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http://www.morrowind.com/

On a related topic. For anyone who hasn't found it yet, there is a HD trailer online:
http://morrowind.com/downloads/media_movies.htm

I doubt that anyone would state that simply because a game has outmoded graphics, its gameplay must be excellent. However, it is true that in an era when computers were only capable of simple graphics, pretty boxshots weren't enough to sell a game. Instead, developers had to focus on other elements to make their games sell - gameplay was a prime marketing tool. In addition, when games were small enough to be created by one developer or a small team, it was possible for someone to put years of work into their game - crafting a game to their ideals, not simply completing a product and rushing it out the door. Finally, simple nostalgia comes into play - when comparing today's selection of games to "the classics," people will almost certainly forget about the metric tons of crap games that have always inhabited the market - instead, each new release will be measured against the best of everything that came before. While this isn't exactly fair to the new games, it is nonetheless pervasive throughout all walks of life; people always reminisce about the "good old days" and forget about all the things that made them not so good.

Of course, it is not Microsoft's plan to lose money. Their plan is, as always, to become so big a player in their chosen market that all the other will be marginalized. Then, and only then, their price setting will rise to a point that they make profits. Serious profits.

Did the XBox live up to my expectations? I expected Microsoft to do better in pushing out their two main competitors, but they did not succeed in that. And I hope they won't succeed in the future, because then the gaming community is going to suffer.

Personally I couldn't care less about console gaming, but any power to Microsoft on the gaming market is, in my opinion, A Bad Thing. We have only to look at games that are developed for both PC and XBox at the same time to realize that PC games are tarnished by the XBox factor.

Morrowind, for instance, is a great game, but the interface on the PC could have been a lot more user-friendly. Come on, hundreds of spells available and only one that can be activated at any time, requiring lots of menu switching and scrolling to select another one? Can you say "Button-pushers"?

This might even be an interesting way to discriminate between magic users who use talent as opposed to study (like sorcerers and wizards in D&D 3E) in MMORPGs; sorcerers may have more power, but can't share spells, while wizards might have less casting power but can share spells with one another.

If you're interested in a modern game that uses a similar system, check out Morrowind. The whole game is incredibly open-ended. While it doesn't have any experimentation requirements for spells, you are allowed to create your own and buy them in standard fashion from wizards, as well as use lots of predefined spells. Also, its alchemy system comes a lot closer to your ideal: you can actually pick flowers and berries from plants (which have some small effects), then use a mortar and pestle to mix potions and other tools to modify the effects. The lists of possible potions on Gamefaqs run for many pages; it's really an incredibly versatile system.

The degree of hand-holding by the brand owner varies, in some cases a developer is allowed to run and get quite creative with a character-based license (like the earlier mentioned Goldeneye with James Bond) while in the case of Enter the Matrix the game was apparently co-directed by the Wachowski brothers themselves. And truly, it is a fitting story in the Matrix universe.

One of the major differences in games vs. movies is the ownership of the experience; games try to give you some illusion of free will to allow you feel like it is you choosing to fight the bad guys and you on the screen kicking ass.

Enter the Matrix was built to tell the Wachowski story, and while an interesting one in the multi-threaded Matrix universe (like the great Animatrix shorts) and tied to the rest of the legacy, it does not leave many open-ended choices to the player. While not the basis for very deep or varied gameplay, this ironically fits with the Matrix universe and the question of free will in human life. You are ultimately on rails, and you will either ride to the finish, or you will perish along the way. That has not stopped the game from selling more than 2.5 million copies, which means they must have done something right.

Chris Crawford and many others have debated the depth of the story tree and mechanisms to create interesting and playable content inside multi-threaded story trees. I have yet to find a massively multiplayer game that was able to carry a coherent story (except about the story of the player himself exploiting a strange world full of rats and squirrels to get "exp" and "eq") and have grown too jaded to enjoy pseudo-random generator worlds like Morrowind. However, I find a lot of pleasure in visiting the grandfathers of 16- and 32-bit roleplaying, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, with a dozen or more possible endings each.

An ideal game gives you a strong illusion of ownership over the evolution and direction of the story while filling all the possible branches of gameplay with interesting content. Spector's Deus Ex 2 is very ambitious in this aspect, and everyone is hoping it turns out as good or better as the first one. However, like The Sims have shown you can also create enjoyable environments with no story at all besides the one you create in your head. Even the Sim-speak is an abstraction that allows you to fill in your own words.

Interestingly for those of us in the business of making games, the financial details of Larry Wachowski's involvement in The Matrix are detailed on The Smoking Gun archives because of his divorce battle with his ex-wife. Fair? I don't know, but educational to the rest of us. Life is a game too, the ultimate license property... :-)

Jouni

Or Morrowind.

Ello, the proper location for all Elder Scrolls based games is http://www.morrowind.com/.

I've played Travels on my Sany 4900, I must say it's darn addictive, I went to school today (1 bus, subway, 2 blocks, stairs, elevator, then class), without even looking up.. cause I was staring at my RPG, I knocked against 3 ppl on the way. And yeah this is addicitve and this would be a problem on a plane. :) I think the mobile phone were just waiting for the killer application and now we got it! Thanks beth!

The sheer size of some modern games is part of the problem; I've been playing Morrowind since it was released and its an amazing game, but its _huge_, and I can't imagine that they managed to play-test the entire game (given that its an open-ended, self-directed game). As a result there are a few plot bugs or glitches here and there (most of which are either fixed now in patches or are patched by community add-ons) and it seems that the area you start the game in is much more well refined than those you meet later on (since you're already hooked by then).

However, its major redeeming features include _having a story_, _being self-directed_ (the player can do whatever the player likes, even if its detrimental to the game / plot, althoug the game notifies you of this) and comes with the tools used to create the game in terms of placing objects and scripting the NPCs so the user can easily tweak / change / edit / make new features for the game.

