Morrowind and its Design.

[Alex]

Greetings people. I have just joined the forums and thought of joining in order to see the view point of the members on some issues. So, I will start with this post. As far as I understand, Morrowind is throughly disliked rpg around here. I would like very much if you people could describe what you didn't like in it, and possibly comment possibe ways to repair the problem. I will start with what was my one of my first experiences in the game.

One of the first things I did in the game was to join the cult of nine. I had read somewhere that the quests for the cult were interesting, like the collection of components for medicine or collecting alms for the poor. I was pretty excited about these possibilities, as I believed they indicated that playing as a priest would both feel like being a priest and would be fun. In the end however, it was neither.

Some of you may think that given the nature of the quests, this would be the case no matter what, but I think this is not the case. Let's see what these quests entailed:

Collecting Reagents: You had to go somewhere a certain reagent grew and had to collect it. If you didn't feel like it, you could even just buy the reagents at the store.

Why was it boring: There was no challenge besides random monsters. The location was given to you, and all you had to do was menial tasks, like clicking containers or shopkeepers. The element of exploration this quest could bring (finding out where to best gather a certain reagent) wasn't that great because the potion making aspect of the game wasn't very fun and making a big backtrack just to collect reagents was more like work than play.

What could be done to change it?: First, I think that if the places the character was sent weren't appropriate. They lacked any sense of wonder. Even something small that identified the places we were sent would be nice. For example, in Ultima 7, you could find a small location full of spider silk. It was in the middle of a forest, in a dead area full of spiders. The place felt nice, for even without a story or any other traits that set it apart, it was a nice area that you could discover while exploring. I think that if morrowind tried to make the reagent groves more unique, like the spider's lair or the bee's lair in ultima 7, the quests would have been better.

Another thing is that you always knew where to look. Maybe if they just gave general directions and you had to find your way by puzzling out the geography and story of the place, the quests would have been more interesting. For example, the quest giver might tell you to take a certain fungus that was known to grow near a city. A certain book might mention that the fungus only grows on swamps and another might mention the secret swamp the founders of the city went through in order o colonize the are. In other words, make the character hunt for information pieces in order to get where he needs.

Another idea would be to change the money system. Thanks to the way things work, you never needed to really go after reagents when it was easier to just buy them. Heck, it was usually easier just to buy the ready potions instead of making your own. I might be wrong, but I think the system in Gothic 2 actually worked nice in this aspect.

Also, note that collecting reagents was a boring process. Just pick it up. So was potion making. If some sort of game was involved, I the experience might not feel empty. No, I am not asking for a silly game like oblivion's pick lock. I am saying that if collecting reagents and making potions was somehow fun like combat (yes, I know morrowind's combat isn't much fun), then people wouldn't see it like just a lengthier way to buy potions.

Also, if coming back wasn't a pain, maybe reagent gathering wouldn't be so bad.

Finally, you never felt like a healer doing these quests. Maybe if they just allowed you to interact (or better yet, have a meaningful dialogue) with the sick people these reagents were supposed to help, I would have been happier. As it is, I felt more like a delivery boy than a healer.

Collecting Alms: You had to go somewhere and beg until people got you enough money. I don't remember very well, but I think you could use your own money and avoid a silly travel altogether.

Why was it boring: You went in dialogue with people and begged. Basically it was just a check to see if they liked you enough. If that was not the case, all you had to do was charm them.

What could be done to change it?: If Morrowind had meaningful dialogue in it, maybe it could be nice to try to convince people to donate. Aside from that, there is little to that could be done with this. However, in a game with meaningful dialogue and character interactions, this could have been really nice. Imagine a game where rhetoric was not only a worthwhile skill, but also a game in itself. Also, some depth might be given to quests like this. For example, if you pry around, you might discover the donations never got to the poor and start a whole new series of quests investigating the church.

Well, that is it, If people here are interested in discussing design flaws (and maybe even the good points) of Oblivion, I will gladly join in.

 

[Human Shield]

Welcome to the forums, this is a nice first post but it is a narrow design examination. Considering Morrowind and Oblivion it would be easier to pick out what they mite have done right in quests. It is easier to say that they were failed attempts at sandbox designs and only provided sub-par action game with limited exploration potential and a tweakable item system.

 

[Mayday]

Hey, this would be a great exercise in quest design- take a quest from Morrowind and come up with at least three ideas to make it deeper.

