Werewolf wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 5:24 pm
Imagine Morrowind’s detailed house interiors but spread across 100,000 square miles and thousands of towns.
There's nothing wrong with that, but what for? I'm actually not a big fan of these details in
Morrowind, although I appreciate the game for what it is.
I don't believe that a large world is a merit in itself. It's about what kind of world the game allows/encourages the player to imagine. NPCs in
Arena and
Daggerfall look more credible because there are limitations to the technology. You see a two-dimensional sprite and imagine the rest. In
Morrowind, NPCs are real three-dimensional characters that look more realistic, so you start asking yourself, why are these guys standing in the same place all day (and night) long or march around aimlessly? Don't they have to eat/sleep/pee sometime? Don't they have stuff to do? There are chairs in almost every house or building,
why doesn't anyone sit down at least for a moment? So they appear more "realistic" because of the 3D technology and detail, but ultimately feel more fake than low-res, often non-animated sprites from the first two TES games.
I know for certain that I can easily imagine towns in
Arena and
Daggerfall to be real places exactly because they give the imagination something to chew on and fill in the gaps. When there are fewer or no gaps to fill, it is actually harder to retain suspension of disbelief, it's kind of like the uncanny valley effect, in a way. The more lifelike an imitation, the more you are aware that it is an imitation.
Werewolf wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 5:24 pm
Morrowind was FAR more of a downgrade then Skyrim.
I wouldn't call it a downgrade.
Morrowind is focused on telling a story, without hand-holding the player like in many more recent games. It's a lot less sand-box-y than
Daggerfall, because that would not be conducive to telling the story of the scope and detail that it tells. It's not something you can blame Bethesda for, it was a conscious design choice or design philosophy, even.
What they could do better was implementing certain things like more credible NPCs.
Gothic came out before
Morrowind (IIRC) but it has way more lifelike NPCs that have their daily routines and act like real human beings, or at least pull off a pretty decent impression. And I guess the "fantasy world simulator" part also took a backseat because they wanted to appeal to a wider audience.
Morrowind takes you places with a lot of sightseeing and some action, all the while being part of a big story. It's a different experience and calling it worse than
Daggerfall is like comparing oranges and apples. Of course, there could be a greater consistency between games in the series, but it seems like the early 2000s were generally a time of radical changes in game industry, and not a few franchises were drastically transformed, not always to the cheering of fans.