2 of my favorites of all time. Final Fantasy VIII and Morrowind.
Final Fantasy VIII, to my knowledge, never once tells you that enemy levels scale. This wouldn’t be a problem if you never grinded fights (for exp, AP, items, etc). I think the intention was that you would never need to grind so you never would (the game is actually super easy). But people do grind, and you can level up very quickly if you want to.
Morrowind just drops you into the world, for better or worse. There are some prompts to familiarize you to menus. But that’s it. Most of the basic functions are self explainable. Except fatigue. Fatigue affects everything you do. And you won’t realize that it’s the reason whatever you’re trying to do isn’t working. Most players get frustrated and quit because they can’t hit anything with their weapon, not realizing it’s because their stamina bar is drained.
Morrowind was on another level compared to modern open world games. Map markers? Nah, fuck you. You get old world directions like “follow the road south east out of town and take a left at the fork then turn right at the crazy broken Dwarven machine and you should find the dungeon my brother went exploring”.
Then the main story quest giver tells me to “come back after two moons have passed” to continue… I thought that meant two MONTHS. Left the dude at level like 3 or 4 and came back a walking God of death because I nearly completed all guilds side quests in 2 months… Learned years later he just wanted me to wait 2 fucking days.
2 of my favorites of all time. Final Fantasy VIII and Morrowind.
Final Fantasy VIII, to my knowledge, never once tells you that enemy levels scale. This wouldn’t be a problem if you never grinded fights (for exp, AP, items, etc). I think the intention was that you would never need to grind so you never would (the game is actually super easy). But people do grind, and you can level up very quickly if you want to.
Morrowind just drops you into the world, for better or worse. There are some prompts to familiarize you to menus. But that’s it. Most of the basic functions are self explainable. Except fatigue. Fatigue affects everything you do. And you won’t realize that it’s the reason whatever you’re trying to do isn’t working. Most players get frustrated and quit because they can’t hit anything with their weapon, not realizing it’s because their stamina bar is drained.
Morrowind was on another level compared to modern open world games. Map markers? Nah, fuck you. You get old world directions like “follow the road south east out of town and take a left at the fork then turn right at the crazy broken Dwarven machine and you should find the dungeon my brother went exploring”.
Then the main story quest giver tells me to “come back after two moons have passed” to continue… I thought that meant two MONTHS. Left the dude at level like 3 or 4 and came back a walking God of death because I nearly completed all guilds side quests in 2 months… Learned years later he just wanted me to wait 2 fucking days.
That explains a lot of things! I couldn’t get into Morrowind for this very reason