Oblivion DEImastered
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (80)
sorted by:
I have no idea of the context of his statement, but going from Daggerfall to Morrowind was a step down in complexity - maybe he’s saying “Oblivion did Daggerfall for the (dumbed-down) masses better than Morrowind” ? Only way I could really see that sentiment making any sense
I've heard his reasoning, but can't elaborate much since I started with Oblivion and never played any of the games before that game.
The main thing I remember in his reasoning is that fast travel was a good feature, that was in Daggerfall that was removed in Morrowind. That people blame Oblivion for "dumbing down" with a feature like fast travel, when in actuality it's re-implementing a feature that was removed in Morrowind but existed in previous games. I believe also he says that in Daggerfall you had to specialize more and play as a class, and commit to it, ie; actually role play as the class you were playing and Oblivion leaned into that more than Morrowind did.
I don't know much else of the reasons he's given but he has talked about it.
But the thing with Razorfist is trying to understand his opinions with video games are a losing battle.
I don't think there's a single person I have more different tastes with when it comes to video games.
He's very clear headed when it comes to politics, but he can be led by reactionary thinking to excuse something from Microsoft or Nintendo that he would rip to shreds with Sony.
It's not uncommon for him to praise a game with the exact mechanics he tore into in another game because the developer said something based.
When it comes to opinions, he kind of has this thing like "splitting". Where something is either all good or it's all bad.
He's a good thinker with politics, but even in that realm he can fall prey to "splitting".
An example of "splitting" is
"pulp is good, George Lucas aims at pulp, therefore the prequels are pulp and the prequels are good and everyone loved the prequels when they came out and Empire Strikes back was controversial....Prequels good and loved, and all the talk on all the star wars is revisionist history"
Empire Strikes Back won the people's choice award and played every summer in theaters until Return of the Jedi came out in 83. None of the prequels ever got a re-release except for Phantom Menace in 3D and it was such a disappointment that they scrapped the plans of giving the rest of the prequels the 3D treatment.
Fast travel was necessary for Daggerfall and Arena before it because the world maps were realistically sized for a nation and would have made the game near unplayable if you had to spend days real time walking to every destination. Morrowind had a smaller map, so no longer needed fast travel. Later games kept the small maps and added fast travel back in.
Or you could just make a broken custom class.
Thank you for at least confirming I wasn't imagining things. Pretty sure he talked about it in his latest Daggerfall stream but I hadn't found the timestamp yet. And yeah I completely agree with you on his opinions and his argument methods. I align with his politics a lot more than his vidya takes, which often seem contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
Part of it i think is that we all have blindspots, and we forget that while objectively bad things exist in entertainment, objectively good things are harder to prove, and a great deal of it all is opinion. Sometimes you just like something. It isn't always rational or categorical.
My example is Gears and Halo. I've never liked gears and halo has defined by view of storytelling more than almost anything other than LOTR and Star Wars. Gears was fun enough to play, I just didn't care about the characters or story at all. And ultimately if you strip them down to their bare "stoic solider fights endless bugs against impossible odds" they aren't that different. But i didn't like one and love the other. So it goes
This will always be my Principal Skinner "no it is the children who are wrong" moment. I loath fast travel mechanics in just about every game. It (along with quest pointers) always turn any game into a menu cycling slog. This seems to have culminated in Starfield; I never bothered with it because although it looked like the game 12 y/o self would have died for, every review showed the gameplay to be a series of fast travel selections.
In order for fast travel to stop being a common mechanic, we need to kill off "open world" games as they currently exist.
Because they value size and story over fun. Sure its cool to run my way to X town the first go around, getting lost exploring things I see along the path. But the 9th time I need to travel there to "talk to Y Guy" to progress a quest, they better let me just skip the walk that no longer has anything possibly interesting along it.