imperistan

^ Your entire argument up there falls apart if you actually read the OP, but whatever. I'll respond anyway. More relying on the wrong definitions (wrong here denoting definitions not being referred to in this thread unless specifically stated) to try and prove your point. I for one think you're wrong because you're making no sense when you say clear cut. A cut is nowhere near being clear, and is in fact very bloody and hurts. You don't want to hurt me do you? DO YOU?! :rolleyes: Anarchy, in its most basic definition, means to be without rulers. Not rules. There is a MASSIVE difference. Society does not need the iron hand of singular, unquestionable, impersonal, and unopposed authority to maintain its internal rules. (which it technically has anyway, depending on what books you get your hands on. This particular school of thought can be called Practical Anarchy, among other things) This is especially comes to be true when you come to accept that certain actions will automatically revoke your right to say NO, regardless of what level of freedom exists in that society, namely because of the severity of that act. Just because you're given the closest thing to absolute freedom that can rationally be afforded to a person, that does not give you right to murder or to rape or (depending on the status of private property) steal. As the old adage goes, your right to swing your fist ends at the other person's nose. And in the interest of sustainability (note that the word "order" is often a loaded term, particularly when it comes to this kind of a discussion. Thus I prefer to not use it too much and instead use sustainability, a more honest and accurate term), it would then become societies right to exact justice for the wrong done. I wasn't aware anarchism has reached the point in its theoretical and political lifetime that its definitions were set in stone, and that all former, current, and possible definitions had been abolished in favor of the one definition that happens to support your own arguments (Which by the way aren't even arguments, its all just bickering over definitions which allow you to conveniently refuse to acknowledge and respond to the actual arguments made). Communism has the same problem anarchism has, but I bet you wouldn't start bickering over definitions there. (or may be you would, but at that point I"d have to question whether you'd really have any place in that topic) I also wasn't aware that it was impossible and illegal to develop a new theory within an umbrella of theories. Its actually rather funny when I see opponents do as you are now, as it implies that you're actually trying to impede our progress by refusing to acknowledge that progress can and must be made in a theory until it has reached apex of its development. Anarchism (only being little more than a century old mind you) is nowhere near that level of development, and won't be for some time. Democracy as we know it took thousands of years to get to where it is now from its primitive origins. It may very well take anarchism that long as well (Though its doubtful. Our ancient ancestors didn't have the wonder that is the internet to help speed the development of thought), but that doesn't give you the right to shoot down our arguments just because they haven't been established as a full-on school of thought. I would also like to point out (again I think), that I do not believe in anarchism either, not because of any disagreement with its internal workings but more with the situation of it. I don't believe one is afforded enough freedom within anarchy, and instead prefer to take up autarchism, or, self-rule, and as an off-shoot, self-reliance. I'm the hardcore individualist of hardcore individualists (so to speak), for its only someone like me that will tell even the anarchists that they are too oppressive.

Whats really funny is that Morrowind and Oblivion could put all of these things on their weapons, and for the most part did. And what wasn't, wasn't impossible to do, just not in Beth's book of stuff to do at the time. And besides that, if you're going to try and use that argument, then nothing makes anything different because its all just meaningless repaints and respecs of the basic armor, weapon, spell. Thats all any item in any of the games are when you get right to it, and everything beyond those basic differences make those items diverse. What Skyrim is doing is moving towards the less diverse end of the spectrum, not the other way around. And this is most certainly true. The consolidation of skills, armor, and total removal of spellmaking and meaningful enchanting are the main culprits. Less overall diversity in items also does it, namely because of the consolidation of armor into fewer pieces. I can create a far more unique set of armor in Morrowind than I can in Skyrim. Not only stat wise, but in terms of looks, weight, effectiveness, noise levels, etc etc. Not so in Skyrm.

^ Bingo. Thing is about the definitions of the words (that I didn't really touch on in my last posts) is that both anarchy (chaotic) and anarchism and all the rest all share the same root word, which as it happens has evolved to perfectly describe it all rather accurately. The real confusion comes to specifics. Anarchy is an easier word to type out than anarchism, anarchist society, etc etc so its often used even by anarchists who'd have nothing to do with chaotic anarchy just as a matter of shorthand. So when someone gets caught up on that word, regardless of whether its been specified countless times that the intended use is different from what they think, we end up seeing what we see in this thread. Coining a new term would help stem the confusion (and perhaps finally rid anarchism of the old notions of chaotic anarchy), but in general that'd be a pain and not only that, you'd have to get people to accept it otherwise they'll just throw out that you're not talking about anarchism and notch a win on their bedposts.

