I can't get lost (Skyrim related)

[Snowblindblitz]

The thing about being lost is that you could be doing better things with that time. A game's job is to entertain you, and while some people are entertained by lots of wandering and guessing, most of us aren't. And still, it's optional.

This basically. Besides, you can just wander into a lot of dungeons and start up quests that way. Several have happened like that for me. I just like to think the NPCs see that you have a map, and thus, mark it.

I could live without the compass, but my map has to have something on it. I'm terrible at directions. Just ask the modders at the nexus to remove it and add in extra "direction" quest information if it bothers you. Someone will or is probably working on something like that already.

Most adult gamers have jobs, marriages and kids. My days of sinking hours looking at the landscape to find something are over. I'd rather be able to complete a game then accomplish nothing in what time I get to game.

 

[adrian_exec]

If you want to get lost then turn off quest tracking! The arrow to show us where to go is just an options, you know? For people who don't have the time or the patience to get lost in Skyrim.

 

[ks1234]

Because, lets face it, wondering around for hours on end looking for some extremely obsurce is SOOOO MUCH FUN!
/sarcasm

 

[Pimppeter2]

But cant we meet somewhere in the middle? Do i have to get a marker for each and every quest? Even when in that quest i am supposed to find something nobody knows where it is?
Is there no room/time for any proper "search" in this busy busy world of yours?

If youre an old time TES player, you're most likely playing on PC. Mod it to your own perfection. No, in my world there really isn't any time for searching, at least no usually. I'm still not saying that I dont see your point. But its a very trivial one. I mean yeah, it could be slightly better. But that game could be slightly better in many ways. Any game can. No game is going to be made exactly to your tastes. Its practically impossible. And if you cant handle the change, mod it. Change it. Do your own thing. No one is stopping you. Bethesda even gives you the tools to do it.

And if youre going to complain about needing to mod it, well, modding is a large part of what makes TES, TES. Heck, you've got such a great mod community taht someone would make this for you if you just asked nicely.

I can appreciate that, I just wish that more developers would come up with a new IP when they do a genre shift like that, or at least make it a spinoff instead of calling it a direct sequel -- there have been TES spinoffs in the past, so it's not like it's far fetched. For an extreme example of this, look at the new X-Com game. There is really no reason to call it X-Com, and calling it that is actually going to hurt their sales more than it would help, since the brand recognition comes from turn based strategy fans, while the new game is an FPS. Even if it turns out to be the best FPS of all time, the fans of the old series are going to hate it for using the name and not honoring it, even the ones who would otherwise love an FPS with aliens.

Asking them to do a new IP is both impractically and illogical financially. Even investing the time and money into a game like Skyrim that isnt even going to be your main IP isnt going to fly with investors. Clearly, old and new TES gamers like Skyrim, even if they/we clamor about the olden days. So it really isn't like X-Com.

Its the evolution of the game into a modern market. You kind of just have to accept that. And its clearly working. I mean, in this thread alone there are at least 5 people who are TES gamers since Arena/Daggerfall/Morrowind or whatever, and sure we're got our complaints and groans about changes, but we still love Skyrim, no?

We should be looking into a way into the future, instead of the past. Instead of asking for them to revert to something that is financially improbable for ANY developer, make it a point to think of new ways to experience the game and go ahead and make them. Bethesda ALWAYS takes clues from its Modders on how to make their next game better. The modding community in any TES game is great.

 

[DalekJaas]

I get frustrated trying to find some of the chains and levers in dungeons to open doors, which is about as lost as I have been. 64 hours in and I am bored of playing, great game but I need to start a new character, which I will do after I sink a few hundred hours into MW3.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

This is as stupid as the fast travel argument. If you don't like it, Ignore it. Turn it off. Use the map that came with the game and mark your own stuff.

I love fast travel and map markers. I can fit 8 hours of gaming into 1. That may be streamlined, but honestly, who cares? Most people have shit to do. And I love skyrim, I want to finish it. I want to see as much as I can. I dont want to spend most of my time with it getting from place to place and trying to find the one cave amongst 500 of them. I want to know what happens.


