Imagine having Skyrim and Oblivion exist
And playing avowed lmao 🤣
Avowed’s story is pretty mid, but it’s still much better than either Oblivion or Skyrim’s.
Exploration-wise, of course Oblivion and Skyrim are better. That’s never been Obsidian’s focus.
Bethesda is already prepping to screw them over. Like with the Fallout London guys. Fuck Bethesda. Leaning heavily on the community to fix their issues but ready to fuck them over when they come with a large project by quickly releasing their own shitty remake or updating the game, breaking the mod. Better pirate their games or don’t play them at all, they do not deserve our money.
How did they screw over Fallout London devs?
Bethesda released (announced, maybe?) a mod-beeaking patch 24 hours before the mod was to be released.
You think they intentionally released a patch just to screw over some mod devs?
I honestly don’t know - I have no evidence one way or the other.
However, FO:London was in development for a long time (years?), and Bethesda decided to release a (edit:) mod-breaking patch right before its release, b/c the TV show got popular and they wanted to say the game was still in development?
Maybe it wasn’t specifically to “screw over some mod devs,” but it didn’t help the community one bit.
How breaking was it? I guess that’s more important context
As far as I know, they basically recompiled the main executable from scratch - to which modders inject code…thus jumbling it all up.
Also def. not intentionally - it just coincided with the fallout series and Bethesda, like every company, wanted to get more cake. Dumb move, but eh.
It broke the mod to where it took FOLON (the mod creators) weeks to fix before they could release it.
It was a considerable setback.
With Bethesda you can never really tell if it is deliberate malice or simply their typical blistering incompetence. But the end result is the same either way.
This is why people censor the word “G*mer”
I don’t see Bethesda has doing anything about this project.
Like TESNexus did take down my Morroblivion main quest implementation back in 2010 (although someone else had already uploaded a half done version which was allowed to stay up? maybe they had sucked Arthmoor off or something.) I just moved to the Morroblivion forums after, nbd.
But you’ve been able to complete basically all of Morrowind in Oblivion for more than ten years, and I don’t think Bethesda has done anything. I think they threatened/scared the French guy who made the executable that converted everything, but backed off and never really bothered again.
Tbh, I could see them giving Morrowind away for free at some point - just like Daggerfall and Arena.
The way they might fuck people over is the endless Skyrim and Fallout updates I guess that break fucking everything. But not legally I don’t think. This gets people to buy more copies of Skyrim (and we know the modern gamer isn’t patient enough for Morrowind proper)
This is a weird take. Bethesda isn’t getting in the way of mods and actively supports them, it’s not like they pushed an update to screw over Fallout London, they’re not going to get permission from mod creators to work on their own franchise.
If Bethesda does make their own remake, I fail to see how that hurts the people working on Skyblivion. It’s their franchise, they can do whatever they want.
Exactly! I hate when people keep saying Bethesda “screwed over” mod devs, as if making a free mod takes precedence over someone who actually works for the game studio being told by their boss to make this update happen.
There’s too much going on at the company for someone to try to track down mod authors to “get their permission”
It would be like you offering me a place to stay and asking if I’m okay with you doing housework. Like I have no say, it’s your house, you need to do regular maintenance.
Combining oblivion, morrowind and Skyrim into one game mod: Bethesda broke it. Fallout London: Bethesda broke it. Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod. Yeah, they do actively break mods to screw too enthusiastic modders who will create more and better content using their platforms, which will show their failure, laziness and not-caring-at-all-about-their-customers-at-all, because they only think of money and how to get as much as much as possible by screwing their customers over again and again. Todd is an asshole and Bethesda is a rotten company which still profits and milks their old successes from the time they weren’t rotten.
WTF are you smoking? It was not “specifically designed to break the mod”. It was specifically designed to coincide with the Fallout TV series on Amazon prime.
How are you even getting upvoted? You’re clearly just talking out of your ass.
an update which was specifically designed to break the mod.
[Citation Needed]
Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod.
I’m now curious about this from a technical perspective - how did the update specifically break their mod in particular? Were they doing a bunch of custom DLL hooks or something?
I know with Skyrim SE modding it’s usually that any update breaks SKSE and a tiny handful of other mods that directly hook DLLs or the executable (these mods are usually scripting engine extensions and are a dependency for a variety of other mods), and depending on the update sometimes it takes longer than average to get a new version of those running (the AE update was one of those because they switched compiler version and that broke the method SKSE was using to find hooks). But in general that only breaks 1) mods using those (think SkyUI) until a new version comes out, after which most of those mods start working again without the individual mods needing an update and 2) mods that include their own plugin DLL, (think SkyClimb) which have to wait on an update and then compile a new version of the DLL for the new version of both the game and the other mod, because addresses and functions they are hooking may have changed. Mods not using SKSE or similar generally run just fine between versions of SSE (including AE).
