Easy modding helps a ton, but what really keeps a game alive is releasing the source code so that it can be updated by the community (or, in rare cases like Daggerfall Unity, some absolute mad lad spending over a decade reverse engineering the game and remaking the entire thing from scratch). The list is endless - the multitude of Doom versions, OpenMW for Morrowind, OpenJK for Jedi Outcast and Academy, even OpenJKDF2 for Jedi Knight 1, OpenRCT2 for Rollercoaster Tycoon, 1.13 and Stracciatella for Jagged Alliance 2, and so on and so forth. Without these modern source ports/remakes, the games would be nowhere near as popular as they are.

Also worth noting that new games not checking these boxes is not a failure, it’s by design. Publishers don’t want you happily playing old games, because then you’d have less of a reason to buy new ones.

If you have any interest at all in Souls-likes and want to see where the genre really started, consider Blade of Darkness. An updated version is available on GOG with modern resolution support and slightly improved controls (still clunky as hell in comparison to newer games, though).

I have both PS4 and PS5 controllers for use with my PC, and I prefer the PS4 one because it feels more comfortable in my hands.

I don’t know if it counts as a controller per se, but I’ve been using an MMO mouse with a big number pad for the thumb for quite a few years now. I used to laugh at these things, but once I tried one, I couldn’t go back. Those extra buttons come in handy a lot more often than you might think, and sometimes I wish it had even more.

I unironically wish all controllers were like this. IMO the main way hardware limits game design is the number of buttons on modern controllers; more buttons = more actions that can be performed = more complex and interesting games.

What about games that become less fun as their development goes along? That’s another thing I’ve noticed with some early-access games whose early versions were more… concentrated, for lack of a better term. If there’s progression involved, it tends to go pretty quickly in early versions. Development then doesn’t change how the game plays or where the progression begins and ends, instead it just adds padding between the fun bits and makes everything take longer. Ever encounter a game like that?

I’ve had a similar experience with a lot of early-access games. They always end up disappointing, and I’ve come to realize it’s because the fun comes not just from playing the game and watching it develop and improve but also in equal part from expectations. It’s easy to look at an unfinished game and imagine what it could be in the future, and those fantasies inevitably exceed what is actually feasible to put into the game. I try to steer clear of early-access games now.

Ah, thank you for your thoughtful response. I’ve tried to condense my thoughts as much as possible, but it’s still a giant wall of text. Sorry about that.

I basically agree with most of what you said, there really is a lot to like about Oblivion. But I’ve always perceived a strange contrast in it between its excellent quest design and the way it treats the actual Elder Scrolls lore, and it has always bothered me. How could they put so much effort into one aspect of the game and so little into the other?

When people reminisce about the game, they always mention their favorite quests: The Dark Brotherhood quest line, the quest where you go into a painting, the one with a paranoid elf, the one with a backwater village full of Lovecraftian cultists, the one where all the people in a village got turned invisible, the one where a ship that’s being used as an inn gets hijacked by pirates and sailed out to sea while you’re sleeping in it, the one where an orc gladiator finds out that he’s the son of a vampire, the one were you help two brothers reclaim their family farm… And these really are some of the best and most memorable quests in any RPG ever.

But, with the exception of the DB, can you see what these have in common? They’re not Elder Scrolls quests. They have absolutely nothing to do with the setting, they’re as generic as can be. You could lift them from Oblivion and drop them into any other fantasy game, and they’d work just fine with basically no adjustments needed.

When the game does make contact with the Elder Scrolls universe, it almost always does so in the most halfhearted and perfunctory way possible. The examples that stick out most in my mind are Boethiah’s quest and Mankar Camoran’s speech in Paradise. What sinister task does the Prince of Plots, whose domain is deceit, conspiracy, secret plots, assassination, and treason, have for you? Go into an arena and kill some dudes one after the other. Like… really? That’s a Mehrunes Dagon or Molag Bal quest, not a Boethiah quest! And the baddie, a supposed expert on all things oblivion, gives you a speech near the end of the game, during which he rattles off the names of some daedric princes and the planes of oblivion they rule over. Except that he gets every single one of them wrong. The writer threw in some TES terminology with no regard for what it actually means in the same way that Star Trek writers throw in technobabble.

These are just two examples, but you notice stuff like this all over the game if you keep your eyes open. Most of the people working on the game, with the exception of the DB quest line designer/writer and maybe a handful of others, clearly didn’t give one singular crap about its setting, avoiding it as much as possible and putting in the bare minimum effort otherwise.

Now the revelation I’ve had is not that the game is like this, I’ve known that for almost twenty years. It’s why it’s like this. It finally clicked as a result of combining three ideas:

One, I recently watched a video by Zaric Zhakaron in which he points out that the people who created The Elder Scrolls left the company decades ago. He argues that Starfield’s worldbuilding stinks in comparison to Bethesda’s previous games because it’s the first game in decades where the developers actually had to do some themselves, they couldn’t simply insert new quests and stories into a world that had been made by others and that they simply inherited (TES) or purchased (Fallout). And it turns out they suck at it. There was barely anyone left of the old Bethesda after Morrowind.

