The Elder Scrolls

[wndrbr]

tl;dw?

[Oyster Sauce]

tl;dw?

Some guy didn't get a promotion and is mad about it

[maidenhaver]

tl;dw?

He gives a bit of context about Kurt Kuhlmann, like he and Bruce Nesmith co-designed Skyrim, while he and Michael Kirkbride set the lore in Redguard with the 1st Edition PGE that established the races. He reminds his viewers that Kirkbride and Kuhlmann were close, and Kuhlmann's idea for the Thalmor plot against mankind seems to be out. Which sounds likely, if after this much time and all these other devs having left, nobody remaining at BGS would know how to continue the story. They could barely stick to the plot when Todd and the oldtimers were still around.

[maidenhaver]

tl;dw?

Nothing matters goy!

They're in full damage control over this one.

[TKVNC]

tl;dw?

TES VI will never release, and if it does, you shouldn't care. Unless you liked Starfield, in which case, celebrate.

[maidenhaver]

Its over. The Kuhlmann Papers confirm Todd is all over the place and not guiding or picking the devs, anymore. He's been replaced by a "They" who are probably a gaggle of brown women.

Emil's been picked as the bag man. I think he believed if he could say condescending **** about gamers at conferences, he'd make a long career of gaming, but everybody's bailed and he's the last hetero white man.

[Algol]

tl;dw?

Some guy didn't get a promotion and is mad about it

If that's all it takes, I hope Todd rapes more of his workers financially so maybe they'll get decent talent in.

[Algol]

tl;dw?

He gives a bit of context about Kurt Kuhlmann, like he and Bruce Nesmith co-designed Skyrim, while he and Michael Kirkbride set the lore in Redguard with the 1st Edition PGE that established the races. He reminds his viewers that Kirkbride and Kuhlmann were close, and Kuhlmann's idea for the Thalmor plot against mankind seems to be out. Which sounds likely, if after this much time and all these other devs having left, nobody remaining at BGS would know how to continue the story. They could barely stick to the plot when Todd and the oldtimers were still around.

Bethesda is a worthless company. Plot doesn't matter. They do the same **** with Fallout and the ES games. Hell, assuming they even make another Starfag game, it will probably retcon the evil serpent deity those space Muslims worship with, idk, a fat black woman or something. Make up some elaborate story about how it was always "symbolic" and a "useful idiot ruse" (while also turning House Va'runn into an all-white echo chamber/ethnostate allegory or something).

We deserve to suffer.

[Stack of Turtles]

tl;dw?

Some guy didn't get a promotion and is mad about it

Is this STILL the one ****** writer seething? How many videos do subhumans need to make about it?

[Oyster Sauce]

tl;dw?

Some guy didn't get a promotion and is mad about it

Is this STILL the one ****** writer seething? How many videos do subhumans need to make about it?

Please understand, it's the first piece of TES VI news in VI years

[maidenhaver]

If I say it doesn't matter enough I win.

[wndrbr]

https://www.pressboxpr.co.uk/news/bruce ... of-fallout

another gemmy interview from ex-bethesda designer. Seems like they are hell-bent of making sure that no one will buy their next game.

Q: Is that belief in lowering barriers of entry for new players part of why there has been a concerted effort to streamline a lot of the traditional RPG elements in Oblivion and Skyrim and do you think that trend will continue with The Elder Scrolls 6?

Absolutely, and I led the charge on that, to be frank.

Obviously I had to persuade Todd Todd as he is the ultimate arbiter on these things but I managed to do so. I did a lot of the character systems and one of Todd’s philosophies early on in Oblivion, which I took to heart and why I pushed so hard for these things, is that he wanted an interfaceless game so ideally you just play the game. You just play it.

It was about getting the character system out of the players’ way. You don’t have your head buried in menus, stats and rules. Just enjoy the moment. It is a way to do that. In every version of the Elder Scrolls where I had any say in character systems, that is what I would push for.

We got rid of attributes in Skyrim and you know who complained? Almost nobody. They hardly even noticed it. I love the whole idea that you do something, you get better at it. That’s now a hallmark of the Elder Scrolls series because you play the character you want to play and you just get better at playing that character.

If you want to change, just start doing other stuff. You don’t have to worry about where you are going to spend your points or how you are going to do this and do that. Just play the game. Lets get the game out of your way. To me, it has always been one of the great things about the progression of the Elder Scrolls titles.