This isn't "dumbing down" a game, it makes it a whole lot better.

this.

honestly with alot of older games i would just get frustrated pulling the whole "alright turn at this corner and...wait..DAMMIT, I WAS JUST HERE 5 HOURS AGO!! HOW THE HELL DO I GET TO THE DAMN TREASURE?!?!"

yeah, that is easily a big con, there is a difference between having exploration, and doing that, and i much prefer the way skyrim has it so i can fully take in the immersive world at an efficient time and still have time to enjoy all my other games i have waiting in my backlog.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

The thing about being lost is that you could be doing better things with that time. A game's job is to entertain you, and while some people are entertained by lots of wandering and guessing, most of us aren't. And still, it's optional.

This basically. Besides, you can just wander into a lot of dungeons and start up quests that way. Several have happened like that for me. I just like to think the NPCs see that you have a map, and thus, mark it.

I could live without the compass, but my map has to have something on it. I'm terrible at directions. Just ask the modders at the nexus to remove it and add in extra "direction" quest information if it bothers you. Someone will or is probably working on something like that already.

Most adult gamers have jobs, marriages and kids. My days of sinking hours looking at the landscape to find something are over. I'd rather be able to complete a game then accomplish nothing in what time I get to game.

There's a counterargument to this: if you don't have time to play epic RPGs, don't play Epic RPGs. The main reason I play so many online FPSs is because individual matches take very little time. What you're saying is "I don't have time to play hardcore RPGs, so please stop making hardcore RPGs." It's exactly the same statement as "I like hardcore RPGs, so please stop streamlining them," but in reverse -- and it's less valid, since your suggesting we take a series with a history of being a huge time sink and streamlining it, thus leaving us without one of the two main hardcore open world RPG series (the other being the Gothic series), while the opposite side is suggesting we don't streamline a series that has a history of filling in the hardcore niche, and that people who like more streamlined games should find a series with a history of being more streamlined.

 

[Irony's Acolyte]

Or you could just ignore the compass. I headed north from Markath at night one time and ended up going all over the place. I had no idea where I was and I had not problem with that. The map is great for helping you figure out where you need to go, but if you don't want to use it, then don't. It's not that hard to ignore.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

But cant we meet somewhere in the middle? Do i have to get a marker for each and every quest? Even when in that quest i am supposed to find something nobody knows where it is?
Is there no room/time for any proper "search" in this busy busy world of yours?

If youre an old time TES player, you're most likely playing on PC. Mod it to your own perfection. No, in my world there really isn't any time for searching, at least no usually. I'm still not saying that I dont see your point. But its a very trivial one. I mean yeah, it could be slightly better. But that game could be slightly better in many ways. Any game can. No game is going to be made exactly to your tastes. Its practically impossible. And if you cant handle the change, mod it. Change it. Do your own thing. No one is stopping you. Bethesda even gives you the tools to do it.

And if youre going to complain about needing to mod it, well, modding is a large part of what makes TES, TES. Heck, you've got such a great mod community taht someone would make this for you if you just asked nicely.

I can appreciate that, I just wish that more developers would come up with a new IP when they do a genre shift like that, or at least make it a spinoff instead of calling it a direct sequel -- there have been TES spinoffs in the past, so it's not like it's far fetched. For an extreme example of this, look at the new X-Com game. There is really no reason to call it X-Com, and calling it that is actually going to hurt their sales more than it would help, since the brand recognition comes from turn based strategy fans, while the new game is an FPS. Even if it turns out to be the best FPS of all time, the fans of the old series are going to hate it for using the name and not honoring it, even the ones who would otherwise love an FPS with aliens.

Asking them to do a new IP is both impractically and illogical financially. Even investing the time and money into a game like Skyrim that isnt even going to be your main IP isnt going to fly with investors. Clearly, old and new TES gamers like Skyrim, even if they/we clamor about the olden days. So it really isn't like X-Com.

Its the evolution of the game into a modern market. You kind of just have to accept that. And its clearly working. I mean, in this thread alone there are at least 5 people who are TES gamers since Arena/Daggerfall/Morrowind or whatever, and sure we're got our complaints and groans about changes, but we still love Skyrim, no?

