That's because Rockstar has an advertising budget that would put the GDP of most countries to shame, and they're not afraid to swing it around after the large and extended success of GTAV.
I expect we'll see the same for Elder Scrolls VI as well, soonish.
Naw, it's nothing like that, thankfully. Everything I listed there is in the game in some manner or another, but some of them I've taken a hair of creative license with.
For that one in particular, Khajiit are playable cat-people, and many NPCs are also Khajiit.
In a town called Pelagiad, there exists A Khajiiti NPC named Ahnassi. She has a short quest line for a male Nerevarine and is notable for being (as far as I know) the only technically "romanceable" NPC in the game, though it doesn't go into any particular detail.
This quest line does also lead into the "robbing the government" bit though, which is fun.
This, I think, is the primary thing to remember about Morrowind. This game was intended for you to exploit it. It wants you to break it. It hands you four different ways to become stupendously overpowered within fifteen minutes of game start, it just doesn't tell you in detail about them and lets you find it out. Some of those ways abuse bugs, but many of them are 100% completely intended by the devs. You're intended to be a monstrous god-beast by the end. I'm the fucking Nerevarine, I'm here to chew ass and kick bubblegum and I'm all out of ass.
If you get cursed to have a reduced carrying capacity in some entry level dungeons, just reload. Fuck that spell. That's one thing I'd be happy to delete entirely from the game.
Agreed, it's manageable, but only if you know it's coming. Every "Restore X Stat" potion is worthless except Restore Strength, and no n'wah worth his skooma is going to walk around without a couple of those. For everything else, there's religion (when you get back to town). But a hefty strength debuff is going to make it real difficult to get back to said town.
For what it's worth, I think the greater bonewalkers doing permanent strength damage is a bug. I think it's also one of the handy toggle tweaks in OpenMW. But since you all learned about them in Dungeoneering 101 today, you know to pack some restore strength potions next time you go crypt diving so you don't have to teleport back home stark naked because your strength score got debuffed to zero and you can no longer lift your clothes.
Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition Remix for the PS2 was a mainstay fixture of my teenage years and might still remain my favorite racing game. I never had any of the N4S games, personally. But this one did me just fine, I played that game for years and years.
Runs great on the steam deck via emulation these days! I set up my collection through Retrodeck and it was one of the easiest drag-and-drop setup operations I've ever done.
VTM:B was my first introduction to VTM in any capacity and boy was it an introduction. I am now the world's hugest WOD nerd. The game is janky as all hell but the characters drive it so forcefully that I barely cared... for most of the game. The end parts of it are... rough. But up until the last few hours of the game the characters and atmosphere carry it all magnificently.
It's still one of my very favorite retro games now, though. First time through the Ocean House Hotel was an experience to remember, and the Malkavian dialogue trees are some of my favorite fourth wall breaking of all time.
A handcrafted, in depth alien world to explore with surprises literally around every corner
divine apotheosis disease that turns you into a zombie shambler
catgirl booba
self-appointed divinity and all around man of mystery Vivec whose main claim to fame is that he canonically, as an in-game Elder Scrolls character, managed to access the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and assign himself the 'deity=true' variable
The Pain Glove (TM)
Furry fulfillment fantasy where you can become a big buff wolfman and run off into the wilderness
Wizard fulfillment fantasy where you can rack up all your stats into the millions by abusing loopholes in magic research, and then craft the potion seller's strongest potions concentrated to a point that they could knock out God
"I cast Everyone In This Town Dies Instantly"
being sexually propositioned by a Daedra
being sexually propositioned in order to recieve a promotion
leaping sixty miles in a single mighty bound and then splattering yourself across a rock face in one shot because you forgot to account for landing your mighty leap
Selling swords to a crab
selling a merchant an enchanted shirt of "Fire Damage 1pt per second, constant effect" and then waiting for him to keel over dead so you can loot his store with impunity
an entire province full of rogue wizards where "I'd like to see you stop me" is the whole of the law
dream daddy Dagoth and his castle-stomping giant robot
caves made out of meat
trying to fight the luckiest man of all time and being literally unable to land a hit on him without abusing the actual fabric of reality
The Boots Of Barry Allen
"That's a good argument. Unfortunately," Weakness to Magic 100%, 10 seconds. Weakness to Fire 100%, 10 seconds. Fire Damage 100pts, 10 seconds.
lockpicking your way inside the government treasury and making off with all the contents
The Corpse of Peke Utchoo
"Listen, this is very important. I need you to stab me in the face."
'mines' full of bugs where the 'miners' harvest the bug eggs in order to eat and sell (this is the primary food source of the region)
smuggling Dwarven artifacts
smuggling drugs
radical abolitionists as a joinable faction
lizard people
"Yeah so, to complete this pilgrimage you need to go drown yourself in the sewers. God says so."
the joys of property ownership
having enough strength score that you hit someone once with a longsword and the weapon instantly shatters in your hands, but it's okay because their entire skeleton exploded
having 100% magic resistance and watching enemy spells just ping off of your shiny pecs with zero effect
skill trainers that are sometimes actively hostile to you. The greatest enchanter in the land is a daedra worshipper that lives in an old Dunmer stronghold. He ain't gonna be happy to meet you. You want to learn his secrets? Do something about that.
....and more. This is just what I pulled off the top of my head in 20 minutes of thinking about it. I love this game, it's peak elder scrolls in my opinion and nearly peak early-2000's gaming in general.
It's a little crusty though. I grew up playing it so I can deal, but the modern gamer is going to struggle a bit. I'm going to give you some tips for the most common complaints.
"The combat sucks! I can't hit anything!"
The combat is roll based, like D&D. You wouldn't expect your D&D wizard to competently cleave someone head to asshole with a greatsword, and you shouldn't expect your Nerevarine to do it either with 30 AGI and 40 Long Blade. Chance to hit is determined by Agility score and weapon skill, and damage is determined by strength score and weapon skill. Make your AGI nice and high at character creation and pick a major skill weapon that you like and stick to it. Using gold to gain skill training goes a very long way towards competency in Morrowind and at low skill levels, it's cheap enough to make it a regular part of your shopping. If you find a really cool axe and you only have 5 in your Axe skill, go get some training with it before you try and take it out into real action. Failing any of that, the "Fortify Attack" effect from the Warrior birthsign or the Orc's Berserk power adds directly to your chance to hit. 10 points gives you 10% added on top after your normal to-hit calculations. Doesn't add any damage though.
By mid to late game, with relevant stats and skill levels at 70 or 80+, missing melee strikes in combat will become kind of rare, even without fortify attack boosts.
"The leveling system sucks! You have to optimize everything with meta knowledge!"
Morrowind is a hilariously unbalanced game, you definitely do not need optimal levelups to succeed. If you do want to get optimal level ups, you are going to need to perform some strange cheese using meta knowledge. But as a casual player, just making the skills you want to use your Major/Minor skills and leveling up normally as you gain experience is plenty fine, you'll be totally okay.
One caveat to that though, is that your HP total is dependent on your endurance score, and it is not retroactive. Getting your endurance high, or maxed, early in the game is usually a primary goal for most experienced players so that you get the maximum amount of HP per level up. I do recommend this. However, there are many other ways to get around this if other stats are more important to you, such as max HP boosting potions or enchantments, or just one of many ways of avoiding being hit in the first place (shield spells, flight, concealment or stealth, killing the enemy dead in one shot from 50 meters)
"I don't know where to go!"
Just read, bro. People give you directions to get places. You don't have quest markers but you do have a quest journal that will let you go back and read the exact dialogue of the quest giver whenever you want.
There are a couple of occasions where people will give you bad directions, or the place you're looking for is just hard to locate. For those, UESP exists. I've been playing this game for 20 years and sometimes I still have to look up specifics on some places, the game is that big. I've run this game probably two dozen times and I usually find at least one thing I've never seen before each time.
I don't really think that 5's story does happen without Franklin, though, is the thing. He isn't one of the big movers of the story, but he is the boots on the street that gets things done. Michael likes to think that he'll go do thug shit when he needs to, but he doesn't, he's an organizer more than he is a goon. Trevor just isn't reliable to get things done when you ask him to, he's going to do things his own way and that usually involves putting a wrench in your plan. Without Franklin you just have two old men past their primes who might have big dreams but they don't have the organization and the gumption to pull it off. Franklin is their man on the street, he knows people, he drives, he keeps a cool head and he sticks to the plan. He's probably the most competent criminal of the trio, in my opinion, if not the most famous or the most successful.
