…“it is obviously difficult to deal with when you’re going back to an area where a game had multiple endings.”
No, Howard. What you are finding difficult is to have any particular vision for a game beyond its literal systems and gameplay loops. You resent New Vegas because people care about it, and nobody cares about 76.
If you have a story you want to tell, you make choices that serve that vision; the problem is Todd doesn’t have one. He bought a franchise built on evocative storytelling and biting commentary and decided its best use is for players to bash virtual action figures together.
I feel like the fallout fans who geek out over continuity can be safely disregarded. The entire franchise is built on the joy of jank, from to to bottom
I know, and I’ll allow that I’m not being very tidy in my rhetoric but the point stands that if you’re writing a FO:NV show, you could easily pick the game ending that suits whichever story you’re trying to tell with the show.
I was trying to connect that dot (my response to his quote) to my other grievances with how the Bethesda house style deemphasizes textual storytelling in favour of commercially safe gameplay loops and more environmental storytelling that, even when well done, isn’t very meaningful on its own.
I honestly don’t get the hate. To me, fallout 3 was on another level. It was oblivion with guns in a post apocalyptic wasteland and I loved every minute of it. I had never heard of fallout before bathesda bought it. I think the first 2 games plus tactics only sold like a million copies combined. Fallout 3 sold like 10 million.
I’m just saying, had it not been for bathesda, fallout would be dead and forgotten. I mean I sure as heck would have never heard about it. So I’m glad they made fallout 3, and it was a landmark game in my life.
To try to answer, succinctly (which I’m bad at): looking backward is easier than looking forward. What I mean by that is since you didn’t get into the series until 3, it makes sense that you wouldn’t have a problem with 3 and 4, since it’s harder to see what the series could have been…as pretentious as that sounds.
Where much of the hate comes from (and I think a lot of it is overblown - I’m not trying to justify the behavior of the maniacs out there) is that the overarching progression of the series feels reset. Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 showed a progression in a *post-*post-apocalyptic world, with society advancing again, to some degree. Shady Sands grew between 1 and 2, and was the foundation of the NCR.
So Fallout 3 at the time was IMHO a disappointment because the setting felt more generic, and like they were just playing the greatest hits from 1 and 2. I get the arguments that the setting in-universe was hit harder, but it still felt weird that it was post-apocalpytic instead of post-post-apocalyptic.
One reason (as always, IMHO) that New Vegas was so popular is that it continued to build on 1 and 2. We saw the NCR had continued to grow, other factions rise in importance, and generally felt less like the bombs had dropped the year prior. It’s what a lot of folks hoped Fallout 3 would be, in that sense. That’s my own biased view though, so take it with a grain of salt - there’s folks who want more humor, only isometric, more complex and branching storylines, etc.
You have to take a look on the size of the “gaming market” at release dates of those games. At mid 90s gaming was barely a thing, since PCs were still unbelievably expensive. Ten years later it was very different. Plus consoles on top of it…
Fallout was created by Tim Cain at Interplay. Herve Caen staged a hostile takeover of the company, forced out Cain and Brian Fargo, and proceeded to run the company into the ground and loot its corpse. Tim Cain was in the process of buying back IP from Interplay when Todd Howard swooped in and bought it for more than Cain could afford. Basically, Tim Cain had his baby - his magnum opus - stolen from him TWICE.
If not for Bethesda, we would have had multiple BG3 level sequels by now, instead of the looter-shooter garbage that Bethesda turned it into.
I don’t get this. Sounds like Tim Cain is a shit business and you’re blaming the person who had nothing to do with the company going under.
Another thing I don’t get, you think bathesda fallout is “garbage”? Really? Why is it every game is either a 10/10 or hot garbage? Why is there no in between? Why can’t you admit it’s just not for you? Fallout 1 and 2 weren’t for me, I didn’t like them. But I like bathesda fallout. It doesn’t mean I can 1 and 2 “garbage”. Fallout 3 and 4 gave across the board good reviews and millions of sales, clearly many people don’t think it’s garbage.
Yeah, I can believe that there are some people who just don’t like Bethesda’s games, but I don’t agree with them. I like the isometric games, New Vegas, and Bethesda’s releases.
