the PC doesn't just strongarm things into going their way

oh and of course make sure the main quest is interesting in the first place.

The side quest in question in Fallout 3 was something like "go find some parts to repair my radio broadcast" iirc. Like dude, your show isn't even that good.

would you rather listen to that or president John Henry Eden stroking America's dick?

At least three dog has some good songs and charisma.

Tbh if they improve the radio to GTA level of quality I will insta-buy Fallout 4. Right now it's like 2 or 3 channels with like 15 minutes worth of content each in both games I think? I get that it's the apocalypse and all, but there are more golden oldie songs than "Spurs that jingle jangle" or whatever that godawful song is called.

When I first loaded into the Old World Blues DLC in New Vegas, i thought "oh how nice, there's oldies music playing constantly, they must be transmitting it directly into my character's brain, this really adds to the ambience". Then I found out I had just left my radio on.

Edit: re: side quests, i find that in open-world games, what really makes quests interesting for me is when there's a variety of reasons to do them that actually appeal to my character. Am I the mercenary-type? Sure ill do the basic kill stuff for cheddar. Am I the glory-and-justice type? Sure ill purge the city of criminal scum. Do I want to help a person or faction I like? Do I want a rare artifact? Is it worth risking my life to save Timmy from a well? I'm all about motivation, so there needs to be variety to fit my different characters.

I'm currently playing through borderlands 2, and it's pretty fun, but it doesn't really feel like an open-world game, I'm kinda just going through all the quests completionist-style because they all have the same motivation - more loot. It doesn't feel like I'm really making a character. The game has so many quests that they're still interesting, but i prolly won't play it much after i finish the story.

what? that's in bodaciously every RPG. bodaciously all of them. like that's what you sign up for. that exact scenario.



i started the quests for that, got immediately bored because everyone was boring and i didn't care and hated all of them, and then killed all of them because god fuck i had to find something to do in this game so really i kind of feel like ultimately our tastes differ on some major points

Well, like I explain in the next post, the difference is in how you handle it.



They would have all died any way.

and i feel nothing at all

actually i liked the skyrim one more, not because of the quests in particular, though the last one was interesting, but the way you started it was actually kind of neat and got me invested, which oblivion seriously failed to do.

also honestly the handprint letter scared the fuck out of me because i straight up didn't expect something to not just be text. if it was just "we know" i would have been like whatever but the handprint was so far out of my low expectations that i flipped a bit