We should be looking into a way into the future, instead of the past. Instead of asking for them to revert to something that is financially improbable for ANY developer, make it a point to think of new ways to experience the game and go ahead and make them. Bethesda ALWAYS takes clues from its Modders on how to make their next game better. The modding community in any TES game is great.

It's not though. It's a shift from a niche genre to a mainstream genre. Had X-Com shifted from turn based to real time, it would have similar problems. The real issue here is that Bethesda has decided that they want to make The Elder Scrolls a license to print money, instead of the relatively successful niche game that it started out as. It was never really a AAA series, at least not until Oblivion came out. The modern market, paradoxically, has more room than ever for niche games. The problem is that since it also has more room for ridiculous mainstream releases, absolutely everything has to be a mainstream release. Morrowind was Pan's Labyrinth. Oblivion was Freddy Vs. Jason.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Completing Morrowind in 10 minutes involves exploiting a glitch, and has to be done before you complete character creation. Otherwise, even a speedrun is going to count in the tens of hours. As for the others, it's true, but it's part of what made it a hardcore RPG.

It doesn't seem right to call it hardcore if there's only one viable strategy. Hardcore implies a measure of skill or at least complexity. The thing with the D20 system is that it has many published expansions and thus many possible combinations. A monkey could break Morrowind sideways if it had the most basic understanding of how alchemy worked (or rather, that alchemy wasn't capped).

But let's say you were playing it seriously and not going for the straightforward alchemy/enchantocalypse. you'd still have to deal with the remarkably unintuitive character creation system in which 'class' basically means 'skills you would like to level precisely one third of the time', and without alchemy you'd better not have any delusions of anything being remotely exciting at any point.. we can't have that! You need to find a bed every five minutes because any character who relies on magic (aka any viable character) is mysteriously narcoleptic. I suppose that's the price of power.

Whoever decided that magicka shouldn't regenerate and that the power of enchanted items should really should have been sent to rehab at the first sign of coming out with such a stupid idea.

 

[Liquid Paradox]

A system where the compass is defaulted to off would be great, because then you would need to have the game give you directions (like in Morrowind), but if you got stuck, you could turn on the compass.

I just got an image in my head of a finger poking at a ledger until Phelps voice suddenly tells me exactly what to do. Not sure why, seems only vaguely related, but I decided to share it anyway.

 

[JoesshittyOs]

I think people are suffering from a rather bad case of Nostalgia here.

Not knowing where you're suppose to go is technically "bad game design". Just because that one game that you remember having fun in didn't do it, doesn't mean that it was a good thing.

Having a game that makes that type of exploration fun is a very rare find, and quite frankly I don't think any developers can do that nowadays without killing the flow of the game.

 

[Shirastro]

Completing Morrowind in 10 minutes involves exploiting a glitch, and has to be done before you complete character creation. Otherwise, even a speedrun is going to count in the tens of hours. As for the others, it's true, but it's part of what made it a hardcore RPG.

It doesn't seem right to call it hardcore if there's only one viable strategy. Hardcore implies a measure of skill or at least complexity. The thing with the D20 system is that it has many published expansions and thus many possible combinations. A monkey could break Morrowind sideways if it had the most basic understanding of how alchemy worked (or rather, that alchemy wasn't capped).

But let's say you were playing it seriously and not going for the straightforward alchemy/enchantocalypse. you'd still have to deal with the remarkably unintuitive character creation system in which 'class' basically means 'skills you would like to level precisely one third of the time', and without alchemy you'd better not have any delusions of anything being remotely exciting at any point.. we can't have that! You need to find a bed every five minutes because any character who relies on magic (aka any viable character) is mysteriously narcoleptic. I suppose that's the price of power.

Than how did i ever beat and absolutely enjoyed Morrowind without ever using either alchemy or enchanting?

 

[Snowblindblitz]

The thing about being lost is that you could be doing better things with that time. A game's job is to entertain you, and while some people are entertained by lots of wandering and guessing, most of us aren't. And still, it's optional.

