Bethesda's Biggest Game Ever Is Free And Remastered

Eezyville@sh.itjust.works to Games@sh.itjust.works – 178 points – Bethesda's Biggest Game Ever Is Free And Remastered
kotaku.com

I might pick this up and try it out. I've only played Skyrim even though I own Morrowind and Oblivion.

40

Fam you have to play Morrowind. OpenMW for an easy startup cost and still a lot of good modding options, base engine if you want to go hog wild with modding to get it to work well on modern machines. The game is so worth it and truly feels like an alien fantasy world not just medieval fantasy earth. I'm one of the Morrowind hardcore fan girls so if you do pick it up and have any questions feel free to ask me, or if there are aspects of it that frustrate you I can link you to mods or potentially make you one to help get around the frustrations

truly feels like an alien fantasy world not just medieval fantasy earth.

This is what I love about Morrowind. It really gave me a sense of wonder and strangeness, at a whole new world to explore.

The successors are good games, too, but much more familiar. They fit right in with if you're used to cliche high fantasy / DnD settings.

Starfield is especially disappointing when you compare it to something like Morrowind. 1000s of planets and all you run into are human beings and all planets just kind've look like variations of earth.

Morrowind set the expectation bar too high for them. The promo video for the next elder scrolls was mountains so it doesn't give me high hopes for another fantastical world

I was so hesitantly excited for Starfield, ended up not buying it :/ I'm worried Bethesda is too big and rigid now to make anything spectacular again. They really did set a high bar and immediately followed it up by watering everything down to appeal to more people.

Is Morrowind the one where you get quests by following directions on a note, or am I thinking of a different RPG?

I have severe ADHD; I need a waypoint marker or I can't play the game. If I have to follow instructions on a piece of paper, I'll just get lost, frustrated, and never find the place. I can't remember names of locations, and I forget something I read or heard literally seconds after reading/hearing it. It makes oldschool RPGs—and life in general—much harder than it needs to be.

Yeah that's the one, I'm right there with you, I probably put in several hundred hours as a kid, but never bothered to read past the tutorial, so I never made it far in the story. I have to imagine there are some good mods to help folks like us

Out of curiosity, what part do you consider the tutorial? The how to play part is only a few minutes at the beginning then it kinda just drops you in the world with a 'good luck fucko' and pat on the back. It took me years before I ever got around to the main story and that was mostly an afterthought for me at the time.

Exactly my experience, hahaha, yup, that's all I was thinking of

Yeah, and unfortunately I don't know of any mods to add quest markers. The community is generally very against things like quest markers because part of the feel of the game is being a bit lost as you talk to people and investigate areas. I never thought about that as an accessibility thing though makes sense. There are mods to get you places in a more specific way like Scouts Services, you could look up where you need to be and write it down, but that's not a marker so idk how well it would work for you. I'll let you know if I can find an actual solution but again may not exist due to how the community feels about markers

I've been wanting to play these games for years. Years. I first got the games in like 2008 or 2009. I let my brother play the shit out of it on my PC but I never played. I was in college for engineering and couldn't get into it because of coursework. Then I played Skyrim for a decade...

I have these games. I see them all the time on my Steam list. I just have a bunch of other games too.

Skyrim...I played it in college with friends...literally the only game ever I was content to sit and watch other people play, and then spend 5 more hours playing g it myself when they were done.

I -love- watching people play Morrowind. My friends and partners don't seem to understand this. I can sit and watch them play for hours and seeing them explore things and talk about their experience brings me so much joy.

Play Morrowind.

Keep your fatigue (stamina) bar above 50% to avoid most of your frustrations. That's the only advice I'll give.

my advice is to make an amulet of summon Golden Saint and use Azuras Star to farm grand souls and build an arsenal of destruction spell gauntlets. They never fail and fire off faster than manually casting spells.

I would absolutely not give that advice. My favorite experiences with the game were just exploring and figuring out my way. Getting my ass kicked by some peasant. Robbing someone of that would be horrible imo.

