being a skilled sneaky person
casting invisibility
wearing 100% chameleon clothes
calm spell

@icedquinn
Question 1: does calm work on all enemy types?
Question 2: wouldn't you have to recast calm over and over again? Wouldn't sneaking be easier?

I've never had a playthrough were I focused on illusion, so I've never managed to have calm/frenzy spells that would be higher levels than what I was fighting.

@alyx illusion is great fun except for later TES games hamstring it by tying everything to fixed level caps.

this kind of thing is why 'caster level + x' used to be a thing.

@alyx i want to say in oblivion this is circumvented through enemy level caps and being able to use the spell creator to create higher level illusion spells (at greater costs.)

in skyrim gg no re since there's no spell creator and you reach a point where there are never any higher level illusion spells to work with.

@icedquinn
Yeah, in Oblivion they really want you to use the spell creator, but it's still pretty bad, cause it takes awhile until you get admitted to the University. So there's still a good chance you outlevel your calm spell if do any other side quests instead of being not laser focused on the mage guild stuff.

@alyx i'm just watching someone do oblivion rn and he's doing all the meta optimization for levelling up. it's not a part of the game i miss tbh.

never finished skyrim either. always got bored and it felt like the character diversity was significantly less than even oblivion

@icedquinn
Peak roleplay diversity was apparently in Daggerfall. Things have been getting simplified since then. Skyrim has almost reached being a generic action-adventure game with rpg elements, instead of being a full on rpg.

@alyx daggerfall had a very involved enchanting and spellmaking system. there was a whole set of certain clothes held different levels of enchant and there were bonuses and penalties that controlled the costs against the threshold (but also the coins to buy it) so you could end up with woozy clothes that only work during mid-day

i didn't really get in to daggerfall though. morrowind was the first one i played until my cd exploded in a faulty disk drive.

i couldn't tell you if there is a market for these old style games. i would guess some people still care because we have things like Wasteland and ATOM going at the old formulas.

@icedquinn @alyx There is enough market to build a free implementation in Unity. It's great!

@xyfdi @icedquinn
Daggerfall Unity is quite an achievement, especially for a dev team of 1. But OpenMW is still more awesome imo, especially with the multiplayer mod.

@alyx @xyfdi isn't openmorrowind very close to feature complete i haven't looked at it in years but when i last checked they almost had the whole game playable