"keep it simple,stupid", but for gameplay mechanics

Q: For those who do want more of a traditional RPG experience is the answer that other titles are available rather than The Elder Scrolls rolling back on these changes?

Yes. If you look at Fallout, for example, and that’s another Bethesda title of course, they are embracing old school RPG features with that, and that is intentional. That’s by the same studio, by the way. We’re not talking about a studio that has a bias. It’s all about how each game should approach it.

In Fallout, they want you to have that retro feel because everything in Fallout has a retro feel. It’s a world based on 1950s super science. The game rules do that as well. They’re very old school RPG game rules where you get experience points and decide how to manage your character at that level.

If you prefer those old school elements, there's a wealth of other games out there for you. For the players who want, they will find games for that. Bethesda as a studio can be the best at doing both with two different titles but a single game can’t be trying to do both.

he thinks that whatever bethesda is doing to fallout is 'oldschool'.

Q: Why do Bethesda seem resistant to remaking Morrowind despite the massive fan demand?

...
The other thing I would say is go back and play Morrowind and tell me that’s the game you want to play again. We all have these fond memories of things that were pivotal moments in our gaming fantasy histories that we absolutely move but you go back and play a 20 year old game and you will cringe.

People even had cringe moments with the Oblivion remake but they forgave it because they’re reliving something, they’re enjoying the nostalgia. I worked on Oblivion. I’m even responsible for some of those cringe moments! The further back you go, the more that’s going to be an issue. The reality of playing Morrowind would not stand the test of time, in my opinion.

Now if you were to completely remake Morrowind with the Skyrim engine, to try and rebuild it from the ground up, that’s a whole other story, but that’s an entire project. That’s a whole four-year development cycle. Why not go and make something new?

nuff said

[Rienen]

We got rid of attributes in Skyrim and you know who complained? Almost nobody.

I def heard plenty of complaints about their omission. Then again, I can see how it'd be hard to hear complaints with his head in the sand.

[stormvermin]

We got rid of attributes in Skyrim and you know who complained? Almost nobody.

I def heard plenty of complaints about their omission. Then again, I can see how it'd be hard to hear complaints with his head in the sand.

Straight outta the Emil college of dealing with feedback. Interesting that in one of the first responses, he claims to be a math guy all 'bout dem spreadsheetz n sheeit while simultaneously spearheading the removal of the series' underlying roleplay systems.

[rusty_shackleford]

Did anyone at bethesda ever discuss why they picked the dialogue system for Morrowind? No other game has really ever used a hyperlink dialogue, as far as I can think of right now.

It's not really the same as keyword-based

[Oyster Sauce]

Did anyone at bethesda ever discuss why they picked the dialogue system for Morrowind? No other game has really ever used a hyperlink dialogue, as far as I can think of right now.

It's not really the same as keyword-based

https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281 ... -bethesda/

We hadn’t done a big Elder Scrolls in a long time; it was a six-year gap between Daggerfall and Morrowind. And the depth that it had, the agency the players had — that still resonates with people. I think when you look back at it, if you try to play it now, there’s gameplay mechanics that have not aged well. But the exotic nature of the world, and your ability to find your own way in it, absolutely holds up for me. The way the dialogue works, too — that nested, kind of hyperlinked system — we spent a long time designing that, and I really like that system.

Morrowind is a very text-heavy game. I used to have the numbers memorized for how many lines of [spoken] dialogue were in each of our games, because I was fairly involved in that process. I wanna say Morrowind had maybe 5,000 lines of dialogue. We went through and recorded intros; we wanted to make sure that everyone had something to say when you walked up to them. Even though we had the rich dialogue trees and the hyperlinked text in the game, we wanted to make sure that each of the races and the sexes had a distinct voice, as well. That was the beginning of having [original Wonder Woman actress] Lynda Carter record voice-over for our games. She’s the voice of all the female Nords in Morrowind.

Ken may just have an autistic fixation with hyperlinks

Neverwinter Nights was in development at the same time. We didn’t have access to any working elements of it, but we watched their development and saw the fact that they were going to have a game master, and online gameplay, and we thought of that as innovative in the same way that we were being innovative. But we weren’t influenced by them. What I was influenced by — as I had played relatively few games, but I had played Might and Magic VI — and the unambiguous influence there was a website called The Spoiler. It had a Might and Magic fan guide that was the fundamental model for how I used hyperlinking to map content, landscapes, and characters to present the world of Morrowind internally. And it was also like an outline for me to spew a game into in a big hurry.

[Norfleet]

We got rid of attributes in Skyrim and you know who complained? Almost nobody.