All of them had their own warts and limitations. I didn’t like the timer – one had to complete a major portion of the game plot by a given period of time – in Fallout 1. I didn’t like the dialog system in Fallout 4, or how enemies tended to get really bullet-spongy late game. I didn’t like the bugginess or limited draw distance with kinda prominent pop-in in New Vegas. Fallout 76 – owing to its multiplayer nature – has a kinda limited story and single-player game.
The series as a whole has always has some balance issues with the various skills/perks.
But there also isn’t a game in the (mainline) series that I regret having purchased, either.
And I think that the series definitely progressed in a number of ways.
Some people didn’t like the shift from the “skill percentages” system present from the first game through Fallout: New Vegas. I don’t think that it was a great system. It tended to be grindy, and there were some clearly-better paths to take. I think that the series is better-off for having dropped it.
Some people really didn’t like having a voiced PC in Fallout 4, like it breaks their sense of immersion. I don’t really feel strongly one way or the other, though I do think that having a voiced PC, absent good voice cloning and synth, makes it hard for mod authors to fit content in seamlessly.
Fallout: New Vegas had a lot of complex story interactions, ways in which you could reshape the world; one choice and another interacted. Fallout 4 was simpler. I liked Fallout: New Vegas doing that…but then, I also remember sitting on a game guide so that I wouldn’t make “wrong” choices, because a lot of the interactions aren’t obvious.
Yes. Outer Wilds was good, although the combat was a bit bullet spongy at times. The writing and direction was on point. Funny to read that the “Spacer’s Choice” edition introduced graphical bugginess - Tim’s got jokes.
I can’t see a way to frankly assess the quality of a game on its commercial success, but let’s say least not pretend the franchise’s popularity is based on its later installments - that puts the cart before the horse imo.
Interplay going bankrupt is the reason Bethesda owns this IP. FO3 wasn’t a bad game, but it started development before their involvement. Everything Bethesda made on its own has been increasingly in their own simulationist, environmental style, which can be fun but isn’t a good fit for the highly novelistic style that made it popular to begin with.
I think my view still stands, without bathesda that series would have ended with that weird ass “fallout: bos” for PS2.
If it hadn’t been bought by bathesda, we would have no fallout 3, 4 or even NV. Cause as much as people claim it isn’t, NV uses the bones and parameters of fo3, just builds on it.
We also wouldn’t have gotten the show, which was great
It’s hard to compare sales numbers of 90s games to late 2000s games lol the whole industry had a massive growth spike post-Xbox introduction and PCs getting massively cheaper to build
I’d be curious to see the sale results of the games while takeling the amount of console/PC present as well as the market size during the release year.
We might have surprise about results of all the games with these parameters.
I was skeptical of the jump to 3D at the time, and sure, it changed the series, but I think that it was done well.
If one wants more isometric games in the rough setting and genre as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, there’s the Wasteland series, the first of which inspired Fallout.
checks
The series is apparently currently on sale on Steam. Wasteland 3 and its expansions are 80% off:
For real though. Todd Howard needs to like, take some shrooms and meditate in the mountains. Touch grass. Given the headass shit he’s said lately it’s transparently clear he’s one of the biggest things standing in the way of another decent Bethesda game- I think the days of those might be done for good, I hate to say.
Ehh but did they really though? Or did they microdose shrooms in chocolate bars and attend some bougie retreat at a ski resort? I’d say the latter is the real problem. Nobody has respect for anything anymore.
That’s where I learned exactly how shitty he really was. I had always kind of figured he wasn’t a great person, people who rise to that level usually aren’t, but I hadn’t realised really how terrible he was.
That’s fine, it’s hardly as if we’ll ever run out of good games to play. Hell, I haven’t even gotten to AC6 yet and I’ve been looking forward to that for ages
Todd Howard, Pete Hines, and the other guy I can’t think of his name right now, are the holy Trinity at Bethsoft. They figured out how to take the success of Morrowind and milk the shit out of it while “streamlining” every game.
The original ES creators said years ago the direction of the series is not what they would have done. And you can see how these three did the same thing to Fallout that they did with Elder Scrolls. Their “best” contributions have been creating DLCs and charging for mods. They’ve made bank for Zenamax. And that’s all they care about.