Wow, people still believe Wikipedia is unreliable. Hilarious, especially considering that any changes made that aren't legitimate get reversed within hours if not within a single hour. Especially when it comes to such a large section as the section on anarchism within wikipedia. Again, demonstrably false that, yet again, relies on the completely wrong definition of anarchy. You can't use one definition of a word to disprove another definition of the same word, it doesn't work that way. I can't disprove the validity of the word scale (as in, a tool for measuring things such as weight) with the definition of the word scale (as in, to proportionally increase one or all of an objects dimensions).

This one is a true gamer. Seriously why the hell do you need to rush a game? I wasn't even rushing. I was just playing and eventually I ran out of discerinible things to do other than walk around, but I had already done all that in-between and during quests. The island isn't very big and almost all of the quests take you all around the island rather efficiently.

Probably. It also helps if you manually install mods (like I do) when you want to replace specific things but leave others. With BSA's it all just gets overridden or ignored regardless of what you want.

Just extract the textures and put them in your data folder. Far, far easier than messing around with the BSA.

Oh yes I ran into that ethereal Miraak bug my first time through him. Pissed me off, I couldn't even kill him with the console!

I generally don't like beer very much, but I'll never say no to a Sam Adams. (Spare me the piss water jokes :tongue:)

What is USKP anyway.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/31057

Thats right, I completed the entirety of the content in the Dragonborn DLC in 8 hours. Main quest + all sidequests and locations and what not. I know this because I went on UESP and unless they're missing something (which I doubt) then I've done everything the DLC has to offer. And this was on one of my actual, Lets sit and play the game characters (rather than the ones I built to be a part of stories or just to screw around with). All in all, the DLC was a major disappointment, and this is coming from someone who went in completely unbiased (I had actually completely forgotten what was all in Dragonborn. It didn't hit me that we could ride dragons until I got to ride one). For one, obviously, it was massively short in regards to main quest, and content wise the MQ was severely underwhelming. Miraak was inconsequential, HM was more annoying than menacing (and his realm just bland) and I felt that the apparent apocalyptic conditions of the island were completely overblown. In fact, the main drive behind me chugging along in the main quest was just to get rid of that god awful sky (which has to be different from the normal Skyrim sky, because even after the MQ it still looked like complete crap and made my game look a lot worse than it should) moreso than anything else. The rewards were meh, and I actually find the Nordic Carved armor to be the best addition (aside from the modding assets anyway) of the DLC as a whole. And as for the rest of the content, it was painfully obvious that the vast majority of it was just throwbacks to Morrowind which was just gross because they did it far, far too much. Seeing Red Mountain was a nice touch, and of course the Morrowind Architecture was nice to see, but other than that the throwbacks were tired and obvious. What wasn't a throw back was pretty much just boring reiterations of whats already present in the vanilla game. What really pissed me off though as I ran around the island was that how much the island was different. I can understand things changing in 200 years, but there's no way Solstheim would end up the way it is in DB in 200 years, even with Red Mountain exploding ash all over the southern half of the island. Also doesn't explain why half the landmarks that should be immovable have moved all around the island (earth stone biggest culprit) or why certain places unreasonably grew larger than they were. Yes, yes one could argue that making the island accurate to how it was in Morrowind would be a throwback, but that's not the point.

No, its not a bad thing. A bad thing is when the sheer amount of evidence and explanation that would be required JUST to cover every possible base he'd try to pick at would require me to reserve several posts in advance. And given his past responses, that simply is not worth it, as he'll ignore the vast majority of it anyway and stubbornly reiterate his arguments. Thing is though is that Beth doesn't even have to try to appeal to the casual gamers now. After Oblivion (and now Skyrim) Beth could do whatever they want and still get stupid amounts of money just for slapping Elder Scrolls on the box, regardless of how the actual game is. Beth's continual "streamlining"*** is pointless now because casuals will buy it up all the same, so why not do some service towards the original fans? ***Streamlining =/= removal

