TES games have no substitute?

/thread

Your parents.

where's the quote tho

Well checked.

watch this trips

shit, one digit off

nice

watch these trips boi

The only decent open world sandbox games have been Morrowind and San Andreas. Everything else has been a complete shitfest, even other games in the same franchises.

It really is as simple as this.

lol

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

demonic trips, simply devilish

Get out of here.

no

I did? Wow. I think I have, but I just don't even remember it. Must be the fact that I've been not using much internet in the last 2 weeks. Didn't have the chance to browse Holla Forums for more than 3 minutes. Too much work to do. Sorry about that, really.

simple economics bro

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1. It takes an absurd budget to actually make something that size that's voice acted and not procedurally generated.
2. Normalfags buy based on brand recognition, and in order to recoup the aforementioned gigantic budget you need normalfags.
3. Normalfags are also driven away by good (complex, challenging) RPG mechanics.

Anything that could compete with TES would be shit in exactly the same ways TES is.

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To expand upon this, the biggest reason you don't seen lots of competition for a game series like TES (or any really large AAA game series) is what's called "economies of scale".

Essentially, the larger a company is, the easier it becomes for it to make a profit and stay in business, because the cost of the inputs goes down. In many business areas, this manifests in circumstances like producers of an input material offering lower prices for buying in bulk that end up being a deal when you are buying millions of units of something. In vidya, it essentially boils down to larger companies already having access to hundreds upon hundreds of skilled programmers and artists, and already owning game engine assets or having exclusive deals with engine owners.

Basically, Bethesda has a company full of people who have decades of game experience and they have an engine (although buggy and shitty) that they own the rights to and are already very familiar with. In addition, they already have a publisher aligned with them and the TES is an established franchise that would pose little risk to investors in a pitch. In short, all it would take for the nest TES to begin development would be for Todd Howard to ask Zenimax "want another cashcow?" to which Zenimax would probably say "Sure! Just wait a few months for retards to stop buying Skyrim remastered!" On the other hand, if a new developer wants to make an open-world RPG, they'd need to hire lots of competent workers, buy the rights to a game engine (assuming they don't waste time making their own), train the new employees in the game engine. Commission artists for game assets and concept art, use these assets to create a pitch to a publisher, somehow convince the publisher to risk a new IP (also considering they'd have to compete with the giants such as TES) and somehow make up for the unknown name of their company and game with a large marketing budget once the game is finished.

For the same reason no one has challenged CA and Total War in years. The industry is creatively bankrupt.

You have one developer monopolizing any given niche while the rest are either making a Call of Duty clone, a World of Warcraft clone, or smearing their shit stained fingers on the indie scene.

Yet keep making shit games. The irony here is that Bethesda is staffed with Todd's butt buddies. It's why their writing and animations are abysmal, the people in charge of those departments are Todd's college friends.

It wouldn't take much to overtake Bethesda in terms of technology or quality. There are better engines out there, and I'm reasonably sure one could drum up a custom engine with a focus on modding that would blow their shitty one out of the water, and any random bum off the street could write a better plot than Bethesda does.

It's not about "economics of scale", it's that the industry is geared towards making a single type of game nowadays. CA makes Total War, Ubisoft makes AssCreed in different colors, Bethesda makes TES and TES with guns, EA shits out Call of Duty wannabes, Activision makes Call of Duty and props up World of Warcraft.

These companies have spent years gearing up to keep rehashing the same product over and over again to the point they have neither the will nor the skill to make anything else.

I guarantee you if you tasked Bethesda with making anything that isn't a Morrowind derivative they'd flail around in confusion. Just look how badly they fucked up when they attempted to ape New Vegas.

Saved, thanks user.

Shit, forgot to post my OC

So cut out most of the VA and scale the gameworld down to a size your team can manage. Then price the game accordingly. Offer the TES experience at half the price and once you've established a following build on that.

Don't target normalfags. Not everything needs to be Skyrim or Call of Duty. There is a substantial number of TES fans and RPG gamers in general that want something like Morrowind again. Give them what Bethesda and their watered down shit won't.

And? It never stopped a good game from finding a niche. Age of Decadence is about as hardcore and niche as you can get in terms of RPGs, yet it made enough money for the developers to justify starting production of a new game.

