Favorite Bethesda Game

[asf]

Forgot the play ******** social minigame part

[asf]

Average obibion experience:

- Arrive in town, "halp, hordes of demons are pouring through oblibion gate, you need to save us";
- Go to gate, find one imp walking around;
- imp drops dead after one punch, "ohhh you are the hero of kvatch".

I suppose I could comment on the great combat system of cast spell that does 1 damage per second during 454475436 seconds then cast invis, but that is every beth masterpiece.

[agentorange]

How EXACTLY is a quest supposed to "take advantage of the open world"?

by allowing players to get lost in it. Morrowind forces you to actually pay attention to what a questgiver says, watch where you're going, point out the landmarks, etc. Meanwhile in Oblivion you can just fast-travel to a quest marker.

Kingdom Come Deliverance, despite overall having a rather inconsistent approach to quest design, has quite a lot of good quests that take advantage of the open world. Not all quests guide you directly to a specific location or an NPC, in some cases you must ask the neighbors on their whereabouts, or visit a local pub or an inn. The infamous monastery quest takes advantage of the NPC AI routines, forcing the player to larp as a monk for a few days and repeate the same actions as other fellow monks in order to blend in.

Let's not conflate fast travel with quest markers. Morrowind had fast travel too, they were just called silt striders and boats, and good thing because it already requires aggressive movespeed mods.

You're stupid.

[Emphyrio]

by allowing players to get lost in it. Morrowind forces you to actually pay attention to what a questgiver says, watch where you're going, point out the landmarks, etc. Meanwhile in Oblivion you can just fast-travel to a quest marker.

Kingdom Come Deliverance, despite overall having a rather inconsistent approach to quest design, has quite a lot of good quests that take advantage of the open world. Not all quests guide you directly to a specific location or an NPC, in some cases you must ask the neighbors on their whereabouts, or visit a local pub or an inn. The infamous monastery quest takes advantage of the NPC AI routines, forcing the player to larp as a monk for a few days and repeate the same actions as other fellow monks in order to blend in.

Let's not conflate fast travel with quest markers. Morrowind had fast travel too, they were just called silt striders and boats, and good thing because it already requires aggressive movespeed mods.

You're stupid.

>99th percentile on Wonderlic

[wndrbr]

Let's not conflate fast travel with quest markers. Morrowind had fast travel too, they were just called silt striders and boats, and good thing because it already requires aggressive movespeed mods.

silt striders, boats, mages guild teleportation, mark&recall and other means never allowed you to just jump in any of the already visited locations. You still had to learn the locations of NPCs who help you to fast-travel, and you still had to learn the optimal ways to travel to specific places.

In Oblivion, in order to get to a specific city while being stranded in the wilderness, all you had to do was to press a button on your world map.
In Morrowind, in order to travel to, for example, Dagon Fel, you had to:
- use the spell of ALMSIVI intervention;
- walk on foot from the church of Tribunal to either the local mages guild, or the local Silt Strider;
- teleport to Sadrit Mora's chapter of the mages guild, or use Silt Strider to jump to Khuul;
- walk on foot to the harbor, then hire a boatman.
That's way more immersive than just pressing a button on a map.

[aweigh]

Let's not conflate fast travel with quest markers. Morrowind had fast travel too, they were just called silt striders and boats, and good thing because it already requires aggressive movespeed mods.

silt striders, boats, mages guild teleportation, mark&recall and other means never allowed you to just jump in any of the already visited locations. You still had to learn the locations of NPCs who help you to fast-travel, and you still had to learn the optimal ways to travel to specific places.

In Oblivion, in order to get to a specific city while being stranded in the wilderness, all you had to do was to press a button on your world map.
In Morrowind, in order to travel to, for example, Dagon Fel, you had to:
- use the spell of ALMSIVI intervention;
- walk on foot from the church of Tribunal to either the local mages guild, or the local Silt Strider;
- teleport to Sadrit Mora's chapter of the mages guild, or use Silt Strider to jump to Khuul;
- walk on foot to the harbor, then hire a boatman.
That's way more immersive than just pressing a button on a map.

Making fast travel cost a resource is an easy fix. Mages already have something like that with mark and recall, it works but it's not "free". Problem is the game has to be designed around this, you can't just mod it into a game and expect it to be anything other than the band-aid it is.

CDPR's signposts/mailbox fast travelling in Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk is inelegant but it's something at least. Honestly it's hard to come up with a good solution. Making fast travel potentially deadly is a good heavy-handed approach that might work but it depends on the game and whether combat is meant to take time or be deadly or be based on attrition, etc.

One way could be to have the world map divided into zones of influence, and in order to continually expand your choices for fast travel (to and fro) inside a specific zone you need to do things like either unlock relevant NPCs and services through questing or combat, restore these services or build them yourself, create a settlement, stuff like that. Then you could also have different zones with different kinds of travel systems, and maybe one zone can't just travel you straight to another one but you have to take a connecting route.

lol i just described Morrowind with extra steps.