Shouldn't be too hard, considering the quality of those quests.

 

[Alex]

Thanks for the welcome. And yes, I know I am examining very narrow aspects of the game in the first post. My intention is merely to examine errors and see how they can be dealt. I took local problems like a few of the quests in my first post, but other people posting should feel free to write about whatever flaws they want, whether they are quests or the system rules or whatever.

You yourself said it

... they were failed attempts at sandbox designs and only provided sub-par action game with limited exploration potential and a tweakable item system.

These are various flaws, but I am interested in what way they are flaws. See, I pretty much agree with you on all these points, but I am interested in better understanding how these are failures and what could be done to repair them.

By the way, I won't comment Oblivion because I couldn't play it very well. Gave up after I discovered I needed to keep looking up so grass wouldn't slow down my computer. I do this on Morrowind because since so many people here dislike it, I can expect more input than a game that was more respected.

 

[Sovy Kurosei]

Welcome to the Codex.

Morrowind's quests suffer from being very generic amongst other things. For example in the Mage's guild the first two or three quests have you running around collecting four mushrooms or four flowers. These are very simple quests that you would expect to find from a random quest generator, not specifically hand made by developers! I don't think it is the open-endedness of quests that are a problem, just the fact that the methods in completing them are uninteresting, as you said Alex.

Also, note that collecting reagents was a boring process. Just pick it up. So was potion making. If some sort of game was involved, I the experience might not feel empty. No, I am not asking for a silly game like oblivion's pick lock. I am saying that if collecting reagents and making potions was somehow fun like combat (yes, I know morrowind's combat isn't much fun), then people wouldn't see it like just a lengthier way to buy potions.

Collecting reagents is an overly tedious process. It would have been better if you could go to a grassy area and hit a key that lets you search the area for reagents. X hours would pass by and your inventory would automatically load up herbs, flowers, fungus, etc. Different areas would have different plants, of course. I don't know how you could make collecting reagents be more engaging or fun without implementing some sort of flower picking mini-game. Move your character's hand across the screen to pick the petals but avoid the thorns or you'll lose hitpoints?

Imagine a game where rhetoric was not only a worthwhile skill, but also a game in itself. Also, some depth might be given to quests like this.

Like the comeback sword fighting in Monkey Island?

 

[Woetohice]

__

 

[MessiahMan]

There was a mod for Morrowind which corrected the plant picking tedium. Don't get me wrong, it was still tedious, now. but they introduced a custom skill...herbalism. Depending on this skill, you could get so many quantities of reagents from the plant you were trying to pick. If your skill was low, you'd gain few/no reagents, etc. and so forth.

The mod also made plants disappear after you picked them, eliminating the "container" feel of the plants. And they regrew after a set time, to boot.

In my opinion, that skill alone made the alchemy part of the game much more fun. Too bad there wasn't a silver bullet mod like that that could fix the rest of the game.

 

[Zomg]

My opinion has moved around on it. The gameplay and mechanics design are absolutely terrible. I couldn't make a worse character development system if I tried, and the core whack-a-mole gameplay is guaranteed to give you "Why the fuck am I playing this?" moments every five minutes. The economy breaks the instant you pay any attention to it. The (almost entirely) non-interacting linear questlines within a completely inert, sterile world make any coherent roleplaying narrative impossible, and any characterization of the PC is ephemeral. It's also very sloppy technically - not that most of my favorite games aren't too.

However, I think some of the higher level art direction, setting and low level writing is very good. The Rolstonian "overlapping mystery" design for the big, genuinely nonlinearly-told background stories is excellent. Sometimes those higher level effects can inspire the basic shittiness.

 

[The_Pope]

I thought it was ok. Shitty gameplay mechanics but the backstory etc. was interesting.

 

[Hazelnut]

Aren't there quite a few people here who liked Morrowind? (Only Exitium comes to mind, for some reason, and he's no longer around).

Not that I want to be associated with Exit, even tenuously, but I'm one of the people who've been here since before Oblivion who liked Morrowind. I spent a hell of a lot of time playing that game, and modding a bit too. It's biggest weakness is the char development where every character tends towards the fighter/mage/thief class. Hence playing with another character is pretty similar to first play since the quests are fixed. It's biggest strength was the world they created and the experience of exploring it in FPP really did it for me.

