What you call failure to establish a consistent player contract most people would call a compromise between being sandboxy/open world and story-driven, and I really don't see the problem with it. As you yourself admit, lots of games do it, GTA games for example have large parts of the world closed off until you get to a certain point in the story.
Lots of games do all sorts of stupid things.
The problem with breaking the player-developer contract is that player is not allowed to form expectations regarding what they are allowed to do in game, what are the breaks from reality the game takes and so on. The game suffers as a result.
If you want to not let the player go somewhere either gate this place in some in-universe manner (like that bridge to BG city in BG itself, enemies requiring particular kind of equipment or ability to deal with, environmental hazards, etc.) or don't pretend your game is open world if you are to violate it on a whim.
Likewise, I really don't see the problem with abstractly adjacent zone maps. Yes, there are a few hours of traveling between some of them, but they are all thematically adjacent, so if one ends with mountains, the other will begin with mountains and so on. This gives it a sense of continuity. It's a bad idea to view those zones as points or locations of interest, because they are not, they represent the (scaled down for practical purposes) entirety of the world both with interesting things and with the space around them.
Again, the moment you offer player only selected locations you signal you're not interested in letting them go everywhere and that the locations you specifically chose are in some way interesting.
Basically, you're telling the player: "you're traveling through the nondescript wilderness when you stumble upon X" (and some BG locations do work like that).
Telling the player "you're traveling through the nondescript wilderness when you stumble upon more nondescript wilderness you need to experience in detail for some reason" just doesn't make sense.
Plus the way map is partitioned in BG effectively precludes exploration - locations are presented as adjacent on world map making world map exploration impossible (you autofind the next location the moment you reach the right border), locations being boxed in chunks with fog of war preclude player driven exploration in favor of mechanical fog clearing.
It is a self-evident fact that most people do not enjoy doing things when they are in a rush to do other things, I don't know what else I can add to that.
That:
- What players do isn't always what they enjoy.
- Game design isn't the matter of including all the things people like and throwing out all the things they don't. Sometimes you need things people don't like to make the whole experience more likeable.
Skill based failure
you mean spam the cheapest spell you have to get your destruction skill to at least 50-70?Skilled as fuck
That's the matter of (poorly implemented) use-based character development, not skill based failure. Skill based failure for spells (and other things) is interesting and sensible mechanics.
Interesting because it introduces a tradeoff between reliability and power and ties it to character's stats. It can even be used to introduce critical failures like in Wizardry (or Fallouts).
Sensible because things like spellcasting are usually portrayed as inherently difficult, dangerous and requiring great deal of concentration - making it easy to fuck up catastrophically.
also calling someone a consoletard while being himself the biggest skyrim apologist on the board
Yes, playing a heavily modded game is a consoletard thing to do.
Even vanilla Skyrim is definitely a better game and possibly even a better cRPG than BG1.
With heavily modded Skyrim there can be no contest.
Deal with it.
You can still shit on Oblivion, modded or unmodded (from not so great height) as BG1 fan, if it's any consolation.
So much shit talking when it could be summarize with simple :
Bg combat > morrowind combat
Morrowind exploration > bg exploration
But it's not even this simple.
Combat is combination of systems, encounter design and AI:
- both games have hilariously shit AI.
- BG has a handful of nicely designed party encounters but the rest of its encounter design may be even worse than Morrowind's pretty nonexistent one. The question is whether a small handful of hand-placed party VS party encounters matters in a game where you constantly slaughter shit left and right.
- Morrowind's systems are clunky and could use some changes, but they are sound in underlying design, have more depth than BG and I could easily imagine a properly designed encounter against properly designed AI being fun even with untouched MW's systems. BG's systems OTOH are a clusterfuck TB on RTWP graft with limited depth and fucked up control (due to RTWP and bandaid solutions like auto-unpause in inventory).
So in the end the best of BG1 combat is better, but the typical BG1 combat is marginally worse and the best means a small handful of encounters.
Wut. The lame ass ability puzzles
I don't mean ability puzzles.
I mean hidden stuff that isn't telegraphed in any way, some of which may require particular abilities to reach.
It works not that differently from things that could only be reached via levitation in Morrowind and serves the same purpose.
Hell, BG had numerous puzzles that were a lot more intricate, varried and interesting.
Care to list some?
Obviously explicit attempts at puzzles in Skyrim were cringe-worthy and the game would be better without them (I guess they would be tolerable as single shot puzzles even though they were retard friendly - one exception, I really enjoyed treasure maps, shame that they didn't lead to unique items), but I can't really remember any single example of a puzzle in BG1.
You can easily notice everything important or useful in Skyrim even if you are half way into a damn coma. And so what if you don't notice X chest with X randomly generated item of lameness?
If you don't notice a hidden artifact of power you can keep going too.
The part that matters is that you need to actively look for stuff and can miss it.
You, the guy in front of computer, not your mouse cursor.
Plus I don't claim in depth knowledge of vanilla Skyrim's loot placement generation, but on my first vanilla playthrough the only piece of dragonscale armor I found was from hidden chest.
No, BG had actual value to most of the exploration - be it in experience points, unique items, or interesting quests.
Perhaps, but it's the mouse cursor doing all the exploring. Not player.
In TES, be it MW or Skyrim, it's the player who explores the environment and asks questions like "Is it possible to get there? Is there anything there?", in BG player is just a device for clicking on black portions of the screen and sweeping the cursor across the uncovered areas in scanlines.
Edit: and dragon scale and bone may as well grow on trees in vanilla, wtf are you talking about? Just kill more dragons.
You need to grind crafting skills for that and yes, I know that crafting in vanilla Skyrim is broken. I prefer to spend my game time playing, though.
Better is subjective. Some people prefer highly packed content, others like to wander around and explore.
That's not the point.
The point is that
For the latter, BG1's method is better
is false and BG1 is bad for either.
As for the Glow vs Basilisks I don't really see the point of this discussion:
- both are local hazards
- both require specific protection that has to obtained somewhere else
- both telegraph the kind of hazard player is about to encounter (basilisk area has a "garden" full of suspiciously lifelike "statues", The Glow is named *THE* fucking "Glow" in a post-nuclear-apocalypse game, if you fail to connect the dots in either case, you might be brain-dead)
Of course, Glow is a proper location and a cool dungeon, so it wins by default as far as exploration is concerned, but as far as hazards go both are equivalent.