There have been plenty of attempts to make another TES franchise

almost all of them have failed because they make a shitty 6/10 game and don't sell enough to break even. Open world games cost a lot of money to make and they're highly risky.

Like this was the last game I remember that tried something similar and completely died on arrival.

If a bunch of drunken Germans can make Gothic 1 and 2 inbetween bouts of apologizing for the Holocaust, and a bunch of Slavs can shit out three STALKER games while wasting half the budget on vodka there is no excuse as to why you can't make an open world RPG.

Okay. Also, I like how you conveniently ignore Witcher 3.

Kill yourself.

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Gothic 1 and 2 were made in a time when you could make a game for like 10 grand and make it sell.

Nowadays games need like a 50 million marketing budget or you never hear about them

The Witcher 3 was the third game in a franchise.

The original The Witcher was a game that wasn't even meant to be localized in English until it was picked up by Atari. It was absurdly low budget and sold triple the amount it did at retail after The Witcher 2 released.

nowadays hundreds of games release every year and you need an enormous marketing budget to even make anyone buy it. It's why companies spend more on marketing than they do on the game itself

Age of Decade was made by three guys in their spare time. It's even more easy to make games today than it was back then. You have so many engines and middleware available that even retarded leftists can cobble a project together. If a Marxist can make something functional then so can everyone.

Again, AoD or Underrail sold well enough to justify new projects by the developers.

And an open world game. user said it was "risky" and then strawmanned with a shitty MMO turned single player.

This is pure bullshit. You need a massive marketing budget if you're making a blockbuster meant to cast as wide a neat as possible. If you're working on something for a specific audience they will hear about it and spread it by word of mouth.

Again, and I can't stress this enough, Age of Decadence is the perfect example of these kinds of project can work out. The issue isn't the market, it's a lack of ambition by people in the industry.

I'm frankly amazed that, despite the number of passionate modders among Bethesda fans, none of them pooled their expertise to attempt and make a TES clone.

How come do these games have all the capability to make a TES-like experience (open areas, entering and exiting buildings, lootable items, inventory and equipment system, NPC dialogue, quest fetching) yet utterly failed at level design? They could very easily be fully open ended like TES, but they chose to be boring. It always boggles me to imagine what these devs were thinking.

Can high doses of iron kill you? Because their entire existence is ironic.

Now you're speaking my language.

You don't have to post in this thread if you don't want to, you know.

Aren't the people behind Nehrim planning that?

I want the underage redditfags to go.

the fuck is going on here

I don't know but I want in on it.

Exploration in Gothic never compelled me the same way TES does. In TES, you can walk into any part of the map anytime, you can choose to ignore objectives and just make your own journey and discovery. Gothic is a lot too rigid compared to TES.

>de-leveled world that heavily rewards exploration
What in the absolute fuck?

That's not a good thing. It makes the main quest lack any and all actual presence in the game and indirectly makes you want to ignore it. It's why in every Bethesda game it seems like it's the worst content since they already know every player will ignore it

If you compare it to Fallout New Vegas, the game's world is designed in such a way that the first half of the game has the player take a pre-determined route. But you can venture off if you really want to. As a result more people have completed F:NV's main quest because there was more thought put into it.

This is only in Skyrim. Morrowind is more objective-based and Oblivion is just an empty landscape.

Except for all the interesting places that are locked or blocked until you start its related quest. Or level scaling that makes the loot you'd find that dungeon in bumfuck nowhere the same you'd find in the one down the road from the nearby village.

I think you are on to the right track but are missing the most important factor, and thats that ALL open world rpgs lack URGENCY. Think about it, all the great epic quests of fantasy and mythology have this sense of impending failure that pushes the heroes towards the objective. Frodo needs to destroy the ring before Sauron can conquer Middle Earth. Perseus was on a time-sensitive quest to gather objects to save Andromeda.

In TES and Fallout games, there either A, isnt any urgency and is therefore shitty by merit of that alone, or B, there IS a sense of urgency but its all superficial because the developers pussy out of impacting the player for not solving problems quickly(Oblivion etc).
In other words, developers need to show some backbone and actually make the main quest matter, and impact the player for failing to take it seriously. Im tired of this sentiment that everyone should be able to "beat" a game. It leads to shitty writing and shitty design.

Daggerfall and Fallout 1 do this pretty well. The common workaround is just not to have a need for urgency. Fallout: New Vegas did a good job escaping this, the only issue here is that the first half of the game involves you chasing a guy in a checkered suit who could very well get away.

Other RPG's, though, Jesus Christ. I was playing Xenoblade X used copy, don't get triggered yesterday. The story was pretty decent, but holy shit it tells you that there's a growing risk of your bodies blowing up at any given time from a power outage and then it tells you to kind of relax a while and do a few sidequests before progressing in the story. I'll be kind of glad when devs either stop trying to do the "exploration based RPG's" or at least make them slightly less narrative driven.

An easy fix for that is putting a timeline on a timer that operates completely separate from the player (though certain player actions can influence it).

So, if you get an urgent message that a town is under siege and do nothing about it next time you come around you'll find it has been conquered by the enemy. Things like that.

Also, I think it's less an unwillingness to punish players and more a question of allocating resources. For every loss scenario you create you need to now write up a new cast of NPCs that populate that worldspace. You could pussy out and just make them all enemies, or have the aforementioned town be razed to the ground, but then you'd have people feeling cheated out.

The witcher 3 is a perfect example of that in display.

this this this
It's always the biggest point of annoyance for me
Honestly, I think one workaround could be to make the world work on it's own without player input, similar to how in STALKER, stalkers go stalking and fight without you there to push them along

Honestly, an interesting open world game shouldn't even establish you as some grand hero on a quest, just a regular adventurer/stalker/merc/etc trying to keep the bills paid off and maybe working towards that grand payday that everyone dreams of finding

Who the fuck wants to be the great world saving hero in TES?
In Morrowind I don't do the main quest, I just want to be a wizard.

I don't know, user. A lot of people seem to be to critical of games that make you the hero, saying it's unrealistic or overplayed, but I like being the one guy who gets that title. Thing is, I really need to feel like I either earned it or was simply in a realistic enough situation for it to happen.

F:NV does a good job at this. Your main intentions are either completing your job, getting revenge, or having a little talk about the platinum chip to do the first half of the story. Then your relentless motivation to do that quest attracts the people who are in charge to give you a high status in their plans to rule Las Vegas.

If they force you to earn it and actually give you rewards/consequences for doing it then sure, but a lot of games don't do this

While this is a shitty example, after you are officially granted the title of neveraine in morrowind, it's nice that everyone calls you that

The thing is in FONV You don't really have an option to "Fail", if you complete the game you are a huge player with enormous influence. Without an option for anything else to happen, it feels forced.
I still love FONV, though.

because no matter how buggy and shitty tes games are, its not as easy as it looks to do it better.

so it will either look or run like shit? seriously, unity is a great engine for some things but big and complex games arent one of those.

So you're saying that big companies have a literal monopoly on the game industry and the government is doing nothing to stop it because "games are for little kids".

Can't wait for the next crash. These bloated rich fuckers need to all disappear.

technically, no they don't have a monopoly, but practically speaking it's not worth the cost to compete against them

But that's wrong though. You're taking into account profit and costs without scaling per team size.
A large team of coders and artists working for several years to make a game and with expensive marketing on top of it has to sell a very large amount of copies to break even, and then some more to make a profit and atract investors.
An average joe and his 3-5 friends working on their spare time will invest peanuts and beer (literally) and as such, a few sales and profit is already raking in. It's never gonna be the same absolute profit but it will be a very large proportional profit.

Thing is, nobody wants proportional profit. Big companies don't want to sink a lot of money into open world sandbox RPGs that appear to be tanking and are already overdone while smaller devs don't want to win a decent amount of cash, they want a lot more.

The most advanced thing TES has going for it is how it's engine handles exterior cells and seamless transitions between them with decent enough occlusion. That's it, everything else is RPGMaker tier of work.
You take a look at Nexus or any other modding site, you'll find a lot of better models\textures\written stories\gameplay elements done by people for free :^) on their spare time.
All enemies are just a template anyway, that share the same statistics tweaked for that particular enemy and an animated model. Whenever you swing a weapon, the game runs the exact same part of the code to calculate the damage and apply it to the target, regardless if it's a giant or a Draugr. And weapons are nothing except modifiers for those variables with an attack animation tied to them.

