7th October 2004, 2:41 PM
Quote:ABF, you're an idiot! You're arguing an opinion that you don't even have!! You've never even played Morrowind you dipshit, so YOU HAVE NO FUCKING OPINION ON THE MATTER!!
Holy FUCK are you dumb. WOW.
Every post in this thread emphasizes again and again how my (more and more intermittent) thoughts that maybe, sometime, you could act like an adult are very faint at best. You are clearly immature and unable to behave like a normal person... or at least that's how you act online. I keep trying to be decent but you clearly just don't deserve it... and writing anything to something you say is obviously a waste of time. I probably should do like DJ and block your posts. The amount of stupidity in them is truly astounding. I won't, but that's just because DJ is a stronger person than I am I guess...
This is just like if I made comments (GENERAL ones, not specific.,.. I mentioned some specific things, but only in passing and not as major themes) about Warcraft II and applied them to Warcraft III. The sensible person would say 'some of those things have changed but Blizzard still makes games the same way'. Which is obviously true.
Warcraft III may have added production queues, subsections in unit groups by type, auto-heal, heroes, one less resource, many different units, etc. but at its core it's a Blizzard RTS. And they are all very similar. Small unit groups, building at buildings (not on a sidebar), no attitude controls, map editor, funny sound effects, great artwork, etc, etc. Just like all Westwood or Ensemble RTSes share a lot in common. Or all Interplay or Sir-Tech (PC) RPGs. Game developers usually do not shift dramatically midstream unless a major innovation (like Mario going to 3d) happens. This does not apply to TES because, from the first title, the games are "3d" (Arena is more like 2.5d, but it's first person with polygons... and Daggerfall is full 3d.). So no. When we are talking about things as general as I am I do not have to play Morrowind to understand.
Now, if I HADN'T played any TES games sure you'd have a much better point. But I have, and they clearly are all to a large degree similar, so you don't have much of one. Not beyond pointing out how the series changed from the things I said. Which you have not done (and that's what I'd like to hear! Is Morrowind any different from how the previous ones are (as I stated), substantively?)
Morrowind. After playing the past games in the series and reading about it (which I've done quite a bit of over the years) I think I have a pretty good idea of how the game works. You create a character. Complex process, like it always is in an RPG. Then you go into your first location. Some dungeon or city. You wander around, do fetch quests, recieve adventures to local dungeons, meet the populace (and ask them where things are or about rumors since that Gamespy post makes it clear that that is still pretty much all you can say to people, just like both of the previous games)... go to the stores, break into houses, level up your character, wander around and kill monsters with a very simple hack-and-slash combat system, wander around some more, walk across part of the continent for the next week if you really so desire... and later visit more cities. See new regions with their different (and neat) graphics. Explore innumerable dungeons and kill legions of monsters. Do more quests in towns, kill people if you wish, buy real estate (at least you can in Daggerfall if you have enough cash-- houses, horses and carts, ships, etc)... etc.
However, the things I said from the first game are still largely prevalent. Now Gamespy said that the random factor is much reduced, which is welcome (and impressive! Actually designing that large a world by hand?). I assume that that also means that the problems with repeating names of people you talk to, repeating names of stores and inns, etc. are also much less prevalent if at all? That would be good... though I don't know how much they could do. Could they really name every store in hundreds of towns something different? I guess they could... it'd take a while though. :) Anyway, even with a set overworld instead of a random one and set dungeons and towns -- which defintitely would improve things from the first two games! Random gets old, and is generally less interestingly designed -- there are still plenty of things I said that are almost certainly still valid.
-Interaction with the NPCs. How much can you say to the people? Topics other than asking locations? Any personal details at all? Do they say different things in different parts of the world? Are the names greatly varied?
-Quests. Different in different regions? Unique dungeon layouts most of the time? Keep you interested in going through dungeons in new locations (with a good variety of graphic sets for dungeons, enemy variation, other things of that nature)? Is the main story worth following? Are there other stories (told by quests that are optional) that are worth doing for a story standpoint?
-Towns. Are they truly differently designed? Different people names, shop names, sizes, etc. Things to do in a town that are unique to the area (don't know of any such thing in the first two titles).
-Combat. Complexity. Challenge. Beyond button-mashing (or, in Daggerfall or Arena, mouse-waving -- to swing your sword you click and hold the right mouse button and move the mouse in the way you want to swing your sword. It's a very unique system that doesn't have much gameplay implications -- I can't tell if different ones have much different effect -- but in a more advanced (newer) game like Morrowind I could easily see it being pretty interesting if they kept that same system... did they? This I'm interested to hear, because that sword system is the one unique thing in the combat and the one thing keeping it above being a clickfest. Magic... magic is just clicking on 'cast spell' and choosing the spell.
"But you can do anything!" Hmm... anything? Like get into meaningful conversations with people? Oh, not that. Only in relation to quests, and even there I have not heard great praise of this aspect of any of the TES games, to say the least. Go to new places? Yup. Kill anyone? Pretty much yeah. See that new places are substantively different from the old (not just new graphics)? Not so much. Finish the game? Quite unlikely. It seems like 'anything' refers more to 'can go to many locations that are physically far apart and look different' and 'play side-quests or explore dungeons until I get bored or make my character all-powerful'.