I remember playing both Morrowind and Oblivion with like a ton of notes on how exactly to level up my character, not to min/max but to keep the game from scaling the difficulty too much.
I’d rather see a remake of Morrowind over Oblivion, though. I have the game on GOG but I don’t have the time in my life to go through all the mods to make it playable (especially getting the journalling system up to par with modern games).
The absolute shit mechanics had some kernels of gold though. I loved my Fortify Strength 100 Jump 100 spell and my 10 chaingun lightning amulets. Very few games let you do properly weird stuff with magic.
The level up system was bad. The thrust/chop/slash system for weapons is awkward. Every attack costing stamina is bad for early characters. The excessive number of weapon categories, combined with short and long blades being the only ones that were common. The persuasion system was just bribe people to get what you want, or taunt them for free murder. Run speed being a skill, jumping being faster than running and being a skill as well (combined with the level system this can cause problems). Item durability in general. The encumbrance system, and containers having weight limits. The spell making and enchantment system had some cool things, but it was also trivial to break the game in multiple ways. The quest tracking and journaling was garbage. Alchemy was undercooked. Merchants had way too little gold so selling became annoying by mid level. The haggling quickly got annoying as you could sell at extreme markup or buy for nothing fairly easy. Magicka didn’t regenerate, so being a mage was annoying at early levels until you had sufficient potion access.
There’s also some things that are more bugs I think than bad mechanics. Stealing from a merchant flagged every copy of an item as stolen from them. I once managed to make every redoran guard hostile to me on sight, which got really annoying.
Almost everything you said is why I prefer Morrowind and replay it more than any other Elder Scroll. I don’t like how hand-holdy and forgiving most modern games are.
The AI is obviously dated, some of the systems are underdeveloped, but stuff like the quest journal and athletic skills and how hard it is at the beginning if you aren’t careful or attentive are all major plusses for me. I want the weapon variety, I want the freedom to be anything but without the wishy-washy “you can be everything” style Skyrim has because they’re terrified of locking a player out of any content.
You can be almost everything in Morrowind, just like Skyrim. If anything Skyrim actually locks a chosen play style in more due to talents. There’s a few more exclusive guilds in Morrowind, but they aren’t major for the most part. Just because you have spent the time to learn how to avoid the rough edges doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Don’t run everywhere (keep fatigue bar at least half full). Don’t use weapon skills that are less than 40 (train them - there aren’t restrictions like in the later games).
It’s closer to D&D than an action RPG. Your swing is like a “to hit” roll. The game cares about your character’s skill - not yours.
I like Morrowind a lot mechanically - I like that the game will happily allow you to kill anyone you want (and with Taunt - you can do it legally!) You can complete the main quest after slaughtering everyone on Vvardenfell bar one person (the thread of prophecy might be broken - but a larger theme in ES lore is that we make prophecies happen).
I like that the game is designed around the lack of fast travel. When I complain about fast travel in Oblivion and Skyrim, I hear “just don’t use it” but it isn’t really feasible (playing a Survival run in Skyrim and life just sucks if I have to go to Morthal).
Morrowind’s world is just real and thought out in a way that I haven’t seen in a game since. The towns are designed around food sources, there’s a lot of thought into to the economies of plantation slavery, and it’s all used to enhance the world building.
The fact you have to start your comment with multiple don’t do X things proves my point. As a story it’s great, but as a game it’s got a lot of problems.
The game tells you these things though. You have to pay attention.
It’s an RPG before it is an action game. The mechanics align with that - you just might not like traditional CRPGs - which is fine, most don’t which is why Bethesda basically dropped the pretense of their games being RPGs by Skyrim.
Edit: if you want the easiest time in Morrowind - a Redguard. Adrenaline Rush will get you through tough spots. If you’re impatient and willing to sacrifice optimization for speed (which isn’t really that much a big deal), take the Steed as your sign. The Lady is better for optimization and will save you money on bribes.
