Now that everyone is talking about Oblivion again, the speechcraft minigame is one of the most pathetic things ever put into an RPG
Bethesda didn't want to make a proper CRPG with actual dialogue trees and speech checks so this is what they came up with instead
Even making random townspeople like you by impressing them with massive farts in Fable makes more sense
"Don't talk such rot."
You mean you don't like
every time you talk to someone?Grinding speechcraft is just running around the city and playing this mini game with every citizen. The hero of the game runs around and goes to each person telling a chicken joke, bragging about his cock size, throwing out a cheesy pickup line, and then trying to threaten people one by one daily.
The Starfield persuasion minigame is like almost just as bad. The way that one works is that you have multiple dialogue options that each have a percentage of success attached to them, with the more likelier ones giving you less "persuasion points" and you need a certain amount of those points to win a persuasion check. So it's just a roulette wheel of saying dumb inconsequential stuff and once you said enough dumb inconsequential stuff you succeed.
They didn't even write any good or actual arguments, there's literally a quest in the game that consists entirely out of you trying to convince two people to invest in Company A instead of Company B. And instead of you as the player actually making any arguments, your character just says "Company A makes better and cheaper products than Company B".
Bethesda is so fucking baffling. Like do the people working there actually know how a conversation work? Watching that Oblivion announcement almost made me worry for them, with them talking about how much love and care they put into Oblivion. Like is this really what love is means for them? Should I call somebody? What is going on here?
I just don't think Bethesda values writing or roleplaying that much. They just want you to kill stuff and get loot
yeah, their philosophy is to make the player feel important and cool, rather than making them ever question their decisions or morality or really anything about the game world. other than cartoonish instances like megaton.
Yeah but they clearly don't value gameplay or combat either because combat in Bethesda games always sucks and only even improves between games in a weird 1 step forward 3 steps back sort of way
The starfield mission I mentioned literally consists only of walking into a room, picking up a single item and then doing the persuasion minigame on two NPCs. There's no loot or killing stuff involved whatsoever. If these people aren't even trying to make an RPG then why is this shit in there?
Imo Starfield is worse because it's just rolling the dice. At least in Oblivion there's actually an element of skill.
For a "cinematic" persuasion minigame, Deus Ex Human Revolution's is so good and nobody has ever done anything similar (although maybe you could consider LA Noir's conversations an evolution of that idea).
For anything else if you're not cribbing Fallout1/2/NV (I consider Disco Elysium an advancement of that idea) then you are wasting my time. Just let me pick at character creation between being nice, sarcastic, or an asshole - we all know it doesn't matter anyway.
Even making random townspeople like you by impressing them with massive farts in Fable makes more sense
New site tagline please.
But
it's funny tho
the way their facial expression changes as you rotate lol
It totally fails at being a decent abstraction and being a remotely fun minigame!
i like/liked the minigame, but yes absolutely it should not be the MAIN thing for dialogue/speech checks.
they should've used it for crafting gear, spells, gambling, idk just some other game system
The gigachad option is being like Griftlands and making the persuasion mechanic half of the whole game
God I wish more people played Griftlands ;_;
There's not even any point to it most of the time, it's not like you need NPCs to have a high opinion of you
You can use it on the merchants to get better deals.
But otherwise, Use Your Illusion so you can start learning paralyse spells
I don't even remember doing this in Oblivion but I'm pretty sure I played through it once and then never touched it again.
I do remember insulting people in Morrowind until they would attack me in towns so I could kill them and take their stuff without being held responsible by the guards.
Its pretty vital, alot of information about quests and locations won't be divulged unless the NPC has a high opinion of you. But its also completely trivialised by being able to bribe everyone to achieve the same effect.
Oblivion is so bad. I truly hope that the remaster scares them off from ever doing morrowind.
E: is it even a remaster or what? Did they at least fix all the obvious pre-ai slop meshes sticking up out of everything?
I played a little put of curiosity because I have gamepass for another month. They changed some game mechanics and so far the textures and meshes look fine. Well, they are grisly. Characters look rough. But it's a style I guess. I do like how alien the elves look.
But like you won’t go a little bit off the road and see a tree or rock sticking up out of the ground all weird because no one did any qa?
There’s a lot of sad memories about oblivion but that one stays with me the most. Busted speedtree landscapes.
E: I also like how alien elves look in those games. I think it was daggerfall that started having mer out of the same book that describes snow apes and Atlanteans.
I actually engaged with it in the past to get the Personality boost when I level up and I'm trying to improve my Illusion but eventually you figure out yeah Charm 100 for 1 second on touch is all you need.
Yeah, let me just randomly threaten people out of the blue when I genuinely want to be their friend.
At least Skyrim gives me the opportunity to always pick the nice option and never hurt anyone’s feelings.
But it doesn't even feel like you're threatening or being nice to anyone since it's so abstracted
I always just bribed them instead of playing this goofball shit. Who says money can't solve your problems?
fuck I want an eli_handle_b.wav for Ricky in Oblivion or anywhere now
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
lol a friend was talking about getting the remaster yesterday, and this is the first thing I brought up as to why I didn't get as into it as I did with skyrim
Still have basically zero clue how it works and I'm not looking it up, have they changed it in the RM?
It's kinda dumb but it's not that hard. When you hover over one of the 4 segments you look at the expression on their face to see if they like it or not. 2 unapproved and 2 approved options that change with each NPC, but an individual should always like/dislike the same things (like jokes one run, always likes jokes). The game is trying to maximize the approval and minimize disapproval when choosing options and you only get one click of each segment. The size of the filled in segment is how much value will be applied with that segment and then that value rotates clockwise to the next segment.
iirc I used to basically bypass it by just casting a custom spell that dramatically increased whatever the likeability trait was called for 1 second and then quickly initiate the conversation. The spell duration didn't matter because no time passes while in the dialogue and it kept the mana cost way down.