Its a point that anarchists make to challenge and eventually change human nature, not work around it or ignore it indefinitely, at least in regards to its internal issues. To fight human nature and hopefully change it in time. Most serious anarchists are pacifists and altruistic, which facilitates these kinds of systems working. The strong and the weak don't exist because strong and weak are irrelevant to discourse between anarchists. And before you say it, no, anarchism isn't for everyone, nor was it ever intended to be. No serious anarchist would suggest that the status quo should collapse and anarchism take its place regardless of what everyone else wants. Anarchists want anarchism. They don't want to force it on anyone who either A, doesn't want it, or B, doesn't want to be a part of it (and as such, fight their nature). This is wrong, and even wikipedia disagrees with you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism Excepting more pure forms of individualist anarchism, every form of anarchism has some kind of structure to it. The system I proposed has a lot more structure to it than is ever presented in any of the past systems, but that is because it is a system that was devised in the wake of countless failures. It is based on practicality and addressing where anarchism has failed before. It treads towards what anarchism is opposed to yes, and perhaps even dangerously so depending on your views, but there are safeguards in place to keep the system in check and power in the hands of society. The number one safeguard is the people themselves, and if that fails, then naturally the system fails. But that is the point. This system challenges the people to be true to what they say they believe. Of course it does. Communism is just anarchist economics. Always has been, even though few want to admit it.

I don't believe so. Most likely you're going to have to upscale and redo the texture if you want to increase the resolution.

Vanilla is fine, but modded vanilla is awesome. One can mod the game but still maintain the vast majority of the vanilla gameplay/content/etc.

Call me silly, but I'm sure almost all of the stuff from Runescape if it had a good model to it could easily translate into Skyrim and be absolutely awesome. http://images.wikia.com/runescape/images/b/b4/Dragonfire_shield_old.png http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120708053848/runescape/images/7/77/Dharok's_armour_set_equipped.png http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120708053850/runescape/images/7/7f/Verac's_set.png http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120311023343/runescape/images/thumb/d/dd/Saradomin_armour_set_(lg)_equipped.png/248px-Saradomin_armour_set_(lg)_equipped.png http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120910231106/runescape/images/d/d5/Bandos_armour_equipped_male.png

