When he prompted the "game" to 'board the uptown train' and one just magically materialized from behind the wall I was like "Wait a second, this is just AI dungeon"

All of these things sounds nice in isolation, cool even. But they compound so quickly, so aggressively that by week two or so you're completely overwhelmed. I tried starting new maps a few times but once I got to that point I quit again out of sheer fatigue.

Every level on your hero you can pick a skill like usual. But these skills have subskills that do special things and some of the skills are necessary to upgrade you class. Even more decisions.

They also added "law points" that you can use to spend on a skill tree-like thing that contains global upgrades. Each town you capture gives you more of these points which just gives you more decisions to make.

They changed the spellbook so that you need to unlock spells by spending a resource, you can also unlock new levels of each spell. That means that when you upgrade your mages guild, you suddenly have around 8-10 decisions to make. Multiply that by the level of your mages guild.

In Olden Era, it feels like every choice you make leads to 5 different, new decision points. Every unit have three different variants and you're not locked into one particular variant when upgrading the dwelling, like the old games. You can freely swap upgrade variant on every stack. On every hero.

In the older heroes games the pacing of the game was mainly controlled by the frequency of gaining new towns. At which point you had a bunch of new choices to make. In between those moments you just had basic gameplay choices (where do I want to go, what do I pick up etc.).

Yeah, I'm just panning a texture. The UV distortion makes it look like it's directional. I suspect it's an old trick, I've seen it in some older games.

Thanks! I wouldn't call the art photoreal but not stylized either. Some middle ground between the two.

This is all you need to do:

#gamedev

Moving from visual scripting to code is not that much of a hassle since the thinking is the same. It's just a different medium, is how I think about it.

I'd say stick with it until you get to a point where you realize the things you need are not exposed, at which point you probably need to switch.

The thing that makes the elder scrolls so interesting though is that unlike most fantasy where the past is the reality, in the elder scrolls the history is weaved into the fiction at it's core in such a way that the history becomes the reality, rather than the past. That's really cool.

I think that's why it has such strong staying power. Because despite all of the crazy shit in the games it still succeeds in allowing you to accept the reality way better than even some more stale, low fantasy settings that by all accounts should be easier to accept as plausible.