Favorite Bethesda Game

[czarwave]

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[Oyster Sauce]

A good throwaway joke account would have included Fallout 1+2

[czarwave]

A good throwaway joke account would have included Fallout 1+2

Bethesda didn't make those games idiot.

[BENEFACTOR]

Voted Oblivion. Clearly has flaws but has high points, the dark brotherhood quest line and the thieves guild in particular.

[maidenhaver]

[H-H-Holmes]

Oblivion was a ******** piece of **** but it was a charming ******** piece of ****.

[Element]

The only good thing about Oblivion was Shivering Isles, Mark Nelson's final contribution to the series. Otherwise, apart from a couple of quests, it was mostly just silly and nonsensical. Warlockracy put it best in one of his vids- it's 50% LotR, 50% Shrek.

Morrowind had great world building and an interesting main quest. Daggerfall had a lot of women with their tits out. It's pretty close, but I'll go with Morrowind.

[Emphyrio]

i wish somebody who wasn't a gay ****** was in charge of bethesda.

[Grey Wolf of Turan]

oblivion is broken but fun as ****. I wish bethesda wasn't ********

[General Reign]

Morrowind because it's the one I played the most.

[Rigwort]

Morrowind, because I think it got the closest to the ideal that Bethesda is shooting for. I think the others aren't much worse than Morrowind, and a lot of people are uneven with how they critique them. That said I only played a bit of Daggerfall and when I realized it was all fast-travel and dungeon-crawling I thought "what is this, Skyrim?" and stopped playing :^) But still, Morrowind had a good and mostly nuanced society, so I enjoyed it the most.

Didn't pay attention, thought this was just Elder Scrolls.

[GhostCow]

All of them are ****

[BENEFACTOR]

Morrowind, because I think it got the closest to the ideal that Bethesda is shooting for. I think the others aren't much worse than Morrowind, and a lot of people are uneven with how they critique them. That said I only played a bit of Daggerfall and when I realized it was all fast-travel and dungeon-crawling I thought "what is this, Skyrim?" and stopped playing :^) But still, Morrowind had a good and mostly nuanced society, so I enjoyed it the most.

Didn't pay attention, thought this was just Elder Scrolls.

Morrowind was pretty good but oblivion has a much more living breathing world.

[angusjones1996]

Couldn't get into morrowind because of jank.

[rusty_shackleford]

Oblivion tried to do something. It didn't succeed at it, but it gets credit for trying.

The related quest even has a farm you help rebuild over time: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Goblin_Trouble
Dozens of NPCs travel all across the map for various reasons from going to get their drug fix to going to stay with their cousins for a weekend: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Traveling_People
So on and so forth.

Yeah, it was jank and a lot of it was half-ased. But every game since then by Bethesda has been a complete move away from trying to create a breathing world.
I like some things about Morrowind but the game world feels completely lifeless to me. I feel more like I'm playing an interactive 3D book than a game when I play morrowind.

[Shillitron]

New Vegas [X]

[H-H-Holmes]

Another point for Oblivion, it has the best music of any Bethesda game.

[Maggot]

Morrowind is the only sane choice, although I do like some of the creature designs in Oblivion.

[maidenhaver]

Another point for Oblivion, it has the best music of any Bethesda game.

Best music system, too. Just mp3s in three or four folders.

[Maggot]

[agentorange]

Dozens of NPCs travel all across the map for various reasons from going to get their drug fix

No offense but you bring this exact same example up every time you defend Oblivion because it's one of the only notable instance of this sort of "dynamic living breathing world" (which of course it isn't even that, because he's scripted to do the same thing over and over again, so it's still static, just a static loop) in a game that is supposed to be based entirely around this concept. I can only see this being defendable if it was something like, there are drug dealers and a skooma problem in the game world, and if the problem isn't handled then you start seeing more and more drug addicts all over the cities, and even some quest givers end up turning into addicts and it makes their quests uncompletable, etc (but I've think we've had this conversation before, where Beth games are more interesting when you think about what they could have been). As it is I don't have to point out the faulty logic in defending a game as having a "living breathing world" by pointing to a small handful of extremely simple scripted behaviours.