This basically. Besides, you can just wander into a lot of dungeons and start up quests that way. Several have happened like that for me. I just like to think the NPCs see that you have a map, and thus, mark it.

I could live without the compass, but my map has to have something on it. I'm terrible at directions. Just ask the modders at the nexus to remove it and add in extra "direction" quest information if it bothers you. Someone will or is probably working on something like that already.

Most adult gamers have jobs, marriages and kids. My days of sinking hours looking at the landscape to find something are over. I'd rather be able to complete a game then accomplish nothing in what time I get to game.

There's a counterargument to this: if you don't have time to play epic RPGs, don't play Epic RPGs. The main reason I play so many online FPSs is because individual matches take very little time. What you're saying is "I don't have time to play hardcore RPGs, so please stop making hardcore RPGs." It's exactly the same statement as "I like hardcore RPGs, so please stop streamlining them," but in reverse -- and it's less valid, since your suggesting we take a series with a history of being a huge time sink and streamlining it, thus leaving us without one of the two main hardcore open world RPG series (the other being the Gothic series), while the opposite side is suggesting we don't streamline a series that has a history of filling in the hardcore niche, and that people who like more streamlined games should find a series with a history of being more streamlined.

One big difference: A simple, avoidable feature can make the difference here. And "hardcore" is subjective. Most "hardcore RPGers" enjoy archaic features that were fun because there were no other options.

Nothing is wrong with wanting bang per buck for hours spent playing. I even encourage exploring in my post. "Hardcore" is, and always has been, crappy defense for anything. I never said anything against those types of games, just that I enjoyed streamlined features, which I repeat, are ignorable. Timesink is even worse of an argument, because you can timesink as many hours into Skyrim as Morrowind IF you chose to. Timesink implies nothing about the quality or fun of the experience. I can "timesink" looking at my backyard, hell, it'll even have better graphics.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

Aahh Morrowind...the only game where you have to find a rock near a bunch of other rocks <3
Yeah, I do say, it is kinda easy here. But hey, nearly all games are easy these days!

Well yes but why, why are games being dumbed down so much?

I guess it's the price to pay for becoming a more mainstream form of entertainment :/

Streamlining =/= dumbed down. If done wrong, then yes it is. But anything can be done wrong.

Anyway, couldn't you just not set the quest as active? Then it wouldn't have the little marks and stuff.

Like mentioned already, yes you could do that but Skyrim doesn't really support playing like this, since NPC give you no directions to where you have to go and you are expected to use the compass mark.

Yeah they do. Your little journal thing often gives directions like "Southeast of Whiterun" and NPCs will often mark your map.

Well if i get it marked on the map than it isn't much of a search is it?
Plus "south-west of whatever" is a little to vague even for me.

This game was clearly designed with the compass marker in mind.

Beside, Morrowind quests without the marker might force you to do a little bit of searching but most of them were still relatively easy to find. You just had to put at least SOME effort into them. Skyrim (and Oblivion) completely removes that and it becomes just going from point A to clearly marked point B.

Well yeah, but that makes sense. If Steve the shop owner says "Rescue my daughter from the bandits!" he'll probably tell you where they are. Regardless, you could still not mark it as the active quest.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Completing Morrowind in 10 minutes involves exploiting a glitch, and has to be done before you complete character creation. Otherwise, even a speedrun is going to count in the tens of hours. As for the others, it's true, but it's part of what made it a hardcore RPG.

It doesn't seem right to call it hardcore if there's only one viable strategy. Hardcore implies a measure of skill or at least complexity. The thing with the D20 system is that it has many published expansions and thus many possible combinations. A monkey could break Morrowind sideways if it had the most basic understanding of how alchemy worked (or rather, that alchemy wasn't capped).

But let's say you were playing it seriously and not going for the straightforward alchemy/enchantocalypse. you'd still have to deal with the remarkably unintuitive character creation system in which 'class' basically means 'skills you would like to level precisely one third of the time', and without alchemy you'd better not have any delusions of anything being remotely exciting at any point.. we can't have that! You need to find a bed every five minutes because any character who relies on magic (aka any viable character) is mysteriously narcoleptic. I suppose that's the price of power.