It's not hard to make a clone, it's hard to make something sufficiently better that it justifies even bothering with it.

Sure Witcher 3 and New Vegas lack mechanics to punish your dilly dallying but both have strong enough writing to make you feel you gotta do something and do it soon (Witcher 3 really hooked me to "I gotta look for Ciri dammit", at least for the first playthrough and that's what really counts for that game and whole New Vegas as a region is a series of political/military powderkegs begging you to set them off).

Lewd

I kinda wish someone made Elona in 3D since that's pretty much that. You make your character and go dungeon delving with a party of loli cat girls, then you dump the shit you want to sell in your store so your lolis can sell it and a few exhibits on a museum. Then some farming and cooking to prepare for the next adventure.

It's pretty clear that "exploration games" don't go along well with Urgency at all since most Devs are too inept to pull it off properly or they will even give up and let you fuck around instead, disregarding the lore.
Either ditch the aspect of urgency at all or, better yet, make it only happen mid-game when you are already invested in the world, when you have something you want to protect and defend. Then actually put some damn penalties for ignoring that shit and have the player feel like his slacking off harms him directly.

For instance, Oblivion is fucking terrible. You can be the head of 4 different guilds and the Mad God before you even go near Kvatch. By that time, the dude would be dead and the world burned to the ground.
Instead, have the main quest start only after you joined a guild, bought several houses or made enough quests your fame\infamy raised enough.
Then have Invasions happen in cities and tell the player when they happen. You don't show up to defend that place? Your house\guild hall in that city burns (so you'll need to pay for rebuilding and wait a while), maybe some NPCs die as well and Essential ones are placed in a chapel, comatose, so you can't do their quests until you solve the situation.
Have houses burning, shops unavailable, no money or valuables anywhere, prices increasing rapidly, more bandits on the road, all hell broke loose on the world you have explored and invested in, just to make you care about it.

Which begs the question, how can Todd not pull a better game? All it takes is one or two guys who aren't mouthbreathers designing the game and implementing it and it would come out better than anything since Oblivion.

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Morrowind did it right, except it doesn't even need to have the random general dialogue too.

It's like you're really autistic.

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Because all the things that would make TES actually a decent game would also make it less popular with "the gamers" and so he'd rather modders do it for whoever wants those things.

For instance, Skyrim could have had actual impact with the Civil War. It could have been about a campaign going back and forth between both sides with you losing and winning battles, proposing strategies, earning the trust of your faction. Captured cities could have different people that might like you less or better, different shops or different inventory.
They could even utilize the mines and lumbyards to run caravans that affect the war so you can raid them and help your faction or protect your own.
But would the average Skyrim player enjoy that? Having to chase caravans for economic reasons, having hard battles he may end up losing, losing access to a town because you joined the oposing faction, etc?

This goes as well for an in-depth Atribute system instead of it's complete removal, more skills and more uses for them or decent spellcraft. Ultimately, they are all features for hardcore diehard fans to enjoy that result in a net loss for the company. Whatever money they make with you, they lose with the loads of retards that refuse to play "such a complex game".
And Bethesda is in a position they can't really not make a huge profit or that means losing tons of money due to high production costs, so they'll do the bare minium that absolutely everyone loves to ensure profit and leave everything else to modders.

Oh please… You can have NPCs having a greeting and a Goodbye line when you interact with them, maybe even a few voiced lines for Main Quest related characters, but you hardly need voice lines to hear about mudcrabs. Fact is, most players can read faster than the lines are spoken and they'll click to skip the text faster than the voice actor can finish speak. And if they already know what's gonna be written, they'll skip it straight away.

Voice acting only exists and should only be used to create a mood and give some personality to important characters in key situations of their narrative. This is something that old school RPGs know very well and that's why you don't have freaking Talking Heads for every NPC in Fallout 1&2, only for special iconic and important characters.

