elander_ said:
If everything is unique then nothing is unique. Just applying some common sense.
The problem of Oblivion dunegons is that they failed completely in their promise of delivering more unique dungeon doing them by hand. They just wasted tons of man-hour resources building similar dungeons that are less fun than Daggerfall ones. The only thing these dungeons have is a great immersion sense and visual apeal.
Daggerfall dungens are more chalenging:
- you can get lost easly
- enemies are stronger and more chalenging
- there are more traps and lever puzzles
- you can climb dungeon pits to access unexplored areas
A good number of respaning quests (besides the thieves guild quests) can be finished without a killing which is good for thieves and non-warrior types.
You can find very good loot if you dig long enough (this special loot is leveled way above the player level).
There is usualy more vareity inside Daggerfall dungeons. Its usual to find huge arena rooms, sacrifcie pits, altar rooms, prision areas, sunken towers, huge submersed dungeon sections. Often there are abandoned mines and cave sections mixed and interconnecting more than one dungeon section.
Playing a Daggerfall dungeon takes hours and it's often a mater of survival. You catch a disease for example and don't have an cure disease spell or an healling potion your survival depends on how far (in travel days) you can exit the dungeon and get to the nearby temple, which also depends on your endurance and disease resistence.
Daggerfall dungeons were random, which made them fun IMO, but also meant that sometimes they were broken as in you couldn't get to the area with the quest item unless you void walked.
It was also nice in it had multiple modes of transportation, multiple rates of travel, many cities(of good size and population), climbing(and other useful skills that added to characters), more complex skill arrangements, banks, a much larger area to explore, etc. Daggerfall was just so much better. MW was OK. Oblivion was crap(I had been hoping for something closer to DF though... Some day I'll try it again with a horde of mods, maybe around Christmas...)
Auto levelling, loot spawning, levelled lists in general, quest compass:
Bethesda COULD have and easily done so, added those items as check boxes or sliders in which range levels could be given.
They could also have allowed a setting to give a variable chance of getting an especially good item at any time.
A checkbox to turn on or off the quest compass
A checkbox to turn on or off fast travel.
I still have hopes for a decent size real expansion for Oblivion with a new engine that would add these options amongst other things(various methods of travel, new landmass areas, etc.) and actually make Oblivion semi-fun to play as an RPG. The skills, etc. unfortunaterly likely won't be fixed as that would require major changes to the game.