This is effectively the plot of Castlevania: Aria/Dawn of Sorrow, so go check those out. They're quality. I would love to see the idea more fleshed out though.
Bonus points if we make this a proper VTM vampire game, but I'm biased because I was coming in here to use my vote on "VTM Bloodlines 2 but good"
Oh, something else I thought of to ask. Say I'm looking for a side branch. Is there any way to know where an exit leads to before you take it? The stairs aren't labeled, so... it feels like a matter of luck more than anything to actually find side areas or not. I expect it's probably optimal to visit all of the side branches that you can before moving up a level?
RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of "all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus"
This definitely does happen sometimes, especially these days, but this is explicitly opposite to old-school Linux design principles. A program should do one thing, it should do it well, and it should be able to be plugged in to other processes in order to accomplish whatever this single-purpose program accomplishes. If you want it to do something else, go get/write a different package to do something different. This is actually explicitly stated in the "Unix Philosophy" papers by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al.
Turtling down in materials and then transitioning to your proper build later makes sense, that's a strategy I haven't actually tried. I'll look into that.
As for the manual hacks, I knew those existed, but I had been refraining from just looking them up. Is there somewhere in game that teaches you any of those? I've never found one.
I definitely have been underappreciating armor based on its weight. I've put on some medium armor and/or energy shields on some of my more combat oriented runs and they seem like they soak up a lot of abuse. They're just so bulky and heavy, I never feel like I have room for it among my other necessary parts.
Cogmind is my favorite game that I'm absolutely garbage at, I've been following the development cycle of it for probably over 10 years now and it's a huge component of why I love roguelikes as much as I do.
But fuck me that game is hard. I have a fairly comprehensive, wide and deep pool of knowledge about a semi-majority of the content in the game, but... I just can't stay alive. The attrition kills me, every time, I don't think I've ever made it past -06 or so on my best run. Pro advice always consists of "Oh just don't get into fights" but that's a lot easier said than done when you've got half a dozen swarmers on your tail that are faster than you are, are all busy calling backup, and are peppering you with 18 shots a round as you fruitlessly attempt to seek cover.
Anyway, yeah, great game. Love it to death. I'm real bad at it. It seems like probably most people are real bad at it, and there are just a couple of mega wizards that make the game look easy in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Especially doing things like wheel or leg builds, in my experience that's just slow suicide that is locked in the moment you decide to commit to it, they're just outright too slow to manage. I find that this is a game where you have to be faster than your opponents, no matter what, it is a hard requirement of survival - therefore, I do not survive unless I equip flight units. So I equip flight units and then I can't carry anything because their carry weight smokes dong, so I die to attrition because I get my parts shot off and don't have backups. So I get frustrated and do a legs build that's strapped down with four shotguns and then I die to active combat because I can't escape anyone.
Point being, if you're any good at Cogmind, I'd love some pointers or some advice on how you play. I've dabbled in this game for nearly a decade and I'm tired of being so straight up bad at it. I feel like I've been misunderstanding some fundamental principle of how you're supposed to play the game, and reading pro guides on the internet hasn't really filled me in on much other than a) try to avoid fights when possible (okay, fair, but this definitely isn't always possible) and b) other people always seem to find cooler loot more consistently than I do. Guides will start off right out of the gate like "okay, first thing's first, find a datajack and some hackware and get some flight" and I'm like, brother, I'm in -07 and I've found one datajack and two flight units in the whole game so far. You want a [Lgt. Assault Rifle]? I got those. Not much else.
I play a lot of roguelikes co-op with my roommate, things where you'll level up and have a choice between a few upgrade options. I'll scan my options and have one chosen and be ready to rock in 5-10 seconds, but he'll sit next to me and agonize over his decision for a full minute, and ask me my advice, and a lot of the time what ends up happening is I end up just making his build for him because I have time to analyze and select my choice and then also look over and analyze and select his choice before he ever makes a decision. My man's analysis paralysis is off the charts.
