First off.. I'm going to say I've never truely played Skyrim, or even Oblivion, in more than a... got past the intro, made a character... wandered for a bit.. and then quit.... Like some others, I found that Morrowind was probably my favourite TES game so far, even tho it had a ton of things wrong with it as well.
To me TES is getting into a groove, and its not a groove I tend to agree with. Combat, which most people rave about, too me is just like it's always been... robotic... I mean, sure it's made improvements over oblivion, but to me the feel of the system just feels mechanical and rigid...
First, combat feels like you have a robotic arms.. you pick up [enter weapon here] and then it plays the animation, same animation, regaurdless of even what arm you are swinging (as in wielding the same weapon in your right and left hand are pretty much mirror images of eachother) while it works ok, it sure removes me from the feel of the game. I'm not a fan of the direction swing type style.. since i feel you should be able to slash right while travelling left fluidly, not by going right first to "start" the swing... reminds me of zelda.. i keep thinking of those laser eyes that you'd have to make sure you were facing by using your charge move to face them... not ideal. I can't say much more tho, other than it feels wrong to me.
I just remembered a example of how much the feeling of combat does for me... Dark Messiah was a very similar looking fprpg, only without the open world concept... but the combat was in my opinion, head and sholdiers above oblivion, and as i can see, skyrim as well... Weapons feel like your wielding them.. its got he same general controlls, the the animations are fluid, the attacls have just that extra special something that makes them more fun... it's a very small different, but in the end it makes combat feel much more realistic.. your not swinging robotically with each hand, like its detached from everyhting else your doing.. your swinging, moving your body around... balancing, kicking, getting fluid fast movements with daggers you can't get with swords... it's a different feel alltogether..
Second is magic... I don't think I'll ever like magic in an rpg that treats them like an item.. as in you "equip" heal and then you can cast the heal spell in your hand... Skyrim has taken it a bit farther, allowing you to equip a spell in each hand... but to me it feels like they're trying to wierld 2 items at once to get both effects... for a worlds magic to immerse me, i find it needs to be more than "pick from 30 spells"... it needs to have some flavour.. i'm thinking concepts like a rune system like dungeon master 2, where you pick your runes before hand to cast... DM2 had a great concept... there were.. i think 4 runes in a spell... the first was power.. depending on what you choose identifies how much mana each further rune cost... after that, they were all concepts.. the rest of them had different combinations for different things.. you could cast simple spells that were just 2 runes.. (like light for example).. or something more complex, like fireball.. which starts out like a light spell, but adds 2 more runes... they even made the location of the runes important, for instance fireball's runes were all in the same location.. so to select those 4 runes, you just click the 3rd rune from the left for each choice.. this was done because it was used in combat, so you wanted to be able to cast them quickly...
Haha, geez this post is getting huge!but I can't help but think of 2 different magic systems.. dnd (up to 3rd ed at least) treats magic as items... they are finished products that you "ready" and cast... bang... and your done... if you compare it to a bit more robust system... i'm thinking a game like HARP by Iron Crown Enterprises... it treats magic spells as an idea... but gives you options to increase their effectiveness, or even change their uses to a degree... HARP spells have a base spell, for instance, firebolt... this spell has an effect (in this case it shoots a small bolt of fire), but it also has "scalar" options, which give your more control over your spell... these scalars can change size, power, add extra effects, etc at the cost of more spell points.. so for instance you are able to cast a fireball by casting firebolt... and adding a scalar to increase its size, and then adding the scalar to make it explode on contact... this concept is a bit more robust than dnd, and i think it adds a lot to magic that rpgs kind of require...
enough ranting.. but in the essence, to me, skyrim likes to comment that they are the leaders in open worlds... when in reality, they are just like all the others.. they have a linear story, with some side quests... they jsut happen to work harder at making those side quests more insteresting... while thats great.. its not an open world... I think rpg's like this aren't going to move forward quickly until they start thinking differently, something which TES does not do well.. they usually just remake the same game with new graphics in a new area...
To me, when your remaking the engine you should be working to make it better.. not just slightly altering it from the last... I think "open world" games need to move away from any form of a storyline... I think instead they should strive more on making the world more dynamic... for instance.. imagine a world that lives by itself... without player interaction... a world that isn't just waiting for user interaction... but is actually "living" by itself and just has to interact with the player...
An example of such would be if you were to goto the local armory in whatever city you are in... the types of armor you find at this shop are directly populated based on the materials the smith has at his disposal, if there is a copper mine near he may have copper armor.. if he's had people killing wolves and selling him the pelts he'll have wolf-skin leather armor.. if the city is trading for iron he may have iron armor... supply and demand would indicate the prices.. so when something happens like a user decides to grind wolves and sell their pelts for money, the price of wolf armor will go down, since there is so much available.. In game this would allow things like hijacking or destroying caravans to severly hamper a cities production, or the ability to have famines natually occur if say farms for some reason lose their crops... city populations would be dependant on what they can support, as if they lose land or food etc, people will leave..
Many people may think these concepts are just to involved to track in games, that we don't have the power to track these sort of things in a pc game.... But there is already a great example... dwarf fortress... the recently updated game tracks many of these things.. for instance.. city's are dynamicall generated, their populations are a result of how much food they have, and their exports are tracked all over the world. It records 100's of years of history, and tracks the events that happen to every person place or thing in the world... I understand that this game is ascii and thus probably allows more processor power to normal processes.. but in the end even a select few of these concepts in a real game would bring it much more alive than anything so far... to me it's just another IP so full of itself that it's lost it's ability to innovate, since they already see what they have as "the best thing possible"
Finally, I do believe that in many cases we feel what we want.. and that if you were to be a fan of the TES games you're that much more likely to play and enjoy their look and feel, where as if you have lost that enjoyment of their games your're going to find more flaws then you would probably find normally.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by loogie
