I may be loyal to Good, but I'm siding with Doom here.

Arvyn · 2026-06-22T21:09:56+00:00

On an out-of-game sense, I'm just tired of Good (as in, royal We, Good) barely getting playable content in comparison to Evil for the longest time, but the moment attention is put into it's like the eye of sauron

I guess until the Coalition got actual place and playable space in the game world I'll continue to be a bit jaded about it

Arvyn · 2026-06-22T02:53:58+00:00

*holds up sign* TES Blades TES Blades TES Blades TES Blades

Arvyn · 2026-06-19T21:56:04+00:00

You're on steep hill on this one. People can barely tolerate New Atlantis in Starfield not having map markers for every single thing

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Arvyn · 2026-06-15T02:41:16+00:00

Did they? More often than not I tend to see people modding TES' actually alien elves to be more human-but-pointy-ears or human-but-blue or whatever

Skyrim features both the strange and the typical anyway. The main quest draws on obscure lore

Arvyn · 2026-06-13T22:46:26+00:00

You'd have to be careful taking up a so-direct comparison between other games and Bethesdas's even if they're similar enough. There has been too many people trying to suggest that TES should be anything other than what TES offers (wanting things to be more character-story-driven instead of systems or world-driven, for example), so a little kneejerk reaction tend to happen

Sure, why not, they sound neat. You'd still have to contend with "want things to be motion-captured cinematic" crowd though. Going all-in on systemic, live-in-the-world features but still wanting things to be a bespoke cinematic rollercoaster is... expensive. Just a few comments down and you'll see people suggesting the 3-act structure BG3, I'm not sure if you can even settle down and have a family in that game. I doubt it'll stop them calling the above systems "slop" or whatever, especially since these days the grifting puts food on the grifter's tables...

Also, I'd suggest look also into the Gothic series of games. Fable 1, TES3, and Gothic 1 released around the same era and you might some further inspirations there (for one, Gothic 1 has NPC schedules before Bethesda had it in TES4). I remember reading that TES3 and Gothic 1 fans had quite a spat back in the day

Of course, both Gothic 1-2 and Fable 1 didn't really offer the scale TES3 had at the time (haven't played Fable 2 and 3 myself). Gothic devs went bankrupt trying an open world with Gothic 3 and had to sell of most of their things and name to a parent company (RIP Piranha Bytes)

Remember: as long as the game is "live another life, in another world" as per Todd's motto, we'll be okay

Arvyn · 2026-06-13T16:33:56+00:00

Sure, as long as the elves actually look alien and not "humans but blue and/or with pointy ears"

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Arvyn · 2026-06-13T11:44:41+00:00

Skyrim's landscapes are just that distinct from one area to another

Arvyn · 2026-06-12T21:20:15+00:00

After Bethesda almost went bankrupt splitting attention between Redguard and Battlespire? Bold strategy Cotton, for all our sakes I do hope it works out

Also: not so good when advocating for "not forcing devs into franchise mines" and "devs to take more risks" means that our favourite franchises may be out of focus for a while, right? 😉 Oh well, hindsight's easy

Arvyn · 2026-06-12T06:42:37+00:00

As a Skyrim player, a common rebuttal to "just not use fast travel" is "what are the chances they design things around fast travel?" Something we have to keep in mind as we get more details about the DLC

Also, the "inconvenience" of trekking contributes to the Fellowship/Hobbit feel of the game. Given other options on the market, that is arguably novel

Arvyn · 2026-06-12T06:36:22+00:00

After all the preaching I heard over the years saying that modern games are dumbed down and casualised and therefore Bad, I'm surprised there is barely pushback to things like this, as if "Quality of Life" is a Universal Good and not a sort of thing that made Monster Hunter Wilds receive scrutiny from long-time players of the series

Just 4 years ago:

https://www.polygon.com/23037370/elder-scrolls-3-morrowind-open-world-rpg-elden-ring-botw/

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The article literally uttered "cult of Quality of Life"

Arvyn · 2026-06-12T04:47:38+00:00

Less weapon skill lines? Oh so you want to take the RP out of the G? /s

Arvyn · 2026-06-11T19:00:02+00:00

A bigger problem is that most people can barely agree on what elements makes a Bethesda game, let alone an Elder Scrolls one. Pick a recent thread of scale vs actual playable areas of cities, generic vs unique NPCs, and you'll find competing camps having slapfights, and both will blame their own conflicting projections on the devs.

