If only... The Elder Scrolls edition

Game Talk The Bunker
1

if only a good Roguelike team had been in charge of creating The Elder Scrolls series, especially Oblivion.

so i have been rocking Oblivion on my new laptop, a massive upgrade from my ancient '02 Dell, which means that i no longer have to have all imaginable settings set at the barest possible minimum.

i have noticed, however, after having played Catadda for the past few months, that TES4: Oblivion is… missing something…

namely, the world of Nirn is, well, kinda boring. no need to sleep except to level up, and that can be done in a single hour, and you don’t even need to do that, as it is possible complete the main quest at level 1; no need to eat except to restore fatigue and that’s more efficiently done with restore fatigue potions, unless you’re a vampire in which case feeding makes you weaker(wtf? but don’t worry, i fixed that with a mod), and no need to drink at all except for potions, and with scrolls and spells you can go almost the whole game without drinking a single drop of liquid.

there are many, many other things that are missing in nice looking and expensive games like TES4 and Fallout, which are included in totally free games like Catadda, and from what i’ve heard Skyrim is even worse. it seems as if games reached a peak with ones like Morrowind in terms of exploration, inventiveness, and imagination, and are now on their way down the path of generic cookie-cutter graphics fests like Call of Duty has become, with players bludgeoned about the eyes with massive explosions of graphics which add no real depth to the game.

2

Why do you think Cataclysm is a ASCII roguelike and not a 3D game with graphics?

I’ll give you a hint: All the awesome mechanics and features made possible in a ASCII roguelike would take 20x the work in a fully rendered 3D game.

There are tons of mods that can turn your TES or Fallout game in to a survival simulator.

3

do you have any suggestions for realism/survival mods?

4

since most RLs have about twenty times the features of most AAA games, it is hard to go back to those sweet, tasty HD graphics. once you have played the likes of Dungeon Crawl, Angband, Cata, Dwarf Fortress (particularly dwarf fortress) you can never go back to those lame interactive movies. it is almost debilitating. do you know how disappointed i am going to be when i put GTA V back on the shelf around 1 Oct and break out the laptop again? this much: _T_T_/

5

Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul increases the difficulty by quite a bit. No more completing the main quest at level 1. Area’s actually have leveled creatures. But they still scale to some extent as well, within limits. So no more level 35 Rats that take 10 minutes to defeat. But also you’re not gonna touch a vampire for quite a few hours of game play. I dont remember if it does anything about survival though.
You can look up “Primary needs” I think the same modder made them for all the games, forces you to eat/drink/sleep or face penalties.

For fallout, FO3 Wanderers Edition will tackle both realism and survival if I remember correctly.

You can find them all on Oblivion Nexus, or Fallout 3 Nexus. Nexus handles all of the modding for all the of the games, and has a gateway for each one, making it pretty easy to find the mods you want.

Its been a long time since I’ve used these mods, but they were the most comprehensive ones and best supported ones when I was playing those games modded to hell about a year or 2 ago :S

6

unlike some gamers, i can make the transition back and forth between Roguelike and 3D game, it’s just that after having spent so long in Catadda it’s was a shock not having to scrounge for food and water, the Oblivion world just seems so empty without the constant struggle for resources. i mean seriously, how much would it have taken for Bethesda to have developed even just a basic hunger system? sure, there’d be the occasional little brat who would be turned away from the game because of it, but then again that kind of gamer will be dead from diabetes by the time they’re 20, leaving us grownup adult gamers as their true fan base.

