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[ductape]

 I facebook friended Malukah when she did her first song because, well...she pretty smokin hot and I wanted to snoop her personal pics.

[Kilroy the Grand]

I facebook friended Malukah when she did her first song because, well...she pretty smokin hot and I wanted to snoop her personal pics.

[scriver]

@Solifuge - I agree with everything you said about quests and non-linearity and that... By I do have to point out that when you jump somewhere enemies can't go and start shooting arrows at them, they do run for cover - the engine still uses the cover mechanics that was implemented for Fallout3. Of course, they're still stupid, meaning that when I jumped to a ledge I could still hit them over the walls they were hiding behind, and they'd just keep running to the same places over and over again. Run to Cover1 -> Get shot -> Run to Cover2 -> Get shot -> Run to Cover3 -> Get shot -> Run to Cover1 -> Get shot -> Run to Cover4 and so on until I killed them all.

[Sordid]

Also, people in morrowind gave you directions and you had to listen and follow them! That was pretty great.

Yeah, just finding your way around can be pretty damn satisfying in a game if it's done right. Case in point, Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover. You do get a zoomable in-game map, but on the highest realism setting it won't show you the position of your aircraft or other units. I cannot describe the satisfaction I felt when I realized I didn't actually need the gamey crutch in the form of map icons, that I could look at the terrain below, look at the map, and figure out where I was and which way I was supposed to go. It felt sooo good that I spent the first fifteen or so hours in free flight with no enemies just flying around, I shit you not. So this game gave me more enjoyment from simply navigating the game world before I even began to play it properly than some other games give you in their entirety.

I think it has something to do with the effort required. If you actually have to think about what you're doing, then succeeding at your task is very satisfying (hence why DF is so incredibly fun once you climb the learning cliff). But if all you have to do is follow a magical quest marker without even paying attention to what supposedly important NPCs are telling you, then the experience is just going to feel hollow and pointless. You could finish Skyrim no problem while skipping all the dialogue and just following the quest marker. Could you finish Morrowind without reading the dialogue and the books? I seriously doubt it. That's really something quite sad, isn't it?

[LoSboccacc]

A similar point focused on interface design
http://gamedesignreviews.com/reviews/street-rod-game-design-and-usability/

[Leatra]

Also, people in morrowind gave you directions and you had to listen and follow them! That was pretty great.

Heh, I remember the fun I had going into wrong directions and witnessing epic stuff because of that. Good ol' times

I mostly miss skills, attributes (thought most people like the way it's in Skyrim) and factions. I was surprised how many people actually liked the removal of some skill and all attributes.

Also, factions didn't make you feel like a chosen one from the start. In Skyrim, whenever you join a faction you get a guy saying you are a special snowflake, have special abilities and stuff like that. There are a few people who disrespect you from the start (weirdly they keep being mean to you even after you become the leader) but it's like everyone has a fixed attitude. In Morrowind, getting promoted and working on your skills to get promoted really felt like you are achieving something. In Skyrim, whenever I become the leader of a faction, I just go "meh" and start looking for other guilds to be the leader. I'm a narcissist dictator like that.

Hell, I didn't even complete the quests of my favorite faction (Hlaalu) in Morrowind. I only managed to become the leader of one guild (Thieves)

[Sordid]

A similar point focused on interface design
http://gamedesignreviews.com/reviews/street-rod-game-design-and-usability/

Oooh, Street Rod! I used to love that game as a kid. We had a wimpy 286 at the time, which could only render the game in CGA mode. So the color palette consisted of four colors, namely pitch black, eye-gouging magenta, radioactive cyan, and blinding white. And it was fantastic anyway.
And yeah, that article totally nailed it.

Oh and btw, if you miss the Street Rod car tuning, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YoMTDzRubw No racing in this one, though.

[Kilroy the Grand]

Also, people in morrowind gave you directions and you had to listen and follow them! That was pretty great.

Hell, I didn't even complete the quests of my favorite faction (Hlaalu) in Morrowind. I only managed to become the leader of one guild (Thieves)

I remember it taking forever to do questlines, and a lot of those thieves guild quests were rather hard from what I remember.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Also, people in morrowind gave you directions and you had to listen and follow them! That was pretty great.

