[Rushy]

According to the TESO wiki, you can only free mannimarco in a quest or leave him. It doesn't say anything about you being able to fight/kill him. That would be utterly world-breaking.

[Saddam Hussein]

According to the TESO wiki, you can only free mannimarco in a quest or leave him. It doesn't say anything about you being able to fight/kill him. That would be utterly world-breaking.

That's part of a later quest, it looks like.  I guess it's his soul or spirit that you have the option of freeing, and canonically he must have been able to find a way to...bring himself back to life?  Not sure if that's how necromancy works in these games.

[Ghost of V]

Not sure if that's how necromancy works in these games.

I don't see why not. Surely someone could write in whatever nonsense they wanted to bring Mannimarco back if you do actually kill him in TESO. Although, most necromancy I've seen in ES usually doesn't bring people back correctly. They are usually not quite right when they come back, or are just zombied.

[Saddam Hussein]

Replying to this here so as to avoid cluttering up the other thread:

I'm playing Skyrim again. The Dragonborn expansion, specifically. Isn't it funny that Bethesda's two best expansion packs since Morrowind's release (Shivering Isles and Dragonborn) are both heavily inspired by Morrowind? More supporting evidence for the case that any videogame that isn't Morrowind 2 is a waste of money and time.

It's supporting evidence for the case that Bethesda does their best work when they steer clear of dumb tropes like Standard Fantasy Setting or Medieval European Fantasy and instead focus on coming up with their own unique, creative settings.  You don't want to see a rehash of Morrowind.  You might think you do, but you really don't.

[Particle Person]

I literally do, though. That's why I'm excited about Skywind.

[Blanko]

...Why? That's just Morrowind without all the shit that makes Morrowind cool.

[Particle Person]

What, like the epic combat? Mostly I'll just be walking around to see what changes they've made to the landscape. Also, I prefer Skyrim's classless levelling system.

[Saddam Hussein]

A couple of corrections I need to make:

Not with all the stuff they could have put into the game in its place.  Things like the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, the Companions, the Morag Tong, the rest of the fucking map, etc.

The Companions and the Morag Tong actually are in this game.  Not as joinable guilds or anything, but nevertheless, they are present.

I've only seen John Cleese and Alfred Molina briefly so far, but they seem to do all right. 

Molina does quite well as Abnur Tharn, his not remembering his favorite line when he was being interviewed notwithstanding.  Cleese sounds pretty bored.

[beardo]

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec.

[Particle Person]

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec.

mispronounces Vivec within first two seconds

epic

[Saddam Hussein]

vie-vec

Even TESO pronounces Vivec's name right!   Also:

http://theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=12855.msg189618#msg189618

Okay, so rant time.


FIRSTLY! They fucked up the lore so badly that you wouldn't believe.
Exhibit A: Cyrodiil is a temperate forest-filled, plain-covered cliche fantasy setting. Read previous books from the past games and you will note that Cyrodiil is a JUNGLE with a few big cities sitting in the middle of it. A JUNGLE. Not a forest.
Exhibit B: "Oblivion" is Hell--and one big, crappy cliche. Okay, think about this for a while...Mehrunes Dagon is a crazy god and an evil genius. Why would his pocket of Oblivion be so ridiculously cliched? There aren't many books covering Dagon's lair, but the one that does describes it as eerie and ominous with dead forests and a dull silence. When I walked through the portal to Dagon's pocket, what I got was not eerie, creepy, nor did it display dead forests or eerie silence. It was a cliche fantasy of Hell, with goddamned LAVA PITS. Bullshit.
Exhibit C: Mannimarco, the King of Worms is a high elf fool who took about three hits and a fireball cast to get rid of him as the 'boss' on a minor subquest in the game. Umm...Mannimarco is a DEMIGOD. He used to be a mortal, but he was never a high elf, and way back when during the dragon shift, he got turned into a GOD by the Numidium. I mean, for Christ's sakes if it was that easy to kill him, you would think that he wouldn't have been a problem at all for the mage's guild or the imperial guard to do themselves.
Exhibit D (I'm gonna keep going): The Imperial City is a piece of shit. Firstly, it very, very roughly follows previous books' examples of what's going on in there. It's also barely bigger than fricking BALMORA, for God's sakes. It's TINY compared to what it's supposed to be. White-Gold Tower was supposed to be HUMONGOUS, not a little stick stuck in the ground in the middle of a crappy-looking city. I mean, COME ON. This is Rome, this is Byzantium, this is Alexandria, this is Athens, and they made it a tiny, little village on a small island.
Exhibit E: Deer? Deer?! Cyrodiil is supposed to be more "normal" than Morrowind or Daggerfall, yes, but DEER?! I loved Elder Scrolls way back when because it was ORIGINAL. When you're walking through Morrowind, you encounter Silt Striders, Cliff Riders, and a series of fantastical beasts. When you're walking through Murkwood or Daggerfall or wherever, you encounter similarly strange creatures that you couldn't even imagine. Instead of that, Oblivion gives me DEER.
There are numerous other examples, but I'm thinking you're getting the picture here.

