I was thinking the other day we as gamers deserve better than Bethesda.

I think I'll replace the word Elder Scrolls with Demon's Souls, much better. Not perfect, but better.

Thirteen years they havn't made a better game than Morrowind, with added massive drm and patches.

Your fired.

Hahaha, thanks.

I know you were kidding and probably talking about my forum time anyway, but it's funny... Your post made me realize I feel like an "old timer" in the video game scene, someone retired and burned out, and I'm only 35 years old. It's like the porno biz, you're an old retiree before you have your first prostate exam.

It should be obvious that Morrowind was the series last PC RPG. Of course, being on Xbox, it was a transitional title from it's PC RPG roots, which imo improved on the past while also bringing it to masses on the console.

Oblivion and Skryim are good, but they are day 1, ground up designed for consoles and console gamers and just happen to be on PC still as well. (And of course are the best way to play them thanks to mods)

It's funny how the stage play-quests has become mainstream nowadays :P I remember seeing them in Morrowind, Jade Empire, The Witcher 3, and Fable 3.

Tides of Numenara, of course - but "near future Torment" was quite innocent, and there I rather like my style. ;-)

Was I forced to make a hard choice, I would probably elevate Infinity Engine - with isometric view - as the best game engine thus far.

I am quite neutral about such things - even text based game can work if writing is compelling - but as said before: "levitate" is certainly a 3D spell, and I like Morrowind better for having it.

As such it could be made into a text base test, Eternity style: "you drink thee times "levitate 70 units" potions one after the other, and cross a mountain range."

To me, perso, Morrowind 3rd party view is good enough to rather merit creative energies to be directed otherwise. For example, I always craved for a full slave revolt option in Morrowind.
I thought "near future Torment" was pretty fine..? :-D

Plus I prefer to reserve judgement - if Numenara sucks, it'll be terrible enough torment at that time... And I might have to find my consolation with yet another Morrowind play-through!

Certainly a commendable project - recommend for anyone mod-friendly to take a look, and thx!

I only wish I had not lost my Morrowind main game CD - until I find it again, I am reduced to Morrowind on Steam, and have some fairly recent negative mod-compatibility/stability experiences with Skyrim. Which I thought could use bit of jazzing up, obviously!

But once I have licked my wounds, and have courage to possibly sustain frustration, I should take a look at Morrowind mods. Better to possibly improve what is already quite magnificent, indeed.

Ps. Sorry I was rude.

I look at my reply now, and think "Wut? I posted that?" (plus throw italics to "I" except I don't want to edit three times over to get it right, lol)

In my somewhat poor defence I am currently a bit at odds with mods - I tried to implement the one improving end user interface for Skyrim in my preferred computer, which is a boot-camped iMac. And whether the Windows partition was already cracked, it is now imploded - and I will have to reinstall the whole Windows dual-boot over Xmas period, and that has always been real pain thus far. Hence putting it off...

For anyone open for mods, something to look at. And contribute to? :-)

No worries friend. In all fairness, I'm usually not one to use mods with a game that: a) wasn't blessed by the company which wrote the game in the first place; or b) is still a game which hasn't yet fallen out of time.

I don't feel bad about modding Morrowind these days and the game is so much better when doing so. The community which showed it so much love did justice to the series.

BTW, your underpinning OS doesn't matter if everyone gets to enjoy the same game. I wish you good luck putting it back together though --I know what it's like to temporarily be without a system; frustrating at best.

In all fairness I was passive-aggressive about it (=not nice), but at least I know when I have done wrong, and do not try to pass dickheadedness for "critical spirit."

In which case also an apology is hopefully fine: but being gracious about it can only elevate your merit, methinks. :-)

OS should not matter, but it (to my experience) does when there it is applied with non-standard HW, like Windows running on Mac HW. From my longitudinal observation starting with Mount & Blade II, then on Steam, on boot-camped windows, Steam was not that end user friendly or stable then. And I doubt it changed with Morrowind.

Symptom of so few games being released mint to Mac OS. I know they backed Unity, but were I them - I would be more aggressive about market penetration for gamers. Minus buying Steam.

A little side rant.


I imagined Mount and Blade - "near future next level" :-p - for this myself.

