When I was into Morrowind I already had about ten years of practice escaping into fantasy worlds via books and games. After listening to The Blindboy Podcast (after art and history, one theme is mental health) since mid-2020 and practicing cognitive behavior therapy to make more time to act between stimulus and (too-often-harmful) response, I no longer feel compelled to escape into games. Perhaps all those hours I spent exploring imaginary spaces helped in some way (I am much more grateful to authors of books, because they helped me develop visualization) and I try not to sink into regret. Having a child was a major contributor to growing up, too, perhaps the top; now I’m more adult and I get to freely enjoy childhood activities again with less risk of dependence.
My point is: it’s okay to grow out of things and move on.
I do get that and I find my ability to escape into fantasy has dwindled in recent years, but I played morrowind at the time when I still read plenty of long winded fantasy books and the other games actually helped lead to my decline in enjoying fantasy.
To counter that. I recently for the first time played dark souls and a couple years back played hollow Knight. I was able to immerse myself into both games because, every single thing you do and find has a point.
Nothing really wastes your time. There's a reason for doing everything in those games. The things you find are worth it and rewarding. Exploring is worth it and rewarding.
I never once really got that feeling from the elder scrolls games, or open world games in general.
They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying.
I prefer games with less things, but each thing feels worthwhile and meaningful. I'd rather find one awesome cool thing that changes the way I play the game or gives me something cool and new for my player over 20 Rusty forks and some apples any day.
I appreciate your comment. In my childhood open world games were - at least in my mind - the non-plus-ultra because the possibilites appeared to be endless. Nonetheless, you are right: Too often those possibilites are trite. I dislike Skyrim and Oblivion for those same reasons but for Morrowind I have a place in my heart because it really felt like you were exploring the world by yourself (not following your quest marker) and the rewards you could get were not just defined by its loot system but designed (so that you could get a really great sword relatively early if you found your way there), but you are right in that the world is rather empty and can be boring for some players like you. Actually, what has not been topped for me personally are 2 games: Might&Magic4+5 (you could play them as a combo-game, changing worlds!) and Fallout 2 because in both those cases the worlds were massive and you could go wherever you wanted to but still had comparatively much and different stuff to do wherever you went. In both cases I was always fixed on finding stuff that usually I wouldn't have at this point in the game and that worked really well, but also the worlds were really interesting. In M&M you had those minigames where you would simply read a text of an NPC and had to answer his question like a puzzle or something; very simple but quite rewarding (however also too easy to look up the answers nowadays ;)) but also you had to learn skills to get to some places in the world like swimming and mountaineering, a really cool feature as well. I don't know if you would like those games, especially nowadays, but compared to 3D games they had the added advantage that walking around didn't take SO much of your time. Which is a dealbreaker for me oftentimes, too.
The first two fallout games were great and even fallout 3 and new Vegas were pretty good. I think the latter two were good because they were smaller and actually did have some interesting stuff to find and do even though they did the open world thing.
I played the m&m series a long time ago, they kind of blend together in my head with bards tale, ultima, those gold box d&d games and games like those. The puzzles in those kinds of games always made them enjoyable.
> They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying.
I’m usually downvoted to oblivion (pun intended) on Reddit for saying: I didn’t like Breath of the Wild for this reason. Empty world, no real rewards, infuriating weapon system, lack of scenario, no memorable music.
Yeah. Breath of the wild seems the same way. I've never played it but i watched my old roommate play it.
Its focus on exploration was cool, but it missed that thing that made zelda 1 fun.(apparently this was the inspiration for breath of the wild)
Zelda 1 was pretty open ended, but again, all the things you found were useful, sure you could do the dungeons in a variety of orders and go wherever, but that's not what made it fun, what made it fun was that you could do that and that all those dungeons had one cool, useful, gamechanging thing to find.
BoTW gave you all the game changing stuff at the beginning and said here...here's a world, ganon's over there, you probably can't get him now, but just wander around long enough and you can, or know what you're doing and you can.
In theory that seems fun, but the lack of structure and progression kills it. That's what made zelda so great to begin with.
My point is: it’s okay to grow out of things and move on.