Next on the chopping block: Modding capabilities.
One thing that really MADE the Elder Scrolls series what they were was the modding community. New mods came out every day, and they were all so much fun, and I was expecting this with Oblivion...but no. Why? Because it's impossible.
I modded for Daggerfall and Morrowind. I still can't mod for Oblivion. It's ridiculous.
The AI system, for one (you know, the "radiant AI" which never ended up working how it was supposed to?), was impossible to use. For every NPC, you have to put in their wishes, their goals, their ambitions. Hell, if you want a guard standing in the middle of a city, patrolling, you can't just tell him to patrol the area, you have to tell him how fucking HUNGRY he is. I DON'T CARE HOW HUNGRY HE IS.
Next, the model imports/exports. The models are hardcoded into the game. They can't be touched except with outside programs. WHY the devs decided to do this, I have no idea, but it really fucked things up. It means that new weapons, new armor, new ANYTHING is practically impossible to import into the game.
Then there's the questing. Instead of making things simple like they did in the previous games, you have to have a sound file attached to each and every person in the game, you need to have a journal entry which is SEPARATE from the actual quest, and then you need a compass point for everything. I can't even convey how annoying it is to have to make a quest in Oblivion.
It's honestly no wonder why the modding community stayed on Morrowind.

Then there's the gameplay features.
A compass? Why the hell do I need a compass? In Morrowind, Daggerfall, and Arena, part of the fun in things was having to go out into the wilderness, and blaze your own trails, and look for this and that while fighting off enemies and trying to stay to your path. In Oblivion, you just warp to a few feet away, and then follow an arrow that tells you where you need to be...Hmmm...
The combat system is also a piece of crap. It turned the whole game into a hack'n'slash, not an RPG. Morrowind was borderline, but Oblivion really sealed the deal, and it barely has anything to do with skill or player-build anymore.
Then there's the leveled lists. I barely want to even get started on these. The devs' laziness reeeeally taxed the game, and it shows in the leveled lists the most. "Wow, this monster is really hard for me to kill. I guess I'll go have to train up my skills and come back........Phwew that was a taxing workout, but now I feel really strong and powerful. Here I come, you...you're totally not the monster that was here before..." If you go and train your own character in hopes to defeat a monster that you couldn't beat before, you come back five levels stronger, and WHAT DO YOU KNOW? The monster that was hard to beat is now TWENTY levels stronger than it was before, and even harder to beat.
Not to mention, the leveled lists also screw with loot. The boards for a while were raging wild with examples of how they found a rat carrying two forks and a spoon...in its backpack? Or how a headless zombie was carrying two heads along with it for no apparent reason. A personal example is when I was waltzing around killing Imperial Guards, and I found one with a myriad of gems and expensive things. I'm sure it's the guard's pay that allowed him to buy all of these things and he was just carrying them around the Imperial City in hopes that someone might come along to kill him and steal all his stuff...right?
Oh, and don't forget the bandits. You know, those poor highway men on the street who are going and attacking people to scrounge up some exta money even though they're already donned in full elven mithril, bejewled rings and necklesses, and priceless swords...every penny counts?

Here's where I'm going to stop for now. I can think of countless other jewels of idiocy that I encountered in the game, but I think I made my point. Oblivion would still be an alright game if it wasn't part of a series. Unfortunately, and something that I think Bethesda forgot entirely, the game IS part of a series, and, imagine this, they have a fanbase who respected them and waited eagerly for a game that they never got.

