I believe The Beatles: Rock Band came the closest to being perfect. Eveything about that game was just beautifully done and the only things missing was Pro Drums, an option for Keys, and a few more Beatle songs (Hey Jude, Strawberry Fields Forever, Yesterday etc. etc.)
Skyrim. It’s a beautiful game, even now when I play it I take a moment to just look at how gorgeous the scenery is. I love the quests and that you can own a horse/house/child/ get married. I love the potions and crafting and customisation.
I don’t think there are many games quite like Skyrim
Have you played Morrowind? Not sure how old you are or your background but I got into Morrowind back when it came out while I was in my early teens and I feel the same way about it. I’m curious to hear perspectives on it from zoomers that have gone back and played it later on. Compared to Skyrim it is definitely less polished but I think I actually prefer the greater freedom it grants you. For example you’re free to break the game and make the main campaign impossible to complete (it will tell you that you’ve done this but allow you to continue).
I grew up mainly with Oblivion. I was alive for Morrowind but my tiny brain didn’t comprehend what my cousin was playing on his Xbox, really.
Morrowind is the best BY A LONG SHOT. (Of course ot helps that a super mature modding scene has eliminated basically all of the jank.)
– Still close enough to Bethesda’s post-Daggerfall soft reboot mentality for TES that the RuneQuest, Dune and Book of the New Sun inspiration is apparent.
– Kirkbride pretty much wrote a legitimate religious text in the 36 Lessons. Nothing about Dunmer history or religion feels superfluous, it both makes in-universe sense and serves as part of TES’s real overall story (as it was imagined at the time).
– Mechanically, Morrowind is very clever. Everything’s very “integrated” and unless you look too closely, it balances out in a cool way. A wimpy wizard might use magical transportation to avoid travel fees entirely, while a warrior needs to pay up but is far safer while heading to locations out the wilderness.
– That’s primarily because of stamina and carry weight. Unlike later games Morrowind actually treats carry weight as a percentage, and as it moves towards 100% you run slower and burn more Fatigue to do it (Morrowind doesn’t tell you this, for some reason.) And of course Fatigue affects literally everything you do. Your chance to hit, your chance to cast spells, your bartering skill, your ability to sneak, they stuck your current fatigue % in basically every stat calculation.
– Best enchantment system in TES outside of how exploitable it is. Rather than “hard-coding” how enchantment works for different weapon types as in later games it’s a system in a sandbox. There’s no real difference between enchanting a sword, a staff, a ring or a sheet of paper (which is how you make scrolls, by the way!) Staffs aren’t the specifically desegnated spell gun weapon, you can smack people with them same as anything else… they just happen to be better able to hold Magicka.
– Want poor people to like you? Present yourself as a poor person. Want rich people to like you? Present yourself as a rich person.
– Factions actually systematically hate each other and IDK why that didn’t carry over. Being heavily associated with one will affect everyone else’s opinion of you. …Of course in vanilla Morrowind it doesn’t matter because the economy is hilariously broken.
– Morrowind’s skill advancement system incentivised paying for training in a cool way. If you absolutely sucked at something, grinding that skill could be next to impossible because you couldn’t succeed enough to level it which is unintentionally a great representation of what being an uninformed novice is like.
– While the game has lots of exploits due to all menus (including dialogue) pausing the game, has the most easily breakable economy ever, and the worst stealth seen in a video game (pickpocketing is universally considered so bad that it was bugged), mods can solve it all. By combining a few mods to fix the game’s blind spots:
– Advance time whenever you move through dialogue / alchemy/ whatever to burn down buff timers – Make random containers not give you gold constantly and generally make shopkeepers less stupid – Make it so you actually need to eat (makes grinding skills cost some money)
– Improve stealth mechanics
– Make speechcraft affect how long people are willing to talk to you, yep, they’ll tell you to fuck off
– Remove the leveling system entirely, only skills, to fix the awful way power-leveling works to break Morrowind’s enemy scaling Morrowind becomes the most mechanicall sound CRPG ever, I think.
Is that why people love it so much? I tried it once, but couldn’t get into it because I had no idea where to even go.
Hmm, I mean, maybe there’s a mod that adds objective markers? For most of us it’s kinda fun that you actually need to pay attention to the directions people give you, and that every once in a while they’re outright wrong.
There’s a journal system that will tell you where to go and you can consult your map to get a general idea. Man, I remember a large actual paper map coming with my box when I bought the game and I used that damn map SO MUCH haha. I feel like you just don’t get that same experience with games these days. It was immersive for me.
I’m a millennial but never played Morrowind. Sounds like something I would enjoy though, will check it out
I suspect that it’s going to be harder for a person to go back to Morrowind from Skyrim than vice versa. You can cheese the hell out of Morrowind and navigation is basically left up to you to figure out (did they add markers in the expansion? I can’t even remember lol). Which on one hand makes it feel much more realistic and you get to know the map more but you can end up wandering around for a half hour saying “where the hell is this goddamn cave??” Once you get immersed into the world though it is really wonderful. There are fewer limitations to what you can do compared to the later games.
It’s hard to classify Skyrim as a perfect game with the amount of bugs in it. It’s literally a meme how many wacky bugs and exploits have been given to us by the great Todd Howard.
I guess it depends on how you define ‘perfect’- personally even with the bugs it’s one of the best games I’ve played in terms of how it makes me feel and what I get out of it. It might not be the best performing game ever but that’s different imo
Yeah this is how I’d look at it. Skyrim’s engine might be absolute dogshit and it might be buggy as a cheap motel mattress, but there’s other kinds of perfection than just perfection of the tech