Tactical combat. » Forum Post by Ashbery76

Quoting Tyrantissar,

OK, I think I am up to speed. It took my 3 hours to find out how stubborn you people are, think outside the box people.... Why not be open minds a bit, go beyond the fact that there is tactical combat, there is a method you can include that will be SATISFACTORY

Imagine a game that is Tactical, but you still maintain a nice short cinematic that will auto resolve.

Q: HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

Well duh, the tactics are all in the ship designer and what modules you fit on the ship that will be tactical.

Q: Does this mean I get a shitty rock paper scissors system?

**** NO! You guys are so thick headed that you don't realize that all weapons are going to have strengths and weaknesses, including fire rate, damage, and even other factors like ship sizes (fighters) or another similar idea.

Q: Does this mean that rock paper scissors is gone?

Well, I cannot answer that yet, but it is a special part of the series and I believe that it should stay in the game where it belongs. This is what separates Galactic Civilizations with MoO (really funny name BTW, I thought Master of Orion was a game based on cows or something (no offense intended, This is what happens when your competitor lives and your favorite series dies)) Besides, you don't want to alienate your fan base do you?

Q: Well what if I am still too stubborn to accept what this game has to offer?

Well, if you are really mad about the decision they made, then go play something you would like, if you are a founder... I am sorry for your loss, but reality is that there are hundreds of fans with different taste, and I assure you that some people will appreciate what Stardock will give to us. Pat yourself on the back and go somewhere else for helping a group of people get what they want.

Q: But what if I don't want a cinematic?

disable it in the options, like in civilization V on multiplayer most of the community likes animations OFF. I can guarantee that the cinematic experience no matter how much eye candy you throw at a player it WILL lose their appeal because they may get repetitive.

Q: How would somebody win and own everybody in the game?

Well, to be honest every civilization will go for different technologies and there will be strengths and weaknesses for all of them. Find these weaknesses and wipe them out selectively, galactic wide rampages could result in disaster if everybody has a different technologies and ships. keep in mind that the more you use a specific weapon type, the opposing side will always be updating their weapon and defense to defeat you, so you need to do the same.

Q: What other factors would make the combat "interesting"?

Well I requested on a separate page of what I wanted to combat system to be like, and apparently while you were all arguing I was able to get "hints" on what the real combat system will be like. Basically all weapons will have ups and downs. Idk exactly what is in store for us, but lets assume that there will be

A) Rock paper scissors weapons

Weapon cool downs

C) Weapon Power

D) Weapon speed

E) Weapon effectiveness against sizes

F) Fighters/bomber modules with fighter assistance bonuses(weapons+???)

D) Rock paper scissors defense systems

E) Many more I don't have time to think about

Q: Why are they making the system this way?

Have you been paying attention to latest GCIII news? Apparently ship design will be HUGE considering it is top on the priority list, we got big surprises in store. so calm yourselves down and move on to new topics, explore the forums and please suggest things that would help the developers, not confuse them.

*** EDIT< FLAW IN QUESTIONS< MINOR SPELLING ERROR AND MISSING WORD***

If you insist upon being a dick, my advice is perhaps you ought to be the person to, and I quote "Pat yourself on the back and go somewhere else for helping a group of people get what they want.".

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Mods delete this double post please. Still figuring out how to reply/quote people

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Quoting Space Voyager,

reply 276

Quoting jim_viebke, reply 274

Quoting mogthew, reply 273[...] makes this simpler than chess to solve properly, and we HAVE solved chess AI's.

Ah... No we have not. Not even close.

True, we have not solved the AI of anything. Sure the comp can beat me in chess no problem, but that is not due to its intelligence but due to the incredible number of moves done by people much better than me that the program has stored.

There is not a shred of intelligence in that.

While chess has a huge number of moves possible during a match, its rules are essentially simple. An average computer game has much, much more complex rules.

It's painful reading this thread. So many people talking about AI who have absolutely no idea. You don't know about how game logic is calculated and weighed in chess, and you have no idea about how it would be done for a game.

Just like the rubix cube, chess is basically solved. We've created AI's that can beat humans, and it's not through knowing just a sheer amount of player moves. Please actually have some idea what you're talking about before just spouting off. Wow.