However, without the fatigue advice, new players will fail a lot and not even know why (eg. missing your attacks). That is one of the biggest reasons people just quit the game and never come back to it.

I can appreciate that. But especially compared to Oblivion and Skyrim, one of my favorite things about Morrowind is how powerful you can make your MC seperately from your stats and level. Leaping over an enemy encampment and dropping loads of rapid-fire fireballs before you hit the ground is an important experience you don't get in the other games.

Oh yeah, there's heaps of suggestions once a player gets their bearings and restarts with their preferred character build. Even knowing about Golden Saints is a huge benefit.

Man…. How much profit do you think that company has made from free labor by now? It’s insane how they’re still praised for this.

I'm not sure how that applies to this since both the mod and base game are free. I agree when it comes to mods on their current paid games to fix their bugs, but I don't see how it works on this.

Reminds me of a friend who plays with two custom spells on quickslots the first chance he gets to make them. The first he calls "JUMP GOD" and the second is "I HATE FALL DAMAGE" with 2-300 points in jump for 1s and a couple seconds of feather fall, respectively.

Who needs fast travel?

Is this worth trying if I really disliked Oblivion and Skyrim? It was mainly the terrible floaty combat that I just couldn't put up with in them.

The combat isn't any better the further back you go, it's actually worse. Combat's never been a strength of this series.

Daggerfall is a very different game from Skyrim. It's much more about hardcore RP, like you can actually fail the main plot if you don't complete the first quest within a few weeks of in-game time.

Thanks for the reply. I'm not adverse to more hardcore RP and actually having consequences. Maybe I'll give it a try seen as I can pick it up for free, I should be able to tell pretty quickly if the combat is going to be bareable for me or not I guess.

I've tried to start oblivion 3 times and skyrim 4 and every time I quit before very long at all. Maybe I should resign myself to the fact this series just isn't for me and wait for Dragons Dogma 2 xD

If the floaty combat is all that bothers you, have you tried playing a pure mage?

I haven't to be fair, I usually prefer melee based builds when I play stuff so I usually default to that play style when I'm playing a game for the first time. Maybe I should try!

Maybe cheat around a bit to get yourself set up for it around the start but I found it a pretty cool way to play a game without any weapons.

There are some minor mechanical differences (by that I mean they are fundamentally different in almost every way, save for the the setting but even that is presented vastly differently from modern ones)

Wait, is it really bigger than Starfield??

Daggerfall is around the size of the UK, but it's all procedurally generated. It still feels enormous compared to Starfield, which felt tiny in spite of having 1000 planets because everything was locked behind load screens

Definitely not in the conceptual sense, but maybe "biggest continuously traversable game" was too many words for them...?

I LOVE Daggerfall. I kinda feel like it gets overlooked. Then again, Daggerfall is the game that made me fall in love with CRPGs. I enjoyed others before it, but Daggerfall became an obsession. I went back and replayed Arena after having had a tepid experience with it the first time around and found it a much better experience. It's not perfect by any means, but it firmly established Elder Scrolls at the top of my favorite series.

OK - I've given it a fair shake and I can definitely say that this game lacks the magic of later games. Exploration is repetitive at best and an outright nuisance at worst, and that is what I loved the most about 3, 4, and 5. I took on a quest to snag some Saints Hair from the mages guild and was treated to the windows maze screensaver that extended over 3 tilesets and had SO MANY ingredients... but only after 6 days of delving nearly identical hallways did I find the hair, and to top it all off, the travel times disqualified me from even completing the quest. The next quest was a mission to track down a serial killer, which meant using the eyeball tool to check every single house in a city bigger than every capital in skyrim combined and chatting up bretons with answers like "What you seek may be north, no west, no east" and "what have khajiit done for me lately". Doing it once wasn't enough, though - I had to do this exact same task 3 times until an ordinary nightblade appears. Oh, and if I didn't do that immediately, the quest would have failed in only 2 days.

This was probably a fun toy when it came out, but i cannot imagine playing it all the way through.