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[NakeyJakey] Bethesda's Game Design Was Outdated a Decade Ago
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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Two decades.
Daggerfall was way, way, way ahead of its time… but when Vijay, Peterson, & LeFay left Bethesda it was all downhill. Morrowind was a pale shadow of Daggerfall, and it only went downhill from there as each release stripped back progressively more and more of Elder Scroll’s ambition and personality. Who was responsible for all this anti-ambitious anti-progress? Todd Howard.
Morrowind has never been a pale shadow of Daggerfall. It's just another take on the RPG genre, and a masterful one.
Of course, it's not a RPG sandbox like Daggerfall was and that might put off the early Elder Scrolls fans, but it's superior to its big brother on numerous accounts : story lines, lore, immersion, quests, etc.
Morrowind is a handcrafted marvel with manually placed details everywhere that make the game fascinating and fun to explore, unlike Daggerfall which was big, but repetitive due to its procedural system.
For some reason, Elder Scrolls is cursed. EVERY Elder Scrolls game that comes out (except Daggerfall) has a massive number of detractors about some facet of it that is "a pale shadow" of the previous.
I was around when people treated Morrowind like they are treating Starfield now. Then Oblivion had a much smaller complaint-base, but it revolved around the "disappointing lack of immersion" because Morrowind was such an opinionated game. Then Skyrim comes out and "it's like they put Training Wheels on Oblivion".
Starfield is just suffering from the same Elder Scrolls curse (but in space). To me, Starfield is a great game that might not be for everyone, but that some of those walking away from it are being told they don't like it.
And it's a bit of a problem. There's not much to change. The story is deep, so they can't add more story like NMS did. It's the most stable Bethesda game ever, so it's not about building stability. The gameplay mechanics are reasonable, so it's not about adding new systems. Bethesda might well be screwed this time - because there's nothing to change.
Daggerfall had some basic guiding principles that have been slowly stripped away by every new release...
It was unapologetically grimdark. The lore was dark, sinister, and scary... very Robert E Howard meets Lovecraft.
It was obsessed with simulation. They wanted a world that functioned logically... hour to hour, day to day, season to season, character to character, and as seamlessly as possible.
It strove for tabletop-level freedom without limits. You could climb, sneak, swim... across rooftops, in streets, in dungeons... there were no barriers whatsoever.
It reinforced that decisions have consequences, with multiple paths if you followed the main story.
With Morrowind, they killed the grimdark and gutted the lore. They replaced the existential dread of the lore with "weirdness". They took the mature, unflinching tone out behind the shed... replacing it with T-rated YA content. Oblivion finally completed the transition from grimdark to sterile high fantasy. This is especially heinous because the Elder Scrolls Bible laid out the franchise from Daggerfall through Oblivion, and Oblivion was supposed to be the final, the darkest, most oppressive game in the series, being literally about the end of the world.
While Morrowind strove to preserve some of the simulation, the grand multi-season scope pared this back somewhat. From there, it never evolved or advanced at all, with each new game using the same minimal, basic simulation.
The tabletop level freedom was completely axed as a guiding principle. Instead, the gameplay became much more gamey. No longer would you sink if you tried to swim while carrying too much weight, climbing has been completely non-existent, dungeoneering mechanics - and dungeoneering as a major gameplay loop - were removed en masse... and all while the seamless open world has had more and more seams - loading zones, invisible walls, etc - added.
And finally, all consequences were removed as basic principles. You could join any and all guilds or factions, your choices had no ramifications or outcomes or branching paths... there was not so much as an attempt to maintain an illusion of impact on the story or simulation.
These are the things people are talking about when they complain about each new TES game being lesser than the one before. And worst of all, they took all this withering away of ambition and applied it to Fallout, gutting the IP's very soul... and nobody really noticed this trend until Starfield, because it was a new IP that was less prone to being viewed through rose-tinted nostalgia.
Every Bethesda game that comes out (not just TES) is worse than the previous. Objectively. Because Todd Howard has removed every shred of fearless ambition from the company.
I actually heard recently that morrowind used some procedural tech in the generation of it's world. They just picked the generation to go with and built on top of it rather than handcrafting from scratch. Which is what starfield should've done to at least a handful of planets that are off significance.
Preach. Daggerfall was the first PC game I got on release. It was the buggiest game I have ever played, and I loved it. Morrowind was such a shock in size and complexity reduction that it took me a while to like it. In retrospect, especially knowing how the following games went, it was great, cliffracers aside.
See, this is what I'm talking about. We have entire generations of people parroting this nonsense because they started with Morrowind and never actually played Daggerfall. It's incredibly sad.
'I'm idolizing my childhood so you must be too' is not productive, to put it lightly. Daggerfall has a comically large empty world full of nearly-identical comically large empty towns. It sends you to dungeons that are hideously complex, which is a nice change of pace, but not exactly great to play through. Dialog is a lot more freeform, for better and for worse, and I could at least allow that dialog gets streamlined more harshly in every game.
Look: Daggerfall was ambitious. Its reach exceeded its grasp, by a lot - but it fuckin' tried. That's admirable, and something to strive for now that knowledge and technology have advanced so far. But it doesn't make a jank relic with sink-or-swim gameplay the bestest thing evar. It certainly doesn't make the homogeneous medieval aesthetic have more personality than mushroom castles, meteorite prisons, and a crab-dome city.
I didn't start with Morrowind but Oblivion so you can't blame nostalgia for my opinion, and I have spent around 50-100h on Daggerfall. Now that your point is invalid, do you want to try something else?