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Comments
It's one of the best RPGs I've ever played. If I had one complaint about it, it's that getting the true ending is incredibly difficult without a guide, due to how sidequests work. Also, the combat system takes some getting used to.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/20/is-half-life-3-open-world-and-coming-after-2013
Most hilariously stupid videogame rumor I've ever seen.
For those who don't want to read it, the rumor is that Half-Life 3 will take place in a large open world, with sidequests and stuff. So basically Skyrim.
I'm divided about Torchlight. On one hand I've heard tons of good things about it. On the other hand, I tried it, and it seemed...meh as a game. Looked well-designed but didn't quite interest me off the bat. The gameplay seemed a bit needlessly complicated.
It didn't seem very complicated at all to me, and that was the problem. It appeared to boil down to "repeatedly click on all the stuff, equip anything that increases your numbers, sell everything else, repeat ad nauseam."
Soulcalibur V Collector's Edition just arrived. Before you ask why the hell I got it, it was a little over $30 on Amazon, and one of my new friends is adamant that it's worth it. My only worry is that it doesn't have $30 of content. Worst comes to worst, I got a new soundtrack CD and an art book.
From what (extraordinarily little) I've played of it, it seems less fun than IV, which was less fun than III, which was less fun than II...
The Soulcalibur series has really been going downhill.
If nothing else though, the character creator is fun.
My first Soul Calibur game was 2. The series had this weird effect on me where it wasn't until I was well into 3 that I realized that I hadn't been having fun. I blame my young self's shitty tastes.
I would have rather got TTT2, but it was much more expensive, and I didn't want to slog all the way through Tekken 6 or Soulcalibur IV again, even though IV was pretty fun.
Bluh, the artbook has very little content and the soundtrack isn't even that good. If the game isn't very fun, I'll probably just sell it to someone on campus.
Soul Calibur II was probably one of the best fighting games ever made, although it seems all the wrong lessons were learned.
That seems like a good descriptor of Diablo 3 too.
And...most other dungeon crawlers, really.
I guess I'm the odd one out for liking the Oblivion setting. Morrowind grated on me because everything was brown. Oblivion wasn't afraid to be vibrant and pretty for the sake of it.
I have a similar problem with Skyrim and graygraygraygray, but it's offset by the forest-y stuff that looks somewhat like my neck of the woods. Can't go wrong with that 45+ parallel evergreen.
Aesthetically, Oblivion was better than Morrowing and Skyrim.
As a complete setting, though, Oblivion is definitely worse. It's just so... normal. European. Regular.
Morrowind is different to the standard fare- and more than that, you can actually see the history of the world and learn about Morrowind.
Even Skyrim is different to the standard fare, although admittedly not to the same extent as Morrowind.
I mean... Go around and compare the towns in Oblivion to the towns you find in most games, then compare the towns in Skyrim and Morrowind.
Oblivion is definitely more colourful, but that's just aesthetics, it's not the setting.
Every TES game is the best TES game (except Arena and Daggerfall).
Every TES game is also the worst TES game (especially Arena and Daggerfall).
You need to do the TES games on your blog
Specifically, the latest three.
Yeah, they're on the list.
Couldn't really do Arena or Daggerfall because they're so bad I can't really get any distance into them.
There's nothing wrong with this when it's done right. The issue is that most people have no idea what to do with 11th-15th century European historical material, game developers included. A lot of ground is never trod because there's so much concern over ensuring that the magic is cool and that all the RPG expectations are in place rather than bringing all the strange stuff from actual European history and folklore into it.
One example is the Draugr from Skyrim. In the game, they're relegated to the regular, zombie-type enemy. In folklore, they're semi-aware of their old identities, self people and animals mad by their presence alone and (in the goofy traditions of European folklore) can alter their size. Kind of like a Lovecraftian, shapeshifting, undead Gollum. But in Skyrim, they're mooks to be defeated in numbers rather than strange being who defy the natural order and shake the foundations of a person's understanding of death.
I could do with some more normal, European and regular -- but I could do with seeing it done well rather than superficial aspects of it applied to RPG and fantasy conventions. This goes some way towards explaining my gameboner for The Witcher games, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls; they're so obviously crafted with knowledge of what makes medieval European history and folklore interesting in the first place that they can play old tropes, often straight, and make them work brilliantly all the same.
Medieval Europe is largely stranger and more advanced than almost any fantasy setting allegedly based on it. What gets in the way isn't the concept or the inspiration, but the execution and the lack of passion that goes into bringing the elements of that to life. Oblivion's lore failures come courtesy not of the medieval European inspiration (although it arguably had just as much to do with ancient Rome), but of the developers' creative decisions. Bringing the Roman influences together with the Ming Empire wouldn't have changed that, because execution is so important, and I daresay we would have essentially had the same thing. But with rainforests rather than European forests.
In short, the resemblance of many fantasy RPGs to medieval Europe is skin deep, and often not even that. Oblivion is one such case. And while it might be disappointing that Bethesda chose to go with that influence over the more diverse implications in Morrowind, the essential issue comes from the way in which they chose to follow standardised RPG tropes and expectations. Oblivion is boring because it's a bunch of warriors, mages and thieves running around with linearly scaling equipment, casting spells with ease and doing all that other stuff that has been so intensely standard since the early 90s.
I mean, it has literally been over twenty years in video games since this kind of thing has become both popularised and recognised. We can move on from D&D's brand of "medieval aesthetic meets superhero stories", which is a formula that has provided a massive amount of failures in comparison to its successes, even moreso than usual.
There's nothing wrong with that in some contexts. It has to be done correctly, yes, but even then, it has to fit.
And that's the issue. Oblivion's setting doesn't fit. It's literally as if they took a look at a map of Tamriel:
"Oh, okay, it's in the middle. Cyrodiil is going to be the requisite European setting then."
That's really the issue. Before Oblivion, we knew some of what Cyrodiil was like;
And that... is not the Cyrodiil we get in the game.
(I can't find the books where other things about Cyrodiil are mentioned.)
What bugs me most is that before Oblivion, they had a medieval Europe setting. That would be Skyrim.
And then they go and have two medieval Europe games in a row.
The next game had better be set in Elsweyr or something awesome like that.
Skyrim had a lot of opportunities to be awesome. I'm disappointed that they didn't play with the setting any more.
I mean, considering how omnipresent dragon-related stuff was (dragons, Alduin World-Eater and Akatosh, Dovahkiin, Draugr, Dragon-Priests, Blades), the dragons were surprisingly un-integrated into the setting. I guess this was to take attention away from the dragons because they were everywhere, but Nord culture ended up feeling... empty. And they had a whole lot of lore right there they could have integrated.
Yeah, Nord culture pretty much consisted of people saying Sovngarde a lot.
And then what even was Sovngarde? Nobody bothered to explain that to me.
Valhalla.
Did you not do the main quest?
No, I did do the main quest.
But what was it? It was a place where valiant dead men went, yeah. But why? For what purpose? Was it a reward, a condemnation, something Nords strive for? What?
It's basically an awesome mead hall of hanging out with awesome warriors forever.
And do the main quest. It's really, really awesome.
Yeah, and that's the problem. There's nothing there. No reason to strive to get there, except to hang out with a bunch of awesome Nord warriors. Nothing to do once you're there, no heroic quests, nothing.
I mean, in Norse mythology, Valhalla was a place where all the awesome Norse warriors went to fight with Odin in Ragnarok. Sovngarde? Well, you can drink a bunch of mead there, I guess. Hope a dragon shows up or somethin', but that's it for the next ten thousand years.
I mean, yeah, are you seeing my point?
There's a whole lot of stuff about Skyrim that could have fit in to make for a while bunch of awesome lore. I mean, Skyrim was the area where hostilities between Men and Mer first erupted, for fuck's sake. You have Forsworn, you have Dwemer ruins, you have Draugr, you have a warrior culture whose way of life revolve around trying to get into fantasy!Valhalla, you have a mortal Nord who ascended into divinity, you have the Greybeards and the Voice. There's so much they could have drawn from to make Nord culture actually seem like a culture. But no. It's just a bunch of guys who live in the north and drink a lot of beer and fight to get into Sovngarde for the sake of getting into Sovngarde.
I think they might also do some fighting, but I'm not entirely certain.
But yeah, the fact that I'm not clear on that when Sovngarde is extremely important to at least two major quest chains I've done kind of drives the point home.
Skyrim just feels so... disconnected. You have awesome pieces of lore everywhere, and each area fits within its own lore quite nicely, but none of the lore fits together to form a cohesive whole.
And I say this as someone who's sunk nearly 150 hours into the game.
Yeah.
So, I was just playing Oblivion, and I heard a battle taunt that I'd never heard before. Wut.
> Cyrodiil
I keep on readnig this as Cyndaquil.