A game doesn't deserve a participation award if it fails at every single thing it set out to do and is overall a bad game. I can see the rationale in giving points for trying something ambitious if they had this incredibly complex game with a lot of systems interacting with each other but it was terribly balanced and broken, and if the basic gameplay was solid (something like the faction system in Stalker Clear Sky comes to mind, or all the half-implemented stuff in X-Com Apocalypse). These systems and their effects should also be abundant and clear enough that the average player could see them during a normal playthrough without having to go and look the stuff up on a wiki or youtube video and deliberately going to seek it out to make a point. If you sell your game as being filled with examples of "living breathing characters" and there are so few examples of this that the same one is brought up every time, and another example is some system that 99.9% of people will only ever see through a youtube video, and can be said to be barely functional, then you've failed totally and your game isn't actually about that stuff. Oblivion is about doing ****** stupid quests in a boring world with level scaled loot.

A game should be judged as a whole, and despite being more static the world in Morrowind feels more real due to the attention to detail. Whether or not one character goes to another town to get his drugs is completely irrelevant, it's froofroo window dressing ********.

[rusty_shackleford]

A game should be judged as a whole, and despite being more static the world in Morrowind feels more real due to the attention to detail. Whether or not one character goes to another town to get his drugs is completely irrelevant, it's froofroo window dressing ********.

It makes the world feel immensely more alive to me than NPCs just standing around.
Same deal with all the activities NPCs do in say, the Gothic games. Absolutely luv it.

I agree with your points, and I also agree that it kinda failed. But nobody else even really tries to make RPG worlds that feel lived in, even Bethesda stopped doing it afterwards.

[GhostCow]

A game should be judged as a whole, and despite being more static the world in Morrowind feels more real due to the attention to detail. Whether or not one character goes to another town to get his drugs is completely irrelevant, it's froofroo window dressing ********.

It makes the world feel immensely more alive to me than NPCs just standing around.
Same deal with all the activities NPCs do in say, the Gothic games. Absolutely luv it.

I agree with your points, and I also agree that it kinda failed. But nobody else even really tries to make RPG worlds that feel lived in, even Bethesda stopped doing it afterwards.

More MMOs need to do this. EQ did it a little bit. I can't think of any others that did.

[SpellSword]

Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind don't have that same feeling of labyrinthine dungeon crawling found in Daggerfall.

Plus it had better box art than its sequels.

► Daggerfall

► Morrowind

► Morrowind: Bloodmoon

► Morrowind: Tribunal

► Oblivion

► Oblivion: Knights of the Nine

► Oblivion: Shivering Isles

► Skyrim

[rusty_shackleford]

A game should be judged as a whole, and despite being more static the world in Morrowind feels more real due to the attention to detail. Whether or not one character goes to another town to get his drugs is completely irrelevant, it's froofroo window dressing ********.

It makes the world feel immensely more alive to me than NPCs just standing around.
Same deal with all the activities NPCs do in say, the Gothic games. Absolutely luv it.

I agree with your points, and I also agree that it kinda failed. But nobody else even really tries to make RPG worlds that feel lived in, even Bethesda stopped doing it afterwards.

More MMOs need to do this. EQ did it a little bit. I can't think of any others that did.

NPCs in EQ were designed to be seen as other people in the world just like players, it's why you trade with them the same way you trade with players, speak with them the same way, and so on.

[H-H-Holmes]

Radiant AI was an exciting concept, and I remember being hyped about it at the time, to the point that one of the first things I did when playing Oblivion for the first time was follow NPC's around to test it out (my heart sank very quickly of course). It is odd that it hasn't been attempted again, after all these years, at least not to any notable extent by a "AAA" studio. Can it really be that difficult to implement successfully?

Now that I think about it, didn't KCD try something similar? I seem to remember a lot of talk about that game riding CPUs hard due to "complex" NPC behaviours in towns.

[wndrbr]

It is odd that it hasn't been attempted again, after all these years, at least not to any notable extent by a "AAA" studio. Now that I think about it, didn't KCD try something similar?

also STALKER series had something similar (A-Life).