They’re creativitly bankrupt. I feel bad for the devs that grew up on the og elder scrolls games and became devs with the company.
This is so sad fate. Morrowind was absolute gem of that era, nothing compared to it at the time. It has wonderful world it takes place in which is believable and filled with interesting characters, supported by truly brilliant soundtrack. And while story is quite decent there’s about gazillion other things to do, explore, see.
It’s sad that every upcoming bethesda game was more and more simplified and lost a bit of the morrowind magic.
I don’t think their games are necessarily becoming more simplified, it’s more that they seem to focus on areas of the games which would help make them more “mainstream” (for example, Fallout 4 made crafting and upgrading more complex compared to 3 and NV, but this is similar to other AAA games), while focusing less (and thus simplifying) other areas.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, I personally think Fallout 4 improved over 3, and Skyrim over Oblivion (though NV and Morrowind are still better). But this also leads to disasters like Fallout 76.
That’s true, but isn’t contrary to my point - Fallout 76 is a disaster because they set out to create a mainstream Fallout live service game, instead of focusing on the strengths of the series. This was further reinforced when they introduced a battle royale mode IMO.
Ted Peterson, one of the actual creators of TES, was involved in writing for Morrowind. It’s the only reason it retained even a shadow of Arena & Daggerfall’s creepy, ambitious charm.
And if you were with TES from the start… with Arena, Daggerfall, and even Battlespire… then Morrowind was nothing but a massive disappointment. And the franchise went even further downhill from there. It’s clear that Todd has no respect whatsoever for the magic that Peterson, Lakshman, and LeFay created together.
I’ve tried to get a sense of pre-Morrowind Elder Scrolls titles, but, as a later arriving fan they can be impenetrable. I’m old enough now to get annoyed when people say that about ES3 though, so I guess it’s come full circle.
I’m not really interested in arguing with anyone about which game is better or anything, I just feel a sense that I’m missing something. What was lacking with Morrowind that you saw in its predecessors?
I get that old games can be really hard to pick up, especially if they were before your time.
It basically comes down to two elements: the gameplay ambition and the world itself.
Arena and Daggerfall were wildly ambitious; and I don’t just mean the scope of the world. They tried to bring a tabletop level of freedom to a real-time first-person RPG. The games had complex interconnected simulation systems long before anyone else attempted something like that again. This was largely the doing of Julian Lefay and Ted Peterson. Morrowind scaled that ambition way back. If it’s the first TES game you played, it’s easy to not realize how pared back it was compared it’s predecessor. Each release after pared things back even further.
That is less important than the world, though. Lakshman and Peterson created a dark, sinister, thoroughly creepy world in the vein of Robert E Howard. It had deep lore, darkness, and unapologetic savage maturity that permeated everything. And it mattered. The world mattered. The lore affected everything… from sacred rights that could only be performed on certain days (which you discovered by reading lore-heavy texts), to huge dungeons both handmade and procedural and labyrinthine, to dark secrets that only revealed themselves in certain circumstances…
What Todd did is loot it and turn it into something else entirely. You can see this with Redfall, Todd Howard’s cheery, bright, swash-buckling adventure game spinoff that utterly disregarded Peterson and Lakshman’s lore and world-building. Vijay and Peterson had written a bible (which may still be floating around online) outlining the series through to Oblivion, which was supposed to be the literal end of the world and the darkest game in the series. We all know how that turned out.
Lefay and Peterson did return as contractors to work on Morrowind, which is why it still retains a bit of the character despite Todd’s directorship and being stripped of some of the darker themes… but we can all see where things went after.
There has never been another game like Daggerfall. It was the first and last of it’s kind.
Thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me. Were that Daggerfall found me as a kid, it sounds like it would have been exactly my thing. Even as a preteen I was already deep into dark, novelistic RPGs like Fallout 1+2 and (to a lesser extent) Strife and the early Baldur’s Gate games.
Since someone in this thread reminded me of Daggerfall Unity I’ve been looking at some gameplay footage, which was quickly apparent to be the wrong way to take in the game even before you described its depth as textual and tantalisingly obscurantist. At this point in my life, masquerading as a breadwinning parental archetype, I’m thinking the best way for me to vicariously digest a portion of Daggerfall might be through the imperial library site (link).
