In a recent interview, the director of The Elder Scrolls Online said that if you made Morrowind today, it would struggle to find an audience. “If you play that right now,” he said, “there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like ‘go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west’… And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it.” Well sir, have you heard of a little open world RPG called Dread Delusion? It’s pretty good. And what’s more, it has just added a whole new area with – let me see – a giant floating squid creature with an entire town of citizens living inside its shell.
This “final content update” will add the Cephalok, “a magical creature filled with rare materials, where legends tell of some Wikkans who built a castle inside of its shell.” To get inside the floating beast you’ll need to have unlocked the airship. Naturally, there’ll be some new enemies to deal with, but also “powerful, late-game items” like weapons and equipment, plus “new airship components to further customize your flying vessel”.
There’s also a “hard mode” included in the update, which will see your attacks and spells costing more stamina and mana to perform, while enemies will also hit harder and attack in groups. Items and ingredients will also be rarer, say developers Lovely Hellplace, which presumably means you’ll have to be more judicious about healing and such. All this comes after last week’s big performance patch, which fixed a lot of smaller things like FPS drops when entering new regions.
I admit picking on TESO director Matt Firor’s quote from Edwin’s recent musings on the open world genre is not entirely fair. For one thing, there is a map and a compass in Dread Delusion. It’s not a particularly clear map (a big ongoing quest involves finding the landmarks required to fill in all the blank spaces for the cartographer’s guild). But it is one concession to players keen to experience the Morrowindy RPG without getting hopelessly lost. That aside, Dread Delusion is a game that trusts the player to discover the weirdness of its world at their own pace. It takes an old-school approach that modern open world games (like those from Bethesda) don’t follow because, as Firor’s words suggest, they are often preoccupied with selling to a broad audience.
Dread Delusion doesn’t want a broad audience. It wants the kind of people who think mushrooms ought to be twelve feet tall and luminous. It wants an audience of sickos who will pledge allegiance to a moaning god suspended from the rafters of an abandoned house like a sac of spider eggs. It desires a player who will see a giant nautilus floating in the sky and think: “I bet there’s something weird inside that big lad.”