3mo ago

Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor

www.videogamer.com

With the success of massive RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that actually offer player choice again, Peterson is excited to release his game to an audience that does want more again. After a rough period of RPGs where player choice and ingenuity were watered down, there’s now a hunger for more branching paths and player freedom.

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Since most of Elder Scrolls nostalgia today is around Morrowind, it's always interesting (and a bit funny) to find people (involved or not) who think the series started to derail with Morrowind.
I am not mocking them at all, I get it, Daggerfall and Morrowind are very different games with a different scale and focus. Daggerfall is also... quite overwhelming, and rather impersonal for 99% of its gameplay. I really don't know what a "modern" Daggerfall would look like.
- I can tell you. It would be HUGE absolutely generic open world with AI generated characters and quests, virtually zero human made and interesting quests and gameplay would feel like filling excel spreadsheets. Somewhat like Ubisoft recepe :-D
  At least that's what original Daggerfall 's spirit would be. It was at the time where "the biggest" was simply the catchphrase and Daggerfall was exactly that. The biggest. But also very shallow and empty. Sure there were billions of quests but what for? When for one interesting there were dozens of generic ones? Don't get me wrong, it was still a great game at the time, because players weren't as spoiled and something was always better than nothing. At least that's my impression.
  
  daggerfall is so messed up that the legitimate strategy to beat the game is go in and out of dungeons and waiting for the quest item to randomly appear next to the front door
  
  That's honestly what I am worrying it would be, and what I meant by a huge part of the game being "impersonal".
  Daggerfall has parts that are fascinating, even long after its time.
  Its custom class creator is rather fun. Its magic effect system too... despite some of the most intriguing effects not even working at all. Seriously. You can craft those spells, they just don't do anything.
  Its dungeons are intimidating in scale, and the 3D automap is both a feat and almost no help at all.
  There are freaking linguistic skills, plural because there are like 8 different languages or so. They are mostly useless, because they just add a slight chance a monster won't attack you, but since you don't know when it works you'll murder them anyway.
  And then there's the undistinguishable random quests and the grind.
  
  I don't think I want AI, or quests generated characters. I already played other RPGs. Build something new please
- I think, at this point, most of the nostalgia is for Skyrim, despite being the newest one in the series, it is nearly 14 years old now and way more people have played it. It had issues, and lost a lot of what was great in Morrowind, but it’s a beacon of quality compared to what came after.
  It’s started to impact their success though, starfield has only sold like 3 million compiles so far, compared to the 12.5 million of fallout 4 on launch day. Hell, Morrowind has sold 4 million copies, albeit over 23 years.
  It’s probably to late for Bethesda to turn things around, but, it’s a great example of what not to do for other studios and publishers.
- I dunno. I have nostalgia from the original where I could get unlimited mana from a magic sword for my spells.
  
  Honestly I have played only a little of Arena (very late, around the time Bethesda started to give it for free on their site). I think the farthest I went was the second staff piece dungeon.
  
  yeah its just that the race or class or whatever that did not regenerate mana but could get so much mana from items. I was levitating with a forceshield and blasting things before long right into the end. I was like gene grey or magneto just tearing up the place.
  
  Oh, kind of like the Sorcerer default class in Daggerfall and the Atronach sign in Morrowind and Oblivion then (and sort of Atronach stone in Skyrim too, though this one is just less regen, not no regen at all).
  Yeah, those are fun. You're basically a magic sponge.

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