Looking forward, it’s impossible to come to any other conclusion about Todd Howard and his ilk being something like the Musk of great novelistic game franchises, buying and cheapening anything that captures the imagination and profiting immensely from it. Such voices are unwelcome in the conversation about games as art.
I still hold out hope that there are enough grown up bookworms like me to carry that torch as indie developers, though. Games like Disco Elysium still do get made, and as games get easier to produce over time it’s not hard to believe that the more writerly among us can make use of the medium to good effect in the traditions established by Lefay and Peterson.
I concur completely. I mean, I like Morrowind quite a bit, but coming from playing 1000 hours in Daggerfall and seeing this tiny simplified, constrained game world in the sequel was disheartening. The fact that everything since has been so much worse in that regard had made Morrowind age pretty well I suppose.
You criticized Todd Howard for his game design skills in your original comment, I just pointed out that the sentence you quoted didn’t refer to designing the story of a game.
You also claimed “He bought a franchise” which seemed unnecessarily personal.
I don’t see how Van Buren is related to this at all (except for its relation to New Vegas, I guess, but I don’t see what this has to do the article or either of our comments).
…“it is obviously difficult to deal with when you’re going back to an area where a game had multiple endings.”
No, Howard. What you are finding difficult is to have any particular vision for a game beyond its literal systems and gameplay loops. You resent New Vegas because people care about it, and nobody cares about 76.
If you have a story you want to tell, you make choices that serve that vision; the problem is Todd doesn’t have one. He bought a franchise built on evocative storytelling and biting commentary and decided its best use is for players to bash virtual action figures together.
I think he was refering to the show being set after new vegas and having to continue on from a game which had different possible endings
I feel like the fallout fans who geek out over continuity can be safely disregarded. The entire franchise is built on the joy of jank, from to to bottom
I know, and I’ll allow that I’m not being very tidy in my rhetoric but the point stands that if you’re writing a FO:NV show, you could easily pick the game ending that suits whichever story you’re trying to tell with the show.
I was trying to connect that dot (my response to his quote) to my other grievances with how the Bethesda house style deemphasizes textual storytelling in favour of commercially safe gameplay loops and more environmental storytelling that, even when well done, isn’t very meaningful on its own.
I honestly don’t get the hate. To me, fallout 3 was on another level. It was oblivion with guns in a post apocalyptic wasteland and I loved every minute of it. I had never heard of fallout before bathesda bought it. I think the first 2 games plus tactics only sold like a million copies combined. Fallout 3 sold like 10 million.
I’m just saying, had it not been for bathesda, fallout would be dead and forgotten. I mean I sure as heck would have never heard about it. So I’m glad they made fallout 3, and it was a landmark game in my life.
To try to answer, succinctly (which I’m bad at): looking backward is easier than looking forward. What I mean by that is since you didn’t get into the series until 3, it makes sense that you wouldn’t have a problem with 3 and 4, since it’s harder to see what the series could have been…as pretentious as that sounds.
Where much of the hate comes from (and I think a lot of it is overblown - I’m not trying to justify the behavior of the maniacs out there) is that the overarching progression of the series feels reset. Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 showed a progression in a *post-*post-apocalyptic world, with society advancing again, to some degree. Shady Sands grew between 1 and 2, and was the foundation of the NCR.
So Fallout 3 at the time was IMHO a disappointment because the setting felt more generic, and like they were just playing the greatest hits from 1 and 2. I get the arguments that the setting in-universe was hit harder, but it still felt weird that it was post-apocalpytic instead of post-post-apocalyptic.
One reason (as always, IMHO) that New Vegas was so popular is that it continued to build on 1 and 2. We saw the NCR had continued to grow, other factions rise in importance, and generally felt less like the bombs had dropped the year prior. It’s what a lot of folks hoped Fallout 3 would be, in that sense. That’s my own biased view though, so take it with a grain of salt - there’s folks who want more humor, only isometric, more complex and branching storylines, etc.
You have to take a look on the size of the “gaming market” at release dates of those games. At mid 90s gaming was barely a thing, since PCs were still unbelievably expensive. Ten years later it was very different. Plus consoles on top of it…
Heh. I think of things as being “incredibly cheap” these days and then being the norm.
