Arena

[OB1]

No. I complained about THE SERIES AS A WHOLE. As in things that, based on everything I know, are in ALL of the games. I tried to say which things I talked about are things that Morrowind fixes (see: random level design -- it's the way Arena and Daggerfall work but evidently Morrowind has a fully designed world... that is a major upgrade which I recognized. I do not know of any other such major changes about any of my other major points, so I have to assume that those ones stand for the sereis...). But I was most certainly never talking just about Morrowind. Note my frequent use of "TES" (series in general), "Arena", and "Daggerfall" and not "TES3" or "Morrowind"...

The SERIES AS A WHOLE as in ONE GAME THAT YOU PLAYED!

So, what is it that makes it so fantastic? As you say, the combat is merely adaquate (I'd say adaquate and not horrible, at least for the first two... as I said, with that much fighting and time you can't have the system be too complex...), the quests mediocre at best, and the NPCs have no personalities or individuality... so what is it?

Based on Arena, the main impetuses to progress would be A) To see new regions of the world; B) To get more cool items (from dungeons); C) To dungeon hack; D) To do things you can't do in most RPGs like kill people and then buy their houses without significant gameplay repurcussions (like you could kill anyone in Fallout, but some people are far better left alive (though Fallout certainly has a lot of non-linearity and has more evil paths to completing the game)... and in the BG games it's really hard to be evil. In this game you can do those things with less repurcussions if any... of course the problem there is that most of those things that you lose in a traditional RPG by doing such things never existed in the first place in TES.

As for BG... yes, that with bad combat wouldn't be very fun. Because it;s a D&D-style RPG. It's all about questing. D&D is about questing. And in most cases, questing without combat it is nothing... the only thing that can make up for it really in such RPGs are story and a more detailed world (Torment!). That's the only D&D-style RPG that I could see still loving if it had a bad combat system... but other than that one, yeah, because that's what it's about. Wandering around a world, meeting people, getting a quest, solving the quest, and doing fighting along the way. TES just is a very different game design. It's not really about story (it's there but it's only mediocre), great, involving quests, or unique NPCs... it's kind of hard to say what exactly it IS about. What comes to mind for me is seeing a vast world and doing dungeon hacking (that is, exploring numerous dungeons in hopes that you will get cool items or progress in the game).

It's kind of funny actually. When I describe it like that it kind of sounds like I dislike TES's style a lot. But actually I find it fun... it's just kind of weird because of how when I compare it with conventional PC RPGs it seems to end up on the losing side on most of the issues. There is one thing that can help, actually... thinking about PC RPGs BEFORE 1997. That is, before Fallout. If you don't remember, the PC RPG business had been in a major slump for several years. Like adventure games for some time now they were thought to be dead. 1994, 95, 96, 97... look back and you won't see much. Before that were the older greats like the SSI Gold Box series (Eye of the Beholder) and the Wizardry games, but by '92 or so those serieses had faded...) Sure, Fallout came out in '97, but it didn't do well enough to bring the genre back to life. Baldur's Gate did that in 1998 in a huge way. It really did single-handedly bring a genre most in the industry had thought to be as dead as adventure games were becoming into full rebirth. But Arena... Arena came out in 1994. Daggerfall in 1996. So for their times they probably were some of the best RPGs of each of those years... I know Daggerfall won a whole lot of awards at least. The question really is how the series held up once it got real competition in the genre... I'd have to play Morrowind to really know but it seems to me that while it still certainly is a fun type of RPG it is one that more advanced RPGs (that is, compared to most of the stuff we were seeing before 1997 -- play Wizardry VI and then Baldur's Gate and you'd see what I mean...) like Fallout and Baldur's Gate have shown where the flaws in TES are. That doesn't make them bad games... within their niche they are good. Like as I said, while BG would be awful with TES's combat, TES would probably be almost as bad with BG's...

If you want to see what makes the game so great then play the damn thing.

However, here is a question. If TES's style is so great. why is it that no one tries to copy it, while the other subcategories of PC RPGs (action-RPGs like Diablo, turn-based ones like Fallout or Greyhawk: ToEE, and pausable realtime like BG, I think) have so many titles in each of them? Is it the sheer amount of work it'd take to make such a huge world? Actually, I think I have the answer. Everyone else making games like that are making MMORPGs, not single player titles.

It's because that type of game takes an incredible amount of time and manpower to create, while Diablo shit can be done in a fraction of the time.

This brings up a point. You keep saying how you prefer open-ended RPGs. However, I don't see anything that meets all of your specifications other than The Elder Scrolls... and you've only played the third one. So is this opinion of yours not really that but really a "I really REALLY love Morrowind", or is it a broad-based thing? As in, what other games fit into this category, in your opinion? I sure can't think of any... the next closest thing in PC RPGs is probably Fallout and Arcanum, and while they are in between the two extremes they are probably closer to traditional RPGs than to TES. Still, the two Fallout games are definitely not your typical titles... especially Fallout 2. That is, by all accounts, a very open-ended game. It's not TES, but it's the next closest thing that I can think of without going into MMORPGs.

I said that I love open-ended games, RPGs being the best type. Body Harvest, GTA, Spider-Man 2, and the like are other types of games that offer great freedom in terms of environments and exploration. When it comes to RPGs the closest thing to Morrowind is probably Gothic. Since open-ended RPGs are the most difficult kind to make, not many developers choose to make them even though Morrowind proved that there is a huge audience for that type of gameplay.