If you want cheese: steal the lime ware plate on the shelves in the Census and Excise office right as you start the game. Drop it before the guard confronts you, pick it back up after he chews you out. Sell to Arrille, buy equipment matching your best armor skill/weapon skill. Hop over to Addamasartus, clear out, grab the moon sugar, sell to Ravirr in Balmora for one of his “Daedric weapons.”
But really the purpose of the game is that you should be a low level dweeb for a while. Pacing is slower - if you’re going to do the Mage’s Guild - you should be capable of magic. Lots of those early quests are no combat/easy.
It’s an experience about immersion. The gameplay and mechanics are built to facilitate this. You’re supposed to suck at first - that’s why Caius basically tells you to fuck off at the beginning of the game. You do end up with your god power fantasies at the end - by the time you’ve killed two gods and a pretender, you do get to run around one shotting everything. (Better than Sheogorath him-fucking-self getting ganked by a troll because its health pool is in the triple digits.)
A positive thing to let you experience the consequences of your actions. You are ignoring the fact that the game explicitly tells you when this happens, giving you the choice to continue if you like or reload a previous save if you don’t. It’s actually more forgiving than dying in most RPGs, which would force you to reload from a previous save.
Yeah, it’s a more immersive and interesting world. I also prefer the quest journal over map markers, make you actually read and interpret shit instead of fast travelling to the nearest pip. You also can’t just be the boss of every faction, they have incompatible goals.
And it does say when you break a main quest so you can revert your save. Just don’t be a murderhobo.
Wow I’m really surprised to hear people actually played with vanilla Morrowind and Oblivion leveling. I modded both games to fix that issue almost immediately after realizing how bad the system was.
I don’t think it was a problem in Morrowind, iirc there was no scaling at all, NPCs just existed at a set level so different areas of the map opened up to you naturally as you leveled up. It’s been a minute since I played through it so I might be mistaken but I don’t remember it being a problem, as opposed to OPblivion
Scaling in Morrowind wasn’t really a problem because almost every enemy was hand placed. You don’t have hordes of generic “Bandits” (in glass fucking armor at end game) - you have Tunipy Sharmirbasour, who has a reason for being where she is and a set level. Barring like guards and some of the humanoid enemies in Tribunal and Bloodmoon - everyone has a name.
Leveling only really comes into play when it comes to some of the generic loot that can be rolled, what some shopkeepers might have, and generic creature enemies. Even then, the scaling isn’t ridiculous - going from rats to Kagouti doesn’t feel uneven. Unlike Oblivion, you also will continue to see lower level enemies generated.
Oblivion even levels the quest rewards - so your Daedric artifacts and faction completion rewards will be useless once you level.
Leveling in Oblivion also affects enemy stats, and a lot of time it’s a flat bonus. Late game ogres and Minotaurs are not fun to fight, because they’re just massive health pools.
Morrowind has the same “inefficient” leveling problem (like, endurance is something you want to upgrade as early as possible, because it effects how much health you get every level up) - but in Morrowind you aren’t permanently fucked because you spent your first ten levels training acrobatics and speech craft or something.
Oblivion’s scaling was so wonky. Especially compared with what I really believe to be one of the worst leveling systems of all time. Anyone defending the leveling in Oblivion is nostalgic or thinks things are good just because they’re complicated. Being able to both under AND over level was such weird design.
I really dislike any game with difficulty scaling. It might make some sense, if you fight random bandits in the middle of nowhere, since they had time to level up a little, but in most places it’s just annoying.
I’d rather have my character level up and be able to literally destroy everything with one hit when I spend a shit-ton of time making it stronger. See: Gothic games or classic RPG’s.
I did play it! But I found the significantly lower usage of level scaling made it much less of a problem. Like... it is still a car crash of a system, but I don't have to compete with the fact that every enemy in the world is scaled to challenge me if I a) levelled perfectly and b) put every level into combat skills
The random hit chance thing is a separate issue though
It did. You’ll start to see “mudcrabs” become, like, “diseased mudcrab” and other various divider names as they scaled up with you, the same as they do in Oblivion and Skyrim. It has the same problem of “oh no, I leveled up to 25 by only jumping and now everything is too strong for my wimpy combat skills to handle.” Though because the game is already tougher from the start, it may not be as noticeable.