Fallout was created by Tim Cain at Interplay. Herve Caen staged a hostile takeover of the company, forced out Cain and Brian Fargo, and proceeded to run the company into the ground and loot its corpse. Tim Cain was in the process of buying back IP from Interplay when Todd Howard swooped in and bought it for more than Cain could afford. Basically, Tim Cain had his baby - his magnum opus - stolen from him TWICE.
If not for Bethesda, we would have had multiple BG3 level sequels by now, instead of the looter-shooter garbage that Bethesda turned it into.
I don’t get this. Sounds like Tim Cain is a shit business and you’re blaming the person who had nothing to do with the company going under.
Another thing I don’t get, you think bathesda fallout is “garbage”? Really? Why is it every game is either a 10/10 or hot garbage? Why is there no in between? Why can’t you admit it’s just not for you? Fallout 1 and 2 weren’t for me, I didn’t like them. But I like bathesda fallout. It doesn’t mean I can 1 and 2 “garbage”. Fallout 3 and 4 gave across the board good reviews and millions of sales, clearly many people don’t think it’s garbage.
Yeah, I can believe that there are some people who just don’t like Bethesda’s games, but I don’t agree with them. I like the isometric games, New Vegas, and Bethesda’s releases.
All of them had their own warts and limitations. I didn’t like the timer – one had to complete a major portion of the game plot by a given period of time – in Fallout 1. I didn’t like the dialog system in Fallout 4, or how enemies tended to get really bullet-spongy late game. I didn’t like the bugginess or limited draw distance with kinda prominent pop-in in New Vegas. Fallout 76 – owing to its multiplayer nature – has a kinda limited story and single-player game.
The series as a whole has always has some balance issues with the various skills/perks.
But there also isn’t a game in the (mainline) series that I regret having purchased, either.
And I think that the series definitely progressed in a number of ways.
Some people didn’t like the shift from the “skill percentages” system present from the first game through Fallout: New Vegas. I don’t think that it was a great system. It tended to be grindy, and there were some clearly-better paths to take. I think that the series is better-off for having dropped it.
Some people really didn’t like having a voiced PC in Fallout 4, like it breaks their sense of immersion. I don’t really feel strongly one way or the other, though I do think that having a voiced PC, absent good voice cloning and synth, makes it hard for mod authors to fit content in seamlessly.
Fallout: New Vegas had a lot of complex story interactions, ways in which you could reshape the world; one choice and another interacted. Fallout 4 was simpler. I liked Fallout: New Vegas doing that…but then, I also remember sitting on a game guide so that I wouldn’t make “wrong” choices, because a lot of the interactions aren’t obvious.
There seems to be an incredible amount of things you don’t get regarding this subject. And you’re refusing to learn any of them.
YOU MUST BE RE-EDUCATED. WRONG THINK IS ILLEGAL!
But then, we wouldn’t have VtM: Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity or The Outer Worlds.
Tim Cain has been hitting it out of the park since the first Fallout.
Yes. Outer Wilds was good, although the combat was a bit bullet spongy at times. The writing and direction was on point. Funny to read that the “Spacer’s Choice” edition introduced graphical bugginess - Tim’s got jokes.
Outer Wilds doesn’t have any combat, you’re thinking of Outer Worlds.
I can’t see a way to frankly assess the quality of a game on its commercial success, but let’s say least not pretend the franchise’s popularity is based on its later installments - that puts the cart before the horse imo.
Interplay going bankrupt is the reason Bethesda owns this IP. FO3 wasn’t a bad game, but it started development before their involvement. Everything Bethesda made on its own has been increasingly in their own simulationist, environmental style, which can be fun but isn’t a good fit for the highly novelistic style that made it popular to begin with.
I think my view still stands, without bathesda that series would have ended with that weird ass “fallout: bos” for PS2. If it hadn’t been bought by bathesda, we would have no fallout 3, 4 or even NV. Cause as much as people claim it isn’t, NV uses the bones and parameters of fo3, just builds on it. We also wouldn’t have gotten the show, which was great
You imagine Bethesda was the sole bidder on the IP, but this isn’t the case. But for their shrewdness, the series would have survived just fine.
