In terms of content, I’d totally agree. I’ve been playing since the earliest days, and it’s incredible how much they’ve added (player ships that replaced the main menu, new tilesets, new weapons, new enemies, new story missions, space missions, competitive modes etc)

But in terms of long-term appeal, it kinda suffers a…

As a point of interest, it might also be worth looking at the “Devs Play” series of videos in which BioShock level designer JP LeBreton plays through Doom 1's first episode with John Romero, and they talk about the development of the game, its architecture, how it works etc.

That’s not entirely true though, is it? Intelligence *does* lend itself to gaming on PC - while there is no direct and absolute correlation (plenty of idiots using a PC), the complicated nature of the PC is such that “hardcore” PC gamers (that is, enthusiasts who are likely to tweak and upgrade their machine rather…

Yeah but was that actually a written-in moment, or was that just a natural “You’re part of both factions, same rules apply” situation?

The point is, Morrowind was *aware* of who you were and what you were doing. NPCs would actually comment on such things. That awareness was actually written into the narrative of the…

Eeeh, forget Bethesda remastering it. Just download the code patch and the graphics extender or whatever it’s called - you can make Morrowind look beautiful, and modders have been working to strip it of bugs and fill in any gaps for years now.

Seriously, google the Morrowind Graphics Extender, and look at the image…

Did you though? Really? Actually feel like an epic hero? I sure didn’t.

Because none of the NPCs ever actually acknowledge anything you do, ever.

In Morrowind they still had the fame system, and NPCs would often comment on such things. In Skyrim, you could be thane of every city, Archmage of Winterhold, Harbinger of the…

Skills. All boils down to skills. The game was merciless if you tried to use a weapon you weren’t skilled in. BUT.

You could always take a non-combat approach early on, steal things, trade things, make potions to sell, enchant things, whatever (there was seriously so much money in so many non-combat professions), then…

Morrowind’s bugs tended to be less overt and less lazy though. Speaking as a modder who has been digging through the innards of Bethesda games since Morrowind... Skyrim is just horrible. Considering their budget went up and up and up, there are *so* many major, glaring bugs that are there for no greater reason than…

Also, the guilds interact at times in Morrowind. If you join House Hlaalu *and* the thieves guild, their stories conflict at one point, and a thieves guild NPC you encounter while working for House Hlaalu actually acknowledges your joint membership and gives you an alternative to complete your mission.

In Skyrim, not…

There *were* mark and recall spells though, unlike the later games. So you could not only travel by silt strider, you could also teleport to the nearest tribunal temple, teleport to the nearest imperial shrine, or mark a spot and teleport back to that whenever you liked.

“There’s nothing wrong with using voice actors,”

There is when it comes to the main dialogue. I mean yes, sure, they streamlined and dumbed down due to the desire for a broader audience, but in raw practical “what you can and cannot do” terms, sound files = a lot of space used up, and a lot of money spent.

So while, in…

That was its one great flaw - it needed big colourful banners to signify each district. But that city was incredible... I’ll never forget the first time I broke into the vaults of one of the great houses, and stole all their stuff successfully. No other game since has allowed me to spontaneously become the greatest…

Get it on PC cheap, then install the various patches and overhauls. There’s a code patch that fixes all the game’s eccentricities, and some sort of graphics improvement that allows you to completely open up the viewing distance, add depth of field etc. It looks stunning.

“It means the game isn’t as fairly balanced, even if it does feel more real.”

It means you’re free to actually explore, and if you somehow defeat an enemy who was way above your pay grade? You’re actually rewarded appropriately. And is your super-powerful weapon unbalanced? Maybe for a little while, but that imbalance…

He looks like an utter pillock.

Good grief... Saints Row had less ridiculous clothing, and that franchise was *trying* to be ridiculous.

I think the best moment in Dishonored was when you use the heart on Daud, and the heart’s response is really bitter. I think they should have pushed it more in that direction. I think the story would have been more interesting, and we would have felt more connected to it, had the heart been actually magically forcing…

I feel like, as a franchise that was supposed to be a “back to the old days” style stealth game... they rather missed the point when it came to all the super powers. Even more so with the sequel.

Back in the ancient times of Thief 1 and 2, the truly compelling thing was that you were playing a regular human who had a…

Well let me put it this way - Morrowind had better writing, greater depth of gameplay, greater freedom, greater dialogue diversity, and at the time its graphics were really very impressive (instead of being a rehashed version of an engine that dates back at least two games).

Morrowind was a game in which *generic…

I’d say it’s disappointing more than surprising. Dishonored 1 was made for *last gen* consoles which had been around for quite a while. Not only were those platforms better known by developers, but the developers would have needed to be far better at optimization to get the thing to run *at all* on... what, 6 year old…

RAM’s a pretty binary issue - either you have enough, or you don’t have enough. If you have more than enough, you may as well have enough - you won’t experience any real performance gains.

If you don’t have enough, the software will stutter horribly as memory is aggressively managed to make room for new data (which…