I'm going to reply to a couple of things as I reach them in the topic: (and note that, unless otherwise stated, when I refer to "anarchy", I refer to anarchist society, not the common definition of total chaos and murder-rape) The thing is, about the argument you're implying here, is that for most of human history (or at least, the parts of human history when governments and states were things), the idea of a state has always been a default method of maintaining any semblance of a stable society. And for much of human history, most humans couldn't really say anything about it, as the power of the state was far too great to really oppose. So as time goes on, the idea that the state is the only way or only sustainable way of maintaining order becomes ingrained in us. After all, few if any are born an anarchist. Its only once we become educated and begin to see past what we were likely brought up to believe that we decide if we will oppose that system. But, I digress a bit here. Point is, just because so few have tried to go completely without a state does not mean that it is impossible, only that there has simply not been ample time to fully realize it. And this is because of several things: Statist Intervention is the main problem. States all too often are like spoiled children, who when presented with something that isn't clearly defined as being owned by some guy with a big stick (or some other quality that basically says, back off, this is mine) they will swiftly try to claim it for their own. Or in the cases where these anarchies were carved out of an existing state, to reclaim it with no regard for whatever legitimacy that anarchy may have had. This is the principle reason why anarchism is opposed to the state, moreso than its own principles. (Any anarchist that has any remote idea of what he's talking about can admit that a state isn't necessarily a bad thing in our current day, but that in regards to the future it isn't sustainable if we as humans are to presume to continue to hold up principles such as freedom as worthwhile) Another large issue is the complete and total lack of educated anarchists. The vast majority of anarchists throughout anarchism's history have either been a part of the working class or adolescents (Or young adults) that have little to no quality education. Those of the working class at least had success in their endeavours because their struggle was often tied to the economy they were present in, and its far easier to affect a nation's economy than its politics. And as for the adolescents (from here on referred to as wannabes, for lack of any serious term to call them), well, its obvious why they fail. They're more often than not just there because they think anarchy is cool or because it satisfies their thirst for rebellious counter culture. And when these people try to establish some kind of anarchy (or do anything to try and progress the movement at all), it often collapses in on itself because it wasn't planned out well (if at all) or because half the people lose interest as they move on to the next fad-rebellion and the other half find they can't sustain whatever is they were doing. So when the few educated anarchists (note I'm not saying that there isn't so few that the ratio is 1:100, there are indeed a lot of educated anarchists, but only enough to where we'd all have to get together to really accomplish anything, which isn't necessarily practical) out there try to make strides towards anarchy, they often have to rely on the other kinds of anarchists, and obviously, it doesn't always work out. And lastly, planning and, to a related and lesser extent, factions within anarchy. As touched on above, when anarchy is established, often times its on a whim and seldom has a well structured plan to it. As such, sustainability goes right out the window. Without a well structured plan, any wrench thrown into the cogs is likely to collapse the system. And this isn't just about maintaining anarchy internally, but also externally. No anarchy will ever survive if it cannot successfully combat the state without bringing the hell of other state's on it (in the case of when anarchies are carved out in war-time) or handicapping it. (in the case of such places such as Free Town). And in my opinion, the idea should be to strive for coexistence rather than replacement, at least for now at any rate. It also doesn't help things that within anarchism as a movement there exists dozens of different theories, philosophies, and methods for anarchy that when anarchists get together its often a right pain to really sort out any sustainable system that will work for everyone present. And this is made worse depending on the types of anarchists present. Exceptions to the rule don't really disprove the rule. An interstate system (or any kind of highway system really) is a good idea for large nations, but it doesn't take a state to realize it. Further, his argument refers more to those cases where the state wastes ridiculous amounts of money with little to no benefit to the people, rather than where the state actually managed resources in a way that did provide a substantial benefit to the people. Couple of things: 1. Government =/= State. Anarchist government is a thing, and it is a sustainable idea within anarchy. The major differences being that, unlike a state (Which is a form of government) an anarchist government does not force its continued survival or force its policies and projects, and instead relies on the people to sustain it and provide for it as a matter of personal and societal responsibility. If anarchists cannot band together and maintain their government, then they are no true anarchists. (Or rather, just really, really poor ones :P) And further, this also applies to leadership and hierarchy. For one, the difference is between being a leader and being a ruler. A leader can be ignored, but a ruler cannot, and that is the point. If the leader isn't cutting it for the people, he shouldn't be able to force his will. Two, hierarchy in anarchism (at least, anarchism in its most sustainable form) is a matter of flexible horizontality (which is something I've taken strides to develop further on my own before I gave up on anarchism altogether and instead went for autarchism). Power only ever bends vertically when the the power of the group cannot feasibly solve the issue at hand. And once the issue is resolved, power straightens back out. Examples are dealing with foreign governments, law enforcement (yes laws exist in anarchy. Anarchy isn't doing whatever you want with no consequences), etc etc. This is why you remove the distinction from citizen to enforcer. Militias would something that would be kept on backburner to prevent such situations from getting out of hand (supposing they even do. A well set-up anarchy can prevent this). But even then, supposing