Alright, I’ll say it. I came into The Elder Scrolls and UESP with Morrowind, I’ve looked at Morrowind more often than the other games, and the layout of the Morrowind namespace is something I’m absolutely in love with. If I could have my way, the entire namespace would become the standard for what our location pages should look like.
When you look at the Balmora place page from Morrowind., you get a lovely layout with a banner saying things such as “People”, “Travel”, “Notes”, “Quests”, etc, and the page goes on to describe the town district by district with a plethora of pictures to show off the life of the city and how it looks. The sections below it detail the people of note, detail roads leading into and out of town and where they go to, and the “Places of Note” section briefly taps on the nearest points of interest. Reading the page feels more like a guide than a wall of text, and the layout is clean and, thanks to the nav bar that functions as a table of contents, navigable… Something that can’t be said about the other pages on the newer namespaces, which don’t have a TOC, because it would look out of place with the as-is layout.
The Chorrol page from Oblivion is more in line with a standard article page, and it’s significantly less detailed. It offers a brief mention of the districts in its sole descriptive paragraph, then it notes a varla stone’s location in town and a note of the statue’s resemblence to a real world one. Then the long wall of quests before finishing with the map.
Riften’s page from Skyrim is slightly better, going into better detail about the locations in town, though it’s a solid wall of text that doesn’t have any breaks or any kind of flair to make it easier to read and look at before the standard table of residents and quests.
Don’t get me wrong, the latter pages are functional as-is (or at least nobody has complained about the layout), but what makes these pages interesting to look at? What makes these pages navigable? They are lacking in comparison. When I looked at the Morrowind namespace when I first got into the series, I wanted to learn more, because the contents of the pages were so navigable and the pages helped to bring the towns closer to life. I was able to look at who ran the places, look at what each place was about, learn about the districts in the town, and even more!
I suppose I have no real purpose to pointing this out, and I suspect the manpower (or desire) to revamp a bunch of pages to fit an antiquated style isn’t there, but I just wanted to bring up my bias towards Morrowind and how everything used to work, being one of those “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” guys. The style works in Morrowind, it exists randomly in the Daggerfall namespace, and Arena, I’m too lazy to look at.
Speaking of Daggerfall and the bare namespace, I have half contemplated working at least sporadically on it, though Daggerfall is such a challenging game that it’s hit and miss whether or not I could get through the Privateer’s Hold.
That can be the question that could be answered in the comments or on Twitter when this thing autoposts to it… Am I just a terrible player who can’t do anything competently (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility if you’ve ever seen me game) or is Privateer’s Hold just ridiculous to get through for a lot of people?