It's not like he's just generally a dumbass, though, he's a smart guy and this is one of the same guys I play D&D with and while he occasionally does the same during those games it's a lot less prevalent. So it's not like he's just dumb, he just gets caught up overanalyzing his options. It's endlessly frustrating to me but not enough to make me want to stop playing games together.
Our other friend that we game with sometimes has the opposite problem than that, where he'll get presented three options, read the first one, and go "yeah that sounds good" and immediately take it before even reading his other two. Honestly I hate that way more, I roast him about that every single time.
I can understand throwing out manuals, I do that too, but when people ask for help about something that they can read, on their screen right in front of them, right now at this particular moment that you're trying to ask me about it -
That's usually when I get a little grumpy about it.
Top is 840, below that, we have 340+(500) to equal 840.
But the problem is that putting the 500 there means the number below that, to add up to 500, MUST be 420, which means the left side of the left puzzle is impossible, because 120 + 420 does not equal 340.
All I've got is arm bones and half a spine, go fish
That's because Rockstar has an advertising budget that would put the GDP of most countries to shame, and they're not afraid to swing it around after the large and extended success of GTAV.
I expect we'll see the same for Elder Scrolls VI as well, soonish.
I trust Steam for exactly as long as Gaben is heading it, once he dies or retires all bets are off
Naw, it's nothing like that, thankfully. Everything I listed there is in the game in some manner or another, but some of them I've taken a hair of creative license with.
For that one in particular, Khajiit are playable cat-people, and many NPCs are also Khajiit.
In a town called Pelagiad, there exists A Khajiiti NPC named Ahnassi. She has a short quest line for a male Nerevarine and is notable for being (as far as I know) the only technically "romanceable" NPC in the game, though it doesn't go into any particular detail.
This quest line does also lead into the "robbing the government" bit though, which is fun.
This, I think, is the primary thing to remember about Morrowind. This game was intended for you to exploit it. It wants you to break it. It hands you four different ways to become stupendously overpowered within fifteen minutes of game start, it just doesn't tell you in detail about them and lets you find it out. Some of those ways abuse bugs, but many of them are 100% completely intended by the devs. You're intended to be a monstrous god-beast by the end. I'm the fucking Nerevarine, I'm here to chew ass and kick bubblegum and I'm all out of ass.
Agreed, it's manageable, but only if you know it's coming. Every "Restore X Stat" potion is worthless except Restore Strength, and no n'wah worth his skooma is going to walk around without a couple of those. For everything else, there's religion (when you get back to town). But a hefty strength debuff is going to make it real difficult to get back to said town.
For what it's worth, I think the greater bonewalkers doing permanent strength damage is a bug. I think it's also one of the handy toggle tweaks in OpenMW. But since you all learned about them in Dungeoneering 101 today, you know to pack some restore strength potions next time you go crypt diving so you don't have to teleport back home stark naked because your strength score got debuffed to zero and you can no longer lift your clothes.
Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition Remix for the PS2 was a mainstay fixture of my teenage years and might still remain my favorite racing game. I never had any of the N4S games, personally. But this one did me just fine, I played that game for years and years.
Runs great on the steam deck via emulation these days! I set up my collection through Retrodeck and it was one of the easiest drag-and-drop setup operations I've ever done.
VTM:B was my first introduction to VTM in any capacity and boy was it an introduction. I am now the world's hugest WOD nerd. The game is janky as all hell but the characters drive it so forcefully that I barely cared... for most of the game. The end parts of it are... rough. But up until the last few hours of the game the characters and atmosphere carry it all magnificently.
It's still one of my very favorite retro games now, though. First time through the Ocean House Hotel was an experience to remember, and the Malkavian dialogue trees are some of my favorite fourth wall breaking of all time.
You should play Morrowind! We've got:
....and more. This is just what I pulled off the top of my head in 20 minutes of thinking about it. I love this game, it's peak elder scrolls in my opinion and nearly peak early-2000's gaming in general.
It's a little crusty though. I grew up playing it so I can deal, but the modern gamer is going to struggle a bit. I'm going to give you some tips for the most common complaints.
