A former veteran Bethesda developer has cast doubt on the possibility of a Morrowind remaster in the same vein as the recently released Oblivion remaster, saying going back to play The Elder Scrolls 3 now, over 20 years after it came out, would make fans “cringe.”
I don’t think it’s just because it’s weird. It’s because it’s weird and immersive. Part of what makes it so immersive is that there’s no modern fast travel. There are in game fast travel options but they can only get you to major settlements, or fortresses that you’ve found and cleared, or whatever point you’ve marked that you can use the recall spell to. Beyond that your on your own two feet. You want to get to the Urshilaku camp? Better start walking because you can’t fast travel there. And at the start of the game you’re slow as fuck. I still remember it being quite an adventure to get from Seyda Neen to Balmora on foot.
And that’s to not even mention the quests. I don’t wish the for the Morrowind style journal, but the quests didn’t have a huge waypoint telling you exactly where to go. If you wanted to know where you had to go you had to listen to the directions you were given and then actually try to follow them. One of my more memorable side quests from Morrowind was where I misunderstood the directions, took the wrong left turn and kept searching for a farm almost all the way to Caldera. The actual farm was pretty much just around the corner had I taken the right turn. I don’t even remember what the quest itself was about. I only remember getting lost.
I remember getting a high enough acrobatics and enough skooma to “fast travel” by finding a high place to jump across the map from. Good times
A time honored tradition of getting lost because of misreading the journal. I don’t remember which quest it was, but it was one that asked me to find something heading south. The first time I went south I got pretty much to the end of Vvanderfell. Next time I tried doing the walk, I kept to the road. It didn’t take more than 1 minute from the city (Balmora? Can’t remember) to where I was supposed to go.
I know there’s one quest that gives the wrong directions. I assume that’s part of the reason they don’t do it anymore. If they modify the game and the position of something changes they need to go back and modify any text that referred to it. With a quest marker they just mark the location and it works automatically. It shouldn’t be that hard to make a procedural text directions generator though, but that wouldn’t work with 100% voices lines.
Thats part of the reason I think that is flawed. They can’t have characters give you detailed lore about the world because it needs to be voiced, so they have to shove it in a book, which means you can’t have a conversation about it. I think a hybrid approach would be better, but there’s no way Bethesda is going to do that now.
I guess there is an argument for AI generated voices for this task. It’d be doing something that is impossible to do otherwise, so it’s not replacing anyone.
Sorry, that was a huge tangent/rant.