7

well probably because every single spare byte in the package is used and not everything can go into a game of that kind of scope… at the risk of offending you, i am tempted to assume that you have never tried your hand at computer programming, because if you had, then the words “how much would it have taken” and “basic hunger system” presumably would not have crossed your mind.
its not like you just throw some flour, eggs and butter in a bowl, stick it in the oven and out pops a pudding. it’s more like meticulously building extremely large, detailed lego models, or even better, kinects or erector sets because of the moving parts and mechanical nature. except, you dont actually have a model sitting in front of you, such that you are able to poke and prod and simply look at and appraise at a glance. imagine building a lego structure 10 meters cube where every single space needs to be taken up in a meaningful and efficient way, except that you dont build it piece-by-piece, you build a set of very long, meticulously detailed instructions on exactly where the blocks are placed (think back to high school math, remember the cartesian coordinate system? x an y and all that, the pythagorean theorem? to the max, bro. most of the time in 3D.) and even more detailed instructions on how they interact with each other to actually get a game to run.
and, besides ALL of that (which, btw, if you do program im sorry for doubting, disregard that last paragraph) i honestly think a hunger, thirst and sleep system would seriously detract from the beauty of the 3D graphics (which you will NEVER hear me dis, even for oblivion), as well as the overall plot and core combat mechanics, not to mention the other 80% of Skyrim and similar games, especially MMOs, that is crafting (read: BF Skinner).
now, dont get me wrong, what you are suggesting sounds awesome, but if it was done properly and fully fleshed out, it would drastically alter the core gameplay experience that Bethesda was trying to offer. besides, there is a vast modding community and, you know, my philosophy is that if you have a good idea, there is an extremely high chance that someone else has already had and delivered on that idea, so look around the internet. if you look hard enough and long enough that it genuinely bothers you that you cant find anything, try and do it yourself if youre that interested. everything is worth trying, no matter how seemingly difficult. no one is going to laugh at you sitting in your room in the dead of night learning to mod. except yourself, hopefully.
PS i dont think any “little brats” are going to be turned away from the Skinner Box, nor will rational, logically thinking adults. that is the point - it is a psychological trap designed to keep you coming back to spend your money. dont kid yourself, even the best games these days are tarnished, AAA, indie, console, pc, all around. creative, original, impressive works of gaming art are few and far between, though that depends on what you value in a game, or at least, what you think you value.
PPS i am a huge downer and you should refrain from communicating with me if you value the things in life that make you happy.

8

When it comes to a game with a powerful toolkit like the elder scrolls series (and the recent fallout games), the difficulty of computer coding is nearly irrelevant, scripting for such a game has similarities but it is orders of magnitude easier.

There are literally tens of thousands of mods for Oblivion (20,000 something on TESNexus alone), I remember atleast 3 offhand that added a hunger/thirst/sleep system to the game. It would’ve taken the developers a week to add such a system, it’s so easy to mod.

In fact, they did add such a system to Fallout NV, and I doubt it was that hard to do.

9

i dont think scripting and actual source code look much different to someone who knows nothing about computer science than chinese and japanese characters look to speakers of western language. and yes they did add that to FNV… and look how that turned out. you wanna know what oblivion would be like? play fallout new vegas because it would be exactly the same bare-bones bread and butter hunger system. i love what cata has done with the morale system, and how feeding yourself plays an integral part in not only surviving but keeping your mood up. hunger also heavily influences your stats and a wide variety of different hunger conditions exist in cata. in NV… well go have a look for yourself but i wont promise anything, especially after playing cata

10

[quote=“pulsefrequency, post:7, topic:2992”]well probably because every single spare byte in the package is used and not everything can go into a game of that kind of scope… at the risk of offending you, i am tempted to assume that you have never tried your hand at computer programming, because if you had, then the words “how much would it have taken” and “basic hunger system” presumably would not have crossed your mind.
its not like you just throw some flour, eggs and butter in a bowl, stick it in the oven and out pops a pudding. it’s more like meticulously building extremely large, detailed lego models, or even better, kinects or erector sets because of the moving parts and mechanical nature. except, you dont actually have a model sitting in front of you, such that you are able to poke and prod and simply look at and appraise at a glance. imagine building a lego structure 10 meters cube where every single space needs to be taken up in a meaningful and efficient way, except that you dont build it piece-by-piece, you build a set of very long, meticulously detailed instructions on exactly where the blocks are placed (think back to high school math, remember the cartesian coordinate system? x an y and all that, the pythagorean theorem? to the max, bro. most of the time in 3D.) and even more detailed instructions on how they interact with each other to actually get a game to run.
and, besides ALL of that (which, btw, if you do program im sorry for doubting, disregard that last paragraph) i honestly think a hunger, thirst and sleep system would seriously detract from the beauty of the 3D graphics (which you will NEVER hear me dis, even for oblivion), as well as the overall plot and core combat mechanics, not to mention the other 80% of Skyrim and similar games, especially MMOs, that is crafting (read: BF Skinner).
now, dont get me wrong, what you are suggesting sounds awesome, but if it was done properly and fully fleshed out, it would drastically alter the core gameplay experience that Bethesda was trying to offer. besides, there is a vast modding community and, you know, my philosophy is that if you have a good idea, there is an extremely high chance that someone else has already had and delivered on that idea, so look around the internet. if you look hard enough and long enough that it genuinely bothers you that you cant find anything, try and do it yourself if youre that interested. everything is worth trying, no matter how seemingly difficult. no one is going to laugh at you sitting in your room in the dead of night learning to mod. except yourself, hopefully.
PS i dont think any “little brats” are going to be turned away from the Skinner Box, nor will rational, logically thinking adults. that is the point - it is a psychological trap designed to keep you coming back to spend your money. dont kid yourself, even the best games these days are tarnished, AAA, indie, console, pc, all around. creative, original, impressive works of gaming art are few and far between, though that depends on what you value in a game, or at least, what you think you value.
PPS i am a huge downer and you should refrain from communicating with me if you value the things in life that make you happy.[/quote]you do have a valid point, but only up to a point. coding IS complicated, and you are correct in your observation that i have never done any. but as was pointed out by Weyrling, the last several TES games have included a Construction Set, which is what has allowed people to create hunger mods to begin with. if you think that a Hunger/Thirst/Sleep system would distract from the graphics that sounds like your own personal preference, but personally i think that most gamers, especially the hardcore ones, would prefer/not care if an HTS system shipped with the game.