It can be done, it can be done well. Whether the devs decide to do it or not is another matter. I think the option should be there, I think tactical combat makes the game feel more interactive, and I feel like the combat viewer was a pathetic anti-climax to research trees. Some of the best feels in MOO came from developing new ships with massive firepower and activating that first attack.

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If you intend to make an argument for tactical combat my advice is to not cite chess, what is arguably the purest form of non-tactical TBS there is.

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

I think the crucial thing for tactical combat is to build it around the expectation that the AI should be competent at it (it is possible to teach them if you do this) and fun for the human player(s). Not fun as in 'lol your ships go boom' but worth watching and participating in.

This may mean that it is not as feature-laden as you would like, but still gives you some kind of adrenaline rush during each battle.

One of the things that I've observed from playing XCOM in multiplayer is that when both sides have similar tactical limits things are more interesting and battles can go either way depending on actions taken. When one side has a massive tactical edge then it rarely matters what the other side does because they are overwhelmed by numerous cheese attacks e.g. mind controol.

Thing is, in GalCiv there tends to always be some sort of mismatch in strength. You rarely get a battle which is so close that it could be considered interesting, it's mostly battles with a clear victor and a clear loser.

That being said, XCOM (single player) does essentially throw you in at the deep end with a bunch of rookies and a hearty slap to the back. You're fighting and (mostly) winning against opponents with superior weapons, and just when you think you've turned the tide and have adapted those weapons to use in your fight, yet nastier opponents await you.

If there's something to take from this, it's that tactical combat in GalCiv should never be just two fleets duking it out predictably. And why should it be? Have ya seen the random events that GalCiv II throws at you?

Imagine that you engage your enemy's fleet in battle, confidently thinking that you have the upper hand, when suddenly the Drengin or the Dread Lords jump in and start attacking both of you. Are you really both going to waste your fleets in a pointless confrontation with missiles slamming into your flanks, or are oyu going to turn and give the newcomers some hot railgun projectiles to swallow?

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Quoting mattiscool555,

reply 304

If you intend to make an argument for tactical combat my advice is to not cite chess, what is arguably the purest form of non-tactical TBS there is.

Not sure if you're trolling or not

Chess - Turn based, 1v1

tactical Combat - Turn based, 1v1

These two criteria are the most important to be able to use reasonably simple algorithms. If they plan on introducing other players into a battle at the same time, this becomes much harder, but very few games do that. My point still remains, chess AI has been around for so long and 1v1 turn based combat can have very similar rules applied to it.

It's all doable. I really hope the devs do this, I enjoyed playing galcv2 but it didn't make it onto my top 4x games list because of the combat viewer. I don't think I'll buy this game if it does not have some element of tactical combat.

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Quoting mogthew,

reply 306

Quoting mattiscool555, reply 304
If you intend to make an argument for tactical combat my advice is to not cite chess, what is arguably the purest form of non-tactical TBS there is.

Not sure if you're trolling or not

Chess - Turn based, 1v1

tactical Combat - Turn based, 1v1

These two criteria are the most important to be able to use reasonably simple algorithms. If they plan on introducing other players into a battle at the same time, this becomes much harder, but very few games do that. My point still remains, chess AI has been around for so long and 1v1 turn based combat can have very similar rules applied to it.

It's all doable. I really hope the devs do this, I enjoyed playing galcv2 but it didn't make it onto my top 4x games list because of the combat viewer. I don't think I'll buy this game if it does not have some element of tactical combat.

People are going to hold out hope on this until it's officially stated but I just don't see it. If anything I could see indirect tactics but I just don't see players controlling ships in any capacity.

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

Quoting mogthew,

reply 306

Quoting mattiscool555,
reply 304

If you intend to make an argument for tactical combat my advice is to not cite chess, what is arguably the purest form of non-tactical TBS there is.

Not sure if you're trolling or not

Chess - Turn based, 1v1

tactical Combat - Turn based, 1v1

These two criteria are the most important to be able to use reasonably simple algorithms. If they plan on introducing other players into a battle at the same time, this becomes much harder, but very few games do that. My point still remains, chess AI has been around for so long and 1v1 turn based combat can have very similar rules applied to it.

It's all doable. I really hope the devs do this, I enjoyed playing galcv2 but it didn't make it onto my top 4x games list because of the combat viewer. I don't think I'll buy this game if it does not have some element of tactical combat.

Not sure if you're trolling or not.

