You Should Rest and Meditate on What You've Learned: The Elder Scrolls Poll

this is morrowind for me, although that (procedurally-generated!) character bio they put in your inventory at the beginning of daggerfall is the coolest thing.

Morrowind all the way.

I played Arena and haven't started a development house. I didn't realise it was compulsory. I am adding it to my to do list forthwith.

been playing arena. the combat works better than anywhere else in the series, weirdly; i make much more conscious decisions about what kind of swing to employ. maddeningly slow inventory interface but other than that i am loving it: a generic but huge ultima underworld with an asking-for-directions sim on top of it. extremely restful. would rank it over daggerfall at the moment but someday i will probably spend a lot of time with daggerfall.

lolll what a landslide this poll was

correct result tho

that'll happen when i'm the only voter

skyryrim

Now that I've got a bit of distance from it, I think I can pretty safely say that Skyrim is the best videogame I've ever played.

I also think so when I'm playing it, up until it starts freezing and losing an hour's worth of progress every time I play it and I have to take months-long breaks from it in order to quell a series of rage strokes.

The only game I binge-played since turning 35. My world crumbled when my PS3 died along with my save games. Still debating whether I should start again but will prob rather wait for the next instalment

i had arena on like 11 3.5" floppies until one got fucked up and i had to like petition bethesda for a new one.

arena is the best because the sense of otherworldliness is so strong. the days of the week and the months with the stupid names, the suggestion of distinct places to go and different cultures to visit, even if all of it wasn't really borne out in the gameplay it just felt so huge.

morrowind in comparison is much smaller but the granularity of its world and the pointless weirdness (silt striders, the canton organizations in viveec) are what made it so compelling. and the boots of blinding speed and spellcrafting and creeper and all that shit. there was the sense that there was an aesthetic vision, even a collaborative/corporate one, driving this stuff. reminiscent of early 90s TSR in a way.

oblivion and skyrim are boring as shit. i have dozens of hours logged in each game and i just couldnt tell you why

skyrim is at least very beautiful. oblivion yes now seems like a kind of mass delusion. i won oblivion! i still haven't even won morrowind in god knows how many hundred hours over the years. i did finish tribunal.

anyway otm, i was expecting arena to be a lot more abstract and unvarying than it is. like, i was v impressed when i traveled to morrowind province and could now see the erupting volcano in the background of all the towns. and the architecture and people's dress and everything changes too; it's neat. every town is functionally the same, but like daggerfall's towns (and world) they don't suffer from the weird scale problem you get from morrowind on, where everything is way smaller than it should be and you have to use the towns as presented (especially vivec, ancient and majestic provincial capital, population 23) as suggestions to help in imagining what the place would actually be like. (i have some morrowind mods installed that add a lot of inaccessible buildings to the towns, but this of course is lame in a different way. another one tho opens up the roofs of the cantons in vivec so that the plazas on top are in the open air, with views, which is rad.) i remember everything looking exactly the same everywhere when i played daggerfall but may be wrong; anyway the real advantage arena has is that it has a functional fucking automap. (or forget that, i don't need to be coddled: mappable fucking dungeons.)

morrowind is an absolute miracle tho imo, in another class. a real place.

(an assertion not backed up by that post which makes it sound p shitty so just gonna repost this list of granularities here for my-thread posterity)

time for my annual appreciation: the ash storms. the smugglers' caves. "jobasha's rare books". the wizard cities where none of the towers have stairs cuz wizards can fly. the underground railroad you only find out about if you happen across and free a dozen slaves. the guy who falls screaming out of the sky without warning, described in this thread's OP. the fighters' guild questgiver you gradually realize is just sending you on hits, because the fighter's guild is in the pocket of a nationalist crime syndicate. the nobleman in his mansion at the highest point of the capital, who'll only "sponsor" you if you strip for him. the town inside a giant crab shell. the FORTRESS you BUILD. and then there's the stuff i actually identify with: the remote volcanic island under an imperial occupation that's lasted long enough to be called a government; the sparse ring of civilization around a huge jungle-and-lava wilderness; the natives who call you outlander; your spy boss, hanging around shirtless in his one-room apartment surrounded by open history books and drug paraphernalia. morrowind rules; games where you can move faster than a crawl for the opening ten hours drool.

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Sunday, October 7, 2012 10:55 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i watched someone play skyrim for a minute and i am here to tell you it is not a good game

did they get punched into the sky by a giant? I don't think the charms of that game open up until you've been punched into the sky by a giant

also this is always delightful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTMwjYgJsFQ

morrowind i remember badly. i think a roommate of mine bought it when i owned a pc. i remember thinking it was underpopulated, listless and unnecessarily harsh to a beginner (my frame of ref was the baldur's gate and planescape games). dlh's posts are compelling stuff tho.

oblivion is just awful: silly, ugly, senseless. i have to carry forty hammers to keep my shit nice? because hammers wear out even faster than my shit does? you want me to think this is ok? couldn't make myself keep going with it.

skyrim i played i think every single instance of content it offered. def got to me but idk if i loved it.

http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110528230526/fallout/images/3/3f/Vault-boy-fallout3-thumbs-up.jpg

to Dan's youtube clip.

I am sworn to carry your burdens.

Just a little reminder for y'all.

man no love for oblivion? it is my favorite title in the series. i'm not really sure why that is so, but it is. i'm sure the stuff i enjoy the most (assassin's guild quests, vampire stuff) is done at least as well in the other games, but something just really clicks for me with oblivion. maybe it is the progression system (i remember really disliking how that was handled in skyrim) or the fact that it controls enough like games i am used to (issue i had with daggerfall iirc) but i really love oblivion.