"The combat sucks! I can't hit anything!"
The combat is roll based, like D&D. You wouldn't expect your D&D wizard to competently cleave someone head to asshole with a greatsword, and you shouldn't expect your Nerevarine to do it either with 30 AGI and 40 Long Blade. Chance to hit is determined by Agility score and weapon skill, and damage is determined by strength score and weapon skill. Make your AGI nice and high at character creation and pick a major skill weapon that you like and stick to it. Using gold to gain skill training goes a very long way towards competency in Morrowind and at low skill levels, it's cheap enough to make it a regular part of your shopping. If you find a really cool axe and you only have 5 in your Axe skill, go get some training with it before you try and take it out into real action. Failing any of that, the "Fortify Attack" effect from the Warrior birthsign or the Orc's Berserk power adds directly to your chance to hit. 10 points gives you 10% added on top after your normal to-hit calculations. Doesn't add any damage though.
By mid to late game, with relevant stats and skill levels at 70 or 80+, missing melee strikes in combat will become kind of rare, even without fortify attack boosts.
"The leveling system sucks! You have to optimize everything with meta knowledge!"
Morrowind is a hilariously unbalanced game, you definitely do not need optimal levelups to succeed. If you do want to get optimal level ups, you are going to need to perform some strange cheese using meta knowledge. But as a casual player, just making the skills you want to use your Major/Minor skills and leveling up normally as you gain experience is plenty fine, you'll be totally okay.
One caveat to that though, is that your HP total is dependent on your endurance score, and it is not retroactive. Getting your endurance high, or maxed, early in the game is usually a primary goal for most experienced players so that you get the maximum amount of HP per level up. I do recommend this. However, there are many other ways to get around this if other stats are more important to you, such as max HP boosting potions or enchantments, or just one of many ways of avoiding being hit in the first place (shield spells, flight, concealment or stealth, killing the enemy dead in one shot from 50 meters)
"I don't know where to go!"
Just read, bro. People give you directions to get places. You don't have quest markers but you do have a quest journal that will let you go back and read the exact dialogue of the quest giver whenever you want.
There are a couple of occasions where people will give you bad directions, or the place you're looking for is just hard to locate. For those, UESP exists. I've been playing this game for 20 years and sometimes I still have to look up specifics on some places, the game is that big. I've run this game probably two dozen times and I usually find at least one thing I've never seen before each time.
I don't really think that 5's story does happen without Franklin, though, is the thing. He isn't one of the big movers of the story, but he is the boots on the street that gets things done. Michael likes to think that he'll go do thug shit when he needs to, but he doesn't, he's an organizer more than he is a goon. Trevor just isn't reliable to get things done when you ask him to, he's going to do things his own way and that usually involves putting a wrench in your plan. Without Franklin you just have two old men past their primes who might have big dreams but they don't have the organization and the gumption to pull it off. Franklin is their man on the street, he knows people, he drives, he keeps a cool head and he sticks to the plan. He's probably the most competent criminal of the trio, in my opinion, if not the most famous or the most successful.
This is effectively the plot of Castlevania: Aria/Dawn of Sorrow, so go check those out. They're quality. I would love to see the idea more fleshed out though.
Bonus points if we make this a proper VTM vampire game, but I'm biased because I was coming in here to use my vote on "VTM Bloodlines 2 but good"
Oh, something else I thought of to ask. Say I'm looking for a side branch. Is there any way to know where an exit leads to before you take it? The stairs aren't labeled, so... it feels like a matter of luck more than anything to actually find side areas or not. I expect it's probably optimal to visit all of the side branches that you can before moving up a level?
This definitely does happen sometimes, especially these days, but this is explicitly opposite to old-school Linux design principles. A program should do one thing, it should do it well, and it should be able to be plugged in to other processes in order to accomplish whatever this single-purpose program accomplishes. If you want it to do something else, go get/write a different package to do something different. This is actually explicitly stated in the "Unix Philosophy" papers by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al.
Appreciate the input.
Turtling down in materials and then transitioning to your proper build later makes sense, that's a strategy I haven't actually tried. I'll look into that.
