10th October 2004, 8:30 PM
Quote:It's been a while since I've played Morrowind, so I can't really answer any of the other questions, but I can answer this one. While there are some towns that look similar to other ones there is plenty of variety. The starting town is a coastal town with wooden houses, some others has houses made of mud bricks, another is a town set in the middle of a lake that has several cantons with multiple levels including a sewer lever, another has buildings inside of giant trees, there was one that had that was straddling a river that had brick buildings and paved roads, and so on. So, yeah, there's diversity in town design. As for names of people and shops, it seems like there was some diversity, but maybe not quite as much as you would find in a real world.
Graphical design, of course there is diversity. I would fully expect that -- even Arena has varying looks in different regions, even if it isn't as big in effect as in Morrowind (it's just graphical; the actual layouts and stuff are all similar). And to some extent that does provide differering experiences, especially earlier in the game, as Gamespy pointed out. Why my point there was (all of those questions were things that, as far as I know, the series doesn't have). But this is true in all RPGs. However, in most (relatively modern) RPGs the differences go beyond that to real cultural, speech, quest, etc. differences. Like KotOR -- Manaan is quite different in style, speech, type of quests, etc. from Tatooine or Kashyyk! From what I can tell that isn't really true in TES. Hence my comment that TES has unmatched breadth but less uniqueness and, depending on your definition, depth, (It's deep -- I can play forever; It's not deep -- I keep experiencing the same things forever after not too long) than the average complex PC RPG.