Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we complete our series on Morrowind, giving our takeaways and then trying to get to the bottom of our mailbag. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.
Sections played:
103 hrs (Brett) vs 36 hrs (Tim)
Issues covered: Brett destroys the heart of Lorkhan and meets another god, games that don't end, wondering about what would happen with the quests, grandmaster quests, not caring about the prophecy, the ur-game, building up a lot of game over time, a leveled-up version of Morrowind, slimming down the dialog options and NPCs, the potential to do everything, approaching the MMO grind loop, feeling like you're in the same game, delivering on the dragons, the sense of a real living world in the abstract and in the experience, the art direction, naming rules, the time to push back to strange, useful frictions, systems you can experiment with, not being handholdy, going big but going built, being in the right era to find a template, interconnected systems, unintended consequences and the ripple effects, emerging systems, the value of continuing to iterate on your ideas, the accessibility of Oblivion, not having to kill a guild master, crazy late game stories, delivering for the writers, creative collaboration, integrating into the creative goals and finding a way to avoid antagonism.
Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Fallout 3, Tunic, Dragon Age, Monster Hunter World, Halo, Menzobarran, Eye of the Beholder, Starfield, Ubisoft, Far Cry, DOOM (1993), Quake, Father Beast, Xbox, Ashton Herrmann, OpenMW, mysterydip, Evan Skolnick, Halo, Star Wars, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.
Next time:
A bit... of Dark Souls
Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub
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