I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

Agree. Can't stand all the superfluous fetch quests - at this point I'm even sick of inventory management. In games like Fallout, or Elder Scrolls, Witcher - these days I hardly even loot the corpses because I'm so sick of it after 25+ years.

One of the best games I've played recently was - What Remains of Edith Finch - a linear, "walking simulator" which implements innovative/interesting design solutions to drive the story forward, very detailed and very tightly designed - kind of on the opposite spectrum of open-world RPGs - but very awesome.

I wouldn't say all DLC is bad, some of it is fine and is pretty much just the modern term for expansion pack. I thought most of the Skyrim DLC was fine (except Hearth Fires I can download way better player palaces than what you could build with that), and a lot of the Borderlands 1 and 2 stuff was decent as well. Horse armor aside, Shivering Isles for Elder Scrolls Oblivion pretty awesome too.

I'm quite enjoying it myself, though I've been playing more Just Cause 3 since it came out.

Fallout 4 is mildly better than 3, especially the main story but not nearly as good as New Vegas (talk about dumbed down in comparison) but as other's have said I've always preferred Bethesda's Elder Scroll series.

That said, none of these titles has anything on Witcher 3, the out and out Goty and quite possibly Go/t... century!

I love Elder Scrolls (back to Morrowind), and thought Fallout 3 was very good but not great, but I just cannot get into Fallout 4 at all.

Some of my reasons coincide with Yahtzee here, but a lot are different. It's clunky, the dog does a great job of heroically jumping in my line of fire to take bullets / melee blows for enemies that I am trying to fight, pathfinding is significantly worse than Skyrim (and it was rather poor there), the crafting seems WAY too obsessed with needing 1 or 2 "rare" bits like the screws mentioned in the video that should be in *everything*, etc. etc.

The city building as an upgrade to Hearthfires in Skyrim is pretty cool, but should be a back-burner *optional* thing that encourages you to check it out because it gives cool rewards rather than because the very first set of hobos that you run into want you to do everything for them.

...Take all of that with a grain or three of salt, because I only played for a few days before I got thoroughly annoyed with it and haven't been back since. Skyrim gets new mods that add fun content or make it look *way* better than Fallout 4 does all the time. And I like the setting and lore better, but that is a personal preference. But basically, even after playing through the main story and all of the factions many multiple times each, I still periodically find myself getting interested in another run through Skyrim with a new set of mods. Fallout 4 might get good once the community gets hold of the creation kit for it, but for now I have zero interest in even giving it a more thorough shot to catch my attention.

"Promotional Consideration Furnished By Bethesda Softworks LLC".

It's an ad. It's a shame because I love the Fallout games, even now they're just Elder Scrolls With Guns, but I hate how marketing seeps into everything. I fully expect all the White Guy Explains Science channels to do Fallout-themed episodes in the next week or two.

Fallout 1 was a technically antiquated VGA (that's right, 640x480, 256 colours) post-apocalyptic turn-based tactical RPG where you could not control you team mates during combat. It was a bit buggy (and so was F2). It was Mad Max, without cars.

And yet.

Fallout is arguably the best world-building work in the history of video games. People are probably going to dispute that, but most other games are built on pre-existing lore or works, or do not have that scope*. Fallout built its world pretty much from scratch, conflating a pre-war 1950's, golden-era, overly-optimistic world-view with the bleak desolation of the nuclear holocaust that ensued (to clarify for those who really know nothing about Fallout: in this universe a nuclear war happened in the 50s**. all that's left is from that era). Beside its content which was plentiful in and of itself, this created a contrasted, yet highly coherent and mature world (and by mature I don't just mean killing friendly NPC, I mean doing Morally Very Bad Things that don't necessarily result in graphic scenes). An open world that you could roam freely, be surprised by a new discovery that you made, and at the same time find these discoveries to fit perfectly with the game's logic. In most large games you just access new areas or are carried by the story, in Fallout you would go "Holy shit I'm in the middle of a city populated by centenarian ghouls!", shortly followed by "ho, of course it's full of ghouls, that's perfectly normal". There are not many games that have this mix of unexpected/logical and dark/humorous content.

Fallout 2 had the same ho-my-God-how-could-they-get-away-with-it VGA engine (so next to zero evolution there), but quadrupled the world map (with a minimum overlap with the one from F1) and brought it fifty or so years forward, expanding the world greatly (there are now rival quasi-city-states, and your action may influence their future), while also building on the first one: some antagonists 'classes' from F1 have now grown their own identity and became NPC, and some characters are still around -- a young character you saved in F1 went back to her settlement, became its leader, built it into a town, and is now in the process of expanding it into a new state...So Fallout 2 is basically the same game, except they did that one important thing: push the game world's boundaries even more. You could never guess what next city would be like, but you could bet it would have some crazy shit in it, and yet somehow still make sense.