Imagine a deep(er) RPG element added to this game. Side with Hlaalu, Redoran or Telvanni - and then war of conquest on saddle n steel - with plenty of machinations to go along?

My rendition of this idea goes with the fact that for whatever reason I have never been able to really immerse into the space genre. A prole peasant, I? Indeed, but with a little class pride, eh! :-D

More seriously, a fusion of Morrowind and Mount&Blade would be a treat, at least to me.

Uuuh, confirmation bias positive cringe here, but I cannot help it - I like yer style wolrsfrain, on yer take on Morrowind at least.

I still recall that for my first play-through ever I was quite shambolic as an RPG player - which is cool too, wish I could repeat the sense of discovery - I had not discovered "levitation" when I got to the Vicec pilgrimage site.

I actually used the Scroll of Icarian Flight - fortify jump by 1000 points - to reach the final shrine.

Naïve certainly, but so cool with hindsight...

Saudi Arabian really? A Saudi, other local or an expat, I wonder...

I agree that the current game output from previously innovative and loved PC developers is dominated by the console market for the moment.

This being BioWare and Bethesda in particular.

Not even a single PC fancier hired to develop the end user interface for Skyrim or Inquisition? It seems so...

I do consider console gamers as our brother and sister gamers, but in case of RPG dumb-down- I wish they would either vigorously signal to the developers that they enjoy complex games too, or at least feel solidarity with us PC gamers for properly delineated controls and interface.

As to me - I am not planning to pay pre-order price for the next game from Bethesda or EA BioWare. At least I will await the peer reviews - which will plausibly tell me it's a poor console port...

Meanwhile, Dragon Age 2 and The Withcer 2 both managed to be successful cross-overs gameplay-wise, IMO.

To me the issue is more that games became much more mainstream, with the arrival of Steam and the Xbox/PS2.

Steam made it possible for anyone to play a PC game, you did not have to know much about PCs.
It simplified everything, from purchasing and installation to upgrading and trouble-shooting.
If you want to reach the masses you need to keep things simple, which is what Valve offered the consumer.
The outcome is that Steam popularized PC gaming significantly.

So in my opinion, certain PC genres got simplified due to PC gaming becoming much more mainstream, attracting increasingly more gamers of various skills and backgrounds. And thanks to Steam, big mutliplayer FPS would still have come into existence even without consoles and Halo: Steam had a growing platform that promised to connect more gamers than consoles could.

The domination of multiplayer FPS and the consequent devaluation of single-player FPS, with all its wonderful level design, was more or less inevitable given increasing connectivity and shared platforms. Its a huge consumer market that's hard to resist for developers and publishers seeking to grow and expand.

Yet the ultimate responsibility for game design is with developers and publishers , not consumers.
Do we blame consumers for games like Day One Garry's Incident and Big Rigs ?! not really.
It is developers and publishers who decide what consumer group to target with their games.
Bethesda could have made Oblivion and Skyrim more classic PC oriented but chose not to.
Instead they decided to pursue a mainstream market rather than a smaller niche group.
Due to Steam, this mainstream market existed even without the presence of consoles.

Lets be frank here, there are only two genres in all of PC gaming that has become "downgraded" or simplified: FPS and bigger RPG franchises. All other genres have not. Some have even gotten more complex with time, such as simulation games and strategy games. For example, any given PC racing sim today, like Assetto Corsa, is miles ahead of its console counterparts. In fact historically the best console racing sims have been ported from PC: Race-Pro, Project Cars etc.

And why will you not levy the same charges against gog.com, pray tell? Making PC games popular, easily accessible etc. Terrible thing, that!

And do you even like Morrowind, or this is just anti-Steam?

I love Morrowind.

The distribution platform, commercial concept is the same - small print, market positioning different - if you care to look at it impassionate.

But the end market for gaming has changed, and I much more readily attribute the change to the commercial predominance of the console platform.

The developers and publishers will sell what keeps them afloat - hopefully with passion - but it is really about us consumers.

This is why T-shirts and footballs sawn together by children in Bangladesh and Pakistan are used by "us." (a bio and fair-trade fan meself)

And that is why I have good hope that the next BioWare Dragon Age game might not a piss-poor console port - the PC fans were vocal and ferocious in their just criticism.

In case of Skyrim - it is pretty popular, as far as I know.