The Elder Scrolls Online director recently said in an interview that if you made Morrowind today, it would struggle to find an audience. “If you're playing it right now,” he said, “there's no compass, there's no map, the quests are literally like 'go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 steps west'… And if you did that right now, nobody would play it. Very few people would.” So sir, have you heard of a little open-world RPG called Dread Delusion? It's pretty good. And what's more, it added an entirely new area with a giant floating squid creature that has an entire town of citizens living inside its shell — lo and behold —
This “final content update” will add the Cephalok, “a magical creature filled with rare materials, legends tell of some Wikkan who built a fortress inside its shell.” You'll need to have unlocked the airship to get inside the floating beast. Naturally, there will be some new enemies to deal with, but there will also be “powerful, end-game items” like weapons and equipment, as well as “new airship components to further customize your flying craft.”
The update also includes a “hard mode” that will make your attacks and spells cost more stamina and mana to cast, and enemies will also hit harder and attack in groups. Items and materials will also be rarer, according to developers Lovely Hellplace, meaning you'll probably have to be more careful with healing and the like. This all comes after last week's big performance patch, which fixed a bunch of little things like FPS drops when entering new areas.
I admit that it’s not entirely fair to pick TESO director Matt Firor’s quote from Edwin’s latest thoughts on the open-world genre. First, there’s a map And A compass in Dread Delusion. It’s not a particularly clear map (a major ongoing quest involves finding landmarks needed to fill in all the empty spaces for the cartographer’s guild). But it’s a concession for players who want to experience the Morrowindy RPG without getting desperately lost. That aside, Dread Delusion is a game that trusts the player to explore the quirks of its world at their own pace. As Firor’s words imply, it takes an old-school approach that modern open-world games (like those from Bethesda) don’t follow because they’re usually too busy trying to sell to a mass audience.
Dread Delusion doesn't want a broad audience. It wants the kind of people who think mushrooms should be twelve feet tall and shiny. It wants a crowd of perverts who will swear allegiance to a groaning god hanging from the rafters of an abandoned house like a spider's egg sac. It wants a player who will see a giant nautilus floating in the sky and think, “I bet that big boy has something weird inside him.”