I wonder if they're going to attribute increased sales to "strengthed" copy protection schemes. You know, those strengthened schemes that force legitimate users to find and download the NoCD crack.

Don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to a 2003 chock full of games whose copy protection scheme isn't compatible with my CD-ROM. I'm sure it's stopping pirates, though!

"The massive scope and flexibility intrinsic in the Toolset, the DM Client and the Official Campaign will be unprecedented in the gaming world"

I'm surprised nobody talked of Morrowind. Like Neverwinter Nights, its gonna be a huge rpg world coming out with the Construction Kit. Unlike Neverwinter Nights, its gonna be single player.

You will evolve in a world free of your action : there will be a main quest, but you can forget about it as the game is so huge and there is so many side quests. There is absolutely no linear events. It's a game where we will get lost by our surroundings, not because we don't know what to do, but because there is so much. Do the character you want, and play it the way you want.

The Construction Kit coming with the game is what will replace the "multiplayer longevity". There is already a whole mod community moving to do their own quests. You want to add an undead island ruled by a bad ancient wizard ? No problem, the construction kit use a simple drag'n'drop system but is complexed enough to edit the *whole* game within. The developers create it only in the Contruction Kit, and you got it. After creating your island, you export it in a plug-in file and everybody can download it so they can add the island into their game. Don't like ? Simply remove it without affecting your game.

The graphics are superb, they make a really good use of pixel shaging (you see each raindrops plunk in the water).

There is a unique hyperlink dialog system too. To learn more of a subject in a conversation, you can click on it if its hyperlinked. All the key word you hear are added in a word bank too, so you can investigate on those subject later.

If your an rpg fan, check it, I really can't appropriately express myself how great it's gonna be, and I surely just said half of it.

Funny facts about Morrowind (taken from gamebanshee.

Non-player characters (NPC's) in the World: 3,244
NPC's in the world that you cannot kill: 0
NPC's in the world that you can't kill if you want to finish the main quest: 1
NPC's who begin the game being not alive: 63
NPC's who start the game wearing no pants: 5
Number of empty bottles per capita in Morrowind: 1.89
Number of bottle recycling centers in Morrowind: 0
Standard-sized novels' worth of text in Morrowind: 6
Variations of creatures and nasties wanting to turn you into a fine paste: 217
Hand placed objects in the world: 316,042
Dungeons in the game: More than 300 (marketeering for 301... including basements, cellars and hobbit holes... just kidding - there are no hobbits, I looked.)
Ninja Monkeys used in creating Morrowind: 6,404 (Ninja Monkeys are placeholders in the editor and represent random leveled creatures in which you specify what range of levels and/or possible creatures you want them to become when they are generated.)
Polygon count for a fully armored Ordinator character: 5,000 (most games feature 2,000 poly characters... and of course, less)
Polygon count for a skeleton: 5,000
Total number of different characters you can create and play: 480 billion
Total number of years to complete the game using every variation of character, completing it two times every single day: 657 million
Total number of wonder women who's voices are used in the game: 1 (Lynda Carter's voice is used for the female Nord Characters in the game)
Basic Spells in the game: More than 500
Additional spells that can be created during the game using spellmaking: 150 billion (I won't go there)
Talking crabs in Morrowind: 1 (now I have a mission!)

Gazou

PS. The game will be released in Spring 2002

You (the Slashdot "editors") just gave me the biggest laugh of the day. After all the hype about Blizzard's attacks on Battle.net clones, you guys come out with a fanboy, suck-up article for Warcraft III. Not unexpected, but definitely a sign that Slashdot is losing its relevance.

This article leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like a Jon Katz polemic. So much for Slashdot's "reputation" as a "defender of freedom." I wonder if Katz will write an article about how people let fanboyism get in the way of their putative idealism?

As for me: I'm donating the purchase price of a Warcraft III to the EFF, and I'll find other fine games to play. Morrowind looks terrific; Heroes of Might and Magic 4 should be fine, too.

Until now, I've bought and played heavily every game Blizzard has produced. But no more; I don't need Blizzard, and I won't support their misuse of copyright. In my book, Blizzard is no better than the Scientologists, in that both breed cults of ill-manner folk, and then get their dander up when anyone dissents.

"It seems that, as technology increase, RPG's are becoming more and more linear. They look like a beautifully rendered movie where I get to play through a few fight scenes and maybe choose from 1 of 3 possible endings."

I am surprised no one has mentioned Morrowind yet... :)
If you want a non-linear rpg with "seemingly endless miniquests", you would want to check it out. :)

I'm so excited!
Another hack and slash(masquerading as an RPG no less) with pretty colors and lights to distract the ignorant from the fact that there is no story line, and it's only designed to feed into the multiplayer madness while contributing minimal effort to actual story building and player interaction beyond getting your next quest of "Find my lost anvil".
Whatever.
I'll be playing Morrowind.

First of all, not all games are made for the 13 year old hyperactive destructive kid (and I don't believe all of that media bullshit which tells us that violent games make kids violent; you can tell what is real by the age of 3..). There are actually games which are calm, and require some thought. I'm not saying it's gonna make you a genius or be harder than your Robust Digital Signal Processing class, but they aren't made to be for the twitchy-fingered young-uns.

Second, you might notice who plays the games: there are actually a lot of people in their 20s or 30s who play games, and they play all kinds of games. However, I must say that it is true that most young gamers do play twitchy games....

Oh. And there are Barbie games, as well as, gasp, a Barbie printer! It's sooooooo cute!

Ahem.

Just tryin' to defend us gamers some... Hyuk....

Fnord.

Quake 3 Arena!

Diablo 2

Counter Strike!!!

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind!