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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

I noticed that view distance can also remove some of the mystique from a game.

When it's cranked too high, the world feels much smaller even though it takes just as long to walk anywhere. Probably because my mental understanding of the world is so fuzzy that it allows my brain to overestimate how far apart the more concrete nodes are like cities. Walking the path from Balmora to some quest location and being distracted half the time with cliff racers and dungeons doesn't really establish how far I walked in my head. It could have been kilometers.

But looking at the whole 3D model of the world removes all of that fuzzy uncertainty that made the world feel big. The best example of this is looking at all of Vivec in your viewport. Without the fog and short view distance, Vivec looks so small despite the amount of times I got lost in it as a kid.

There seems to be a healthy balance of fog + view distance.

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I agree. Also, I really liked the hazy vibe that Morrowind has from an immersion point of view. It's a volcanic island, it makes sense for there to be tons of smoke that clouds your view! It really goes well with the bizarre out-worldly vegetation and fauna.

When I played Oblivion and Skyrim, both great games, I felt I was back in a medieval setting rather than some fantasy land. (Skyrim is a bit better, Oblivion's look and feel is too Europe in the Middle Ages).

Yeah, that's why I could never get into Skyrim even when playing it after I beat Morrowind a few years ago on OpenMW. It's cliche criticism, but it felt like a generic medieval setting. The generic dragon opener of an otherwise interesting hook also crystalizes the feeling.

It just can't compete with Morrowind's giant mushrooms and random people calling me a filthy N'wah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utG17UeUv00 (19 seconds)

I remember reading somewhere that there was a single writer behind most of the distinctive, weird setting of Morrowind (and I think the first two Elder Scrolls, too?) and he didn't work on IV and V. The person or people who replaced him didn't have that kind of creativity, or weren't allowed to express it, so we got Generic Fantasy instead of all the delightful weirdness we should have (some of the early lore about other parts of Tamriel is nuts, I wish we'd gotten to see more of it).

You may be thinking of Douglas Goodall, who designed and wrote the majority of Morrowind’s questlines. He left Bethesda shortly after Morrowind’s release.

I don’t know if the general strangeness of Vvardenfell could necessarily be attributed to Goodall, but various central themes and dialog certainly could be.

You have probably received the response you were looking for, but Kirkbride is another of those contributors to Morrowind lore that helped make it special. Sermons of Vivec, Dragon break, etc.

Michael Kirkbride is mostly responsible for Morrowind's unique flavor: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-mor...

I read somewhere that he would come up with his weirdest lore during all-nighters, delirious from sleep deprivation & some kind of intoxicant which I forget.

This reminded me of something the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wrote on the "intoxicant" part: https://uesp.tumblr.com/post/179903892360/is-it-true-that-mi...

> All of these rumors are false. The truth is that people on the Internet saw someone adding writing beyond a grade school level to a video game, and decided that to produce such a thing required you to be on drugs. Ignoring the dangerous message to budding creative types who may see the message that to be creative you have to be on drugs, it’s also extremely unfair to Michael Kirkbride himself. He’s a real person, with a real career. It’s not the best thing in the world to be a noted professional, and whenever someone googles your name, one of the top results relates to a fictional history with substance abuse.

Kirkbride's description tones it down to just some coffee and bourbon: https://www.imperial-library.info/content/thirty-six-lessons...

> "It was one dev, naked in a room with a carton of cigarettes, a thermos full of coffee and bourbon, and all his summoned angels."

And: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/hrmdzk/comment/fyd...

> You know that comes from a Photoshopped image, right? Come on now.

> Anyway, that’s all a lie. I’ve already given an account of how the 36 were written: a week of bourbon, smokes, and solitude. I’ve never dropped acid in my life.

Gettin high on skooma no doubt

There’s plenty of weird environments in Skyrim too. Even if you do not necessarily see them during the main quest.

That's good to hear. I sheepishly never made it more than a day into Skyrim but I owe it a fair shot.

> But looking at the whole 3D model of the world removes all of that fuzzy uncertainty that made the world feel big.

The map also plays a trick on you. Many of the paths are deliberately winding through valleys and such to make the travel seem longer. Personally I felt this the most in the northern Ashlands. Combined with the Fog, limited Fast Travel, and a bunch of distracting Dwemer ruins the whole island felt huge.

...I might have to reinstall

The fast travel's not actually that limited, you just have to work for some of it. Like if you don't learn the mark, recall, and the two intervention spells pretty early on, yeah, it's painful. Otherwise, it's barely less fast-travelly than the next two entries in the series. The game provides the tools to solve the problem, it just doesn't give them to you for free, and it doesn't push them at you with flashing lights around them like "DEFINITELY GET THESE ASAP".

... which means that younger-me totally did two entire playthroughs without ever learning any of those spells, of course. Ouch.

This is definitely true. A good compromise I've found is the mod that adds volumetric fog to OpenMW. Looks absolutely stunning and retains the mystique of distance in a more immersive way.

Oh man, does it have a way to set the fog to different density in different areas? Vanilla's max draw distance seems way too low in the relatively-nice parts of the island, especially the South, West, and coastal East, but if you set OpenMW's draw high enough to feel right in those areas, it's way too high in the ashlands and around the volcano and all that.

Not directly, but it is dynamic based on weather and atmosphere in each region.

It's definitely an important factor! Open world games are at their best when the player navigates the space naturally - without quest markers and the like, but with "oh, that thing on the horizon looks cool, I'll go there!". FNV is amazing at this. The Morrowind devs definitely considered this, but they were of course limited by the hardware of their time. So the game is made to evoke this feeling even at small render distances.

But if you then crank them up, you won't have one or two cool landmarks to see, but way too many! You can see this done well in Elden Ring - you can see very far, and the map is big enough to still space out points of interest.

The only way to "fix" this for higher render distances is to rebuild the world with those in mind.

I guess the next generation of open world games will have a much larger scale ... you will be able to stand on a hill and watch miles of procedurally generated landscape populated by ChatGPT powered farmers and bandits.

While that sounds great ... I bet AAA titles will find ways to make that repetitive as hell in the name of providing predictable fun.

Yeah, high enough to see most of Fort Ebon from Vivec and vice-versa is roughly the sweet spot, IMO.

(Or is it Ebonheart? That sounds right.)

I think everyone's first playthrough should be the vanilla game if possible.

There are hi-res texture packs & mesh improvements that are pure wins, even for a first time player, IMO. They don't change the art much, they just make it look way better on a modern screen. And I'd recommend a mod to make plant harvesting more like the later games (there are a few, I think the one I usually use is Herbalism—the vanilla behavior of treating them like containers and not marking which have been harvested simply sucks). Plus the usual unnofficial-patch mod that's basically required for any Bethesda game.

That'd be the extent of the mods I'd recommend to a first timer.

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