I've not got time to say any more about my reasons for liking MW. (I've said it all before in the past anyway)

Welcome to the forums Alex, but I'm curious how exactly you came to the conclusion that "As far as I understand, Morrowind is throughly disliked rpg around here". Remember the hive mind is a myth...

 

[Naked Ninja]

Agreed with Hazelnut. I disliked the char system, use-to-increase systems are hellova tedious, but the backstory and world exploration were quite cool. The first time I walked through GhostGate, that city with the giant crab shell, the telvanni towers, the way the place felt like a bunch of cultures had collided, instead of the neat divisions in most RPGs....

Morrowind cemented in me the fact that I want to make a first person real time RPG. Especially the first time you fly. I don't care how unbalanced it was, I love being able to fly in an RPG.

 

[Joe Krow]

Morrowind was good stuff. Combat was repetitive but at least it was character based. Exploration made the game what it is. The backstory was the best i'd seen in years. All told, B+.

 

[Naked Ninja]

Indeed, the story was told as if it was actually written by adults, a pretty rare thing in this industry.

Also, certain little moments. Anyone remember the daedra hanging around in the one temple? If you talk to him, you can piss him off to the point where he proclaims he is going to "kill you and rape your corpse", then he goes hostile. Another thing you don't see often in games

 

[Alex]

...
Collecting reagents is an overly tedious process. It would have been better if you could go to a grassy area and hit a key that lets you search the area for reagents. X hours would pass by and your inventory would automatically load up herbs, flowers, fungus, etc. Different areas would have different plants, of course. I don't know how you could make collecting reagents be more engaging or fun without implementing some sort of flower picking mini-game. Move your character's hand across the screen to pick the petals but avoid the thorns or you'll lose hitpoints?

I think the big problem with item collection like the one on Morrowind is that if gets old pretty fast. Like I said, I think Gothic 2 was more fun in this. Although the system was pretty much the same, since the game had a better and harder combat system, it was not just a pain to go around collecting stuff. Also, the locations in that game seemed less generic, which made exploration for me more worthwhile.

However, making something fun on the collection of reagents and creation of potions wouldn't be easy. Making the areas where reagents grow more risky is a way to go, and in part is what Gothic 2 did, but it still would get old fast if wee keep coming back to the same areas. A game where the knowledge of how to deal with which kind of reagent in order to get it (for example, taking a certain plant's roots render a stronger reagent, but also stops the plant from growing again) might be feasible, but I have no idea of how to do this without making it a chore very fast.

Like the comeback sword fighting in Monkey Island?

That game was awesome! Just a pity that once you heard all insults/comebacks and saw how they fitted together, there wasn't much to do anymore.
[/quote]

There was a mod for Morrowind which corrected the plant picking tedium. Don't get me wrong, it was still tedious, now. but they introduced a custom skill...herbalism. Depending on this skill, you could get so many quantities of reagents from the plant you were trying to pick. If your skill was low, you'd gain few/no reagents, etc. and so forth.

The mod also made plants disappear after you picked them, eliminating the "container" feel of the plants. And they regrew after a set time, to boot.

In my opinion, that skill alone made the alchemy part of the game much more fun. Too bad there wasn't a silver bullet mod like that that could fix the rest of the game.

That would help, I guess. Part of the problem I have with the reagent gathering in Morrowind is that I didn't like exploration very much in that game. The randomly generated enemies and the blandness of so many areas made sure very few locations were remarkable. I am not saying there weren't any interesting areas, I am just saying I never found them.

...

However, I think some of the higher level art direction, setting and low level writing is very good. The Rolstonian "overlapping mystery" design for the big, genuinely nonlinearly-told background stories is excellent. Sometimes those higher level effects can inspire the basic shittiness.

I actually had some big hopes for the game when it came out. I remember reading a story that would be inside the game about an old alchemist that fooled 2 dark elves by making a potion into a cake and using the main component on a knife, so when she took a bite out of the cake, she managed to run away leaving them with a worthless cake. However, after playing the game for some weeks, I realized that we would never get to do anything quite so fun in game.

I thought it was ok. Shitty gameplay mechanics but the backstory etc. was interesting.

I agree with you, but an interesting backstory can't save a game (interesting interaction with the said story might, however). I actually think that the game could have been much better by only adding a few remarkable areas and allowing the player to travel around with a world map like Arcanum.