From that interview, you'll know what todd loves doing the most in his games. Watching scenery, collecting items, and greeting people. He imagines the screenshot before concepting the gameplay. As you can see, it's what Fallout 4 and Morrowind are all about. Giving all the freedom and praise to players, punishing them the least when they don't expect it.

This is what I happen to like in my games too. Walking and looting simulator with minimum reasons and objectives. I find reasons and objectives superficial and sometimes even cruel, but important in order to give a bit more reason to play further. This is why I want them to be implemented minimally in open ended games with lesser focus.

Urgency is a threat to player's freedom. It should never exist in video games, especially such open ended games.

They only did that in skyrim.

Morrowind and Daggerfall have no substitute.

Oblivion is hot garbage if you take away it's modding legacy. It's shit to play even with mods tbh.

Skyrim is shit, questwise, but with the new version and with enough mods, it's a pretty game to go out and hunt animals. The very light action RPG elements keep it nice and easy to get to the sex scenes in the game without too much trouble.

I hope you're just memeing here, because what you just said goes against everything that narrative-driven RPG's are about.

Sorry user but touching your little penor to an anime doll doesn't count as sex

Did you play Morrowind? The game world fucking hates you until you can get a good standing by actually doing the objectives set out by the guilds, clans, etc. It doesn't give out free praise unless you earn it, and your good standing among some factions actually have consequences on standings with others. The world actually reacts to your actions and makes you give a shit about doing things.

All this unlike shit like Skyrim or Fallout 4 where the world just passively accepts you no matter what you do and has little reaction - just bland sandboxes that don't care for your actions.
Your ideas are poisonous to game design and are the cancer that gives us shitty open worlds game with bland and pointless content. Games need objectives to actually be fucking games and to engage the player.

TES since Morrowind and Fallout 3/4 are more of an image driven RPG rather than narrative driven. Sure, the narrative is there, but you can choose to make it not play a big role in the game. You should be able to choose to follow the narrative only when you're scavenging to broaden your image.

No, the game hates you until you discover a million gold, trainers, enchantment, and ebony-daedric armors. The first thing I would do in morrowind are searching for gold and strengthening my character. And the world would stop caring about my actions once I become stronger than gods.

Those are the games that don't care about their image. TES-like games take image more seriously than other sandbox games.

And TES games do have objectives, albeit with lesser focus, just like the way I like it. I agree that complete lack of objectives is cancerous, but TES isn't like that at all.

That the player can react and answer to with on his own terms and therefore still enjoying freedom. In fact, fighting to protect that freedom from the feeling of urgency makes for really good context.

For instance, Recettear is a game about a loli running an item shop with a huge debt to pay with increasing payments every weekend. You have freedom to decide where you'll spend your time to best adquire money and reputation or explore the world and advance the story, but the sense of urgency is still there giving context to your actions and making you think before you commit any slice of time.

Another light example is just about any roguelike with an hunger system that's placed there specifically to keep the players moving instead of farming a floor. Sense of urgency, and yet still plenty of freedom to play the game, to the point that removing hunger would make the game worse.

Nope. Several dungeons in Oblivion had entire sections locked being unpickable locks because of that. Umbra herself only shows up if you're on the quest.

I think I remember killing some faggot named Umbra on my first playthrough not knowing who the hell she was.

Oh wait, I got that wrong. Umbra doesn't show up if you're below level 4 (I think?) because of how level scaling works. You get some skeleton, if even that, instead and then she only appears if you're on the quest.
But if you show up with the minimum level, she'll show up anyway and you'll be given a quest item for a quest you don't yet have. Fun.

Anonymouse doesn't care. Anonymouse plays TES anyways because he has fun with em.

Not really my cup of tea, sorry.

Then nuTES still has a sense of urgency to some extent.

Now I find that kind of urgency extremely cruel.

I haven't even played Oblivion, my system somehow can't handle that game. But I've been in Skyrim, FO3, and Fallout 4.

Personnal opinions then. The game isn't any better or worse than other games because you dislike it.

No. Recettear gives you 4 actions per day, 7 days per week until the next payment. If you squander those actions and don't make the best you can, you lose. TES does not do anything similar to this except a bit with the Oblivion gates except not really. There's no lose condition in any TES game based on how long you take to answer a quest.

