T w e n t y S i d e d

Duoae asked:

Where do you stand on levitation? Was it worth being removed because it broke the game or do you view TES games as fundamentally broken (like me) and that's why they're fun?

The problem is, there’s two kinds of broken.

The first and most obvious kind is unbalanced; open to player exploitation, outside of the developer’s projected cycle of challenge and reward. That’s the “good” kind of broken; it’s a tool for the player to experience content on their own terms rather than something categorically detrimental to the experience. It can be a problem when the exploits are too obvious, but if players have to find or research them on their own it usually increases rather than decreases enjoyment of the game–the challenge becomes figuring out how to beat encounters easily and the thrill becomes voluntarily reveling in these advantages. It increases the player’s sense of personal freedom when a developer doesn’t block off all the advantageous mechanical alleyways that make exploits possible. Bethesda’s been cracking down on the “good” kind of broken for a while now by removing or streamlining spellcrafting, enchantment, and the ability to make your character faster or bouncier; it’s not an outrageous assumption that they’ve been keeping flying out of the game because it’s just too hard to design encounters around.

However, I doubt that’s why they got rid of levitation. Levitation in modern TES games stands to be the “bad” kind of broken. The increased demands of the engine require towns to be separate instances–you can’t just pass from the wilderness into the Imperial City because the Imperial City, outside its outer walls and very crude stand-ins for its inner structures, doesn’t exist in the main gameworld. Players essentially teleport to a separate gameworld when they interact with the outer gate; it’s only through environmental cues that the illusion of continuity is preserved. Flying over said gate and into the “city” will reveal the only thing that does exist in the main gameworld: a bunch of bleary-textured and totally inert buildings meant to look good from a distant ridge. This is the main obstacle to levitation in modern TES games, although I’m sure there are issues with draw distance as well–the old Morrowind trick of thick mist everywhere doesn’t really hold up in 2016, although some kind of attractive swirling maelstrom might do the trick.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls: Q&A, Part 4 (Final Q&A)”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

This is the second-to-last one of these. This weekend, we’ll polish it off and start bringing the series to its conclusion.

falselordzalzabar asked:

Ruts: you get the lead position and $100 million budget (just for nice round numbers) to remake/upgrade 1 Elder Scrolls game for the current console generation/computer level. Which game do you remake, and how do you spend your money?

My knee-jerk response is Morrowind, but lackluster combat aside, that game’s fine the way it is. The visuals and text aren’t harmed by their presentation. Revamping it would only make it accessible to a generation that a.) could play it anytime they want and b.) probably don’t care all that much.

The most commercially and artistically interesting avenue would be a modern and very selective updating of Daggerfall. The core principles would be preserved: a simulationist rather than theme-parky world, character builds that give a variety of tools the player has to find applications for, endless buffets of quests and dungeons. Most of the budget would be allocated to creating a procedural, appealing, varied, and plausible gameworld; only a few instances (walled cities, specific dungeons) would be individually crafted.

All being well, the end result would be a relaxing game experience rather than an actively engaging one; a tremendous natural wilderness full of peaceful, quiet little towns to stumble over and nooks and crannies to explore. With modern graphics and a budget bigger than Skyrim (hopefully enough to find applications for all the skills), the result would unquestionably surpass the original game and might be a neat understated take on the open world.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls: Q&A, Part 3”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.