Redguard was released before Morrowind and it was a terrible game that had late 1600s style golden age of piracy ships, cannons and gunpowder weapons that they never showed again in any other games.

I haven't played much Square in a very long time and never played much of FF7(didn't have a PS so I tried it later). I think a huge part of the problem with Square is they decided increasingly to be about "experiences" at the expense of making games. We all know Spirts Within of course but what you mentioned is more the slow creep of that idea.

FF1 is a dungeon crawler (with an overworld) for the most part with enough plot to keep you killing Imps x 5. Gradually they added more plot as installments went on. They also reinvented stuff (yes unlinked stories but also new systems) constantly which means of course that FF is going to mean something a little different to everyone.

Where they seem to have gone wrong is when they reinvented the franchise to be more about telling me the story then about me playing the story. There are positive and negative aspects to each approach but that's where they lost me. I also hate the art style after FF6 for what it's worth. Amano just resonated with me more.

Well yeah, so was Battlespire, and both games were bad. They were spin off action adventure games, not traditional rpgs like the main series, even though the newer games have more in common with Redguard and Battlespire than they do with Morrowind or Daggerfall.

I used to be a big Team17 fan, bur since I have seen how they treat their games on GOG, my admiration has ... diminished.

Also Deep End Games will never see any money from me again. I backed "Perception" and we all know what happened to that game on gog.

Night Dive behave like vultures, feasting on carcasses of long gone so called "abandonware" titles. Or maybe necromancers is more appropriate term, as they re-animate them as "zombies" for sale. A few of their titles I have been glad to see resurrected, and they've done those few well. The rest are "zombies" indeed.

"Dove Tail" also did this with "Flight Sim X" on Steam. They left FSX in the unfinished state that Microsoft left it in when they gave up on it, not coding a single bytes worth of fixing it up, and just collected as many of it's old DLCs as possible (1000's of them valuing at £100k+ in value) and shoved them alongside it, for bloated prices.

"Rockstar" are another, thanks to their "Sharkcards". Simple as. They've allegedly made a billion in sales of these, which only require them generating and sending a code that can be redeemed in GTA-V Online. Likely why there is no GTA VI yet, and probably never will be. It allows them to only need keep adding new stuff to keep it fresh, and then they can milk fortunes from GTA-V Online forever. Why go to the expense of money and effort on making a whole new next generation GTA that would require even bigger maps, better GFX, more work when they can make "money for nothing" instead?

Then there is the curse of "DLC Dysentry". Armed Assault 3 is an example of a game I bought with high expectation, then realised what was going on with their DLC policies, and I'm left with a "white elephant" that is utter garbage empty of any real content, unplayable, and even barred from using 3rd party mods, unless I spend £500 on all it's DLCs!

GOG themselves are also allowing their willpower to resist such evils to weaken in the face of increasing pressure to force such evils upon us by the games industry, an industry getting ever more and more against it's own customers. Us.

Thing is, the way I see it, skills that were in Daggerfall that were cut for Morrowind tend to overlap heavily with skills that were rather pointless in Daggerfall (if they even worked at all). At least Morrowind, unlike Daggerfall, doesn't have any non-functional skills.

On the other hand, Morrowind did make conventional magic (as opposed to item cast magic) too weak later on, not to mention there's still the problem that high level spells, while more difficult to cast than lower level ones, don't give extra skill XP to compensate for the higher difficulty and cost.

FF3 is an evolution of FF1's system, and FF5 an evolution of FF3. But then, after refining the system in FF5, it was completely dropped from the main series. (Note: I don't consider FF11 and FF14 to be part of the main series because they're a different genre, and I'm also not looking at sequels like FFX-2.)

FF4 didn't bother with an interesting growth system. FF2, on the other hand, was like many second games of the era, departing from the rest of the series (see Zelda 2 and Castlevania 2 for other examples, as well as Fire Emblem Gaiden). (I think that FF2 could reasonably be called SaGa 0.)

I agree with this, and it's a problem common in modern-ish JRPGs in general.

(Incidentally, FF6 has this problem until you get the second airship, at which point the game opens up and the story finally gets out of the way. FF7 has the same problem, except that the game never opens up.)

I also understand that Team17 often says and does a lot of stupid things, even for a Yorkshire dev house.

Eee by gum I remember one un' their Amiga 500 side scroll shtmups from 1991...... can't even remember t' title now. Bit of an R-Type clone it were.

My guess is you mean Project-X, but there were so many side scrollers back then ... not even R-Type was very original. It was one of the first successful side scrollers on a home computer however. Most side scrollers before were only available on arcade machines.
Among their most famous Amiga games are also the Alien Breed series and Superfrog.

Here's a collection of Team17's Amiga games.
http://www.gametronik.com/site/fiche/amiga_cd32/Team17%20Anthology%20V1.2/

This post gave me the urge to try out Daggerfall Unity, it's just a shame that it's the only engine reimplementation that uses closed source Unity as far as I know.

OpenTESArena, OpenMW, Arx Liberatis (for Arx Fatalis a game like Ultima Underworld but with mouse gesture spell casting) etc are all open source.

I hate bethesda

DaggerXL was the other major source port, but it was closed source as well.

Yes, that was it, "Project X". I had another one called "Z-Out". Christ, you thought the old Amiga R-Type was hard, well "Z-Out" was just plain stupid, not likely anyone anywhere in the world has ever completed it without cheats. Even with invulnerabity cheats on, you could sort of count how many "lives" you would have used up completing it, and that was in the tens of thousands.

Theyve had nothing to do with Yorkshire