the militia then goes on to try and do the same thing (basically screwing everyone else over), then anarchy collapses. It wasn't well planned out. (namely because either the people it started with weren't truly anarchist, or because the overwhelming amount of people they let join weren't) But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The freedom to fail is a normal consequence of freedom to be and live as you please. Note quite right, namely because you're confusing terms. Do remember that there is a very distinct difference from anarchy, chaos and disorder in the absence of government, and anarchism, the absence of the state. On the subject of definitons and terms, I'm going to go ahead and settle something regarding anarchy and anarchy. (Confusing isn't it? ^_^) But first, let me make it clear that what I am about to say is based on the development of anarchism outside of what's really present on the internet, as much of this was hammered out between me and several other anarchists I've chummed around with over the years as we expanded our knowledge of anarchism and tried to move the movement forward (we also had no access to the internet at all for much of this time, so there's that as well). For ease in this particular part of my post, here Anarchy will denote the common definition, and anarchism will denote the other side of things. Anarchy, or more accurately, Chaotic anarchy, is, obviously that state of society when organized government has collapsed and order is thrown out the window. This kind of anarchy is the sort of thing the likes of Max Stirner and all those psychopath terrorists (note that we REALLY didn't like Stirner nor his philosophical ilk) would like to see come to fruition. This is, in truth the exact kind of anarchy that all statists and general opponents to the idea of anarchy continually use as an argument against it. Unsustainable and completely horrifying to even suggest as an alternative to the status quo. Anarchism, in contrast, is instead not merely the absence of government, but the absence of the state, and further, a completely different kind of government distinct from that of the state (Note that states make up 99.99% of all governments on earth). In anarchism, government still exists, but rather than being based on full coercion and vertical hierarchy, instead it is based on voluntarism and horizontal hierarchy. As explained above, the hierarchy allows for power to bend, and thus allow society to govern itself without any unnecessary coercion. Power in this case is provided by the entirety of society, with power only being in the hands of society and never any one individual or group except in those cases where society as a whole cannot solve the issue at hand as a unit, and always once these issues are resolved does power bend back into the hands of society as a whole. An officer at rest cannot command others to act in a certain way (or do anything he would be tasked with) unless society deems this necessary, or, in the case when society can't or isn't there to say so, he can prove that he had due cause to carry out his duties. For instance, if no one is complaining about someone spray painting the sides of buildings or if there is no law in place that says you can't do that, the police can do nothing no matter their personal issues. But if an officer see's someone kill or assault someone, then he would have every right to pursue the that person and enact justice. (Vertical heirarchy in comparison is rigid and indeed, an actual heirarchy, with those at the top never really being checked by those at the bottom. And even in those cases where such a thing is possible, it still results in a very rigid system that still inhibits freedom) And the structure for such a system would be laid out when anarchist society is established, laying out that everyone within that society has every right to revoke the hierarchy and not allow themselves to be coerced by the rest, but at the same time you would be restricted by the fact that certain actions would revoke this right. The basic laws of an anarchist society would be against murder and rape, and depending on that societies stance on private property, theft. If you commit any of those acts, then you automatically revoke not only your right to not be coerced by society nor its representatives, but also the overwhelming amount of freedom you are given in such a society until such time as you've paid your debt. The idea that anarchism can work without order and government is outdated, namely because much of anarchist theory was hammered out during a time when the likes of socialism and communism (note: Communism is just a form of socialism, and indeed, true communism is just a form of anarchist economics) and such started to rear their heads, and most just accepted de facto that it would be possible to establish sustainable anarchy in this way merely because these other radical forms of government were managing to do it. Where communism was the answer to the problem of capitalism, so would anarchy (chaotic) be the answer to the problem of the state, an idea that ultimately proves to be a mistake. The ideal state of anarchism in the present day shouldn't be to strive for the complete absence of government and order but to strive to completely eliminate coercion and hierarchy from government. The system I talked about above is a bridge to that state that takes humans into account, as well as the rest of the world. Anarchism will never exist in a vacuum and until states have gone extinct, any anarchist society that comes about is not only going to have to deal with people that will simply refuse to not abuse the freedom allowed, but also with statist societies that would still exist and will most surely try to undermine that which opposes it. My system provides for that, allowing anarchism to sustain itself only at the cost of having to maintain some small form of hierarchy in the mean time. The thing is though about all this is is that it all relies on the personal and social responsibility of the individuals within the society. If society as a whole cannot or will not sustain the systems that give it this level of freedom, then that society is doomed to collapse. And it isn't a fault of the system of government, but of society itself, and that is the point. Society should be responsible for maintaining itself, not some external government that, though its made up of individuals from society, is still largely separate from it. (note the vast difference between your average American and your average American politician, for instance) And as for the issue of terms being confused (as well as terms seemingly being contradictory) this is because in order to really make these terms distinct, new words would have to be invented. And that would just be a glorious pain in the ass.