Chess - one piece moved per turn. The different pieces can move in different ways, but that's about it. All pieces have the same hit points, attack and defense power - that is, 1, 1 and 0. Every attack kills the opposing piece.

Tactical combat in a game like GC3 - each ship can move a variable amount (even ships of the same type may have differing engine abilities), using attacks of variable power against defenses of varying nature and then removing non-uniform numbers of hit points. Adding in things like weapon range, miss percentages, and weapon traverse arcs (some people seem to want that, for some reason) and you have programming requirements several orders of magnitude higher than a chess computer.

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Quoting WIllythemailboy,

reply 308

Not sure if you're trolling or not.

Chess - one piece moved per turn. The different pieces can move in different ways, but that's about it. All pieces have the same hit points, attack and defense power - that is, 1, 1 and 0. Every attack kills the opposing piece.

Tactical combat in a game like GC3 - each ship can move a variable amount (even ships of the same type may have differing engine abilities), using attacks of variable power against defenses of varying nature and then removing non-uniform numbers of hit points. Adding in things like weapon range, miss percentages, and weapon traverse arcs (some people seem to want that, for some reason) and you have programming requirements several orders of magnitude higher than a chess computer.

Thank you. Exactly.

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More importantly, since every game of chess uses the exact same pieces in the exact same starting positions, the number of strategies you can execute is limited. In GalCiv, the number of ship designs is limitless. It's just not feasible to make an AI that could match a human player.

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Quoting mattiscool555,

reply 307

People are going to hold out hope on this until it's officially stated but I just don't see it. If anything I could see indirect tactics but I just don't see players controlling ships in any capacity.

I'm pretty sure "if you're expecting to control individual ships as in MOO2, you may be disappointed" is officially stating it. The door has certainly been left open to some kind of additional player involvement in combat, but it sounds like all-out tactical battles of the sort some people want are definitely not happening.

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Quoting Antilurker77,

reply 310

More importantly, since every game of chess uses the exact same pieces in the exact same starting positions, the number of strategies you can execute is limited.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

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Quoting deducter,

reply 57

I am cautiously optimistic about GalCiv3, having enjoyed the previous two titles. However, I am concerned about the general trend of feature creep these days in game design. Some strategy games try so hard to please all of their fans and add feature after feature, with sprawling tech trees, fully customizable ships with dozens of components, RPG elements of heroes and leveling up ships/commanders. These is a lot of emphasis on freedom and allowing the player to do whatever he wants. This is often justified with the logic that more choices are inherently better. But really, are more choices necessarily better, or "deeper"?

I am wary because inevitably a lot of these so-called choices are merely illusions; dozens of the options are frankly not worth pursing, and only a few builds are acceptable. That a game designer can't make dozens of choices viable is not really his fault, since this is a superhuman task that is just not realistic to complete. Rather, the sin is in the attempt to please everyone by keeping meaningless choices as part of the game.

Take a game like Diablo 3, which pre-release was advertised to contain millions of possible build combinations. It turns out there's really only a few builds for each class that are viable. So millions of those so-called builds were so inefficient that players never ended up using them.

Players often demand to play the game their way. They also want to have success regardless of their choices. But if both of this is true, if all choices lead to the same outcome, then it just means that the choices are merely cosmetic. Choices that are merely cosmetic don't result in a strategy game. For a RPG, I don't think there's anything wrong with a game with only a few classes, as long as the playstyles of each class are sufficiently distinct. Keep the system simple, and make the choices meaningful.

I very well may be offending the "grognards" of the 4x crowd, but I don't think there's anything inherently interesting about being ordering your ships into such and such a formation, or firing their weapons at such and such range. I certainly don't imagine myself as some sort of Ender Wiggins, nor do I have any interest in that role. Designing a combat system with many options alone doesn't make the combat deep. Games like chess, bridge, or poker are fairly simple, yet they are very hard to master.

I'd rather see no tactical combat than a tactical combat system done poorly. My personal preference is no tactical combat, since in games of this type the mid-late game inevitably becomes bogged down in these mandatory battles. Auto-resolve is often cited as a choice for players who don't want to do the tactical battles. But is that really a choice? If the outcome is always worse, which is the standard for this type of game, then it's merely an illusion of choice. Who wants to intentionally gimp themselves by having a worse result? And needless to say, if the outcome is always better, no one would play the tactical battles anyway. The real reason to include auto-resolve is when the tactical battles cease to matter. This is usually because one fleet massively outclasses another. But by that point, the player has already won the strategic game, so, it's just checkmate in x moves. Not really interesting.