As for the manual hacks, I knew those existed, but I had been refraining from just looking them up. Is there somewhere in game that teaches you any of those? I've never found one.
I definitely have been underappreciating armor based on its weight. I've put on some medium armor and/or energy shields on some of my more combat oriented runs and they seem like they soak up a lot of abuse. They're just so bulky and heavy, I never feel like I have room for it among my other necessary parts.
Cogmind is my favorite game that I'm absolutely garbage at, I've been following the development cycle of it for probably over 10 years now and it's a huge component of why I love roguelikes as much as I do.
But fuck me that game is hard. I have a fairly comprehensive, wide and deep pool of knowledge about a semi-majority of the content in the game, but... I just can't stay alive. The attrition kills me, every time, I don't think I've ever made it past -06 or so on my best run. Pro advice always consists of "Oh just don't get into fights" but that's a lot easier said than done when you've got half a dozen swarmers on your tail that are faster than you are, are all busy calling backup, and are peppering you with 18 shots a round as you fruitlessly attempt to seek cover.
Anyway, yeah, great game. Love it to death. I'm real bad at it. It seems like probably most people are real bad at it, and there are just a couple of mega wizards that make the game look easy in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Especially doing things like wheel or leg builds, in my experience that's just slow suicide that is locked in the moment you decide to commit to it, they're just outright too slow to manage. I find that this is a game where you have to be faster than your opponents, no matter what, it is a hard requirement of survival - therefore, I do not survive unless I equip flight units. So I equip flight units and then I can't carry anything because their carry weight smokes dong, so I die to attrition because I get my parts shot off and don't have backups. So I get frustrated and do a legs build that's strapped down with four shotguns and then I die to active combat because I can't escape anyone.
Point being, if you're any good at Cogmind, I'd love some pointers or some advice on how you play. I've dabbled in this game for nearly a decade and I'm tired of being so straight up bad at it. I feel like I've been misunderstanding some fundamental principle of how you're supposed to play the game, and reading pro guides on the internet hasn't really filled me in on much other than a) try to avoid fights when possible (okay, fair, but this definitely isn't always possible) and b) other people always seem to find cooler loot more consistently than I do. Guides will start off right out of the gate like "okay, first thing's first, find a datajack and some hackware and get some flight" and I'm like, brother, I'm in -07 and I've found one datajack and two flight units in the whole game so far. You want a [Lgt. Assault Rifle]? I got those. Not much else.
Hah, I have this problem but in complete inverse.
I play a lot of roguelikes co-op with my roommate, things where you'll level up and have a choice between a few upgrade options. I'll scan my options and have one chosen and be ready to rock in 5-10 seconds, but he'll sit next to me and agonize over his decision for a full minute, and ask me my advice, and a lot of the time what ends up happening is I end up just making his build for him because I have time to analyze and select my choice and then also look over and analyze and select his choice before he ever makes a decision. My man's analysis paralysis is off the charts.
It's not like he's just generally a dumbass, though, he's a smart guy and this is one of the same guys I play D&D with and while he occasionally does the same during those games it's a lot less prevalent. So it's not like he's just dumb, he just gets caught up overanalyzing his options. It's endlessly frustrating to me but not enough to make me want to stop playing games together.
Our other friend that we game with sometimes has the opposite problem than that, where he'll get presented three options, read the first one, and go "yeah that sounds good" and immediately take it before even reading his other two. Honestly I hate that way more, I roast him about that every single time.
I am the world's biggest Qud stan and will always up vote it in the wild
It's a very weird game, but if you can pierce the surface of it, it has such an incredible amount to offer you.
Literally came here to make this same joke, lmao. Great minds, and all.
I can understand throwing out manuals, I do that too, but when people ask for help about something that they can read, on their screen right in front of them, right now at this particular moment that you're trying to ask me about it -
That's usually when I get a little grumpy about it.
In 2007 when my phone had an aux port
For the first problem.
Top is 840, below that, we have 340+(500) to equal 840.
But the problem is that putting the 500 there means the number below that, to add up to 500, MUST be 420, which means the left side of the left puzzle is impossible, because 120 + 420 does not equal 340.