Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Zseni"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Zseni"]Would the article take the form of you posting ignorant comments and me correcting you with mild yet blinding genius? We're gonna be halfway there in a minute![/quote] I'm all for whatever's easiest. I also have a pretty bad memory, which might be confused for trolling or a general fog of stupidity, so please keep that in mind. [/quote] Man, you and Bananaman are so polite and deferential, it throws me totally off kilter. There's a guy like that at the Unemployment Office too - all I do is bash on him for loving Jesus and looking like a hippie, and all he does is give me supportive hugs and express his wishes for my success. "You look like your mom's stretched-out cunt today, Johan. Did Jesus dress you or something? snigger" "Aw Zseni, you're right. You're so good about clothes. hug I'm gonna run home and change. Good luck on your thing today! I know you'll do great!" If I could do that emotional judo shit, man, I'd be <i>running</i> this town. [quote][quote]You can't clean them out in Oblivion either. Although the shopkeepers go to sleep, all store goods and money are kept in Sekret Hidden Chests - you have to turn clipping off to get to the bootle. You can take all the shopkeeper's painstakingly-arranged Novice Alembics and 10-drake copies of Thief Of Virtue - a really fat decorator can set you up with 200... even 300!... drakes. [/quote] I don't know, I thought I saw a bunch of shop keepers have all their wares out on the desk, like the Hispanic Flea Market on 88th out here in Denver, and then you could just go in and take what you want when nobody was around. If you tried to sell it back to the same guy, Oblivion would recognize that and freak the seller out in dramatic histrionics, but you were completely free to sell it in a different town (also like the flea market here in Denver). If they pack that stuff up at night, or it's all so low value that it becomes an asteroid mining grind to make any money, then it's a wash between that and Morrowind's Buckingham Palace routine, sure. ... But come on, it's really dumb for the same guy to watch his crap 24/7. I'm not saying it matters, and it's pretty nitpicky, but still. It shatters the craftsmanship that the Morrowind team otherwise invested in creating a very immersive world. [/quote] There's the shit sitting out on the shelves and then there's the actual inventory (in Oblivion) - the inventory (and I think the money, but I'm not sure) sit in chests which are, as I mentioned before, off in the middle of the non-shop under the floor or whatever. The shit on the shelves may also appear in the inventory, but if you steal the item from the shelf, you can still buy it from the seller, and vice versa. In Morrowind all sales inventory was carried on the seller's person or in a chest somewhere in his vicinity; if you raided the chest/person, you couldn't buy the item any more. You can't sell anything stolen to anyone but a Thieves Guild fence in Oblivion. Morrowind is the one where you can sell it to some other dude in a different shop (no need to go to another town!) The hysteria: also Morrowind. In Oblivion all stolen items are marked with a cute little red handprint in your inventory, but in Morrowind you had to remember what you had stolen from whom. People recognized their own shit no matter what, and on a few occasions - for example, stealing diamonds from the Balmora alchemist, or the Golden Saint soulgem from that whore at the top of the stairs in the Balmora Mages Guild - any time you tried to sell any (non-stolen) diamonds/Golden Saint soulgems to those vendors, they would freak out all over you and your ass would get arrested. [quote]Yeah, but I always play my characters in Bethesda games as shiftless and broke layabouts, with few prospects for the future. I can't stand games where the PC is more financially successful than me. It turns them, in my mind, from "in-game avatar" to "smug, bullyboy prick." That's one of the things so reassuring about Bioshock - I'm playing a dipshitted drug addict who couldn't afford to ride on an airline with non-exploding flights, who is (condescendingly) called "rich" by the game when he has $190 to his name. Plus, the guy doesn't have any friends. (Except Atlas.) (Who is Irish, which means he's more like a drinking buddy.) When I exit that game, or more likely, see my fucking computer reset itself due to a temperature fault, I stare at the BIOS splash screen feeling good about myself. So I don't think I've ever made enough to afford even a +5 dagger of melee in a Bethesda game. Partly because of class, partly because I am the man intentionally keeping my dude in old brown wine bags for shoes. But everyone hated cliff racers, and that was before I learned they regenerated, which I did just now because you told me. Fucking Racers! [/quote] The weapon enchantment regenerates. The racers don't. Take heart! The thing I get sometimes when I'm playing Morrowind/Oblivion/whatever is, like, my dude will be practicing his Restoration spells, and I'll get the Restoration skill-up, and I'll realize that if I hadn't been sitting here pressing the Cast Spell button over and over again, I could have been learning Restoration spells in real life. My PC is getting more buff because I'm sacrificing my own buff-up time to it!!?!?!!! Oh shitty damn!!!! Then I take a breather and remember that I'm Zseni, which is already like Max Level Human, so everything's cool. Maybe you could start thinking of your dude in-game as being a buddy who's down on his luck. Spot him a loan! Take out a double sawbuck and burn it, then open up the console in Morrowind and type "additem gold_100 20". Later when your dude makes good and sells enough rat whiskers to pay you back, you can have him drop 20 drakes down a sewer and then you can take your double sawbuck back. [quote][quote]More arguments as to why Morrowind is better than Oblivion:[/quote] This all sounds very reasonable, which is great for you making strong arguments as to why Morrowind is the better game[/quote] It is. :( It's a little hard to go back to the Morrowind graphics after Oblivion, though. But even with all the mods and auto-levelling turned off and everything else, I'm still about ready to stop playing Oblivion. This thread has talked me out of enjoying it. [quote]Oh, I just remembered the other thing - I liked the opening to Oblivion better than Morrowind. "Break Picard out of jail" is better than "fill out these forms." If that's what they went with to open, I'm sure the stuff they shot down involved the game giving you a vacuum cleaner, a push into town and binding the left mouse button to "knock." But both of them are a million times better in the opening scene than Daggerfall. That reminds me: I assume you liked Morrowind more than Daggerfall. <b><i>But did you like Daggerfall better than Oblivion?</i></b>[/quote] I don't think I ever played Daggerfall! We got Arena when it came out, and I liked it a lot, but then... nothing until Morrowind. I like the "Fill Out These Forms" opening. Why? Because it's over quickly. And you can make it over more quickly by getting a silent character gen mod, which strips out all the chatty bits. Breaking Picard out of jail is pretty sweet, but it's pretty unsweet that you can't actually break Picard out of jail. Come to think of it, you're a sick man if you'd rather watch Picard get killed than do a multiple choice test and write your name on top.[/quote]