Full recompilation of exec from scratch - memory positions changed and basically f4se became extremely borked.
So basically what happened with the AE release for Skyrim SE where Bethesda switched to a new compiler version and the tool the script extender team was using to find the correct offsets couldn’t handle it so they had to track down the offsets manually like before they’d written the tool, leading to a longer than usual time for the script extender to update than usual?
Which if it’s anything like SSE means that mods that didn’t use F4SE were basically unaffected, mods that use F4SE had to wait for it to update which took longer than usual after which they would mostly work unmodified, and mods that involved a plugin DLL for F4SE had to at the very least be recompiled against the new versions of the game and F4SE. Nothing about that specifically targets Fallout: London though from what it sounds like.
Exactly, nothing target mod specifically, it’s just dramatic people being dramatic. It DOES suck for Fallout London creators, but whatchu gonna do.
Oblivion without the comically fucked-up levelling system sounds like a blast
I remember playing both Morrowind and Oblivion with like a ton of notes on how exactly to level up my character, not to min/max but to keep the game from scaling the difficulty too much.
I’d rather see a remake of Morrowind over Oblivion, though. I have the game on GOG but I don’t have the time in my life to go through all the mods to make it playable (especially getting the journalling system up to par with modern games).
I really dislike any game with difficulty scaling. It might make some sense, if you fight random bandits in the middle of nowhere, since they had time to level up a little, but in most places it’s just annoying.
I’d rather have my character level up and be able to literally destroy everything with one hit when I spend a shit-ton of time making it stronger. See: Gothic games or classic RPG’s.
Skywind is being developed as well.
Morrowind was better than oblivion and Skyrim. Skyrim was good but Morrowind was so well done.
Couldn’t you just kill primary quest givers and be locked out of the game?
Yes. Many people view that as a positive thing.
A positive thing to be able to accidentally not be able to progress in the story?
Yeah, it’s a more immersive and interesting world. I also prefer the quest journal over map markers, make you actually read and interpret shit instead of fast travelling to the nearest pip. You also can’t just be the boss of every faction, they have incompatible goals.
And it does say when you break a main quest so you can revert your save. Just don’t be a murderhobo.
A positive thing to let you experience the consequences of your actions. You are ignoring the fact that the game explicitly tells you when this happens, giving you the choice to continue if you like or reload a previous save if you don’t. It’s actually more forgiving than dying in most RPGs, which would force you to reload from a previous save.
Morrowind had a decent story and great world building but the mechanics were absolute shit.
Don’t run everywhere (keep fatigue bar at least half full). Don’t use weapon skills that are less than 40 (train them - there aren’t restrictions like in the later games).
It’s closer to D&D than an action RPG. Your swing is like a “to hit” roll. The game cares about your character’s skill - not yours.
I like Morrowind a lot mechanically - I like that the game will happily allow you to kill anyone you want (and with Taunt - you can do it legally!) You can complete the main quest after slaughtering everyone on Vvardenfell bar one person (the thread of prophecy might be broken - but a larger theme in ES lore is that we make prophecies happen).
I like that the game is designed around the lack of fast travel. When I complain about fast travel in Oblivion and Skyrim, I hear “just don’t use it” but it isn’t really feasible (playing a Survival run in Skyrim and life just sucks if I have to go to Morthal).
Morrowind’s world is just real and thought out in a way that I haven’t seen in a game since. The towns are designed around food sources, there’s a lot of thought into to the economies of plantation slavery, and it’s all used to enhance the world building.
The fact you have to start your comment with multiple don’t do X things proves my point. As a story it’s great, but as a game it’s got a lot of problems.
The game tells you these things though. You have to pay attention.
It’s an RPG before it is an action game. The mechanics align with that - you just might not like traditional CRPGs - which is fine, most don’t which is why Bethesda basically dropped the pretense of their games being RPGs by Skyrim.
Edit: if you want the easiest time in Morrowind - a Redguard. Adrenaline Rush will get you through tough spots. If you’re impatient and willing to sacrifice optimization for speed (which isn’t really that much a big deal), take the Steed as your sign. The Lady is better for optimization and will save you money on bribes.
If you want cheese: steal the lime ware plate on the shelves in the Census and Excise office right as you start the game. Drop it before the guard confronts you, pick it back up after he chews you out. Sell to Arrille, buy equipment matching your best armor skill/weapon skill. Hop over to Addamasartus, clear out, grab the moon sugar, sell to Ravirr in Balmora for one of his “Daedric weapons.”