but you are correct, computer gaming, at least for the mainstream/big indie games which are developed for profit, are designed to be a money sink, whereas the smalltime/free Indie games and mods are generally developed by artists and modders who simply want to make their fans happy.

11

I can guarantee you, implementation difficulty has absolutely nothing to do with these games not having eating/drinking/sleeping requirements. If they wanted it, as you said it could be added fairly trivially.
With all the foodstuffs lying around in Oblivion, I seriously wonder if they had a nutrition system, but the feature got cut.
Far more than that though, I was extremely disapointed in the advancement and levelling system, that just BEGS you to break it and far outpace the monster scaling if you’re paying attention at all.

Are they right? Would a game with roguelike realism and immersion sensibilities and a AAA budget for graphics flop? Hard to tell, and the way the industry works, we’ll likely never know (though I’m holding out hope for some genius indie game devs to just get on a roll and bootstrap an awesome game studio that can just do what they want, and I wonder if such a studio would bring up the hardcore level of the games industry as a whole)

12

I am VERY excited with what is happening with crowd sourcing of late and how that may very well give the Indie sector the boost they (and so many end users like me) have been waiting for, for so long. I am 38yo and have been dissapointed with the direction games have taken for a long time. May we see many more great games being developed full of the things we like, rater than take what we get from dollar-chasing suppliers.

Don’t get me wrong, I get it, I always did, but now there’s a chance for passion to compete on (near) equal terms and the end user gets to have a direct say.

Viva Indie!

13

GTA, COD and the like get called “murder-simulators” by bored housewives and sensationalist tabloids
Not a simulator.
Can’t bite their limbs off in sequential order.
Can’t use said severed limbs as weapons.

Ah, dwarf fortress. The only game where you can immobilize your prey opponent with submission moves, before biting off every finger, limb, eye and rear tooth– at least, until you get bored and stab them in the head.

And before anyone starts, it’s not cruelty.

It’s procurement of ammunition for a minecart-based street-sweeper shotgun. I can only make so many goddamn serrated discs. I’m really not sure what the invaders fear more; the actual sharp pointy bits or the squishy smelly bits. In either case, there’s fear.
So, psychological warfare: [glow=green,2,300][tt]APPROVED[/tt][/glow].

14

I think the “doesn’t care how much it costs, but just wants the game they want” crowd is underserved.

Jeff Vogel makes a living selling isometric dungeon crawl games that wouldn’t look all that out of place in the late 90s at $20 - $30 a pop, but from what I can see, he’s selling variations on the same game (not a criticism) to the same customers over and over again, to the tune of $100s per customer, and they’re totally fine with that because it has the gameplay they want. He has a game engine he’s continuously extending (with periodic big rewrites), which is what everyone in the industry SAYS you should do, but for some reason no one actually does. (I suspect most studios don’t have the discipline to implement in the quality necessary to keep reusing a game engine across many years of releases)

Introversion Software is doing exactly the same thing (though their recent stuff isn’t as compelling, to me at least, but that’s how it goes) Simulation games are tarpits, believe me :wink:

Anyway, these niches exist, and I have a suspicion that some of them are VERY price-insensitive, because they currently don’t get the games they want at ANY price. (I just want an updated X-com damnit, I’d pay $100 for that in a second)

15

My Jagged Alliance I have been waiting for, for an eternity is on its way, this time via crowd sourcing. I am so excited I can barely contain myself. And yes, when it launches, I do not give a fark how much it costs, it’s a done deal.

