Gaming: Larian Publishing Chief Wades Into The Fray, Says Morrowind Updated...

Bruce Nesmith has an enviable list of design and writing credits earned over a long history on some of Bethesda's greatest games: Daggerfall, Oblivion, Skyrim (on which he served as lead designer), Fallout 3 and 4, and others. None of which prevented him from being extremely wrong in his recent assessment that "the reality of playing Morrowind would not stand the test of time."

"Go back and play Morrowind and tell me that’s the game you want to play again," Nesmith said last week. "We all have these fond memories of things that were pivotal moments in our gaming fantasy histories that we absolutely move but you go back and play a 20 year old game and you will cringe."

It's the sort of comment that will get you thrown out of reputable drinking establishments (and possibly beaten up in the parking lot) if uttered too loudly, and some of the social media reactions to Nesmith's position have been, let us say, spicy. Larian Studios publishing chief Michael Douse also had some thoughts on the matter, as he sometimes does: He went easy on the spice but was still, I have to say, entirely correct.

"Call me optimistic but there is a very technically qualified developer out there that would happily remake Morrowind with a modern combat system and it would sell like fucking hot cakes," Douse wrote on X. In a subsequent post, he continued, "Mission to find Bethesda's Bloober: go."

(Bloober Team, you'll recall, recently earned acclaim for its work remaking Silent Hill 2, which came out just the year before Morrowind.)

Morrowind's combat was kind of janky—or at least, it was perceived as such because of the way it incorporated stats and RNG to determine hits and damage, none of which was reflected especially well in the on-screen action. In another post, Douse said "you cannot have an RNG system with first person combat," and points to VATS, introduced as a first-person mechanic in Fallout 3, as a way to effectively incorporate virtual dice rolls into FPS-style action.

"Maybe Morrowind with VATS would be the solution," Douse wrote. "But let's not pretend it played well at the combat level regardless of choice."

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It's not too difficult to find people who disagree with that take (most of them in the Morrowind subreddit, to be fair), but Douse isn't wrong to the extent that Morrowind is from a different era when this sort of thing was normal, and probably wouldn't fly

Source: PC Gamer