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).
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 don’t know if the general strangeness of Vvardenfell could necessarily be attributed to Goodall, but various central themes and dialog certainly could be.
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.
> 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.
(Or is it Ebonheart? That sounds right.)
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
... which means that younger-me totally did two entire playthroughs without ever learning any of those spells, of course. Ouch.
That'd be the extent of the mods I'd recommend to a first timer.
While that sounds great ... I bet AAA titles will find ways to make that repetitive as hell in the name of providing predictable fun.
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.
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.