 

[Alex]

Not that I want to be associated with Exit, even tenuously, but I'm one of the people who've been here since before Oblivion who liked Morrowind. I spent a hell of a lot of time playing that game, and modding a bit too. It's biggest weakness is the char development where every character tends towards the fighter/mage/thief class. Hence playing with another character is pretty similar to first play since the quests are fixed. It's biggest strength was the world they created and the experience of exploring it in FPP really did it for me.

I wouldn't have minded much the fighter/mage/thief division if each play style felt different enough. However, at least while playing with a mage, I never felt much like one. I know this is not something easily done, but if just the guild quests made you few as a mage instead of a courier boy. It might be so that some of the quests toward end game were better, but I still think that is no excuse.

I've not got time to say any more about my reasons for liking MW. (I've said it all before in the past anyway)

Welcome to the forums Alex, but I'm curious how exactly you came to the conclusion that "As far as I understand, Morrowind is throughly disliked rpg around here". Remember the hive mind is a myth...

I just went by what I had seem in most comments. However, it is nice that there are some people here who enjoyed it, for I would like to see the good parts that they found good in the game. You, Naked Ninja and Joe Krow seem to have enjoyed exploration. By all means, share some details of what you found good in it.

 

[hakuroshi]

I think, that bland areas are necessary part of a sandbox game. They make player appreciate more unique places. Of course it means that unique places also must be in the game. For my taste, MW got exploration part adequately. Could be better, maybe, but it is stiil one of the few things done right.

As for the travel in map mode, MW world is too small for that to be an improvement. It probably even could diminish exploration expirience for some players. But it definetely would serve in a bigger world.

I also liked exploration in MW and take the liberty to say a few words about it ininvited
It may appeal differently to different people, or not appeal at all. I already said about bland parts and unique parts. MW has both in good proportion. It brings joy to heart to find something unique after striding along lava fields or climbing bleak hills. It is a sense of discovery. An you never know what you may find. Maybe nothing at all, maybe some glade with flowers, maybe a strange ruin. And there is always a possibility to find something inside the ruin, something that cannot be found anywhere else. It is rarely something big. Probably never (artifacts aside). But the feeling is very akin to discovery and exploration in real life.

The expirience depends on how rewarding you consider this discoveries, and I admit they are rather small for the time you spend finding them. For me all terrain of MW have it's charm, and I am not easily bored with it, but I understand that may be the case. And discoveries do not compensate for the lack of role-play and other failures. Still as adventure-exploration game MW is quite good in right set of mind.

 

[galsiah]

I wouldn't have minded much the fighter/mage/thief division if each play style felt different enough.

The point is that there is no division. Hazelnut isn't saying that characters tend towards either a fighter, mage, or thief - rather that all characters tend towards a generic master-of-all-trades fighter-mage-thief. It's horribly bland.

In general I agree with Zomg. Morrowind certainly had its strong points - that's what makes the god-awful game systems and mechanics so offensive. It's just depressing to compare the creativity and huge workload that go into realizing such a setting, with the trifling amount of effort it'd take to fix many mechanical flaws. Ken Rolston is the only name credited for game design - perhaps he simply sucks at the technical side of design. If most of his focus was on big-picture/setting/story, then someone else should have been hired to grapple with the mechanical detail.

Though that's not to say some high level design doesn't suck too - e.g. quest linearity/mundanity, total lack of pacing, general lack of game world reactivity/consequence....
However, to change some of these high level aspects would have taken a load of work - non-linearity, interacting quests, dynamic world systems... are all nice, but at least there's the argument that it would take too long to do well. For many of the low-level mechanics, there's no such excuse: they're just broken, and any technically proficient designer could improve them in a day (if not an hour).

I did enjoy much of Morrowind, but I'd have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I hadn't had to experience the setting through a noxious cloud of WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!!!???!?

 

[JarlFrank]

Hey, this would be a great exercise in quest design- take a quest from Morrowind and come up with at least three ideas to make it deeper.

Shouldn't be too hard, considering the quality of those quests.

I don't remember a lot of them, but different options should have been there in lots of the quests, also some ways to resolve them peacefully like in Arcanum or Torment, with dialogue skills.

The dialogue skill was a lot too useless with that stupid conversation system.

 

[Human Shield]

Be sure to cheak out our design discussion catalog.

Thanks for the welcome. And yes, I know I am examining very narrow aspects of the game in the first post. My intention is merely to examine errors and see how they can be dealt. I took local problems like a few of the quests in my first post, but other people posting should feel free to write about whatever flaws they want, whether they are quests or the system rules or whatever.