But really the purpose of the game is that you should be a low level dweeb for a while. Pacing is slower - if you’re going to do the Mage’s Guild - you should be capable of magic. Lots of those early quests are no combat/easy.
It’s an experience about immersion. The gameplay and mechanics are built to facilitate this. You’re supposed to suck at first - that’s why Caius basically tells you to fuck off at the beginning of the game. You do end up with your god power fantasies at the end - by the time you’ve killed two gods and a pretender, you do get to run around one shotting everything. (Better than Sheogorath him-fucking-self getting ganked by a troll because its health pool is in the triple digits.)
Other than the roll to hit mechanic (which would be pretty cool if paired with parry and dodge animations), which mechanics were “absolute shit”?
The level up system was bad. The thrust/chop/slash system for weapons is awkward. Every attack costing stamina is bad for early characters. The excessive number of weapon categories, combined with short and long blades being the only ones that were common. The persuasion system was just bribe people to get what you want, or taunt them for free murder. Run speed being a skill, jumping being faster than running and being a skill as well (combined with the level system this can cause problems). Item durability in general. The encumbrance system, and containers having weight limits. The spell making and enchantment system had some cool things, but it was also trivial to break the game in multiple ways. The quest tracking and journaling was garbage. Alchemy was undercooked. Merchants had way too little gold so selling became annoying by mid level. The haggling quickly got annoying as you could sell at extreme markup or buy for nothing fairly easy. Magicka didn’t regenerate, so being a mage was annoying at early levels until you had sufficient potion access.
There’s also some things that are more bugs I think than bad mechanics. Stealing from a merchant flagged every copy of an item as stolen from them. I once managed to make every redoran guard hostile to me on sight, which got really annoying.
Almost everything you said is why I prefer Morrowind and replay it more than any other Elder Scroll. I don’t like how hand-holdy and forgiving most modern games are.
The AI is obviously dated, some of the systems are underdeveloped, but stuff like the quest journal and athletic skills and how hard it is at the beginning if you aren’t careful or attentive are all major plusses for me. I want the weapon variety, I want the freedom to be anything but without the wishy-washy “you can be everything” style Skyrim has because they’re terrified of locking a player out of any content.
The absolute shit mechanics had some kernels of gold though. I loved my Fortify Strength 100 Jump 100 spell and my 10 chaingun lightning amulets. Very few games let you do properly weird stuff with magic.
the mechanics were absolute shit
Levitate on up to the top of my Telvanni tower and tell that to my face—oh wait, you can’t!
psh all i need is a horse and i will climb anything
Touché, but not even a horse can get you through a hole in the middle of a room’s ceiling.
Also, there were other things that were mechanically better about Morrowind, such as its much more interesting/immersive fast travel system.
Oblivion paintbrushes will get me up there just fine.
Wow I’m really surprised to hear people actually played with vanilla Morrowind and Oblivion leveling. I modded both games to fix that issue almost immediately after realizing how bad the system was.
I don’t think it was a problem in Morrowind, iirc there was no scaling at all, NPCs just existed at a set level so different areas of the map opened up to you naturally as you leveled up. It’s been a minute since I played through it so I might be mistaken but I don’t remember it being a problem, as opposed to OPblivion
There was scaling, but it was done pretty sensibly, compared to Oblivion
Scaling in Morrowind wasn’t really a problem because almost every enemy was hand placed. You don’t have hordes of generic “Bandits” (in glass fucking armor at end game) - you have Tunipy Sharmirbasour, who has a reason for being where she is and a set level. Barring like guards and some of the humanoid enemies in Tribunal and Bloodmoon - everyone has a name.
Leveling only really comes into play when it comes to some of the generic loot that can be rolled, what some shopkeepers might have, and generic creature enemies. Even then, the scaling isn’t ridiculous - going from rats to Kagouti doesn’t feel uneven. Unlike Oblivion, you also will continue to see lower level enemies generated.
Oblivion even levels the quest rewards - so your Daedric artifacts and faction completion rewards will be useless once you level.
Leveling in Oblivion also affects enemy stats, and a lot of time it’s a flat bonus. Late game ogres and Minotaurs are not fun to fight, because they’re just massive health pools.
Morrowind has the same “inefficient” leveling problem (like, endurance is something you want to upgrade as early as possible, because it effects how much health you get every level up) - but in Morrowind you aren’t permanently fucked because you spent your first ten levels training acrobatics and speech craft or something.
