Keys in Skyrim

I am so glad I managed to cure my addiction of skyrim. Seirously. Only when you stop playing it, do you realize that it is like heroin. It feels great at first, but when it starts to wear off ...

The strange thing about it is, and that is what I really hate, it shows potential. You know when ever I played Skyrim I always thought, I want more, but sadly the game never delivers more. It only "talks" about more, its teasing you. The towns, the locations, the NPCs, the "civil war" quest line, it could be all fun, but it is so underwhelming. Solitude, Windhelm, they look interesting, but they are not interesting as every village is bigger then Solitude, yet it is somehow the capital of Skyrim? This is why Witcher always felt a lot more immersive in my opinion. Same for TW2 of course.

There's a LOT of "clever" architectural "filler" also, to create an illusion of an urban centre. Compare with the sincerity of Balmora, where you have the little town in front of you, and you nod to yourself. Windhelm has those HUGE pointless walls, criss-crossing the city for no other reason than to obscure that there are too damn few interactive buildings. Same in Markarth and Solitude. First impression is always "whoa, big city" then you try to begin locating doors and homes, and there are just a couple :D
I seem to recall that in Morrowind, many if not most of the houses were the same handful of copy-pasted layouts with absolutely nothing of interest in them whatsoever... not to mention most of those houses were quite small, so you could fit a larger number in the same relative space. There's also the subjective factors like ever-present fog and slower movement speed making cities feel larger than they really were, etc.

I don't necessarily fancy getting lost in the identical bonemold tunnels under Ald'ruhn for hours again, searching for a single NPC out of dozens that actually has something relevant or interesting to say. ;)

(I love Morrowind but just saying, size isn't everything...)


But I kinda like that, several lil houses that aren't really interesting and kindov blending into each others. It IS filler, but it's good filler. Compare Khuul to Rorikstead, or some of those small villages of Skyrim. Khuul actually IS a village, it has several shacks, all of them inhabited. The shacks are similar, and mostly uninteresting, but a typical Skyrim village has... 1 home? At best 1 home, 1 tavern, and 1 saw-mill. Easyer to navigate, sure, but it's not really convincing as a village.

Fuck you Zegh. Fuck you. You're making me want to install Morrowind and play it. Fuck you.

But yeah, I miss the good old days before everything was DRM or had to go through Steam. They've basically kicked anyone who can't afford the net or has shitty net out of the PC gaming world. Fuck you Steam (even though I still use it).

They days where you could just pop a CD in your PC, click through a few prompts (in those old Windows boxes which still pop up when I reinstall my old games and give me huge nostalgia. Remember the games that you'd install, it would have the blue screen in the background with the percentage rate in the middle?) on the now basically useless install wizard and be happy.
 
Steam isnt even so much the problem, they have offline-mode. The problem are gaming companies that force always-online crap on single player games. Shitty infrastructure or not, but that is simply a shit move. Also, I had so many issues with Games for Windows Live in the past, where it outright refused to register even after HOURS, that I avoid GfWl games like the plaque. I can deal with almost everyhing. But a service that is refusing to work? No thx.

Obtrusive DRM measures are simply a bad thing.
 
Get mad at your countries shitty infrastructure, not steam.

I've already seen so many people talk shit about the US (mainly on Youtube) it doesn't even get to me anymore. I always laughed at the ignorance of people using the word "hater", but now I'm pretty sure I get why it can have a place in a structured conversation. Half of them either jump on the "let's hate whoever everybody else hates right now/whoever has military power" band wagon (which has changed from the US to Russia recently) or it's pure jealousy. But then, you have those people who just want something to bitch about or need something to hate. I think that's the case for 50% of it.

You can talk all the shit you want, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Well, maybe Hong Kong municipality but that's it.
 
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The best cop out in the world, accuse people of either hating things because they are popular or because it's popular to hate the thing, never ever address or acknowledge any of their arguments.
 
On settlements, I feel it's really hard to do a realistic or at least logical settlement in a game with such a large scope, it's why I rarely complain about it.

Looking back on it, Morrowind's towns weren't that huge, but only seemed so because of walking speeds and the general scope of the game and I'm sure there's a tad bit of nostalgia thrown in there too.

The only way I could see a game feasibly pulling off a realistically sized city that allows you to explore the full thing, would be to have the entire game set inside a huge city,which is something you rarely see in games.

Thief and Dark Souls come to mind (Yes, Lordran is one big city, only Darkroot Basin and Firelink are outside of it), though I'm not entirely certain on Thief, as it has been years since I have played it.
 
yeah the one in Oblivion/Skyrim is much better whith its randomized and leveld loot where you can't get any rewards for quests really because they become completely useless after a few levels.

Also both Oblivion and even more so Skyrim have a serious problem with their crafting System. Making 1 milion daggers to get the best armor in the game. Awesome soze! Do I play an RPG or an MMO?
 
You don't get it Crni, making 1 million daggers to learn how to make Dragon Bone armor is more realistic and imuhrshive than just adding points on level up.

I like the Daedra weapons, those are like the most interesting quests in Skyrim, I want to see more weird Elder god shit.
 
yeah the one in Oblivion/Skyrim is much better whith its randomized and leveld loot where you can't get any rewards for quests really because they become completely useless after a few levels.

Also both Oblivion and even more so Skyrim have a serious problem with their crafting System. Making 1 milion daggers to get the best armor in the game. Awesome soze! Do I play an RPG or an MMO?

You couldn't make armor in Morrowind, so that sucks, but it's the same for anything else. "lol make 1000 health potions and you learn what all these ingredients do" or whatever.

Anyway, I'm only talking about the points system based on the skills you used. So you can get maximum 5 points in three different fields, but if you just run around hitting things and leveling up long sword when you level up you'll only get 5 points in strength, then 1 in the other two -- and if you wanted to try and level up two other characteristics afterwards, well, hope you don't plan on sleeping. Then the monsters level up with you so you better have been power leveling otherwise they're gonna kick your ass after you level up.

To me that's just really wrong. Basically when you level up you're worse off then you were before, unless you do this completely obnoxious and unnecessary run around.
 
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I might be wrong, it's been a long time, but I think you can only enchant armor in Morrowind, not make your own armor, I definitely remember that I have been absolutely thrilled about every Deadric ruin I came across in Morrowind for the prospect of finding that one next piece of Deadric armor. I guess if I could simply create my own set of Deadric armor I probably would have never spent so many hours of running around in the wilderness searching for ruins.

And I think somthing in Oblivion was only used to repair your equipment, the idea to create armor and weapons came with Skyrim. But like I said, my memory is a bit shoddy. But you are right, Morrowind could be just as bad like Oblivion and Skyrim here. I just don't like the MMOesque structure of recent Bethesda games where you spend hours of "grinding" just to get to the top so you can use it a few times for the whole game to create your set of armor. I did this only once and then never again whenever I started a new game in Skyrim I just opened the console and did all in 5 min what would take you several hours. It's the same effect, I mean it doesn't even change the game since everything is leveling up with you anyway.

You couldn't make armor in Morrowind, so that sucks, but it's the same for anything else. "lol make 1000 health potions and you learn what all these ingredients do" or whatever.
Fair enough! I can't argue with that. But with potions at least you have a mechanic that is rewarding in its own sense, it's not simply a use-and-forget skill. Once you reach 100 in Alchemy (both Skyrim and Morrowind) you could create very powerful potions that would eventually stay useful trough the whole game, like invisibility potions or stat altering potions, poisons and more potent potions to fortify archery or something else.

But smithing? Or even enchanting? Grind for hours to get to the top of the skills. Use it once. Forget about it for the rest of the game. And that's it. Hell. Skyrims whole skill/perk system is a mess in my opinion, 90% of the skills and perks are just filler and not even really interesting.

Like the destruction skills that are basically archery skills where you kill something from a distance. Neither archery nor Magic was ever really good at Bethesda games, but in Morrowind there have been at least a TON of more options for the player to choose from. Much more than in Skyrim.

If you can't find a good use for the smithing-skills for the late game which is somehow relevant to the character then you could also remove the process of leveling it entierely, Gothic 2, Risen and The Witcher 1 and 2 did a MUCH better job here because it didnt required you to spend hours of hours on making daggers to enchant them just to get the best items trough smithing.

They made the whole process of creating powerful weapons/armor by finding and combining rare and powerful magic ingredients which you would eventually get by killing unique and difficult enemies. And this makes a lot more sense. And a lot more rewarding.

The Bethesda idea of leveling up really works very well with combat related skills, because you always have a use for them. But it really falls apart with skills that have either no relevance in combat or only indirectly. Like Illusion spells or Smithing and Enchanting. Leveling up the One Handed or Archery skill feels naturally while leveling up Smithing on the other hand not.
 
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