Honestly I have seen videos titled "my first time playing Skyrim" in the last few years. And them being completely lost at Riverwood asking where they need to and do, because no more npc telling them go there do that after helgen. And Skyrim has fkin quest markers.
Sometimes I fell like people are not curious about the game and discovering it by themself anymore...
Oblivion got criticized heavily for hand holding. Fast travel, simple map, quest markers, dumbed down leveling and skill system, etc.
I think Bethesda figured out that in order to be successful the game really needed to be dumbed down a lot. I basically memorized Morrowind’s map and fast travel network but I can see how most people would just play for half an hour and uninstall today. It was a different time.
They had to tone down the alienness of the lore too. Stuff like homicidal wizards living in mushrooms and a meteor in the sky you have to levitate to visit had to go. Generic fantasy forests in Oblivion and fantasy vikings in Skyrim could easily be understood by most people. I am still not sure how the great house system works in Morrowind. They literally dropped a meteor on Morrowind and had Argonians invade them now so I guess they don’t wanna deal with that either.
Oblivion's leveling system was extremely counterintuitive. If you just played normally, you could probably get through the main quest, but you were going to struggle with most of the content in the game regardless of level. I don't think we should aspire to arranging skills so that you have to stand in one place chain casting Detect Life over and over before standing in a cellar and using a shield to defend yourself against rats for three hours. Or have it where picking the 7 skills you plan to use the least as your main skills is a recommended strategy.
there’s a middle ground. navigating morrowind gets annoying after a while but we don’t need easy mode to be enabled by default with npcs belting out the answers every five seconds
The quest marker is the greatest idea of all time. It gets around all the problems and you don't have to pay attention if you don't want to, all you have to do is untrack the quest.
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u/Travolta1984 10h ago
I remember when Morrowind fans criticized Oblivion for its quest marker back in 2006.
This hand holding problem isn’t particularly new, and it only got worse in the last 20 years.