You couldn’t make Morrowind today, 'cause if you did, everyone would say, “Hey, this is Morrowind, a game that already exists and continues to be played by large numbers of people, thanks in part to the OpenMW project, which was only possible due to Morrowind’s enduring popularity.”
While I do like having a bit of assistance from the map/UI in my games for sake of usability, the point being made in this video is spot on. When developers focus on spoon-feeding users and guiding them by the hand at every step, they get lazy about designing the game itself, and the games suffer. Call it Ubisoftification. I love the part where he’s like “you can’t make a game like Morrowind, but apparently you can make Starfield.” Exactly! All your UI nonsense isn’t going to make your game better if just being in the game isn’t fun or interesting.
Looking back, I think that’s one of the things that makes Subnautica really excellent. I honestly think it could benefit from having a basic map function, but it’s really cool that you just have to navigate with a combination of coordinates, beacons you make yourself, and recognizing the geography and landmarks. You get clues about where to look for things from various datapads and whatnot, but then you have to go actually look for those things. It makes everything more interesting and rewarding. If the game just handed you a map and started putting quest markers on your screen, it wouldn’t be nearly the same experience.
I think a map, a compass (like one you have to hold next to a map) and certain land markers to help establish position would do well even now in gaming. Maybe have something like a North Star would also do wonders for navigating at night and helping immerse the player. Make use of sunstones as well for when there’s cloud cover during the day. It could be a whole thing instead of using map markers. Now sometimes there’s issues with finding where something is at and it could lead to some inaccessibility, but at least in TES they have an in universe solution with magic. To add maybe you could use something like a loaf of bread in a dungeon to mark where you’ve been, or if in a forest, can peel away bark that’ll stay like that until the tree is chopped down and regrown. There’s a plethora of ways we could do navigation these days, but IDK maybe it’s deadlines and such that hamper the creativity. I know for myself, when I play Minecraft, I make a lava beacon to find my base of operations when I’ve been diggy diggy holing for way too long and I finally breach the surface again, and during my spelunking I place torches on either the left or right and keep on using only that side so if I want to backtrack to the surface its ez pee zee.
I’ve not played Sub Nautica before but have watched Markiplier play, it does look really fun
Also also, haven’t watched the vid or read the article in question but it has come up on my browser before when I’ve got a new tab. Low key how I found the sub waaay back.
Morrowind is based except for the magicka regen. In the base vanilla game it’s borderline impossible to play a pure caster cause u gotta eep after every fight
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