There's always the temptation to add more and more. More ships, more weapons, more tactics, more planets, more aliens. Perhaps it might be wise to, on occasion, step back and just keep the game's choices simple, but meaningful.

I'd much rather see GalCiv3 overcome the problem that has plagued all 4x strategy games: the problem of the snowball effect of exponential growth, such that the game is won in the early/mid period and late game is a foregone conclusion. Each game period should be meaningful and challenging. But this problem is not easily overcome, and solving it would require much thought and hard work. I'm much more interested in whether the designers have put any thought into this area.

This is a great post; very insightful!

This guy knows what's up.

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Wintersong

Join Date 07/2006

+235

Quoting ParagonRenegade,

reply 313

This is a great post; very insightful!

This guy knows what's up.

That guy assumes that tactical combat would be implemented poorly while supposing that the strategic map would be implemeted perfectly. Like if Stadock couldn't (theoretically) screw the stratregy layer. No one wants a poorly implemented tactical combat as no one wants a poorly implemeted strategy layer. 2+2=4.

Apparently, there is no ground for "Doing tactical combat or autoresolve has similar results in average" or "I play the tactical battles that I choose to" or any other case that it's not "Either tactical is so good that it's a must or it's so bad that you must ignore it". We cannot even consider a check in game creation in which you either play all of them as tactical or none at all. Because, again, it's asumed a poorly implemented tactical system. Curious because the only way to implement good tactical combats is to actually develop them. And the more experience you have about it, the better you can develop/implement one. If Frogoby were to create a new 4xTBS by himself now, he would do a better job that when he did the OS/2 GalCiv (and newer techs do also help).

Not saying all this to ask for tactical combat. I don't play tactical in MoO2 and in Master of Magic, it would depend on the armies involved. But sad to see so much "Tactical == Anathema". Should be strongly streamline GalCiv? The less elements to it, the more meaningful we can make present ones. Let's start by getting rid of espionage, then diplomacy (talk about systems exploitable by players), then...

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I would ASSUME it would have tactical combat, ala Legendary Heroes style.

Having a short video, with auto resolve cheapens the experience.

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

Let's take an example from popular sci-fi.

Suppose that your enemy starts teleporting nuclear warheads into your warships. It's a cheap tactic, but so is finding some kind of way to jam the teleport so that the warhead can't be deployed. Therefore the playing field quickly becomes level again.

For tactical combat to retain its freshness then, there needs to be some sort of tactics room which allows you to develop new ways of gaining the upper hand that your enemy hasn't yet found a way to counter, and similarly find a way to counter the tactics which they have used.

When a particular tactic stops working you'll get a notification and it'll be greyed out for that particular enemy unless one of your new tactics is to counter the jamming code to make your old tactic work again.

Of course this is in the simplest possible terms, but you get the idea. Tactical combat should not be about running the same play over and over again, it should be the essential spice that keeps battles interesting.

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Quoting ParagonRenegade,

reply 313

I'd much rather see GalCiv3 overcome the problem that has plagued all 4x strategy games: the problem of the snowball effect of exponential growth, such that the game is won in the early/mid period and late game is a foregone conclusion. Each game period should be meaningful and challenging. But this problem is not easily overcome, and solving it would require much thought and hard work. I'm much more interested in whether the designers have put any thought into this area.

I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. But, I would prefer that it not be accomplished simply through the introduction of random events (the Jagged Knife comes to mind as an event intended to upend the then-current strategic balance) but instead through more competitive AI. I don't claim to be an expert on any of this so I have no ideas on how that can be done.

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

The Jagged Knife fails because it's so much of a wrench that players often reload. If it was like the other colony breakaway events, growing slowly over time, then the human player(s) would have a choice - combat the new threat or let it erode their opponents and soften them up.

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Lucky_Jack

Join Date 01/2002

+62

Quoting qrtxian,

reply 311

I'm pretty sure "if you're expecting to control individual ships as in MOO2, you may be disappointed" is officially stating it. The door has certainly been left open to some kind of additional player involvement in combat, but it sounds like all-out tactical battles of the sort some people want are definitely not happening.