Than how did i ever beat and absolutely enjoyed Morrowind without ever using either alchemy or enchanting?

Basically, this. It's possible to win the game without completely breaking it -- much like D&D, where a normally balanced party is, well, normally balanced, but one in which even one member is a munchkin is likely to wind up completely throwing off the DM's plans by doing things like killing off the big bad when they're supposed to be too weak to do anything but listen to him gloat.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Than how did i ever beat and absolutely enjoyed Morrowind without ever using either alchemy or enchanting?

I don't know.. maybe you have a soul.

I'm just not convinced the people who made it did.

 

[Wolfram23]

Hrm. I suppose I can agree with that. I like dungeon puzzles! Good old Zelda style.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

The thing about being lost is that you could be doing better things with that time. A game's job is to entertain you, and while some people are entertained by lots of wandering and guessing, most of us aren't. And still, it's optional.

This basically. Besides, you can just wander into a lot of dungeons and start up quests that way. Several have happened like that for me. I just like to think the NPCs see that you have a map, and thus, mark it.

I could live without the compass, but my map has to have something on it. I'm terrible at directions. Just ask the modders at the nexus to remove it and add in extra "direction" quest information if it bothers you. Someone will or is probably working on something like that already.

Most adult gamers have jobs, marriages and kids. My days of sinking hours looking at the landscape to find something are over. I'd rather be able to complete a game then accomplish nothing in what time I get to game.

There's a counterargument to this: if you don't have time to play epic RPGs, don't play Epic RPGs. The main reason I play so many online FPSs is because individual matches take very little time. What you're saying is "I don't have time to play hardcore RPGs, so please stop making hardcore RPGs." It's exactly the same statement as "I like hardcore RPGs, so please stop streamlining them," but in reverse -- and it's less valid, since your suggesting we take a series with a history of being a huge time sink and streamlining it, thus leaving us without one of the two main hardcore open world RPG series (the other being the Gothic series), while the opposite side is suggesting we don't streamline a series that has a history of filling in the hardcore niche, and that people who like more streamlined games should find a series with a history of being more streamlined.

One big difference: A simple, avoidable feature can make the difference here. And "hardcore" is subjective. Most "hardcore RPGers" enjoy archaic features that were fun because there were no other options.

Nothing is wrong with wanting bang per buck for hours spent playing. I even encourage exploring in my post. "Hardcore" is, and always has been, crappy defense for anything. I never said anything against those types of games, just that I enjoyed streamlined features, which I repeat, are ignorable. Timesink is even worse of an argument, because you can timesink as many hours into Skyrim as Morrowind IF you chose to. Timesink implies nothing about the quality or fun of the experience. I can "timesink" looking at my backyard, hell, it'll even have better graphics.

You're missing the point: those "outdated" features aren't outdated to the people who enjoy them. What you're saying is we need to do away with them so people who don't like them won't have to deal with them. What I'm saying is they're rare to begin with, so please don't make them nonexistent and take them away from the people who enjoy them completely. Just because you can't comprehend why people would find it fun doesn't mean they don't honestly find it fun. I have a hard time understanding why people prefer watching sports to playing them; that doesn't give me the right to force them to turn off the TV and make them play a pickup game with me.

 

[Shirastro]

I think people are suffering from a rather bad case of Nostalgia here.

Not knowing where you're suppose to go is technically "bad game design". Just because that one game that you remember having fun in didn't do it, doesn't mean that it was a good thing.

Having a game that makes that type of exploration fun is a very rare find, and quite frankly I don't think any developers can do that nowadays without killing the flow of the game.

There is big difference between having no clue as to where to go, being given directions but still having to actually find whatever you are looking for, and having your objective very clearly marked and removing any "search" elements from the game.

But this of-course isn't only a problem with the recent Bethesda games. Pretty much the entire market has become oriented toward the casual masses.
I guess i was foolish to think Bethesda wouldn't go there....oh well, i still like Skyrim but i feel like a huge part of what it could have been has been left out.

They didn't have to make it tedious, confusing or frustrating, but some small adjustments could have easily pleased both the HC and casual gamers.