I am a spreadsheet kind of guy and the old system is for that, but it isn’t very intuitive. Without a guide you have no real idea what you should be doing, which wouldn’t work for mosr people who would love the game otherwise.
I wasn’t even going to pay $449, let alone $600. I figured it would have been somewhere between $300-400, with 400 being on the high end of reasonable.
$449 I would have waited a bit. But $600??? I get it’s because of tarrifs, but that’s really going to hurt the systems long term sales numbers the same way covid hurt PS5’s lifetime sales numbers.
Yeah I’m not in it at either price point. I’ll for once be a patient gamer and wait until it’s reasonable or I’ll skip this one. I’m betting there’s lots like us.
The games don’t drop in price, but the consoles do. There’s even a chance the price could go down for the holiday season, even if it’s something miniscule. This launch price is the early adopter tax.
Tariffs are not just for new products (new models). As soon as the current ps5 stock of a retailer is gone, they have to order new ones and pay a tariff. Then they make it more expensive for the consumer.
lets say Walmart now sells a ps5 for $400, but in a month they have to order new ones, from China. The order is more expensive than the one last month because of the tariffs, so they pay like 40% more. Walmart will now sell the ps5 for about $550 to you.
I’m honestly surprised they haven’t jacked up the prices already! Partly because Capitalism^TM^ — but also because I fully expect for big retailers like Walmart to have 30-90 day payment terms with vendors, and some of those invoices potentially being subject to these tariffs.
…stop being right! I got angry reading that, but when I clicked reply to yell at you, I realized it was all emotional backlash on my end. I couldn’t formulate a thought process to show why you’re wrong. Because you’re not wrong. I just hate that you’re right!
So something that I wonder about with the MSRP is how much of that is a Nvidia tax that inflated the price? The Nvidia GPU market has been so absolutely screwed by Nvidia’s lack of competition pricing model.
nVidia genuinely does not care about gaming. It is just a way to have a few extra bins to increase effective yields for their datacenter/AI chips. If Nintendo wants to buy in bulk they’ll sell in bulk. And if Nintendo doesn’t like nVidia’s prices they can talk to AMD… like the other consoles did. Jensen will just sell those chips as mobile devices or cars or whatever.
Most speculation was around 400 USD for the switch itself for the given specs, tooling, etc. The Steam Deck is a different process but their LCD model is pretty indicative. 450 was a bump that would account for economic uncertainty and give them room to drop back down for regular discounts and the like.
Then trump trumped the bed and the previously expected buffer zone just isn’t enough. Which is why we are seeing the massive price hike.
Never heard of that, I assume it’s an emulator. Emulation is different from running a game natively. Yeah, Nintendo probably could get AMD hardware to work as a replacement for Nvidia hardware, but I would guess either compatibility would be imperfect, there would be a performance hit, or both.
Business to business is different than the consumer market. Nintendo comes to Nvidia and orders a custom product with a minimum order of 10 million chips, Nvidia wants that deal. They aren’t going to arbitrarily increase the price because they can because Nintendo can and will move to another vendor. Nvidia wouldn’t risk fucking up a long-standing relationship like that, especially since Nintendo is a repeat customer, and they can rely on repeat business from them each year. These are long standing relationships that don’t just fall apart that quickly unless one party wants to drastically change what they are doing.
Right. The only difference between a tariff and a VAT, is that the VAT applies to all products indiscriminately, where as a tariff only applies to imported goods.
I think they made their own technology which sounds kinda similar to hall effect. We’ll have to wait and see if it works but that doesn’t generate hate and clicks.
Of course they will, they make too much money off people buying replacements. Since the games also got an increase in price, I expect the joy-cons bought separately will also be marked up by a non-trivial margin.
they make too much money off people buying replacements.
Didn’t they start offering free repairs at some point due to it being such a widespread issue? Or did they stop doing that at some point?
