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« on: August 09, 2012, 09:14:25 AM »
I as a 14 year old gamer cannot understand for the life of me why people are like ZOMFG BANJO KAZOOIE! Or such.
I have a theory though.
MMOs stay alive due to their fans who get engrossed and who have spent enough time into the game to feel it'd be wasted if they left.
People spent their childhoods playing on NESs and SNESs so obviously they'll get nostalgia. Hell, why do you think WoW is alive today? RIFT could've killed WoW easily, it's just one has nostalgia, one doesn't, so boom.
But COME ON! Banjo Kazooie looks terribly boring. Nuts and Bolts on the other hand was fun. The ability to create your own way of tackling a level was loads o' fun. I dunno. It's certainly what they mean by a changing consumer base.
But here's my big thing. I am by seriously, seriously no means a 'casual' gamer. I play way too long for my own health, I loved TESIV and TESV, but for holy hells sake I detested Morrowind.
So I bought Morrowind, a game touted as being so much better than Skyrim and Oblivion and being seriously great. I was excited because I knew it had an awesome art style and had awesomeness in the lore and such.
I boot up to full settings, and first thing I notice is the view distance. The fog is like 'WTF?' though I know that's a software limitation in the engine. That said, I had view distance on max, so I was expecting better. Oh well.
Next thing I notice IS NO QUEST MARKERS?! Holy hell. What some might've called a challenge I called lack of functionality and I would be agreed with with my compatriots. I'm being serious, OK, a GPS satellite green marker over a character is overdoing it but is it that hard to just maybe circle the area on my map? I mean Uncharted had Drake's Journal which was awesome because you looked at it and figured it out and that was fun and challenging. This just seems like a straightforward problem. It was so bad I couldn't continue onwards without UESP's help - and even then it was fruitless due to the goddamn view distance preventing me from finding out where anything was.
Here's a really glaring problem. The combat. PEOPLE TEAR UP SKYRIM'S COMBAT BUT WHY NOT MORROWIND?! The combat HAS NO IMPACT. The dice roll system is horrible - if they were going to do that, at least copy Warhammer Fantasy since that actually has a really balanced chart for weapon skills and such. Hit you with ebony broadsword at 60 longsword skill - miss. Spam desperately, keep missing. Any possible kind of immersion I could've achieved that survived the fog and lack of feel in movement - oh man, I haven't even started on movement! It feels just like I'm painfully slowly gliding across a landscape. Still, immersion, anything that survived that was crushed by missing constantly. I swung my sword at him! The graphics met! WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME OTHERWISE? I can somewhat more agree with the marksman skill missing due to it being a projectile but seeing it hit and then reading 'miss!' is just poor. Magic feels weird and disconnected.
Let me weigh this up for you, Skyrim versus Morrowind.
Skyrim is for the older TES gamers and the newer ones. It is actually a rather mainstream title and surprised me with it's popularity.
Morrowind is quite a fair bit older. I would have started playing about the time it came out, a full decade ago.
Does it have a functional, good feeling movement system? Skyrim yes, Morrowind no.
Does it have combat (magic, archery and melee) that works well? Skyrim utilizes real hit detection, Morrowind just guesses if you hit or not.
Does the quest system work? Skyrim has quest markers that tell you were to go to prevent you walking five miles thataway. Morrowind gives you a location in text. When you start the game without any knowledge of the game world or a functioning map from day one, this serves purely as a barrier.
Does the game and viewpoint feel connected to the world it's set in? Skyrim has view bobbing and the combat feels sloppy and brutal. Which is very, very good! If I'm wielding a sword then I don't want to think it's paper, I feel the weight of my blows and such. It's just great and very very functional. It feels true. Morrowind feels like a kiddy slap fight with swords - there is very little movement, enough for me to see noclipping was no different from normal movement. It feels like there is nothing there.
But here's the great shame.
Morrowind has SUCH AN AWESOME STYLE! I WANT to enjoy the game properly! I want to enjoy walking around Vivec, I would like to take a visit to Mournhold and do quests. I liked walking down to Balmorra. I wanna play the game without using fast travel! The game feels so cruelly and poorly executed to a gamer like me. Skyrim immersed me greatly but I have a feeling Morrowind will do better still.
Yet it's not just Morrowind! I heartily enjoyed Fable 1 The Lost Chapters BUT the enemies were cruelly unbalanced and slow time was insanely over powered, making a troll that was nigh impossible to kill a cakewalk since it basically disabled AI. Fable 2 however, balances out combat, boosts the sense of the RPG hugely, provides a far fuller interaction with villagers rather than just named characters, the loot is far more varied and rated, it's just a way better game. Course Fable 3 is very mainstream but... I dunno, I kind've really like it. It's a spectacle fighter rather than RPG. Don't have much of a problem with that. Metal Gear Solid 1 I have no problems with, awesome game. Perhaps most importantly of all, Halo Combat Evolved - my first ever game - is to this day as good as an experience as Halo 3. Yet of course, that's just because it was my childhood game right? Not neccesarily. The combat was, and is, fast, brutal, the soundtrack is AMAZING, it just felt so damn great and halo reach is actually vindicative of that. Halo 3 and Halo 2 buff up 117's energy shield so some of the challenge is lost (IE legendary difficulty on Halo 3 is more like heroic/normal on reach/CE) but it just left me so awe inspired and full of joy to be able to run around being this monstrosity of a fighting machine.
This is all really horribly written, amirite? Tell me what you think.