[maidenhaver]

It is odd that it hasn't been attempted again, after all these years, at least not to any notable extent by a "AAA" studio. Now that I think about it, didn't KCD try something similar?

also STALKER series had something similar (A-Life).

Not Pripyat, though.

[maidenhaver]

Morrowind had more accurate h2h animations, though. You jab when you step and you hook when you bob. MW h2h anims was better than BGS have ever tried lol

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'm going to say Skyrim.



There were several things I liked about the Morrowind.

• + It was weird, surreal. It has bizarre aesthetics. Elven kingdom in a volcanic land and an ashen sky, with feuding Elven clans. Clans living inside the shell of a giant dead crab. Huge mushrooms and floating jellyfish monsters and stuff. The setting and aesthetics are exotic and unique.

• +Morrowind's NPC interaction is really good. In Skyrim, EVERYTHING is voiced, and voice acting is expensive. So there is far, far less dialogue in Skyrim. In Morrowind, they went nuts with the amount of text, so you just get so much more lore and character. Speechcraft is such a great skill in Morrowind because it reveals so much more meaningful information about the characters and the world. I also liked that you could click on a phrase/term and the NPC would give you information about that.

• + Subfactions. I joined House Telvanni, and then had to pick one of five master wizards to become an apprentice to, and each one as an extensive questline. I got really immersed in working for this one wizard who lived in this ruined castle overgrown by vines. You really feel like you're in the world.

• +Being able to craft spells so I could leap over mountains was fun.

• - Aside from one track, the music was forgettable.

• - But then you get to the bad. Morrowind isn't very friendly to newcomers. It doesn't give you a tutorial. You step off the boat, get attacked by 20 cliff racers out of nowhere, and die having had no way to defend yourself. Learning the hard way is extremely frustrating (or you read a guide or a wiki, which is boring). Morrowind as tactile as Skyrim. In Skyrim, you swing your sword and hit the bad guy. In Morrowind, you can spend a minute swinging your sword and never hit, which makes it very aggravating to level up skills and combat not very fun if you don't set up your character a certain way right from the beginning (which requires foreknowledge). There are a thousand different things like this that add up and create an unsatisfying experience.

• - Another issue is that most of the map looks like the same, brown wasteland. Morrowind becomes boring to look at after 20 hours.

Skyrim:

• + Biome diversity. You get a lot of variety in environments. You have lush forests, snowy plains, snowy mountains, rocky mountains, valleys of golden fields, autumnal mountain forests, marshes, chilly beaches, and icefloes. I could play Skyrim for 200-300 hours before the world started feeling samey. Also, Skyrim is overall prettier to look at than Morrowind, which was a lot of mud huts in barren wastelands.

• + Fixes a lot of the irritating issues with Morrowind. You click an enemy to swing your sword and it actually hits him. There is a proper tutorial so you know what's going on. You can't screw your character at creation because you were knew and didn't have prior knowledge of unintuitive mechanics. Etc. You can pick a direction and go on adventures and not need to be constantly alt+tabbing out to consult a walkthrough or a wiki. More fun to actually play.

• + About half a dozen memorable tracks. Still not many but more than Morrowind.

• +/- Generic Viking/Germanic fantasy. Not a very memorable fantasy world to visit like Morrowind but not bad either.

• +/- Civil war was a cool idea but so much content was dummied out, you really need mods to expand the experience.

• - Factions aren't as fleshed out as as in Morrowind. The Companions were probably the coolest but there is so little flesh to them. No subfactions either.

I have Oblivion but haven't played it yet. I've heard thieving is really fun in it. I am a little put off because you really want to play Bethseda games with mods to fix the game, make them look better, and sometimes make them play better, but modding is very frustrating. You have to spend many, many hours looking up recommended mods, then reading through their pages, then downloading them, then trying to install them in the correct order, creating batch patches, and then you load up the game and 5 hours your game crashes. I wish there was just an all-in-one stable modpack I could download and play. I know there was one for Skyrim but I haven't found one for Oblivion.

Now that I think about it, didn't KCD try something similar? I seem to remember a lot of talk about that game riding CPUs hard due to "complex" NPC behaviours in towns.

From my 80 hours playing KCD, I didn't notice anything like that.