Re: Does Daggerfall make other open worlds seem fake?
Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2022 8:04 am
It's important to bear in mind how the industry changed, what changed it, and why. People like Robert Altman were not gamers, they were business people looking to create a profitable business. Altman ousted the original owner of Bethsoft presumably to have better control. Julian Lefay, Vijay Lakshman, and others were out of the company by the time the company was reshaped into the company that created Morrowind. To a great extent Daggerfall and Morrowind were created by two different companies with very different goals.Werewolf wrote: ↑Wed Jun 29, 2022 1:23 am Morrowind was still a great game. Keep in mind it was Bethesda’s last chance to be saved from bankruptcy so it makes sense that it would be more conventional. Morrowind could’ve been a stepping stone to Elder Scrolls rising back up. Bethesda could’ve used Morrowind as a soft reboot that would be the first step in making the successor to Daggerfall. They could’ve made the future games perhaps be more beginner friendly with more forgiving early areas and the return of fast travel whilst expanding upon the ROG elements more in line with Daggerfall. But then of course we ended up with Skyrim not even freaking having classes. Morrowind has an excuse for being dumbed down as it still has a lot going for it and would’ve been a great soft reboot towards the more simple “chosen one” nature of Arena that would then build back to Daggerfall with future entries. But that didn’t happen. Oblivion clearly was designed for console gamers who don’t play RPGs but it still did at least try to be an RPG, it clearly struggled to resist the demands of executives who interpreted the genuine criticism of games like Morrowind being hard for new players as the ways of the RPG genre itself, not the starting area being hard. But Skyrim had zero excuse, that game was gleefully dumbed down to the point where it insulted the player.
What killed the Western RPG? The idea-amongst corporate executives-that the reason why many found Western RPGs too hard to play is because of the deep mechanics of RPGs, not the tendency of Morrowind’s world to be dangerous and thus brutal for early players.
Had Western RPG designers been able to convince the suits that they could just make the starting areas easy for low level characters to make them accessible then we very well could’ve had Elder Scrolls post-Morrowind get more complex over time like how Daggerfall was more complex then Arena, instead of the series getting dumbed down. They failed