You yourself said it

... they were failed attempts at sandbox designs and only provided sub-par action game with limited exploration potential and a tweakable item system.

These are various flaws, but I am interested in what way they are flaws. See, I pretty much agree with you on all these points, but I am interested in better understanding how these are failures and what could be done to repair them.

Very good. I noticed that your purposed ideas follow in the Ultima and others' style of RPG, which is great but it different from what sandbox design tries to accomplish. It isn't such a bad approach because Morrowind was very incoherent and combined the worst of both styles with tedious linear quests with a boring, unengaging world.

The best approach with a sandbox approach in mind would be to remove or automate the little boring, prescripted side quests. In an open world what is the point of prescripting tedious actions? If a certain mage needs reagents why not design a recurring desire to obtain reagents with a random chance that someone special is being brewed? Why not tie the process of getting the items to a outdoors skill roll and pay off that character design? If the mage appreciates your help why not raise your status in mage guild, if druids didn't like you taking rare plants why not lower your reputation with them?

Sand box design is about interconnectivity in an open world, sand boxes are interesting because of how you choose to shape the sand not that the sand is just there. What you choose not to shape out of sand is just as important; you only have realistically so much space, too much sand becomes sandstone and unshapable. Morrowind is like this, without interconnectivity the player has no mark to leave, whenever you run into a new guild the developers feel that more sand was needed and that previous shaping should have no impact. But dumping more sand on just makes what came before it meaningless.

Sand box games can be great even with random terrain (like a sand box is all sand) that goes forever and random quests but the design has to be providing the player with gameplay and impact. Rouge-likes attempt to do this to the extent of being able to grow your own forests and building a house. It is type of simulation minded approach of interacting with a dynamic world but can also be merged nicely with tactical combat and dungeon crawling to form a hybrid with gamist gameplay to challenge the player.

You'll have to forgive me, I try and think of how GNS theory (this is kinda outdated but haven't found a more up to date source outside of their forums) can be used.

By the way, I won't comment Oblivion because I couldn't play it very well. Gave up after I discovered I needed to keep looking up so grass wouldn't slow down my computer. I do this on Morrowind because since so many people here dislike it, I can expect more input than a game that was more respected.

Agreed, good points. But we feel here that Oblivion is just the logical continuation of design ideas from Morrowind.

 

[Alex]

After reading a few replies, I see that some of my suggestions would either turn morrowind away from being a sandbox game or make it impossibly larger. I however am just examining some of my perceived flaws. Indeed some of them are inherent to all sandbox games, but it is nice to know what you actually trade off when you create such games. By the way, thank you Human Shield. I never really understood why they used such name to describe this genre before your explanation.

By the way, I think that part of what I didn't like in morrowind's exploration was the fact that, while there were many different places to nose in there was relatively few things to do. Sure, there were some nice ones, like finding slaves in a dungeon and being able to free them, but I can think of hundreds of interesting encounters and opportunities that could have been sprinkled across the landscape.

Comparing Morrowind with another sandbox game, Darklands, I actually saw a lot of interesting things in the second that couldn't be matched in the first. I think Morrowind had a lot more variety, but it somehow lacked fun. If you, however had fun exploring Morrowind, by all means share some interesting experiences. I am just telling my own with the game, and I will admit I never looked into every corner to see if there weren't better things to do.

Speaking of Darklands, it was a game that handled automation of some repetitive stuff very well. Still, I would prefer to seek a way to make gathering and brewing interesting rather than simply automating the most annoying task.

 

[OverrideB1]

I liked MW more than I should have done, given the massive flaws in the system -- so many that it's really difficult to know where to begin even listing them -- let alone actually fixing them. That being said, I'm still playing DF 10 years on, I'd have to be really bored to re-install MW and play it.

And that's the really crippling thing about MW: the lack of replayability. Once you've played through each of the factions, run through the 2 expansions, you're not going to want to play it again anytime real soon since you know exactly what's going to happen in any given situation.

And there's the fault that I think you're trying to get at, and one of the big bugbears around here (regardless of the game). Morrowind was sterile, totally and utterly unresponsive to your actions. You become the Neravarine and what happens? Nothing. Oh, for sure people get awe-struck in your presence but there's no real reaction other than a bunch of starry-eyed NPCs. Where's the reaction from House Indoril or the Temple? Where's the Imperial reaction, what is the monolithic Imperial Cult going to do now that there's a living avatar of a Dunmer hero walking the land? What reaction does your House have, or the opposing Houses?

