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Uh, I. . .what Toblix? I think I sort of get where you're going with that, but let me try and clarify it.

You mean that Todd goes from point A to point B and doesn't deviate, doesn't turn left or right, really, yeah? Because yeah, he doesn't, because it's basically scripted for that. (Ergo, that dragon might not be there at Bleakfall Barrows in the real game.)

But there are a number of journalist previews coming out of Quakecon in which they're given a mid-level character with some gear, and told to do whatever. Several of them, having seen the presentation, wander off in completely different directions.

As far as I know, the world is 100% open. (Though probably more like 90-95%. I'm sure there's a cave/something that you can't get in without the main quest.)

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I was thinking more about the world itself, how it looked to me that the narrow, winding paths were the only viable way of getting around from set piece to set piece. That's incorrect though, obviously, which is good.

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I was thinking more about the world itself, how it looked to me that the narrow, winding paths were the only viable way of getting around from set piece to set piece. That's incorrect though, obviously, which is good.

Ahhhhhh. I think that's just that sort of low-lands/mountain area, but I'm sure even that has plenty of explorable spaces.

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Ahhhhhh. I think that's just that sort of low-lands/mountain area, but I'm sure even that has plenty of explorable spaces.

I think it's probably just the nature of that scripted stage demo they've been showing.

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It is not the nature of Bethesda RPGdom to put invisible walls in the bushes and make objects not jumpable-upon. If they did that for some reason, there would be angry mobs in the streets of Rockville.

The primary reason I hated all Bioware games (save for the old top-down ones for which no jumping actually made sense) is the world comprised of corridors and short ledges that cannot be jumped down. Ultimately, I prefer to explore worlds in my RPGs rather than roleplay fantasy douchebags. Bethesda has been effectively scratching that itch better than all competition for fifteen years now.

Anyone remember Redguard? That was a weird game. It was impossible to make it run when it came out, how buggy it was. It was a kind of fusion between an adventure game and an RPG, leaning more heavily on the AG side of the scale. And it was a lot of fun.

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Anyone remember Redguard? That was a weird game. It was impossible to make it run when it came out, how buggy it was. It was a kind of fusion between an adventure game and an RPG, leaning more heavily on the AG side of the scale. And it was a lot of fun.

Yeah, i remember Redguard, it's a pretty cool game if you give it a chance.

There were a few weird Elder Scrolls spin-offs.

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No it's not; the speedrun is 2,5 hours. A bare minimal playthrough of the game would still be much longer than 2,5 hours.

Anyway, I'm not worried with that news.

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No it's not; the speedrun is 2,5 hours. A bare minimal playthrough of the game would still be much longer than 2,5 hours.

Anyway, I'm not worried with that news.

And what about the other content? because that's usually whats better than any of the campaign stuff in Elder Scrolls.

I never finished oblivion because it bored me to tears to do that actual campaign. As long as I can wander around and do some things for a while, I'm a happy camper.

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And that of course. However, I do fear less side content. Starting from Morrowind less and less stuff could be done besides the main quest. Fallout 3 was quite thin on the ability to ignore the main quest and do wtf you want.

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agreed, Im just hoping this news meant they figured out where to spend their time... side content.

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And that of course. However, I do fear less side content. Starting from Morrowind less and less stuff could be done besides the main quest. Fallout 3 was quite thin on the ability to ignore the main quest and do wtf you want.

Fallout 3 wasn't an Elder Scrolls game and wasn't built around having tons of side factions. Even so, i would argue that neither of those games were lacking in side content. (Oblivion though, especially. Come on. There's a lot of bad things that can be said about Oblivion, but that it's factional side quests were lacking is not one of them.)

Like, and are people actually making a big deal out of this two hours thing? It's just the way Bethesda's games are structured; if you know what to do and where to go ahead of time, you can sequence break like a crazy person. As pointed out, quite infamously, people have done Morrowind speedruns in about ten minutes.

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Yeah, I think mikemariano was actually joking with the tone of his post. We all know the main quest will take much longer than two and a half hours to complete when played in any sensible fashion, and with side quests factored in I'm sure Skyrim will have plenty of content.