When I see "if you're expecting to control individual ships as in MOO2, you may be disappointed", I see it as "GC3 will not be MOO2". Nothing more, nothing less. To me it leaves the whole field wide open. And Brad has demonstrated an uncanny ability to entertainingly surprise us in the past. Hey, maybe he has something even better in mind.

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Quoting Wintersong,

reply 314

That guy assumes that tactical combat would be implemented poorly while supposing that the strategic map would be implemeted perfectly. Like if Stadock couldn't (theoretically) screw the stratregy layer. No one wants a poorly implemented tactical combat as no one wants a poorly implemeted strategy layer. 2+2=4.

Apparently, there is no ground for "Doing tactical combat or autoresolve has similar results in average" or "I play the tactical battles that I choose to" or any other case that it's not "Either tactical is so good that it's a must or it's so bad that you must ignore it". We cannot even consider a check in game creation in which you either play all of them as tactical or none at all. Because, again, it's asumed a poorly implemented tactical system. Curious because the only way to implement good tactical combats is to actually develop them. And the more experience you have about it, the better you can develop/implement one. If Frogoby were to create a new 4xTBS by himself now, he would do a better job that when he did the OS/2 GalCiv (and newer techs do also help).

Not saying all this to ask for tactical combat. I don't play tactical in MoO2 and in Master of Magic, it would depend on the armies involved. But sad to see so much "Tactical == Anathema". Should be strongly streamline GalCiv? The less elements to it, the more meaningful we can make present ones. Let's start by getting rid of espionage, then diplomacy (talk about systems exploitable by players), then...

The thing is, diplomacy, espionage and the such are absolutely essential to the strategic aspects of the game, otherwise known as the reason people play this game. Nobody play Galactic Civilizations for the pulse-pounding, visceral combat; we play it for the management, planning, number crunching and broad-scale military maneuvers. The only tactics that even really factor into the game (at present) are considerations of unit placement relative to enemy positions and fleet compositions, with a few other minor exceptions. Adding full-blown tactical combat would detract from these other aspects by putting so much onus on the execution instead of the setup (what the game is currently about), cheapening the remainder of the game . "That guy" I quoted didn't even need to bring up the unavoidable trichotomy of suck to make his point.

Beyond that, tactical battles would consume both development resources and my personal computer resources, doing something that is largely irrelevant to the overall game and not particularly well-implemented into most other 4x games. This may seem anathema to some here, but I feel even MoO2's tactical combat was rather... woeful. I'll reiterate; If a game features strategy and management to the degree most 4X titles (ES, MoO, GC...) do, then any sort of tactical combat begins to divert attention from the focus, giving you a diluted and lesser experience overall for the small benefit of one segment of the game.

:3

Of course, this is all my opinion, and I may not be expressing it correctly due to English being my second language, but there you have it.

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Quoting ParagonRenegade,

reply 320

[...] The thing is, diplomacy, espionage and the such are absolutely essential to the strategic aspects of the game, otherwise known as the reason people play this game. Nobody play Galactic Civilizations for the pulse-pounding, visceral combat; we play it for the management, planning, number crunching and broad-scale military maneuvers. [...]

I think that was very well expressed.

If I may add my own opinion, Sins of a Solar Empire is a good game, but it doesn't belong inside of Galactic Civilizations.

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Quoting ParagonRenegade,

reply 320

I may not be expressing it correctly due to English being my second language, but there you have it.

Nope - nice job, if you are not already, go for a Translator Job

The world has moved on since the infamous comment by Henry Ford in 1922:

"the customer can have any color as long as it is black..... "

I hope Civilization & GalCiv continue to hold the line, and not get swamped by the RTS flood - there is life after instant gratification

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qrtxian

Join Date 03/2010

+30

Quoting Lucky Jack,

reply 319

Quoting qrtxian, reply 311I'm pretty sure "if you're expecting to control individual ships as in MOO2, you may be disappointed" is officially stating it. The door has certainly been left open to some kind of additional player involvement in combat, but it sounds like all-out tactical battles of the sort some people want are definitely not happening.

When I see "if you're expecting to control individual ships as in MOO2, you may be disappointed", I see it as "GC3 will not be MOO2". Nothing more, nothing less. To me it leaves the whole field wide open. And Brad has demonstrated an uncanny ability to entertainingly surprise us in the past. Hey, maybe he has something even better in mind.