~D-Draw

Many of his points are wrong.  Mannimarco was indeed an Altmer, and it was only ever rumored that the Dragon Break (which is presumably what he meant when he said "dragon shift") turned him into a god.  It's actually kind of funny that anyone would try to point to an event as incredibly (and deliberately) vague as the Warp in the West as evidence of any detail of lore.  The Imperial City is far larger than Balmora.  And his description of the Deadlands is wrong.  Here's the book he must have misread:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Doors_of_Oblivion

'I am in a storm,' he told me as he entered the next realm. He described the landscape of dark twisted trees, howling spirits, and billowing mist, and I thought he might have entered the Deadlands of Mehrunes Dagon. But then he said quickly, 'No, I am no longer in a forest. There was a flash of lightning, and now I am on a ship. The mast is tattered. The crew is slaughtered. Something is coming through the waves … oh, gods … Wait, now, I am in a dank dungeon, in a cell …'

He was not in the Deadlands, but Quagmire, the nightmare realm of Vaernima.

derp

I also assume he was talking about quest markers when he said "compass."  Even though Morrowind doesn't have a compass, for some unfathomable reason.

[beardo]

Even though Morrowind doesn't have a compass, for some unfathomable reason.

It has a minimap instead.

[Particle Person]

I'm pretty sure he meant "compass" when he said "compass". You can't stumble on anything unexpectedly with the compass.

[Saddam Hussein]

<Saddam> This game's ridiculous choices
<Saddam> It automatically kills you if you get too close to the Imperial City
<Snupes> wat
<Saddam> Yeah, they call it "environmental damage" and it registers as 0 damage
<Blanko> How does dying work in TESO
<Saddam> But it just automtically kills you
<Saddam> When you die you respawn at a wayshrine
<beardo> you respawn at a wayshrine, or if you have a full soulgem, you can respawn in palce
<beardo> place, even
<Saddam> And there's a perk you can get that allows you to respawn right there once an hour
<beardo> Yes
<beardo> But all the enemies in the area will have full HP again once you respawn
<Blanko> >once an hour
<Blanko> So you can always respawn right where you die, right? :^)
<Saddam> No
<Blanko> Saddam dies more than once an hour, confirmed
<Saddam> The game is super-difficult
<Blanko> lol
<Snupes> It's literally the Dark Souls of MMOs
<Blanko> Dark Souls isn't hard though
<beardo> It's only difficult when you're in high level areas
<Snupes> Blanko does not need to play a game to know its difficulty
<Snupes> He is literlaly Rishy
<Saddam> All of Cyrodiil is high-level
<Blanko> They wouldn't make a TES game hard
<Saddam> Because they apparently want to discourage PvP
<beardo> If you're level 20, and you try to fight level 30 enemies, you run a big chanse of getting killed
<Blanko> Gotta pander to the fanbase of literally babies
<Blanko> beardo: Uh no shit
<Blanko> Pretty sure you're supposed to be killing things of your level m80
<Snupes> Where's the fun if you can't put a ton of time and effort into taking down things way more powerful than you
<beardo> punishing exploration
<Blanko> Yes
<beardo> I killed a level 21 boss when I was level 14
<beardo> It took a few tries
<Blanko> They want to railroad you through the Correct Way to Play The Game
<Saddam> Linear Theme Park
<beardo> Some quests doesn't even involve killing anyone, so those are always easy even if they are 15 levels higher than you are

[Particle Person]

Or it could just be a regular compass, not one that shows you locations before you've discovered them.

Yeah, it could be... but it isn't. Not sure what you're saying.

[Saddam Hussein]

I'm saying that it makes no sense to complain about there being a compass in general if your complaint is really that the way the compass works is bad.

[Ghost of V]

I'm saying that it makes no sense to complain about there being a compass in general if your complaint is really that the way the compass works is bad.

Are you trying to say that complaining about something being designed badly makes no sense? Because I think it makes a lot of sense... what other reason is there to complain about anything?

[Particle Person]

I'm saying that it makes no sense to complain about there being a compass in general if your complaint is really that the way the compass works is bad.

You're an idiot.

[beardo]

But you're a cunt.

[Blanko]

Oooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh