wycha on 23/1/2020 at 15:43
Quote Posted by froghawk
The reversed light gem tattoo is particularly odd... it glows more when you can't be seen? What?
The reversed light tattoo it is supposed to be seen and be helpful for player, not for ai, so don't worry. I guess besides working as lightgem, it also should help player to have an idea where character is in great darkness to not feel lost.
TrueMoods on 24/1/2020 at 17:30
I recently bought Return of the Obra Dinn, really enjoyed Papers Please and have huge respect for solo game devs. So lots of hype!
WingedKagouti on 26/1/2020 at 17:59
Been playing a bunch of Morrowind lately. 2020 or 2002, same digits.
demagogue on 27/1/2020 at 09:08
I tried to get back into Morrowind a week or two ago and ... I got maybe 3 hours or so in and it wasn't really sticking this time. Felt like quite a bit of dead space, I wasn't really believing the areas as real world space, and the story or world wasn't really pulling me in in that first town you travel to. It's in a weird hybrid space, like the style of a top-down or 2.5D RPG in a 3D world that's not yet the style of a 3D RPG. Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind though. I seem to have better memories from 10 or 15 years ago.
Thirith on 27/1/2020 at 09:59
I always liked Morrowind better as an idea than as an actual game. I'm hoping that the big total conversion project Skywind will be more to my liking.
Yesterday I played on in my replay of Dishonored 2. The Duke's Palace is such a great location: its scope, its aesthetic, what it says about Duke Abele and his cronies. It puts me in mind of Hitman (2016) and its missions, to such an extent that I wish I could play some of Dishonored's levels in Hitman and vice versa.
WingedKagouti on 27/1/2020 at 11:02
Quote Posted by demagogue
It's in a weird hybrid space, like the style of a top-down or 2.5D RPG in a 3D world that's not yet the style of a 3D RPG.
While newer 3D RPGs look prettier, Morrowind still makes better use of the actual 3D environments than the vast majority simply by virtue of not restricting z-axis movement or having invisible walls.
PigLick on 27/1/2020 at 11:46
Yeh and there are some pretty amazing mods like tamriel rebuilt which adds a whole lot extra areas, quests etc. Also there is a huge patch which adds massive graphical overhauls, QoL improvements and many bug fixes.
Sulphur on 27/1/2020 at 12:01
Quote Posted by demagogue
I tried to get back into Morrowind a week or two ago and ... I got maybe 3 hours or so in and it wasn't really sticking this time. Felt like quite a bit of dead space, I wasn't really believing the areas as real world space, and the story or world wasn't really pulling me in in that first town you travel to. It's in a weird hybrid space, like the style of a top-down or 2.5D RPG in a 3D world that's not yet the style of a 3D RPG. Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind though. I seem to have better memories from 10 or 15 years ago.
That's arguably more Daggerfall than Morrowind, that 2.5D feeling in a 3D space. There's more interesting spaces in Morrowind but it is a lot of real estate and trudging, true. That's emblematic of the entire game: everything takes an age or is inconvenient, and there's lots of
matter presented as dryly and infodump-heavy as possible. It's not a very artfully designed game, weirdness factor notwithstanding.
Thirith on 27/1/2020 at 12:10
I think I could've forgiven a lot of clunkiness, but Morrowind's conversations were by far the biggest hurdle for me to enjoy the game. They always felt like some badly-presented Wiki, not like conversations, not even the stylised, stripped-down conversations of video games.
demagogue on 27/1/2020 at 13:39
It may be a mood thing. Planescape had info dumps but they still had a charm to them, or did to me at the time I was playing it. This last time with MW, it reminded me of what X4 is doing with its NPCs. There are these random NPCs standing in random places that dump a little wiki info, and you go around town to check them like boxes. So that was a blargh, but that said it has to do something right because it sucked me in back in the day. But I never got too far into the game and I want to finish it someday anyway. I will, just not right now. :)
Speaking of info-dump RPGs, I'm still chugging Disco Elysium. At this point I'm realizing it's mostly just a platform for interactive storytelling and interacting with the world and characters. I mean a very good one, but that's still it's main MO. It toys with some tropes of being an RPG, and the chance aspect built into the convo system is actually a clever way to have a gaming side to it, but that's not really what makes it special. Well, it makes it little special in an innovation way, but it's just this really engaging & weird world and the guy's frame of mind and the events and these characters, the whole mix of it all thrown together for you to explore at your own pace that make this special.
And speaking of "they don't feel like real conversations"... these feel like real conversations, but it's wild that you can keep replaying them and taking different conversation routes. It gives this provisional quality, like you can taste these different realities in the same world, and it's interesting how much I anyway want to be sure each conversation ends up the way I want it to, that there's an element of commitment the game itself doesn't force but the player can stick to, like the way a player commits to the rules playing a boardgame that itself doesn't care either way, but anyway it lets you have the world & the little wins and losses you make for yourself that you want.