I def heard plenty of complaints about their omission. Then again, I can see how it'd be hard to hear complaints with his head in the sand.

I actually agree with the idea of removing attributes: They were just skills by another name, with a convoluted process of how to gain them that required you to twist your play in decidedly abnormal ways, to hit the maximum level-up bonus. Having stats that both derive from and backfeed into other stats is really kind of demented.

[DemoGraph]

Having stats that both derive from and backfeed into other stats is really kind of demented.

Tabletop hater.

[rusty_shackleford]

I think daggerfall classes, other than custom, are some of the most elegant skills-based systems in any computer RPG.
Custom class breaks it quite a bit.

[Norfleet]

Having stats that both derive from and backfeed into other stats is really kind of demented.

Tabletop hater.

Tabletop skills don't backfeed back into stats. You don't maximize your strength gains by doing exactly 10 points of strength skillls, then maximize your dex by doing 10 points of dex skills, and then maximize your con by doing 10 points of con skills, while making sure exactly 10 of those points are in your actual class skills. Can you even imagine a tabletop game where you're required to play like this? It's ridiculous.

I honestly don't see it as WRONG that Skyrim got rid of this ****, it was insane.

[DemoGraph]

Can you even imagine a tabletop game where you're required to play like this?

Yes. The majority of the worker placement tabletops reward you for concentrating resource by giving you a way to get this resource better.
We can even shift the example to D&D without unimaginable stretch. Ranger gets feat to kill goblins -> kills goblins better -> gets more xp -> gets another feat to kill goblins. Fighter gets a level, kills stuff better, etc.

I agree that the skill system implementation in Morrowind is dumb, because it
a) limits stat increase via the pool of possible skill increases,
b) promotes autismmaxxing skills at 10/level to max that stat gain/level.
But I had some characters where I stopped caring and leveled "organically" and the game still was perfectly okay (even without alchemy, etc.). You don't need 100 in everything to finish the game.
And if you do want to statmaxx, you can go to jail to decrease a random assortment of skills. Or use console to decrease them / raise main stats.
Or, you know, just don't bother and chug fortify stat potions.

I think the more glaring failure of Morrowind is unlimited HP increase per level. It leads to a serious HP bloat that devalues defensive spells (no point increasing fire resist if you can fortify health or heal limitlessly) and turns combat into a dumb race to HP bottom. But it's to be expected, because it organically stems from its ******** D&D ROOTS.

I made a mod once that limited player HP to something like Const+Str/2 (without any gain at lvlup whatsoever). It made the player much more vulnerable and the game much more interesting. I actually had to prepare for combat.

[rusty_shackleford]

bethesda has had notoriously bad RPG mechanic design since post-daggerfall

[Bertram_Tung]

bethesda has had notoriously bad RPG mechanic design since post-daggerfall

gwok is this twoo?

[Norfleet]

Yes. The majority of the worker placement tabletops reward you for concentrating resource by giving you a way to get this resource better.
We can even shift the example to D&D without unimaginable stretch. Ranger gets feat to kill goblins -> kills goblins better -> gets more xp -> gets another feat to kill goblins. Fighter gets a level, kills stuff better, etc.

That's just a regular growth cycle. Demented would be "Ranger must kill exactly 10 of exactly 3 different types of monsters, no more, no less, exactly 10 of which, no more, no less, must be the specific monsters he selected as his favorite monsters, the remainder of which must not have been chosen, to maximize his level-up". That's the kind of thing that Bethesda had, which they rightfully gave the axe to in Skyrim, like they gave the axe to axes in Oblivion.

I think the more glaring failure of Morrowind is unlimited HP increase per level. It leads to a serious HP bloat that devalues defensive spells (no point increasing fire resist if you can fortify health or heal limitlessly) and turns combat into a dumb race to HP bottom. But it's to be expected, because it organically stems from its ******** D&D ROOTS.

I don't think that can be blamed on D&D, since D&D of the era effectively caps out your HP growth by clamping off HP growth post level 9 or 10 (I forget exactly which). This feature was, of course, dropped post-2E and resulted in massive HP bloat after that.

[DemoGraph]

like they gave the axe to axes in Oblivion.

Now I hate you. MUH SPEARS.
Seriously, the logic behind "we failed making a system, lets just cut it" is utterly ********. Bethesda failed at making even a single polished game, they should've bricked themselves long ago.

by clamping off HP growth post level 9 or 10

The growth up to 9th level is bad enough.
And it creates the default impression of "what a successful roleplaying system should be like", because the majority of campaigns are over before epic levels.