For all the fact that MW was touted as a living, breathing world, it was living and breathing the same way that a coma patient does.

This, I can only presume, was down to the terrible influence of pretty, pretty graphics. So much time and lavish care was spent on the graphics, the game-engine, and the oh-so-fucking-important voice-overs, that the actual gameplay slipped through the cracks. (And, having failed totally to learn from this mistake, Bethesda repeated it - in spades -- with Oblivion).

I'd heard (in game) about these terrible Telvanni -- Mage Lords of great power, overwheening paranoia, and extreme xenophobia. What did I find? A bunch of affable and slightly dotty wizards pootling around in their towers doing a whole lot of nothing and employing a shitload of non-Dunmer mercenaries. There was no intrique, no passion, nothing other than another bunch of Fedex quests that lead you, inevitably, to the top of the Telvanni power-structure.

As for character design -- it was so far beyond pathetic that it was a joke. Start off with the best of intentions to be a warrior and, before long, you found yourself a jack of all trades -- master of every single one. This was due to the totally arbitrary caps put on abilities and the extreme ease you could level up in any skill -- regardless of what your majors and minors were.

What is most depressing is that there were hints, vague shadows of what the game could have been if it hadn't been commissioned by suits, designed by committee, and aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator.

As for a silver bullet to fix it, I honestly don't think that such a thing would be possible. It's too fundamentally flawed, broken in far too many places and far too many ways. The only way it could be saved is by a total rewrite, done by people with the neccessary passion to ignore all the pretty stuff and concentrate on the gameplay.

 

[Hazelnut]

I wouldn't have minded much the fighter/mage/thief division if each play style felt different enough.

The point is that there is no division. Hazelnut isn't saying that characters tend towards either a fighter, mage, or thief - rather that all characters tend towards a generic master-of-all-trades fighter-mage-thief. It's horribly bland.

Correct - that's exactly what I meant. Sorry, I wasn't taking into account that you're new here Alex, I think almost all Codexers would have understood what I was trying to say.

I did enjoy much of Morrowind, but I'd have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I hadn't had to experience the setting through a noxious cloud of WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!!!???!?

I found that I was able to put the blinkers on enough to enjoy Morrowind almost til the end of the main quest. It was pretty hard after a while, and although I bought and played both expansions, I never really enjoyed either that much.

I tried doing the same with (a borrowed copy of) Oblivion, and it was simply impossible - hence I never bought it.

I'd be quite happy to speak at length about what I liked Alex, but I'm not going to because I'd like a couple of hours playing Daggerfall which I recently dusted off again before I go to bed. I will say that my ideal ES4 would have combined the best bits of DF and MW, rather than carry on the direction of DF->MW.

 

[inwoker]

hm..
Maybe you guys can try to clarify smth. for me. If the game is retarded and have poor design, why do we need to discuss how to improve it?
For example: there is a bad movie, book etc. And if somebody will say: that aspect might be better if remade in some more interesting and complex way, and it hadn't that much trick effects, hm and if it wasn't Matrix, but Lars fon Trier's Dogville.... )

So, this was written, because to me it's simplier to make good rpg from scratch then improving some crap. It's like rewriting some women detective into "Ten Little Niggers"

 

[hakuroshi]

It is not enough just to say that the game is retarded and have poor design. To understand why it is poor and retarded it is necessary to discuss and analyse it's features. Are they plain shitty by default and no good game should have them? Or is it a developers fault and if done differentely the same feature could truly enhance gameplay? If nothing else, actual discussion on the game instead of useless whining may help to understand true value of future releases.

 

[inwoker]

To understand why it is poor and retarded it is necessary to discuss and analyse it's features.

You know I never discuss with anybody WHY Britney is bad singer. It's very trivial and pointless.

Are they plain shitty by default and no good game should have them?

Features like what? Stupid poorly written dialogs.(they won't enchance any game).
Like quests - kill and collect?
Game done by very uncreative untalented people with no taste at all.

Or is it a developers fault and if done differentely the same feature could truly enhance gameplay?

????
If some feature done differently, it's another feature, right?

If nothing else, actual discussion on the game instead of useless whining may help to understand true value of future releases.

Did I whine?[/quote]