Between the damage to their reputation it would cause (knowingly releasing a very flawed product despite having already publicly apologized for it years ago) and the potential for more class-action lawsuits down the line, it seems like it’d be profoundly shortsighted for them to do this.
But maybe the profits from selling replacements outweighs all that in their eyes. I sure hope not. One would hope the profits from a considerably more expensive console and moderately more expensive games would be enough.
I don’t know for sure if it was ever a thing in the USA. A cursory search only showed mention of Europe offering that repair. I didn’t even bother checking and just went straight for the hall-effect replacement sticks when I had joy-cons that drifted, probably a bunch of other people in that same boat.
IMO, the profits from this would still come even if they offer repairs. I’d venture to guess many out-of-the-loop parents would just buy the replacements ‘cause they probably think their kid is abusing it somehow. The good ol’ “sigh 'n buy” phenomenon to keep the kiddos entertained.
Nope. I’ve sent several pairs of Joycons (at least 4 sets) to be repaired by Nintendo absolutely free of charge. Never had an issue though I remember the process being a little convoluted.
Still though, from the fact you had to send in 4 times means that replacing mine from the get go with hall-effect was much less hassle. Sounds like the new controllers will be exactly the same quality, joystick-wise, since you had such a great experience. Why change the process?
They initially also only did it in places that consumer protection laws would force them to. Some markets (at least initially) didn’t get the same benefit.
I used it a few years ago, and it was fine and i didnt have to pay anything. I wish Sony offered this because I’m on my 4th ps5 controller…
If it’s not fixed in the new one, they can screw off… it’s bad enough they got away with it, but to totally redesign everything and still say yes we’ll keep the defective parts going forward is a big no from me.
It’s not even out yet and they redesigned the entire stick. Can we stop whining about every little detail here, we’ll find out how they perform in 2 months
I could totally be misremembering, but I seem to recall the Ezio trilogy being praised for accurate cities. So not the original originals, but probably some of the best.
Not all of it though. I remember Blue from Overly Sarcastic Productions going on a tangent about how he went over to florence (or venice) and looking for a place that didn’t exist. Ubi had made it up completely.
Apologize for Nanjing and maybe there’s a snowball’s chance in hell you have a leg to stand on.
Edit: he said “It is an insult to the nation.” It’s a nation which is broadly too cowardly to recognize and apologize for the senseless and solely perpetrated murders of hundreds of thousands and rapes of tens of thousands. Your nation’s government has no honor for this, and no microscopic “insult” in a game can sink you lower.
Until they do that, their PM shouldn’t be getting up in front of cameras and crying like a whiny little bitch about how a video game portrays their history.
This article sucks horrendously. The Japanese PM was asked about Assassin's Creed Shadows by a member of the House of Councillors, which from a quick search is roughly like the Senate in many western governments.
Prime Minister Ishiba responded to the questions by Kada, saying that if such actions were carried out at real-life landmarks in Japan, he would oppose them. He said that acts such as shrines being graffitied are completely out of the question, which was in reference to a real life act from November 2024.
Holy fuck, the PM doesn't want people to vandalise shrines in real life. He's so mad about Assassin's Creed Shadows, everybody point. Also, the writer doesn't know how to spell feudal ("fueduel") and that's probably the worst part.
Considering what a shitshow tourists are in Japan? I completely get why they would comment on this rather than just say “It is a video game, who cares? Next question”.
Last time I was in Kyoto I swear a local priest/monk was about to throw some 'bows when a German tourist an his family just walked straight across a zen garden.
Still, the endless chud culture war is always incredibly tiring. And here I am playing Rise of the Ronin instead (the PC port is ass but it is functional ass!). Chuds hate it because women exist. They SHOULD hate it because you can totally gay seckz Sakamoto Ryoma but that would involve knowing anything about the game that isn’t in a launch trailer. Sort of like how Nioh “got away with” acknowledging the existence of Yasuke because all the chuds tuckered themselves out before finding out he was in that.
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Aktywne