Oblivion’s scaling was so wonky. Especially compared with what I really believe to be one of the worst leveling systems of all time. Anyone defending the leveling in Oblivion is nostalgic or thinks things are good just because they’re complicated. Being able to both under AND over level was such weird design.
I mean, for Morrowind at the time I played it, I probably didn’t even realise modding was a thing, I must have played it around 2005 or so :-)
I tried that once, found it too tedious, and just stopped levelling up instead
There is a group that’s remaking Morrowind in Skyrim, but I have absolutely no idea how far along they are https://tesrskywind.com/
Oblivion XP was fun.
If you think Oblivion’s was comically fucked up, I have to assume you didn’t play Morrowind. Which was basically the same but worse.
I did play it! But I found the significantly lower usage of level scaling made it much less of a problem. Like… it is still a car crash of a system, but I don’t have to compete with the fact that every enemy in the world is scaled to challenge me if I a) levelled perfectly and b) put every level into combat skills
The random hit chance thing is a separate issue though
I honestly can’t remember, did morrowind have scaling? I remember hitting walls, but not ones that were because I was too high level.
It did. You’ll start to see “mudcrabs” become, like, “diseased mudcrab” and other various divider names as they scaled up with you, the same as they do in Oblivion and Skyrim. It has the same problem of “oh no, I leveled up to 25 by only jumping and now everything is too strong for my wimpy combat skills to handle.” Though because the game is already tougher from the start, it may not be as noticeable.
I’m waiting for skyrim and oblivion to be remade in OpenMW
There are mods that add Skyrim and Cyrodiil.
I think Project Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel are the ones.
I’ve not played them, watched a stream play one of them. The tippy part is they go off the OG lore so Cyrodiil is a more tropical/Mediterranean climate which is fun.
The tippy part is they go off the OG lore so Cyrodiil is a more tropical/Mediterranean climate which is fun.
Fucking Thalmor denying the power of Talos of Atmora.
Seriously though, the canon explanation for Cyrodiil being the way it is now as opposed to original lore is that when Talos achieved CHIM he changed it, because that’s a thing you can do with the secret syllable of royalty. All part of the path to mantling Shor/Lorkhan via one of the Walking Ways and forging an empire.
I’ve joked in other places in the past that CHIM stands for “Character Has Installed Mods” because what it allows is roughly on par with the character opening the modding tools and changing what they want to change.
I’ve used Tamriel Rebuilt a while back and it was pretty fucking cool. There was only one small patch of the map that wasn’t completed when I played it, and none of it was populated. But they had the landmasses and cities all built and decorated. If they haven’t gotten NPCs populating places by now, I have no idea what they’ve been doing this whole time (it’s been several years now since I checked it out).
The fully lit portions of this map have been fully NPCd and quested. You might have enabled the preview landmass, which includes (or included, not sure if they still distribute it) a bunch of mostly mapped exteriors with partial interiors and typically no NPCs.
Skyblivion in OpenMW
They need to. Strong rumours that Bethesda has tasked a studio to remake Oblivion in a different engine.
Let’s see who can do it better, BGS or unpaid indie devs.
My money is not on BGS.
Frankly Bethesda would do very well with remastering all their previous tes games, including the first two.
I would really like to play Morrowind with the option of a modern UI instead of dragging windows around and clicking stuff
A remaster for the first two wouldn’t be enough, I figure. I played daggerfall unity and it just does not hold up. A full on remake would be interesting, but they’d have to go hard, and reconceptualize a lot.
I feel like at this point, remaking Daggerfall would need to involve replacing the procedural generation with generative AI.
Nah, they could just make it smaller instead of filling it with slop
Without the gargantuan 3-dimensional death maze dungeons it’s not really going to appeal to the hardcore Daggerfall fans.
A different engine? Are you sure? They just buffed up their creation engine 2 for Starfield.
Both and Neither.
It’s the same as the GTA remasters, it’s still Gamebryo running the game, but UE5 will be handling the rendering.
Yeah an ex Virtuos developer said they had been working on a remake in UE5 for Bethesda. Can’t find the reference but it was a big rumour a while ago.
not a huge fan of UE5* but it has to be better than the spaghetti that is CE2 at this point.
*-The engine itself isn’t the problem developers just don’t optimize shit because they aren’t given the time/derective to.
The engine itself isn’t the problem developers just don’t optimize shit because they aren’t given the time/derective to
The same can be said for CE2.
While the Creation Engine can be limited, the issue with Bethesda games is not the engine, but their development and direction
You’re not wrong honestly. Some how they spend so long making games and they still seem like they need another 2 years in the oven.
Have you seen what the recent UE5 games play like? Not even frame generation can make them run smoothly.
I honestly prefer creation.
