With the success of massive RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that actually offer player choice again, Peterson is excited to release his game to an audience that does want more again. After a rough period of RPGs where player choice and ingenuity were watered down, there’s now a hunger for more branching paths and player freedom.
Since most of Elder Scrolls nostalgia today is around Morrowind, it’s always interesting (and a bit funny) to find people (involved or not) who think the series started to derail with Morrowind.
I am not mocking them at all, I get it, Daggerfall and Morrowind are very different games with a different scale and focus. Daggerfall is also… quite overwhelming, and rather impersonal for 99% of its gameplay. I really don’t know what a “modern” Daggerfall would look like.
I can tell you. It would be HUGE absolutely generic open world with AI generated characters and quests, virtually zero human made and interesting quests and gameplay would feel like filling excel spreadsheets. Somewhat like Ubisoft recepe :-D
At least that’s what original Daggerfall 's spirit would be. It was at the time where “the biggest” was simply the catchphrase and Daggerfall was exactly that. The biggest. But also very shallow and empty. Sure there were billions of quests but what for? When for one interesting there were dozens of generic ones? Don’t get me wrong, it was still a great game at the time, because players weren’t as spoiled and something was always better than nothing. At least that’s my impression.
daggerfall is so messed up that the legitimate strategy to beat the game is go in and out of dungeons and waiting for the quest item to randomly appear next to the front door
Acting like it was the players fault for not wanting that, instead of the companies not wanting to spend the money on the needed complexity…
It’s not necessarily even more expensive to develop, it just impossible to do with the management techniques brought in recent years. Techniques brought in with the intention of streamlining personnel management and to make lay offs easier.
I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.
Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.
Yeah I’ve spent considerably more time on BG3 than any other game I’ve played on this console generation, but still haven’t finished it. I could have gone for something shorter, but it’s kinda nice to come back to it every few months and put a few more hours in.
