Fallout 4

[Norgy]

For some reason I could never get into the Gothic series.

[grumbler]

For some reason I could never get into the Gothic series.

Neither could I.  They seemed far more baroque than necessary.

[Razgovory]

Terrible controls and voice acting.  I dislike the idea of trainers because it begs the question.  Why am doing all this?  I'm the least qualified person in the land.  Why not have the trainers go do it?

[Norgy]

Were the controls that bad too?

I just remember Gothic 3 being released some time after TES: Oblivion and being quite shitty. Almost as poor as Two Worlds.

[Syt]

Terrible controls and voice acting.  I dislike the idea of trainers because it begs the question.  Why am doing all this?  I'm the least qualified person in the land.  Why not have the trainers go do it?

Fair point.

When I played Gothic 1 it was the first 3D open world game I'd encountered, with three different factions you could join. Now, there were areas of the map that were too dangerous for you to go, but the game generally allowed to go where you wanted, and it had seamless transitions between inside and outside areas.

Gothic 2 made everything better and larger and actually had a reasonable world setup for its time. A small island with the important ore for the war effort against the orks. A mining colony with convicts who mine the ore. Several farms to provide food for everyone. When the barrier around the mining colony falls, the convicts escape and are hired by the farmers to counter pressure from the royal paladins who keep squeezing more and more out of the farmers, because the situation is so desperate. And then there's the orks who've pretty much overrun the mining colony now. And smugglers and pirates. But ultimately, this is all just the backdrop for a much larger evil gathering. It's one of my favorite bits of world building.

Gothic 3 was janky as shit on release - bugs galore, and devs and publisher parted on bad terms. It seems to have been a combination of devs biting off than they could chew, and the publishers refusing to lower scope or extend deadlines. I've tried the later patched version, but while stuff has improved I just couldn't get into it. It doesn't help that the game throws you into the middle of a free for all melee with dozens of orks that is supposed to be a tutorial. And Gothic 4, done by different devs, just received crap reviews.

The original devs went on to make Risen 1, which was basically Gothic 2 in the Carribean and not too bad. And I haven't played Risen 2/3, but reception was not good for them.

[Razgovory]

First open world 3d game I played was Daggerfall which was a fun but buggy mess.

[Monoriu]

First one I played was Arena, the first TES game.  I only played it for a while, as I disliked the randomly generated towns, dungeons, people, and everything.  It felt absolutely huge, as it encompassed all the provinces.  But still, everything felt too generic.  I strongly preferred the Ultima series to that one. 

I had Daggerfall, the second game, but I was busy at the time and didn't really bother.  Probably played a grand total of 10 minutes before giving up.

So I didn't pay much attention with Morrowind, until the raving reviews convinced me that I was wrong.  I greatly enjoyed it, and considered it the ultimate RPG game.  I spent many hours in the game, and restarted a few times.  But somehow I didn't finish any of the major quest lines, including the main one.  It took a bit too long.  The levelling system was really odd.  I can't remember the details, but in order to maximise the benefits, it was necessary to deliberately work some skills that were not really used.  I had to use lots of paper to plan exactly how many points I needed to put in this and that skill in each level, most of them unrelated to what I was doing.

The first game that I completed was Oblivion.  The annoying levelling system was still there.  I think.  They finally fixed it in Skyrim.

[Norgy]

First open world 3d game I played was Daggerfall which was a fun but buggy mess.

I think it was released into public domain a few years back. You'd need DosBox and whatnot to play it now.
There'd be no fun with TES games unless they were buggy.

In Skyrim, the poor horse trader that offers a quest that can give you a free horse and a chance to screw the Black-Briars in Riften was stuck in the ground outside Whiterun for eternity in my first playthrough.

[Valmy]

Daggerfall was almost unplayably buggy though.

Daggerfall was great because the main quest had all these timers and it was all 'FUCK YOU' if you didn't meet them.

[Valmy]

First one I played was Arena, the first TES game.  I only played it for a while, as I disliked the randomly generated towns, dungeons, people, and everything.  It felt absolutely huge, as it encompassed all the provinces.  But still, everything felt too generic.  I strongly preferred the Ultima series to that one. 

I had Daggerfall, the second game, but I was busy at the time and didn't really bother.  Probably played a grand total of 10 minutes before giving up.

If that was your issue with Arena then you really wouldn't have liked Daggerfall.

[Solmyr]

Daggerfall was my first TES game and I played the shit out of it. While the world was generic and randomly generated, with some imagination you could create fun stories in it, and I used to read a lot of those on some Daggerfall-related websites. Also, the main questline does not have you saving the world, but instead participate in some rather convoluted political intrigue (the world-shattering stuff only really appears in the very last quest of the main line).

[Monoriu]

First one I played was Arena, the first TES game.  I only played it for a while, as I disliked the randomly generated towns, dungeons, people, and everything.  It felt absolutely huge, as it encompassed all the provinces.  But still, everything felt too generic.  I strongly preferred the Ultima series to that one. 

I had Daggerfall, the second game, but I was busy at the time and didn't really bother.  Probably played a grand total of 10 minutes before giving up.

If that was your issue with Arena then you really wouldn't have liked Daggerfall.

Arena's main quest was also quite bland.  The quest was to defeat the chief imperial battle mage who had imprisoned the emperor in another dimension.  In order to gain access to the imperial palace, I needed a staff.  There were eight pieces scattered in the eight provinces.  Then, in order to figure out the location of each piece, I had to do one quest in each of the eight provinces.  So it is like - do one quest, they tell me where the staff piece is, get the staff piece, then go to next province, repeat 8 times.  Granted, you can ignore it and do other secondary quests, but my impression is that most of them (if not all) are randomly generated. 

[Norgy]

As we're (again) discussing TES rather than FO, i'll just chime in and say despite all its shortcomings, Morrowind had a superb main quest and some fairly good side quests too and offered the most vivid universe of all the TES games.

Unlike the later installments, I actually liked reading the books you found in Morrwind. A certain one about lusty Argonian maids excluded.

[Razgovory]

Well this is Skyrim with guns.  I mean, it's the same engine.

[grumbler]

As we're (again) discussing TES rather than FO, i'll just chime in and say despite all its shortcomings, Morrowind had a superb main quest and some fairly good side quests too and offered the most vivid universe of all the TES games.

Unlike the later installments, I actually liked reading the books you found in Morrwind. A certain one about lusty Argonian maids excluded.

All of the books from Morrowind are in Oblivion and Skyrim.  It's just that we've read them before.

What I miss from Morrowind is the map.  It only showed ground you had covered (the rest was blacked out), and you could click on it and type out notes for the various places you'd been.  That was way cool.