At the tail end of highschool I began following an upcoming MMORPG that promised amazing new gameplay. It would have interesting factions, crafting, a quest system. It was called Atriarch. I'm always shocked that the website is still up (www.Atriarch.com).
Now it is the vapory-est of vaporware, but at the time it had a thriving community of people all dedicated to the slivers of information we'd received about their world. We'd all played games like Everquest, Asheron's Call, or Ultima Online and we could see the potential for more.
Atriarch promised a lot, but more than that was what it was in our heads. It was unmolded clay that we could shape in our heads to be whatever we wanted it to be.
In 2001 the Atriarch devs posted on a forum that they had some spare tickets to E3 and would be willing to let some members of the community have them. I was able to snag two, one for myself and one for my college roommate.
It was a pretty amazing trip. We got to go to the tar pits, see the Griffith Observatory, the walk of fame, the studios, and all the varieties of LA people on the street. My roommate thought he saw Leonard Nimoy drive by at the airport.
We even got to actually visit Atriarch's developers, World Fusion studios, and tour where they were working on the game. I remember it looked like a dentist's office. They took us to lunch with all the developers as well. It must have been pretty cool for them, too, to have a couple of college kids fawning all over them like rock stars.
And then there was E3. The main attraction going in for me was Master of Orion 3. We even snuck into a semi-private demonstration and Q+A for the game.
As we were walking away from that demonstration, through the haze of tears (ok I wasn't crying but it would have been a totally fair reaction) I saw a promotional standie for another upcoming game that I'd never heard of.
It was Morrowind.
In June of 2002 I bought it for myself for my birthday. I played that game for the next year, easily. I never installed any mods either, I just played it over and over again, never finishing it. I always found a new reason to restart and a new path to take to keep it fresh.
I didn't love Morrowind for what it was. In truth it was a clunky, ugly game where people had at most 5 or 6 things to say to you. Much like Atriarch I loved Morrowind for what it could be. For what it could be molded into.
So when Oblivion came out I picked it up immediately. And it broke my heart.
In Morrowind you could fly, in Oblivion you cannot.
In Morrowind your advancement in one faction could limit your involvement in others, in Oblivion you can become the leader of all the factions.
In Morrowind you had to find information and follow it to find your goal. You know, adventure. In Oblivion your HUD takes you directly to whatever you need to do next.
And so on. The same applies for Skyrim as well.
But Oblivion and Skyrim are fine games. If I had played them first I'm sure I would have loved them even more than Morrowind (I'm sure some players of Daggerfall feel the same way about Morrowind). But what they aren't is any sort of advancement from Morrowind in anything but graphics. In Morrowind I saw a sketch of something amazing, but Bethesda have been unwilling or unable to actually improve on that initial sketch.
But all of this is just why Bethesda disappoints me. Tomorrow is a novel chapter day, but on Monday we'll discuss what made me hate them.