R

I don't think I'll ever understand why companies are obsessed with youth. Somehow it's better to have an audience of unemployed students with limited discretionary spending?

How does remastering Oblivion without releasing anything related to TES6 prove they can do both effectively? We have no idea whatsoever about the progress on TES6. They might not be making any significant progress at all. Similarly why would releasing news of a game shortly before its release be a poorly kept secret? Since when are games supposed to be kept secret until their release? Typically you want to drum up interest beforehand with marketing, not keep it confidential like military technology.

Exactly! Chosen one or not, if you had the option to reject the role of hero and watch the world burn or even join the evil Daedra to help burn it down yourself, it would be far more fun, interesting, and consistent with the intention to make games where players can "live another life, in another world." I more or less get why they haven't done that. We can assume that the games they've released basically represent the best they could make at the time. And they were always glitchy, especially when semi-significant choices like Skyrim Civil War were offered. They just haven't had the capacity to do it all. I still wish they could, of course.

Yes, I've read all of them, that's why I think most of them aren't very dark. Like, Berserk or Tokyo Ghoul are dark fantasy. These titles are mostly typical heroic fantasies/tweenie shounen-type stories with a little bit of black paint. Like the 66,666 years one lol. It's all him acting cute with his family, making friends, and rescuing people. What, it's dark because there are bad guys or because he died and reincarnated? Or because he's a black magician? He might as well be a white one with how he acts and the plot itself. Come on, be serious.

You are very much mistaken about Hammerfell, High Rock, and Orsinium. Those were the settings of TES 2 Daggerfall. In fact, the player character could help found Orsinium (or not) in Daggerfall depending on their choice. This divergence is why Bethesda wrote in "the Warp in the West."

TES 1 Arena featured the capital cities of all the regions, but I think it's fair to leave that out because Arena wasn't an open world game and traveling between those cities was almost all you could do.

Other fun memories of those games:

• You could drink yourself to death in a tavern in Arena.

• You could solicit special services (wink wink ah-hem) in Arena.

• The Temples of Dibella in Daggerfall had nude priestesses, as she advocates free love.

• You could purchase a ship and a wagon in Daggerfall.

• You could borrow money from a bank in Daggerfall if you didn't have enough funds—and the bank would send bounty hunters after you if you didn't repay it.

• Sometimes in Daggerfall you'd arrive to find city gates shut, unable to enter, due to a plague in the city.

All base game, as there weren't mods back then.

I'm glad The Story Of A Low-Rank Soldier Becoming A Monarch didn't end too abruptly, it's quite a good one. Though I left off above chapter 100 and felt like there should be a lot more? 🤷

Uhhhh, but Kim Rok Soo was not originally a "normal young Korean man." He's from a gate cataclysm world and he was a 36 year old ability user who led a monster-fighting team.

They've managed 2-5 times before. I leave out Arena as it was a smaller game than the following ones, so Daggerfall really started the tradition of what a TES game plays like. Each installment has been both significantly better and also slightly disappointing. For example, in Daggerfall you could own a wagon and a ship. When you arrived in towns you might find their gates shut tight due to a plague or see a flyer for a holiday festival. However, these aspects weren't very immersive. You couldn't even see your wagon firsthand. They dropped these from Morrowind, but the things retained had more immersion. Oblivion further simplified, but in return had richer storytelling in its quest lines. And so on. Due to this, I worry what will be lost and gained in each release, but I have never been entirely displeased. I just hope they don't get too distracted by what other popular games are doing and lose the core values of TES. For example, Baldur's Gate 3 is so freaking popular and I'm sure it's great (I have fond memories of NWN), but I will probably never play it because it's not enough like TES and I ain't got time for that. I am willing to deal with many issues in return for getting what no other game provides. Mods are gonna have to be a big part of it. Mods are what elevated the following games to and beyond the Daggerfall level. So I hope they provide a better framework for mods that add realism and immersion. Unfortunately, I will be dead long before we get there technically and economically, but my dream has long been to play a TES game in VR—not the pedestrian kind of VR we have, the sci-fi kind of VR.