I for one remember the first time I stumbled upon Vivec Foreign Quarter. It was a very dark and stormy night (and in fact the first time I ever really travelled at night. I always used to just sleep until morning so I could always be in day light. That's right, I was afraid of traveling at night. In a game. No other game does that for me :D ) and I was just travelling around that cave that you hit early in the main quest and I just sort of wandered off. Ended up right in front of the Foreign Quarter, and when it finally came in view out of the fog, my jaw literally dropped. The feeling was like seeing the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower for the first time at their bases (which I've also done in real life). Absolutely awe-inspiring. That was Morrowind for me, in a time when the most graphically pleasing game I had ever seen up to that point was Halo CE.

It is is so ridiculously refreshing to see a thread like this.

It'd definitely be worth it regardless of when you buy it, as eventually mods will start making use of a lot of its assets, but if you aren't interested in seeing the story or just simply getting something new in the game, I'd definitely hold off for a while until it gets a good sale on Steam or some other place.

I found that once I figured out how to make Tag's actually do what they're supposed to do, the silly mods (no real offense intended but that's how I see them) disappeared for the most part from my mod searches. You can find the tag blocker here: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/users/tagpreferences Simply select the tags that don't go in line with what you want and bam, insta awesome.

Clueless did you even look at the plot of Oblivion or Skyrim for that matter? The world IS ending in game (Skyrim) a daedra army was invading (Oblivion). What's more YOU'RE the one that was arguing that the actions of the player did make large changes in the game world not the other way around and to prove it I will quote you (read the part in bold). People do know, they jut dont care. Tell me, do you go "OMG YOUR THAT POLICE OFFIER GUY I HEARD ABOUT" every time you meet some random police officer you saw on TV, assuming you had seen one on tv? No, people treat you normally becuase that is how people act IRL. All I can really say is FALSE, on many levels. -Preventing the world from ending is significant -Killing the emperor and allowing for a change in regime is significant -Handing Skyrim over to the Empire, or the Rebels, is significant. The choices you do have are visually different, in all the Daedric quests that have choices, which is to say practically all but two, the different endings either spare someone, thus letting them live, or allows you to kill them for an object of great power. Letting them live gives you an alternate reward, including possibly letting them be a companion. I dont see how you can claim there is no closure, especially considering every story is wrapped up before the game is over. And -Having half the holds in the game have their guards/Jarls changed. -Having around 6 forts occupied with soldiers, when before they were occupied with bandits and the like. -Having remnants of factions like The Blood Horkers, or the Afflicted, attack you. -Having random Thieves attack rob cities you have taken over for the thieves guild. -Having every NPC you have ever helped ever constantly thanking you as you pass them by. -Having the ability to bribe guards, and tell those random thief NPCs that you are in the guild, and thus to ignore your crime/not rob you -Having random encounters with people like Sinding, should you spare him Amongst a large list of other things, does significant impact on the world around you. Frankly, the only way anyone can say what you do doesn't show up in the world, is if you close to your eyes to everything that happens in the game. furthermore, Oblivion's guilds were not decently paced, they were padded out with tons of misc quests that had nothing to do with the main guild story at all, so to say Skyrim;s guilds are rushed, when they are, in fact, not rushed, just plot focused, is a falsehood. I think this proves imperistan conclusion, this is completely pointless. When someone like Saj can't even follow their opponents arguments without having them explained to him in a 10000 word research document, bibliography and all, it becomes pointless to argue with them.

I don't think you've ever actually played a mage. But eh, I'm done. It's really getting pointless. (and spare me the obvious response where you try to get the last word and make yourself feel like you won)