Do you have some insider knowledge about other companies that bid on the rights or?
From what I can find online, there’s not much out there aside from Activision, which… Lmao
It’s hard to compare sales numbers of 90s games to late 2000s games lol the whole industry had a massive growth spike post-Xbox introduction and PCs getting massively cheaper to build
I’d be curious to see the sale results of the games while takeling the amount of console/PC present as well as the market size during the release year.
We might have surprise about results of all the games with these parameters.
I was skeptical of the jump to 3D at the time, and sure, it changed the series, but I think that it was done well.
If one wants more isometric games in the rough setting and genre as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, there’s the Wasteland series, the first of which inspired Fallout.
checks
The series is apparently currently on sale on Steam. Wasteland 3 and its expansions are 80% off:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/
And Wasteland 2 is 75% off:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/
…and the latter is bundled with the (very, very elderly) Wasteland 1.
For real though. Todd Howard needs to like, take some shrooms and meditate in the mountains. Touch grass. Given the headass shit he’s said lately it’s transparently clear he’s one of the biggest things standing in the way of another decent Bethesda game- I think the days of those might be done for good, I hate to say.
Lots of the worst people in tech did this, and they just got worse…
Ehh but did they really though? Or did they microdose shrooms in chocolate bars and attend some bougie retreat at a ski resort? I’d say the latter is the real problem. Nobody has respect for anything anymore.
Fair dues. I mean Steve Jobs went full bore, and he was a fuckin scumbag.
The behind the bastards four part series on him was a huge eye opener into how incredibly terrible of a human being he was
That’s where I learned exactly how shitty he really was. I had always kind of figured he wasn’t a great person, people who rise to that level usually aren’t, but I hadn’t realised really how terrible he was.
That’s fine, it’s hardly as if we’ll ever run out of good games to play. Hell, I haven’t even gotten to AC6 yet and I’ve been looking forward to that for ages
Todd Howard, Pete Hines, and the other guy I can’t think of his name right now, are the holy Trinity at Bethsoft. They figured out how to take the success of Morrowind and milk the shit out of it while “streamlining” every game.
The original ES creators said years ago the direction of the series is not what they would have done. And you can see how these three did the same thing to Fallout that they did with Elder Scrolls. Their “best” contributions have been creating DLCs and charging for mods. They’ve made bank for Zenamax. And that’s all they care about.
They’re creativitly bankrupt. I feel bad for the devs that grew up on the og elder scrolls games and became devs with the company.
Todd Howard was the project leader for Morrowind and its expansions
This is so sad fate. Morrowind was absolute gem of that era, nothing compared to it at the time. It has wonderful world it takes place in which is believable and filled with interesting characters, supported by truly brilliant soundtrack. And while story is quite decent there’s about gazillion other things to do, explore, see.
It’s sad that every upcoming bethesda game was more and more simplified and lost a bit of the morrowind magic.
I don’t think their games are necessarily becoming more simplified, it’s more that they seem to focus on areas of the games which would help make them more “mainstream” (for example, Fallout 4 made crafting and upgrading more complex compared to 3 and NV, but this is similar to other AAA games), while focusing less (and thus simplifying) other areas.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, I personally think Fallout 4 improved over 3, and Skyrim over Oblivion (though NV and Morrowind are still better). But this also leads to disasters like Fallout 76.
I think that most of Fallout 76’s characteristics were a result of it being a multiplayer game.
That’s true, but isn’t contrary to my point - Fallout 76 is a disaster because they set out to create a mainstream Fallout live service game, instead of focusing on the strengths of the series. This was further reinforced when they introduced a battle royale mode IMO.
Ted Peterson, one of the actual creators of TES, was involved in writing for Morrowind. It’s the only reason it retained even a shadow of Arena & Daggerfall’s creepy, ambitious charm.
And if you were with TES from the start… with Arena, Daggerfall, and even Battlespire… then Morrowind was nothing but a massive disappointment. And the franchise went even further downhill from there. It’s clear that Todd has no respect whatsoever for the magic that Peterson, Lakshman, and LeFay created together.
I’ve tried to get a sense of pre-Morrowind Elder Scrolls titles, but, as a later arriving fan they can be impenetrable. I’m old enough now to get annoyed when people say that about ES3 though, so I guess it’s come full circle.