Where you're seeing "GC3 will not be MOO2", I'm seeing this direct quote:

"Those who imagine fleet battles that play like MOO2 (i.e. where you're micro managing individual units) will be less happy."

Of course, my personal opinions are undoubtedly coming into play here: there's simply no way in which adding true tactical combat to GalCiv will make me happy, "surprises" or not. But I just don't see how anyone can look at that and expect real-time micromanagement of ships in combat, which is what I'm most against.

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Lucky_Jack

Join Date 01/2002

+62

I am merely boiling the statement down to its roots. I am noticing that Brad is saying that there will be no fleet battles in GC3 that look or feel like the MOO2 fleet battles. I am taking that statement very, very literally, and recognizing that he is not saying "there will be no tactical combat in GC3, but saying "there will be no MOO2 like tactical combat in GC3".

Other comments about MOO2:

MOO2 was turn based, not real time. Also, I remember a lot of controversy over MOO going multiplayer, but do I incorrectly remember that as MOO3?

MOO2 was a strategy game that also had tactical ship combats imbedded into it. I loved MOO2, but I can't get it to play reasonably on Windows 8, even in DosBox 0.74. It ran fine on Vista in a DosBox.

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Quoting ParagonRenegade,

reply 320

The thing is, diplomacy, espionage and the such are absolutely essential to the strategic aspects of the game, otherwise known as the reason people play this game.

Espionage as implemented in GCII was about as essential to the strategic elements of the game as mercury is to your health. It was little more than a money sink that provided little worthwhile information about your opponents and carried an excessive price-tag, and which was little more than a nuisance in most instances (except for the spies spawn everywhere event, which was a pain rather than a nuisance).

As for the actual subject of the thread: in my opinion, an implementation of tactical combat which is fun is superior to autoreslve and the little movie that played in single-player mode. As long as there is a functional autoresolve that normally does not produce significantly worse results than the player would attain by playing the battle themselves (assuming that the player is of "average" skill), then I don't have a problem with using autoresolve when I'm not inclined to control the battle myself (e.g. 20 battles in a turn - I might pick one or two, but I probably wouldn't control all of them, or a 'battle' of 200 state of the art battleships against a handful of obsolete fighters).

Concerns about multiplayer don't bother me since I'm not interested in it, but I fail to see why you couldn't have a game setup option that requires all combats to be autoresolved, or which limits the players to one or two manually controlled battles per turn with a configurable time limit (configured during game setup) for each battle, which as far as I can tell would make the issue with people taking forever resolving each and every little fight that comes up into a nonissue. These are options that games have had for years already, and while it may not be the absolute easiest thing in the world to program in, it certainly isn't the hardest.

Regardless, neither the presence nor the lack of tactical combat would materially affect whether or not I give the game a chance, as whether or not the game is fun isn't dependent on the presence or lack thereof. I enjoyed Age of Empires, an RTS with real-time tactical combat, Sword of the Stars, a TBS with real-time tactical combat, Warlock: Master of the Arcane, a TBS with an implementation of autoresolve, and Civilizations II, a TBS with a different implementation of autoresolve - as long as the game itself is fun and enjoyable, its combat mechanics don't matter to me. Nor would an announcement regarding either the presence or the lack of tactical combat signal the end of the world and the ruination of the game to me, unlike it appears it would to some of the people commenting in this thread.

When I get a game which is a sequel to a game that I've played before, I hope for an improvement in the feel of that game. The way GCII handled combat is one thing I felt could be improved about the game, and I don't think that changes there would significantly impact the feel of the rest of the game unless the developers decided that they were going to change the focus of the game from the strategic side to the tactical side, which I feel is rather doubtful. On the other hand, it's also not the only thing that could be improved, and it's certainly not essential to me that it receives changes. What would disappoint me is if GCIII turns out to be GCII but with 'better' graphics (and which would have 'better' graphics would be a matter of opinion - what new games have isn't always an improvement, at least not to everyone; maybe I'm unusual, but I like the graphics of Morrowind better than those of Oblivion, and no, I'm not referring to modded versions of either Morrowind or Oblivion, nor am I only referring to the appearance of the characters), because that's not what I'm looking for in a game. Pretty visuals are nice, but they're worthless if the game isn't fun, and they aren't worth the cost of a new game if they are the only difference between the new game and a game I already have.

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