-Failure isn't a bad thing to deal with in a game, nor to subject the player to. Unless the game is progressively killing off all quest givers at a steady rate (Which if done right it shouldn't be, even with the AI present in the game) there is no reason not to let quests fail or be locked out if the unfortunate happens. That makes for interesting and unique play-through's, and indeed encourages the player to play the game even more, and you'd be a liar if you said that's a bad thing. And again, there's nothing wrong with perfecting the system I suggested earlier, where only the player can directly or indirectly harm quest NPC's, which is really simple. Just make them immortal to all damage until the player engages combat with them. (IE, a script that removes the immortal flag as soon as the player engages combat) I wouldn't even be surprised if such a system could even be modded into the game, but even if it can't, it wouldn't be much of a stretch for Beth to do it. -Hmm? Let's see: From Amazon "Play any type of character you can imagine, and do whatever you want; the legendary freedom of choice, storytelling" The same can be found on Steam. From Beth's Own Website "Live another life, in another world Play any type of character you can imagine, and do whatever you want; the legendary freedom of choice, storytelling, and adventure of The Elder Scrolls comes to life like never before." Note the bold. If that doesn't mean absolute freedom, then English again must not make any sense. -Yet again you over think it, and not only that, miss how this would even work at all economically. 40 Actors doing lines 10-15 words long each for each direction isn't necessary at all for this system. 2-6 words are all you'd ever need (the majority being 2 or 3). All you need is a simple pointing animation (with the NPC spinning to the direction) and simple lines like "Over there" or "He went this way" or, in the case of people who don't know "I don't know", with variation for different genders (if you even bother denoting a gender at all) Doing that doesn't exactly break the bank over so many actors. (And this isn't going into how 70 voice actors was about the stupidest waste of money on the planet. Any voice actor (actual voice actor mind you, not actor actor's) worth their salt can do a multitude of voices. And looking over the actual list of voice actors and what voices they did, a LOT of them could have done the work of the voice actors who only had one or two different NPC's to voice. (Discounting the unique NPC's that is) -This goes back to how Morrowind did things, when you actually had to find what you were looking for instead of having some handy dandy GPS that pointed you to it. And every NPC ever knowing exactly where you need to go is just lazy writing as it is. -You're missing the point (surprise surprise). I'm promoting being able to eventually get to a MOAT status. The point of my system is to make that actually take work, but not only that, PREVENT people from attaining MOAT status from just merely playing the game without really thinking about it. The only reason anyone should ever attain MOAT status without specifically trying is if they're character has hundreds if not thousands of hours on it, and at that point you don't really have much to complain about. -You can do the same thing in my system, and indeed, the same thing happens in my system, except in mine you have more freedom and diversity in how you define your character. You apparently are hung up on the restrictions (which apparently you don't like, even though you hold perks up in Skyrim (IE, restrictions) as a good thing) and can't get past that you can't just dabble in something (which you also say is bad?) and gain 5 levels, even though you can still dabble. -A well made game doesn't require grinding, no matter the rate of leveling. Make using skills fun and the experience will come. And besides, it isn't really that satisfying to play for a few hours and hit 100 without even thinking (something I've actually done). Slow leveling makes you appreciate the game more. -Point is is that an entire skill shouldn't be able to be rendered pointless. And I guess we're going to ignore the other half of what I said in that particular part of my post. Mkay. -Oh yes, because glorified spells that don't cost anything (and half the time don't even matter to any particular situation whether you use them or not) totally change how each race plays out. Superficial differences don't make the races diverse. -I never said perfect mages didn't need intelligence. Don't put words in my mouth. And besides that, you missed the point of what I was saying there. (you seem to do that a lot) -That's why you can change. And besides that, nothing stopped you in the past games from going off-class except that you couldn't level, and that could largely be mitigated if you did it right, if not completely ignored depending on the skill and what you wanted to do with it. My system gets rid of that limitation but while also preventing you from growing all powerful without even trying. And i'm not going to even bother arguing with you on classes. If you're going to be so stubborn as that then there's no point. You'll just constantly reiterate what you already said. - :facepalm: Taking examples literally for a 1000? -Open world doesn't mean static world, and yet again you strawman me. -Compared to Morrowind, Daggerfall, Oblivion, and Skyrim all have perhaps the worst dialogue options ever, with each game either not having much at all (in the case of Daggerfall) to having progressively less, to the point of many NPC's not even having any significant dialogue or even the option of pulling up the dialogue menu itself at all. And what dialogue is present doesn't have much to it unless its involved with a quest. In hindsight yes, Morrowind's dialogue was largely generic, but I'd take generic over nothing any day. Even a hive-mind of generic-ness is more alive than no mind at all. In stripping away all the visual aesthetics and visceral qualities of the games, what we have left is little more than a fetchfest, a world filled with people whom you can largely only interact with either through the giving or receiving of things or by taking their lives (thanks to 1up for putting it awesomely). There is absolutely no soul in that. And though even Morrowind was just like that, at least its NPC's had some illusion of having more to them than a quest (if they even had that). -Who said the player has to be present for these things to happen? And before you give me your obvious response, gods forbid the game was actually alive and did things on its own without your input. -If I'm going to do that, then I'll just drop the game and imagine what I want. I can't speak for others, but I didn't start playing computer RPG's just to put arbitrary restrictions on myself outside of the game mechanics. -Missing another point. No quests would actually be connected except through the time factor, and the differences time would induce would largely be superficial (except in cases were a large change could easily be reversible in the storyline), but would make the game more alive and deeper than it is if things remain constantly static.