I think Avowed is the smoothest (strictly comparative) game on UE5 I’ve played in a long time. I get 120fps locked on epic and no shader compilation stutters (1440p, 7900XTX and 7800X3D, FSR quality) outside of cities. As soon as I enter a city and move my camera/character, it dips to 50fps with my GPU barely being used and CPU spiking, which really doesn’t make much sense to me considering the aren’t a lot of NPCs in town and they don’t move/have routines
My experience so far has been very different. I have a 6950 and can barely hit 60 fps on high settings with upscaled 4k.
The issue there is 4K, even with upscalers it’s a massive rendering job for GPUs. Realistically, only the 4090 and 5090 could run in high settings at 4K (with or without upscaling). I had a 4K monitor with my 7900 XTX and decided to dial back to 1440p (and got a n OLED screen too) so I could run my games at max on 120 or 144 FPS, because at 4K I would get anything between 50 and 100 fps with a mix of high and medium settings
I really hope so! It seems like such a no brainer, get a studio to remake the bulk of it and keep creative control. I came into TES world in Skyrim and would love to go back through them but I’m a snob for a modern looking game now.
Even if they do, I feel like both projects will have different enough approach to things to avoid making the other obsolete. Maybe… possibly.
I’ll certainly take the unofficial remake over the Bethesda one due to lower requirements and lack of Creation Club. That, and I’m just more interested in the fan interpretation of Cyrodiil to be honest.
I thought I’d heard a rumor that TES 6 was going to be an Oblivion remake, which would be a dick move on Bethesda’s part if true.
How? I don’t care how long a game takes to make, I want it to be good.
Half right. There are credible rumors that they’ll be releasing a remaster of Oblivion soon, which is a separate project from TES 6. And yeah, it’s a major dick move.
How is it a dick move to remake their own game? I would love that and buy it day one, Oblivion is amazing and it’s very constrained by its PS3/360 era memory limits.
A dick move would be sending a C&D to the Skyblivion team and not letting the remaster/remake stand on its own. Attitudes like this are why most developers don’t even bother with modding support.
Bethesda heavily leans on their community to fix their insane amount of issues. When the community comes with a big project, like Fallout London for example, they screw them over by quickly updating the game, breaking the mod, or by releasing their own shitty remake like in this case. They encourage people to work for free for them but they love to screw them over when they do something Bethesda could earn money with or show the shortcomings of that shitty company.
You’re not wrong, they are absolutely within their rights, and Skyblivion shouldn’t preclude others from Oblivion projects (especially not the IP holders). But it still rubs me and others the wrong way. Bethesda doesn’t need to do this; they aren’t hurting for cash. It feels petty to jump on the Oblivion remaster train right as this public (free) project, that has been worked on for like a decade, is nearing the end of its production. It’s just slimy behaviour from Bethesda IMO, but I will definitely give them kudos for not issuing a cease and desist.
How is that a dick move? Bethesda (and other companies) don’t owe anything to the very small community of modders of their products, and they certainly aren’t doing this rumoured remake out of spite for the Skyblivion team.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-elder-scrolls-4-oblivion-remake-details-reportedly-leak-online
Yup. They love to screw the community. All they care about is money. Fuck Bethesda.
I bought oblivion six years ago in anticipation of this release. Just another couple of years until it’s done.
I hope they manage to get it complete, and good. Giving Oblivion another try (this time exploring the rest of the world instead of focusing on the boring main quest) has been on my list for a while, and improved graphics would be welcome.
That font, though… not a good choice for quickly delivering information. Mods to the rescue?
Funny, for me it’s the other way around. I probably played a couple hundred hours of Oblivion back in the day: modding, exploring and restarting. Never once finished the main quest. I’m thinking Skyblivion might be my chance to finally do it.
That’s me with every Bethesda game I played. I don’t even treat them as games to beat, just worlds to run around in.
just worlds to run around in
Which, ironically, was why I only played the main quest in Starfield vanilla. Running around empty, boring planets, with copy-pasted dungeons (there’s only, what, 10 varieties?), felt like nothing but a colossal waste of time.
So glad I didn’t pay for it (Gamepass, with apologies to my Linux friends).
Starfield never really grabbed my attention so I thankfully dodged a bullet with that one.
So glad I didn’t pay for it (Gamepass, with apologies to my Linux friends).
No need to apologise, people should have the option to play games however they want.
I got through about half the main story before the load-door-load-fastravel-load-door-load made me just give up. I learned later you can directly fast travel from the map but for some reason when I tried it initially it didn’t work and thought you had to go to your ship everytime.
Sweet, then I could finally play oblivion instead of giving up after the 34th crash
