Morrowind will still not be popular with younger players. I imagine the lack of fast travel, map markers and the class/skill system is just too much for most.
Part of the game is learning how to figure out what the fuck you're supposed to do.
I love immersive sim games. Miss back in the day when we didn't have maps for dungeons and you were supposed to be drawing a map on paper. I never did, as a little kid I just learned how to memorize dungeon layouts really well and now I memorize any place I go on foot.
A case of limitations working in concert. The rather oppressive distance fog helped conceal just how small the world was, and it felt a lot more expansive thanks to the slower pace of the game.
No sprinting, no mounts, no fast-travel-from-anywhere (beyond mark/recall and the teleport to temple spells) and the in-game fast travel systems were varied, thought out and well placed. Having to plan a route of mage guild teleports, boat rides, stilt striders, and/or the teleportation complexes helped immerse the player in the world.
Boots of blinding speed to the rescue!
No idea why authors think it was good idea to make default speed so low and lock game-fixing item behind some random-looking quest in the middle of nowhere
Yep, my first TES was Oblivion and I loved it so much that I tried going back to Morrowind. I don't mind having to read and I don't mind walking, but holy hell the combat makes the game almost inaccessible.
I think younger players can get over those things. The dealbreaker with Morrowind is the incredibly clunky and frustrating combat system. It presents as a real time first-person action game, but almost every action you take in a combat scenario is governed my hidden die rolls. When a player swings their sword and they see it visibly clip through an enemy, but the die roll calls it a miss, the player feels like they've been cheated by the system.
The combat in this game was considered rough when it was new, and it has only aged like milk since then.
If they had simply shown "hit" or "miss" when the weapon was used, it would have been less frustrating, I think. Even if it still intersects the character model, you would at least know the miss was intentional and not a bug.
I gotta admit, as someone whose first Morrowind experience was on a smartphone running OpenMW, combat that requires aiming correctly and having hit chance was infuriating. One or the other would be fine, like with a Zelda-esque lock-on feature combined with hit chance.
I mean the open world design philosophy in Elden Ring is not too dissimilar to Morrowind's and it was a massive hit. What really needs updating is the combat system, it wasn't great when the game came out and it aged horribly.
Morrowind is similar, with map markers for major landmarks and diegetic fast travel, but still requiring the player to explore and orient to find quest objectives.
Yup. I still remember running Morrowind for the first time. My jaw dropped.
Arena and Daggerfall (the two predecessor games) were procedurally generated, and just felt "more of the same" after a while. My understanding is that the world in Morrowind was lovingly crafted by hand. This might have resulted in a small in-game world—but each inch of that world felt special.
Interestingly, the Witcher 3 is probably the one other game that gave me the same "this world is handcrafted" feel (dunno how that was built though).
I think this is why the Hogwarts Legacy game is doing so well. The story is fine I guess, and the combat is polished but not particularly deep. But the recreation of the castle and Hogsmeade are so painstakingly detailed and well thought out. It's easy to get lost for hours just exploring, something most other open world games of the last decade really struggle with.
The illusion starts to fade when you wander further away from the school, but the game smartly keeps most of its critical path around Hogwarts and Hogsmeade.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is another example of an open-world with ridiculous attention to detail. It's certainly rare to have such a detailed open-world and a really good story.
The Witcher 2 was the first game I remember really blowing me away in that regard. Sure, it's not quite fully open world (more of a series of small open worlds), but the design is immaculate. To make up for space constraints they definitely leaned into the whole "Disneyland sightlines" thing, where you'll turn a corner and suddenly be a in a new area, with all sorts of fascinating nooks and crannies to check out.
I'm very much in the minority in that I actually prefer The Witcher 2. It's not open-world, but it's immersive. The world design is superb, and the characters are well-written in a way I haven't seen an open-world game achieve (not even The Witcher 3). I remember feeling guilty for pilfering some coins from someone's house, and then realising I'd never felt that guilt in a game before.
Ever play Riven? I remember reading that "every pixel was crafted by hand" (which probably wasn't quite true, but, probably not enough to matter. That game was a work of art)
I'm, ah.. I'm gonna go over here with my eager anticipation and prior excitement over literally this. Although I know you're not actually referring to these kinds of remakes, if only because these are much more "labor of love" than "cash in on a known thing".
(Dungeon Keeper -> Dungeons 2; more than a straight remake)
(Master of Magic; dec last year; nearly an exact remake - switch to hex grid, few other tweaks, maybe more down the road :hopes:)
(Pharaoh, A New Era - tomorrow, possibly an exact remake?)
Hell if I could get a Metroid Prime Remastered-type remake of every game from my childhood I'd never need another new property again. Better than playing a new game that takes up 120GB on my drive of which 80GB is microtransaction textures so some bro can have anime girls on his M-16.
I cannot damn wait until the Banjo-Kazooie decompilation project is complete and someone starts working on a Render96-esque version of it.
Control is such a great representation of what a modern game can be. For example, with newer games I have a hard time picking out enemies and items on screen. Control solves this by making the enemies a bright red.
That couldn't be further from the truth. There are more people than ever creating games, and, discoverability aside, some of the greatest games are yet to come.
Imagine you made that statement on May 27, 2019, the day before Outer Wilds came out.
If we use the Atari 2600 as a (very!) rough benchmark for publicly available video games, the medium as we know it has been around for about 46 years. [1]
Given that movie theaters sprang up in the early 20th century, [2] you could make the argument that video games haven't even reached their equivalent of the French New Wave yet. Given how far someone can go with a little bit of self-taught asset creation, I think the best video games will be made after you and I have passed away.
The internet has certainly accelerated the development speed of culture. What year did indie films start being distributed by amateurs? We’re at least that point in gaming. We’re at the point now where independent startups are making higher quality products than the peak AAA games from ~20 years ago.