Two, modern Bethesda has no balls. Old Bethesda made a variety of different games, some of which were highly innovative both in terms of technology and design (e.g. it was Terminator: Future Shock, not Quake, that pioneered 3D enemies and mouselook in first-person shooters). But then Morrowind became a huge hit, and the price of success was the company’s soul. It spent the next twenty years making the same game over and over with different coats of paint.

And three, I had a brief discussion about Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. It’s a game I like a lot, but whenever I talk about it, I tell people that it’s an excellent pirate game whose biggest flaw is that it sometimes forces you to leave your ship and play Assassin’s Creed. It’s pretty clear the developers wanted to make a pirate game, but they still had to contort it into the AC straitjacket for marketing reasons.

I’m sure you can tell where this is going. You said Oblivion was made with passion, and that’s only half true. Yeah, the developers clearly did want to make a good game, and in many ways they succeeded, but they had no passion for The Elder Scrolls, because it wasn’t their setting. They hadn’t made it, it was just a leftover from some guys who no longer worked there, and as a result the new guys didn’t know or care very much about it. They still had to make a game in it, though, because that’s what the fans wanted. The result is a rather formulaic game that distances itself from its own setting whenever it can, yet is unable to develop its own identity because it would clash, and mangles it when it can’t.

Maybe I’m just slow and this stuff was obvious to everyone twenty years ago, but I feel a strange sense of closure having figured it out. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

That’s fair enough, but then they shouldn’t make a game blatantly unsuited to the tech they do have. Just make another Morrowind with a fresh coat of paint like they’ve been doing for the last twenty years. It’s what the fans want anyway.

And also because lore youtubers gotta eat, but there’s only so much lore in each game, so they grasp at straws to come up with far-fetched theories that were definitely not intended by the writers.

I mean… there’s not holding your hand and then there’s the game not bothering to inform you that you’re softlocked because you failed to notice and pick up a one-pixel item four hours ago in an area you can no longer return to. I remember those old point-and-click adventure games very well, and I have very little desire to go back to those days.

I agree about the history thing. I’m old enough to remember a time when games were derided as mindless schlock and even stories considered laughable by modern standards were lauded as profoundly impressive. At most one could argue that emphasis on story in games has followed something of a bell curve over time, but I don’t think even that is really true.

But I think your time frame of Bethesda lacking ambition and innovation is a bit too broad. 30 years would include things like first-person shooters with an official Terminator license and groundbreaking graphics and controls (3D enemies and mouselook, which people usually attribute to Quake, but that came later) or hyper-realistic racing games with extensive customization of the car’s drivetrain and suspension. It wasn’t until they hit it big with MW that Bethesda lost their balls and started just remaking the same game over and over with different coats of paint.

Eh, Bethesda flip-flop on that kind of stuff all the time. IIRC in Arena, the Imperial City was just in generic temperate woodland, then it was retconned in some in-game books to a jungle, then retconned again in Oblivion back to generic woodland. Same thing with the armor of imperial soldiers. Generic fantasy plate in early games, Roman in Morrowind, generic fantasy plate in Oblivion again, Roman again in Skyrim… They just can’t make up their minds.

I will say this, though: It’s okay to retcon old lore, but only in order to make it more unique and interesting. Retconning stuff to make it more generic and bland is a high crime.

Morrowind is the reason I’m in the game industry and has impacted my life more than any other single piece of media. It’s been heartbreaking for me to see the treatment Elder Scrolls has gotten. I was so excited for Skyrim it was the only game I’ve ever preordered, it’s the reason I originally got a Steam account, and the whole game is a let down start to finish.

I feel pretty much the same as you about those games, which makes me very curious what your opinion of Oblivion is. I’ve recently had a bit of a (belated) revelation about it, so I’m interested in other opinions and discussion.

That’s easy to say, I don’t think either of those things is easy to do.

Basically all of NetHack, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the fact that the devs foresee things that don’t even exist in the game. For example, if you polymorph yourself into a monster that can eat metal and then eat a trident, you get a humorous message referencing Trident bubble gum. A similar message exists for when you eat a piece of flint (referencing the Flintstones, naturally), despite the fact that there are no monsters in the game that can eat rocks. In other words, that message can never be seen in the vanilla version of the game, but the devs prepared it anyway just in case you mod such a monster in.

Also, Vane.

Frontier: Elite 2 had it in 1993. There really is no excuse at this point.

Dang, this is a disappointing read. This might be an unpopular take, but I have been steadily losing respect for FromSoft over the years due to them essentially following the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became very successful, and from that point on they’ve just been remaking that one game over and over with slightly different coats of paint. I was hoping they’d break out of that pattern with AC6 and do something original for a change, although I was also keenly aware there was a risk that, being the sixth game in the series, it would be just another AC. The fact that it’s apparently just another Souls is somehow even worse.

two decades is enough to capture Skyrim and Fallout 3.

So a decent but by no means amazing game and a complete turd? Not really helping your case here very much, IMO. The last truly great game Bethesda made was Morrowind, and I will die on this hill.