Quote from: Local Trouble on Feb 20, 2019, 08:16:56 PM
I've never played any of the Bethesda RPGs, but I do own a few. What's wrong with them?
With Oblivion/Skyrim...
- The story is minimal and unbranching. So while you can wander around an enormous world and with virtually zero limitation, you're only choosing the order in which to see the stories and subquests play out.
- Character development is minimal - there's very little emotion or, again, branching options. That also goes for your character - you can attain leadership of all the guilds, save the world and be powerful enough that it only takes you a couple of seconds to kill the dragons/demons that everyone's so terrified of, but it has very little impact on what you can do in the game or how people treat you. In other games that would be fine, when you finish all the quests you've finished the game, but Oblivion/Skyrim are immersive RPGs that are supposed to be like an alternative life; the game never technically ends.
- In Skyrim, particularly, you can get so powerful that combat becomes completely unsatisfying.
- While the world is colossal, you tend to find there are a limited number of patterns that are repeated ad nauseum. It's almost game-breaking in Oblivion, but even in Skyrim... the first time you plunder a Dwemer ruin, it feels dangerous, epic and special - some amazing steampunk fantasy - but later you find another, and another, and realise that everything that made it cool is copy/pasted in dozens of places across the game world.
So basically, while they're games that are massively immersive, the substance of what you're immersed in is quite shallow and slightly unsatisfying. This is why the mods are so critical - each one adds a bit more substance, more to do, making it more worthy of your time.
That said, some of the lore is pretty cool, with a Greek-style pantheon of personality-driven gods, and a Warhammer-style plane of demons. And it does feel incredibly liberating to go virtually anywhere and do virtually anything, at any time, within that game world. So much immersion that it can easily gobble up 200 hours of your time, but if you take an extended break, it does break that immersion and you start to wonder why you loved it so much.
Another point is how incredibly groundbreaking these games were. There wouldn't be a Witcher 3 without Elder Scrolls, or most of the other open-world games on the market today. The amount of content in them just defies belief. And the concept of a first-person sword/bow game was basically unique back in the day.