I’m not really interested in arguing with anyone about which game is better or anything, I just feel a sense that I’m missing something. What was lacking with Morrowind that you saw in its predecessors?
I get that old games can be really hard to pick up, especially if they were before your time.
It basically comes down to two elements: the gameplay ambition and the world itself.
Arena and Daggerfall were wildly ambitious; and I don’t just mean the scope of the world. They tried to bring a tabletop level of freedom to a real-time first-person RPG. The games had complex interconnected simulation systems long before anyone else attempted something like that again. This was largely the doing of Julian Lefay and Ted Peterson. Morrowind scaled that ambition way back. If it’s the first TES game you played, it’s easy to not realize how pared back it was compared it’s predecessor. Each release after pared things back even further.
That is less important than the world, though. Lakshman and Peterson created a dark, sinister, thoroughly creepy world in the vein of Robert E Howard. It had deep lore, darkness, and unapologetic savage maturity that permeated everything. And it mattered. The world mattered. The lore affected everything… from sacred rights that could only be performed on certain days (which you discovered by reading lore-heavy texts), to huge dungeons both handmade and procedural and labyrinthine, to dark secrets that only revealed themselves in certain circumstances…
What Todd did is loot it and turn it into something else entirely. You can see this with Redfall, Todd Howard’s cheery, bright, swash-buckling adventure game spinoff that utterly disregarded Peterson and Lakshman’s lore and world-building. Vijay and Peterson had written a bible (which may still be floating around online) outlining the series through to Oblivion, which was supposed to be the literal end of the world and the darkest game in the series. We all know how that turned out.
Lefay and Peterson did return as contractors to work on Morrowind, which is why it still retains a bit of the character despite Todd’s directorship and being stripped of some of the darker themes… but we can all see where things went after.
There has never been another game like Daggerfall. It was the first and last of it’s kind.
Thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me. Were that Daggerfall found me as a kid, it sounds like it would have been exactly my thing. Even as a preteen I was already deep into dark, novelistic RPGs like Fallout 1+2 and (to a lesser extent) Strife and the early Baldur’s Gate games.
Since someone in this thread reminded me of Daggerfall Unity I’ve been looking at some gameplay footage, which was quickly apparent to be the wrong way to take in the game even before you described its depth as textual and tantalisingly obscurantist. At this point in my life, masquerading as a breadwinning parental archetype, I’m thinking the best way for me to vicariously digest a portion of Daggerfall might be through the imperial library site (link).
Looking forward, it’s impossible to come to any other conclusion about Todd Howard and his ilk being something like the Musk of great novelistic game franchises, buying and cheapening anything that captures the imagination and profiting immensely from it. Such voices are unwelcome in the conversation about games as art.
I still hold out hope that there are enough grown up bookworms like me to carry that torch as indie developers, though. Games like Disco Elysium still do get made, and as games get easier to produce over time it’s not hard to believe that the more writerly among us can make use of the medium to good effect in the traditions established by Lefay and Peterson.
The unity remake of daggerfall is free, slightly more accessible and absolutely worth checking out.
I forgot about that. Will have a look, cheers
I concur completely. I mean, I like Morrowind quite a bit, but coming from playing 1000 hours in Daggerfall and seeing this tiny simplified, constrained game world in the sequel was disheartening. The fact that everything since has been so much worse in that regard had made Morrowind age pretty well I suppose.
He was ALWAYS the one standing in the way of good Bethesda games. He’s responsible for Redguard as the followup to Daggerfall. Redguard!
He should have been chased out of the industry decades ago.
That quote actually makes sense in context, it’s talking about handling the story of the second season of the show.
Also, I doubt Todd Howard was in a position to independently decide to buy the Fallout franchise in 2004.
See for yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_(video_game)?wprov=sfla1
You criticized Todd Howard for his game design skills in your original comment, I just pointed out that the sentence you quoted didn’t refer to designing the story of a game.
You also claimed “He bought a franchise” which seemed unnecessarily personal.
I don’t see how Van Buren is related to this at all (except for its relation to New Vegas, I guess, but I don’t see what this has to do the article or either of our comments).