As he pointed out in the original post, Morrowind was completed in about 10 minutes, and I forget what the speedrun record for Oblivion was, but it was less than two and a half hours I think. If anything, the fact that the speedruns are getting longer is probably due to better structuring and stability in Bethesda's games.

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The speedrun record for Morrowind currently stands at 4 minutes 10 seconds.

The same two guys that speedran (?) Skyrim did both Oblivion and Fallout in the 1 hour 10 minutes range. (I could be off a couple tens in the minutes category.)

Keep in mind they've been playing this game for years now, they know every trick, every possible permutation of everything they ran into. And it still took them an hour more to speedrun Skyrim than Oblivion.

That should be heartening to you, not troubling. It means twice the possible content in the main quest, and gods only know how much side content. (Tom Francis in the PC Gamer Skyrim feature took more than an hour to walk across about a quarter of the world.)

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Fallout 3 wasn't an Elder Scrolls game and wasn't built around having tons of side factions.

Why not?

But compare TES4 with TES3, it contains much less side content, and the side content is less deep. Now cmpare TES3 with TES2, even less side content. Granted, TES2 relied a lot on random generated content. But besides that, it included way more factions which also had transitive effects when joining.

Anyway, we'll see what happens with Skyrim.

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Why not?

What? I don't see why this is a question. It's because that's not the game Bethesda set out to make, those guys were very upfront about Fallout 3 being a game that was supposed to be more about a central narrative. (Whether you think they succeeded in that, or that in having done so, if it was a good thing for them to do, those are different matters.) Just because everybody wants to say it's Oblivion with guns doesn't mean it's literally Oblivion with guns.

But compare TES4 with TES3, it contains much less side content, and the side content is less deep. Now cmpare TES3 with TES2, even less side content. Granted, TES2 relied a lot on random generated content. But besides that, it included way more factions which also had transitive effects when joining.

Anyway, we'll see what happens with Skyrim.

I absolutely do not agree that Oblivion's side content is "less deep". There is perhaps less of it, but those quests and events are as elaborate or moreso than anything in Morrowind.

Man, and nothing is going to stack up to Daggerfall if you want to use that as your benchmark, that game is ridiculous.

I don't think there's any clearly linear trend here to cause worry, Daggerfall was such an anomaly just in general, and Morrowind and Oblivion are only two games. (That still have more in common with eachother than any other two TES games, it's like arguing apples and apples.) What about Arena? Or Battlespire and Redguard? TES has been all over the map.

I expect that Skyrim will probably "feel" a lot like Oblivion when it comes to the core game mechanics, but if we're going to talk about Skyrim on the whole, i'd assert that we don't actually know enough about the game to make any real guesses about where it's going to fall in the spectrum of TES games.

They're betting heavily on dynamically generated content this time, something that neither Morrowind or Oblivion did. (Or Fallout 3, for that matter.)

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Oh, I didn't know it was BethSoft's goal to make Fallout 3 much less like Fallout 1 and 2 wrt to quests.

With "less deep" I meant sequence of related quests. Most side-quests in Oblivion were just singular quests; with the exception of some guild quests. Morrowind had more side quests that had multiple phases.

So random regenerated content will return? Awesome. I wonder how they're going to pull that off considering it's quite difficult to do that for full 3D environments.

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Or does he mean dynamically generated content as in "Hey, I'm going to go over there, wow look at this tree, oh shit, bandits! Die bandits die!"

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I actually don't think I'm going to purchase Skyrim for quite a while, simply because I have so much of New Vegas left to explore. It's taking me forever.

But "forever" in a good way. I have only fast-traveled once in New Vegas (to escape falling halfway through the ground in a pile of rocks), and have taken many hours to get only halfway through the game. I don't mind taking my time.

Is fast travel an Elder Scrolls thing? I'll ignore it if it's in there, but as someone new to Bethesda gaming I didn't know if that was an addition with Fallout 3 or not.

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