Hell, I didn't even complete the quests of my favorite faction (Hlaalu) in Morrowind. I only managed to become the leader of one guild (Thieves)

I remember it taking forever to do questlines, and a lot of those thieves guild quests were rather hard from what I remember.

I remember walking in circles around a mountain for about an hour looking for an item that was supposedly on it.

[Kilroy the Grand]

Also, people in morrowind gave you directions and you had to listen and follow them! That was pretty great.

Hell, I didn't even complete the quests of my favorite faction (Hlaalu) in Morrowind. I only managed to become the leader of one guild (Thieves)

I remember it taking forever to do questlines, and a lot of those thieves guild quests were rather hard from what I remember.

I remember walking in circles around a mountain for about an hour looking for an item that was supposedly on it.

Staff of the Magi? Some of the items in the game were hard to find. It was neat when I ran into a piece of daedric armor though.

[Sordid]

It was neat when I ran into a piece of daedric armor though.

Those gauntlets behind the coffin (or whatever it was) in the caverns underneath Kogoruhn, just before the exit to the Red Mountain region, right?
Or the daedric monkey helmet in the cave you pass on your way to the first Ashlander camp.
Maaaan, it's all coming back to me.

[Kilroy the Grand]

It was neat when I ran into a piece of daedric armor though.

Those gauntlets behind the coffin (or whatever it was) in the caverns underneath Kogoruhn, just before the exit to the Red Mountain region, right?
Or the daedric monkey helmet in the cave you pass on your way to the first Ashlander camp.
Maaaan, it's all coming back to me.

Skyrim for the most part didn't have experiences like that, because all the loot was worthless, daedric, glass, and ebony were hard to find, and difficult to acquire. In Morrowind there were two complete suits of daedric armor, but to get one you had to kill a quest essential character, the guy who ran the corporsium.

[SomethingCreative]

I just wanted to mention that I managed to get Skyrim running on my toaster. If your specs are better than mine you should be able to play Skyrim.

Intel 4 CPU 2.80 GHZ
1536MB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS/XT 256MB
No sound card

After some .ini tweaking I managed to get around 30 FPS in most areas. I find this absolutely hilarious because this rig can't run Oblivion or Fallout 3 that well.

The game is very fun but it is buggy, which is pretty much every Bethesda game from A-rena to Z. I'm personally finding it to be much better than Oblivion, and haven't enjoyed a Beth game this much since Morrowind.

I'm probably going to regret buying it now instead of waiting a year or so for the "Pretentious of the Year" edition, the final official patch, and the hopefully finished by then community patch.

[Duke 2.0]

It was neat when I ran into a piece of daedric armor though.

Those gauntlets behind the coffin (or whatever it was) in the caverns underneath Kogoruhn, just before the exit to the Red Mountain region, right?
Or the daedric monkey helmet in the cave you pass on your way to the first Ashlander camp.
Maaaan, it's all coming back to me.

Skyrim for the most part didn't have experiences like that, because all the loot was worthless, daedric, glass, and ebony were hard to find, and difficult to acquire. In Morrowind there were two complete suits of daedric armor, but to get one you had to kill a quest essential character, the guy who ran the corporsium.

So they were just like Morrowind?

I get the feeling that a happy medium between spoken directions and quest markers can be achieved, but I can't say I missed walking around some wastelands looking for some goddam door. Or imagining some Skyrim quests without the marker, like that mages guild quest where you look for rings on the ground in a tomb. Or another quest in some hall of the dead where I had to find an amulet.

Morrowind had some good experiences, but they don't hold up when you fix the annoying and stupid parts. We gotta move forward and figure out ways of making cool quests in modern systems.

[Kilroy the Grand]

I meant to say they were hard to find in morrowind, not skyrim.

I would have been fine with the quest system in skyrim in the npcs actually told me how to get to a location, and my quest journal had a short description of the quest, and what I have done in regards to that quest. In morrowind there was far more dialogue, and thus backstory, you got the feeling that dagon fell was different from molag mar.