[Norfleet]

Now I hate you. MUH SPEARS.

Because of how unbalanced and overpowered spears are, armies would just spam entire blocks of spear infantry. Swords were effectively relegated to sidearm status. Spear infantry OP, plz nerf.

Seriously, the logic behind "we failed making a system, lets just cut it" is utterly ********. Bethesda failed at making even a single polished game, they should've bricked themselves long ago.

Yes and no. Sometimes a system fails so badly that it probably SHOULD be cut, as the effort to salvage it would essentially be the same or greater than a total rewrite....a rewrite which might not necessarily have it in the first place. In Bethesda's case, it's obvious that stats are effectively a redundant system. And frankly, some of the skills are pretty redundant: One-handed weapons vs. two-handed weapons, for instance, of Skyrim. It does not make a lot of sense that I am a master swordsman...but only if I am holding the sword in one hand. The moment I hold the sword in two hands, I apparently don't know which end is the pointy end anymore. Skill systems are pretty weird like that.

[DemoGraph]

Spear infantry OP, plz nerf.

Vivec made them do it. His Muatra is so fat everyone else is ashamed to show theirs.

It does not make a lot of sense that I am a master swordsman...but only if I am holding the sword in one hand. The moment I hold the sword in two hands, I apparently don't know which end is the pointy end anymore.

We have "programmer art" saying. We definitely should have "programmer logic". Because this problem is fixed by reconceptualizing skills.
First option is to have wider categories based on the move set, not a weapon. E.g. fencing (blades) / hacking (axes, maces, some blades) / two handed.
Second option is to make skills leak-out into each other, like in GURPS. I don't remember the specifics, so I'm making it up on the go, but there your single-handed sword X level skill automatically defaults to two-handed sword X-4 level. Or your history 5 defaults to politics 2, because you inevitably pick up one while learning the other.

Of course Fallout-style small weapons / energy weapons is turbo dumb. I don't need a special training to aim a slightly different pistol. It should all be "shooting" with additional perks or secondary skills for sniper rifles and grenade launchers.

The only way to justify skill spam is a marketing necessity to hide the primitivity of the underlying game system.

[rusty_shackleford]

Yes, advertising the number of skills you had in your game was in vogue at the time.

[Norfleet]

Second option is to make skills leak-out into each other, like in GURPS. I don't remember the specifics, so I'm making it up on the go, but there your single-handed sword X level skill automatically defaults to two-handed sword X-4 level. Or your history 5 defaults to politics 2, because you inevitably pick up one while learning the other.

I've always rather liked this because it's realistic in that way, yes.

[Vaako]

Can you even imagine a tabletop game where you're required to play like this?

Yes. The majority of the worker placement tabletops reward you for concentrating resource by giving you a way to get this resource better.
We can even shift the example to D&D without unimaginable stretch. Ranger gets feat to kill goblins -> kills goblins better -> gets more xp -> gets another feat to kill goblins. Fighter gets a level, kills stuff better, etc.

I agree that the skill system implementation in Morrowind is dumb, because it
a) limits stat increase via the pool of possible skill increases,
b) promotes autismmaxxing skills at 10/level to max that stat gain/level.
But I had some characters where I stopped caring and leveled "organically" and the game still was perfectly okay (even without alchemy, etc.). You don't need 100 in everything to finish the game.
And if you do want to statmaxx, you can go to jail to decrease a random assortment of skills. Or use console to decrease them / raise main stats.
Or, you know, just don't bother and chug fortify stat potions.

I think the more glaring failure of Morrowind is unlimited HP increase per level. It leads to a serious HP bloat that devalues defensive spells (no point increasing fire resist if you can fortify health or heal limitlessly) and turns combat into a dumb race to HP bottom. But it's to be expected, because it organically stems from its ******** D&D ROOTS.

I made a mod once that limited player HP to something like Const+Str/2 (without any gain at lvlup whatsoever). It made the player much more vulnerable and the game much more interesting. I actually had to prepare for combat.

I agree with the level up system thats not much fun in multiple playthroughs if you are a min/maxxer. But that they completly removed stats also meant they dumbed down item enchantment possibilities. Skyrim has so few worthwhile enchantments. And if you play as a mage there arent any decent gloves in the whole game even most big artifact mods dont have mage gloves. And if you use enchanting there are also no worthwhile enchantments you can put on gloves/boots except carry weight/sneaking maybe.