Most enemies you defeat drop corpses you can eat for survival. Hunger is actually the least deadlist thing in roguelikes and accounts for 1-2% of deaths.
The hardcore players actually even play entire chalenge routes where they avoid eating anything and they still manage to win.

Also, again, personnal opinions. I personnaly mod Bethesda games to always include hunger, thrist, sleep and even hygiene and lust. I find that they greatly increase the fun I can have since finding apples in Skyrim is a lot more fun when your character has come back from the wilderness without supplies and is starving. That and waiting 24 hours for a quest to complete sounds dumb when there's a counter going down, forcing me to make those 24 hours actual meaningfull actions.
And the whole "prepare your supplies before you head to the dungeons" is much more extended.

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Dragon's Dogma is pretty good, if you haven't given it a shot yet, you should.

But in terms of providing freedom for players, it's an objective opinion.

Time limit has to be the worst thing ever implemented in an open ended game. I didn't realize that your sense of urgency is time limit. Time limit is the most vile of all challenges in an open world.

Fallout survival mode provides you the same thing.

While I personally hate such thing, I think it should be a complimentary feature or option for those who like it. Player should be given a freedom in giving a meaning to their game, and if this is the meaning that you want that's fine.

DD is bland.

That's some shit taste you have there.

The world is bland and empty.

Not as bland as a typical TES game.

I think it's atmospheric. You are either jaded because you've played it for 1500 hours or you got lost on the way to Gran Soren and got buttfrustrated and convinced yourself that the map is no good and so gave up.

Shut up faggot.

Not an argument.

Also Dragon's Dogma has much better combat than any ES game.

TES has fast travel, objectively better scenery, and richer stuff all around. In DD, you just fight enemies.

About as atmospheric as the lotr game.

Dragons Dogma has fast travel too.

Taste is subjective, but graphically speaking, sure Skyrim has Dragon's Dogma beat.

What does this even mean? Dragon's Dogma had a semi-complex gear upgrade system, whereas Skyrim comparatively had nothing; enchanting was just a level requirement, and gear was overpowered enough as it is without enchanting any of it at all.

As opposed to playing a walking simulator? Again, what does this even mean?

With port crystal. Boring.

Stuff as in objects all over the map.

It's only good for fighting enemies, not wandering.

Why even play it then?

Oh, I didn't realize you were this casual and needed waypoints at every single point of interest in the entire game. I was under the impression that this was a thread about open world, traveling, and exploration.

So the same dungeon over and over with the same pointless loot you'll just huck at vendors or hoard in your house and never look at again. Right.

Shit opinion.

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The only thing going for TES is its lore. That's it.

Not remotely similar to TES games in the slightest, but it is super fun.

also kill yourself tripfag

the time for suicide is now.

Also not an argument.
My argument was that you're a faggot and should shut up.

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Precisely the opposite you retarded moron.
Or are you saying CoD is the least successful shooter franchise?

I don't, but I want to go back to somewhere I've been before anytime I want.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be anywhere anytime you want. You should be able to go back to an explored area automatically.

I'm here for the scenery and walking simulator. Pointless loot is alright though, more immersion.

I would respect your opinion if you have an elaborate basis for it.

You can play the entire game without fast travel if you don't like it.

CoD aren't shoddy, their graphics are always top tier.

incompetence. Blizzard had WoW, which is about as close to solid competition in expansiveness and lore as you can hope for. Online only, tho

Been wondering that myself. Nobody seems to want to make an open-world choose-your-character RPG much these days.
Most the ones I have seen cut out 80% of the shit that makes TES interesting. No races other than the basic three dwarves elves and humans, for instance.

I want a game where I can play a qt kobold and adventure across the lands in hopes of becoming a proper dragon one day.

It's called consolidation.

The irony of fast travel is that games like Oblivion and Skyrim can only really bring out their random and semi-random events out when you walk everywhere yourself. You're actively cutting content and reducing the experience for sake of rushing through the game.

And heck, I get that. Many years ago in Morrowind I had that same rush, after a long slow start, the way I played the game more and more became a rush, teleporting everywhere with Mark and Recall, Divine Intervention scrolls, and so on.

because