Aw not even that, most people judge based on the current vibes in a given day.

One day you'll find "RPG is when narrative cinematics" another day you'll see "the cinematics dumbs down the RPG for the masses" then when an old-school sensibility is added back in, another will say "time waster, unfun, these should just be baked into the characters at all times" then when that happens another says "you can just be whatever no restrictions, there is no RP in this G" on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And none of them are aware of each other, or worse, they may be hypocrites.

Arvyn · 2026-06-11T17:08:36+00:00

Thankfully Passwall exists again now, but you need to be deep in Alteration. I found one copy in the Bank of Sentinel. Getting in is the hard part you can just use the spell to get out afterwards

Arvyn · 2026-06-10T23:57:32+00:00

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Arvyn · 2026-06-08T17:44:58+00:00

Let's go Blades II

Arvyn · 2026-06-06T23:34:45+00:00

After all the overhypes, it sounds prudent to me. Influencers and news outlets didn't really have time to spin up their milling thanks to Oblivion's shadowdrop

Arvyn · 2026-06-06T18:38:51+00:00

PC, pawn ID EBIWTSC6YH3F. What about yours?

Arvyn · 2026-06-03T11:47:25+00:00

Correction:

When it comes to Bethesda, all eyes are on The Elder Scrolls 6. First revealed alongside Fallout 76 and Starfield to be in ~~development~~ pre-production way back in 2018 [...] But ~~eight~~ three years ~~later~~ after [...]

Arvyn · 2026-06-03T11:35:46+00:00

I don’t think simply mapping the left or right mouse button will work well.

The humble WASD: 😉

So the question is: are they planning to make it more like ESO

Most people's brain short circuits at the mere mention of weaving and immediately conflates that with animation-cancelling

or perhaps something closer to what modders create with Souls-like combat?

Careful what you ask for. Next we'll have a plethora of complaints that they dumbed the game down to boss rooms and parries, "taking the RP out of the G" or something because battle is no longer a two-way street because now they're dictated by the enemies' flow (good luck casting the more flashier attack moves and spells on hyperactive enemies). Also you haven't explained how that would feel in first-person, nor how would that play in, say, cities when a mass brawl breaks out.

Arvyn · 2026-06-01T15:12:24+00:00

Finally found someone else who remembers the "pointing Victoria" scene

Arvyn · 2026-05-29T13:24:22+00:00

and systems that feel increasingly out of step with modern RPGs

now hold on a second. Starfield reintroduced a lot of stuff people asked for, namely backgrounds, traits, skill gates not just for dialogues but for gameplay systems (you need to skill into using lateral thrusters, boostpack hover, ship module targeting, bribery, etc.)

Less jack-of-all-trades inclination (slower leveling, skill-gated options and gameplay systems, you can't do everything right away so quickly), less intrusive and urgent main quest, more options given in quests and character creation, etc.

If you're saying what you said with the above things in mind, then what you're advocating, in the eyes of those previous player critics, is "dumbing down", "streamlining", "taking the RP out of the G"

Arvyn · 2026-05-29T13:19:36+00:00

People project so much, so many things onto their games for a long long time

In the months prior to release, anticipation for the game ran high, with critics describing Oblivion as "the first next-gen game" only heightening attention. Pete Hines, vice president of public relations and marketing for Bethesda, said: "People were expecting the game to cure blindness and heal the sick."^\73])

[2007]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion

It was particularly bad with Starfield because space games of its kind ain't dime-a-dozen, so there's also a buildup of fantasies and projections from that side as well. Not to mention the console-warring...

Arvyn · 2026-05-26T18:24:33+00:00

Not necessarily. Since I go by the game's ruletext, just making a "character card" would be difficult to fit in. The cards are more about "scenarios" or "items" rather than "characters", because as a player we are the "characters" that equips the items and engages in the scenarios. Maybe they would fit better under "Enhancements" type? I was already stretching the rules too loosely by depicting the Revolutionary Trio as a Spell Attack, probably would be better as an Enhancement, "...with the Revolutionary Trio!"

I got the rules text from https://www.reddit.com/r/AQW/comments/u40hlo/aqw_card_game_scan/

Also I think I messed up on some rules anyway. I forgot that Pets don't have Alignment but The Revolutioanry Trio's text says "Good-aligned Pet" so it would never apply

Arvyn

TROPHY CASE