16

Y’know, I’ve been waiting for a true PSO sequel for over ten goddamn years-- and then I remember, X-com even predates PSO by about half as much again same with Jagged alliance.

I feel for you guys, I really do.

17

I just wanna ask y’all experienced gamers one big, and by my own measures - important question:
If you had a group of talented individuals and an engine that’s worthwile, let’s talk Morrowind as a significant improvement over TES2 that’s picked clean of bugs whilst still needing a line of tweaks and an example for this, just how much time would they need to invent, conceptually present, test and produce enough artwork to call it a game? I’m putting everything into picture here - from every instance of physics that needs visuals and different variations, to bottom-line figures like texture packs? Of course, sounds, testing and super (in terms of overall) effecting comes at the very end.
Can ten do it in any assumable time, or less than that? And can an unexpensive workstation or two cope with the rendering involved, for every dimmed light reflecting off a stone wall’s texture, and for every patch of snow-rippled land that consist a scenery?

18

As a full-time job or working in your off-hours? Depending on how much work people can get done or are willing to do
I’m thinking at least a year, maybe less for a very motivated team depending on where you start from… e.g would you use existing character models and some textures?
As for the artwork itself, texture packs are relatively simple to make. What kind of physics visuals are you thinking of making?
In any case, I’d suggest as a test case trying to make a waterfall that doesn’t look terrible or very repetitive. Shouldn’t kill your FPS either.
Also footsteps/splashes in water are pretty simple compared to that, but they’re an essential part of total immersion.
With regards to the machine, you got any specs?

19

I don’t think anyone here has worked on a morrowind-like project, so this isn’t a particularly good group to ask for an actual numeric estimate. I’m not even qualified to try to make an estimate.

Some context I can offer though is how that theoretical 10-person team is going to break down, you’re going to need at least one person to fill each of these slots, with corresponding (skills):
3D rigger(artistic/coding)
Texture artist(artistic)
Engine interface(heavy duty coding)
AI(heavy duty coding)
Area design(artistic/game design)
Sound design(artistic)
NPC scripting(writing)
Scenario scripting(game design/coding)
Story(writing)
Web presence (coding/writing)
Coordination(management, “enough” of everything else)

Note I said “at least one”, depending on project details you might need more than one of a given skillset, and some decisions, like generative plot and NPC interactions might replace some of the writing with more heavy duty coding, generative level layout might replace the area design person with someone coding generative level design, etc…, but I don’t think this reduces the overall amount of manpower, just shuffles it around. The only way you’re going to really reduce the workload is to cut out things, like 3D models, sound, music, NPC interactivity, etc.

If you have really rockstar individuals, they might be able to fill more than one slot, or two could handle three slots, something like that, but I wouldn’t bet on it, more likely you wouldn’t have people capable of fully filling a slot(especially if this is a part-time thing for people), so what you really need are teams that together fill the various slots, so all the writing might be pooled into a writing team, all the rigging/texture/area design might go to another team, etc. With more teams though, you need more coordination, which is quite hard, especially with the amount of assets something like this needs.

Realisticly, for a morrowind type game (even assuming a solid engine to build on, say Blender) to be done by a volunteer team, I’d want to have like 30 people with the appropriate skills solidly comitted to it. For context I consider DDA to have about 10, and it started with 3. Even then I’d expect it to take a few months just to get off the ground and have a kinda crappy demo assembled, and several years to put out something really good. For a “pro” team I couldn’t make an estimate at all, just don’t know enough about how that works to even guess.

20

I was looking at a copy of Unity3D, and went to see what was Morrowind all about in terms of the engine - and I knew about middleware before. Just didn’t see the exact pricing range for professional solutions. Then it came to me - if I even had a full-paid license for such a well-crafted set of developer tools, how much time exactly does it take to pull it off? All that, you know? With talented, maybe even experienced individuals? I know there must be some sort of help involved (not the support from the middleware owner, it’s a talent’s work for the coder) at least for conceptual scrapbook, if you wish to have an edge, and save sound producing and mastering in an all-around music studio for later. But then, if you even plan such an endevour, the team is left on its own to do pretty much everything.

Just for the price ranges, there are prices as high as 200k US$ for the tools. And I mentioned two workstations for rendering only as a supplement, even when talking of such a decade-old piece of software (Morrowind). Anyway, as for the prices, I was shocked to know even the figures for a single commercial product you make with it, not the owner’s thing.