That's why many people don't like Fallout 3. It is not in itself a bad game, but comparatively, it's kind of coasting. Also it's too damn easy.

I'm sorry, I got carried away, you were asking if you should play the previous ones? No, you 'should' not. But you could, and for F1 & F2 you would certainly not lose your time if you know what you're getting into. And if you don't, at least go and watch their intro on Youtube, they'll give you the feel of the world.

* Possible contenders in terms of "original video game world": Elder Scrolls (vast, but less original), Deus ex (not as large), Bioshock (same), Final Fantasy (original and vast, but not as complex). Any other idea?
** Technically not the 1950s, but in practice the 50s + a bunch of high tech gizmo.

What's the first paragraph of the description say?

"...making Workshop mods now have the *option* for the developer to lock them behind a paywall..."

I understood it to be 25% goes to the mod maker and the remaining 75% goes to valve and bethesda (splitting to 30% to valve and 70% to bethesda). But maybe its 30% to valve then 70% to mod maker and bethesda (splitting it into 25% to mod maker and 75% to bethesda)? Either way its stupid.

Do you think auto repair and service centers should pay the car companies a percentage of their profits when they paint your car or make modifications to it?

The fact is modding has been grand for the last 30+ years without anyone doing it for the money. Some have gone on to make full games based on their mods and sold them, and there's no problem with that, because the mod still remains free.

Game companies like Bethesda release mod tools because it is good business for them. It extends the life of their games, grows their community and brings in more people who buy their games FOR the mods. Just go and have a look on the Nexus to see how many mods there are for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.

Both Valve and Bethesda are now just in PR mode and trying to put out the fires. Do you think their sole intent was purely for the money to go to the mod makers like they say? Then why is the split so heavily in their favor and the mod makers are getting a pissy 25%. Its contradictory.

And if you think it's "playable fan-fiction" then you obviously have no idea what you're talking about

Yeah, that wasn't really directed at you, but more at the whole "give us an objective review" cry that's been going around.

For the record, my two favourite gaming sites are bluesnews (that's how I found the sift in the first place) and rockpapershotgun, for different reasons obviously.

The reason I like blues and the issue I have with news in video format is time. I can read a days page of news on blues in well under a minute, spawning tabs of interest as I go.

Your video is 6:25 long.
First up is the BAFTA awards: it's a fairly dry list with no commentary on it. If I want that information, a link to http://awards.bafta.org/award/2015/games is a much more succinct way of presenting it.

Then some news about Hawken: cool! Hawken is awesome and I've been hoping to hear more about it.

Elder Scrolls: don't care.
Nintendo licensing agreement: don't care
Nintendo's next console: don't care

Steam refund policy change: Interesting.
Kojima to leave Konami: interesting.

The point is not what I care about or don't care about, that's going to be different for everyone. The point is I have to fast forward to the news I'm interested in and as presented, it's an inherently bad format for that.

Maybe instead of one long video have a series of shorter videos linked via annotations? Or even timecodes in the description. That way, we can jump to the stories we're interested in.

HTH

And I thought my 600 was a lot SDGundamX.. damn!

Skyrim on console (or without mods) - a solid addition to the series.

Skyrim on PC w. mods - bar none the best Elder Scrolls yet!

Want a free Elder Scroll Online Beta Invite: Explore Tamriel (Windows and Mac only) key for this weekend? First come, first get!

It's too early for any news if a single player TES game is in development but the MMO is a massive undertaking with rumors of a massive budget. Zenimax Online, the company developing the game, isn't seperate from Bethesda/Zenimax, it's just a legal entity for the development team. So just how much can the publishing side of the house afford to commit to other proects while the MMO is in production? We already know the production of expansions for Skyrim was prematurely halted right before it was announced that ESO would be the next Elder Scrolls release.

I thought I heard that the MMORPG is being handled by a different studio and should have no effect the next single player Elder Scrolls game.

Your video, Elder Scrolls online: the arrival trailer, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I would totally go see the CGI "Elder Scrolls Online: The Movie" in theaters.

I will NOT be buying ESO: Online the game. The first time I have not bought an Elder Scrolls game. I don't know where Bethesda got it in their heads that people wanted a TES MMO. The whole idea of playing Elder Scrolls in groups just puts me off.

Plus, no way in hell I'm paying $15/mo subscription, or submitting to any other monetizing scheme.

What really burns me is that they're wasting all this dev time on the project. Not only am I waiting a whole extra dev cycle for my next TES game...but the amount of money they're investing is staggering. What if this brings down the franchise? It's a bone headed move.