Like most people here, I was eagerly awaiting Skyrim. For whatever reason, I am struggling to get into it, and I keep thinking of Morrowind. Has anyone gone back to Morrowind since starting Skyrim?

I want to make the pilgrimage of Seven Graces, stroll through the Ascadian Isles, beat someone over the head with a walking stick, etc...

I don't think you can state "like most people here," not unless you took a poll. My guess (and that's all it is!) is that as this is being posted in the Morrowind forums, chances are many people haven't migrated. After all, if they haven't left for Oblivion, chances are the hype for Skyrim didn't push them out, either.

I've got Skyrim, played perhaps 4 hours. It's pretty, but I find it boring. There's very little to do compared to Morrowind, the environment is dull and depressing, and while I really like the idea of eavesdropping on real conversations (something actually promised for the original KotR), the lack of spellmaking, advanced character creation, lengthy quests, and individually defined dungeons saps my interest. I'm not saying 1) I won't play it, or that 2) everybody else who plays it is foolish, because neither is true. But I've got a great Morrowind setup with plenty of mods and lots of features, and I find the earlier ES game more to my tastes.

Each to their own, however. And I wouldn't fault anybody else for differing with me on this.

Yeah, Skyrim just doesn't do it for me either, realized this after playing 30+ hours , with all my morrowind mods it looks prettier in many areas anyway

I don't know, I'm in love with Morrowind but Skyrim has a lot to offer. There is no way it is better then Morrowind (so far) as far as I've seen.

Skyrim is a meh type of game. Its neither here nor there.

That is why after finishing the main quest I am, like most on this forum, going back home.To the east.To Morrowind. Honestly if the Tamriel Rebuilt guys ever manage to finish all of mainland Morrowind I will never play a new Elder Scrolls game, save for just testing it out. Morrowind is, and will always be home for me.

Skyrim, eh, not so much. I said this many years ago when Oblivion came out: This game is like a really hot blond chick - pretty and dumb.

Thinking of going back to Morrowind as well, if I can't get a decent melee Nord going on next on Skyrim. With my sneaky Argonian, no-one never notices me anymore if I'm sneaking, and that's becoming pretty boring. Somehow Morrowind seems the most balanced of all the ES games. Or maybe it's just me and my fanglasses. 8)

I kill dragons with 5 hits on master difficulty with my warrior. FUS TROLOLOLOL. If the game is unbalanced as hell I'm sure as hell going to exploit its stupidity just so that I don't have to suffer through annoyances.

Anyways after MQ in Skyrim is done for me, I'm back onto Morrowind, at least until some DLCs/Expansion for Skyrim comes out.

going back to Morrowing too, if just to console myself a bit. they took so much out of the game for Skyrim i just loose interest, have so many complaints about skyrim i won't even bother trying to list them.. shame as i was looking forward to this game for years, don't think i will be buying the next one to come out, they have gone so far from the spirit of the games they started with Daggerfall / Morrowind, i don't think there is a way back for them.. maybe time to look for a new, smaller games developer trying to get into the PC market..

What?

I've played Morrowind for the last seven/eight years and don't plan on stopping any time soon. That said, Skyrim's longest quests are no shorter than Morrowind's longest, the dungeons are far more unique and "individually defined", and I can't even understand why you'd say there's little to do compared to Morrowind. Four hours has given you a skewed version of Skyrim...

Also, http://www.schulzjewelry.com/Beyond3D/Skyrim/Blackreach%202.png.

So let us replace "lack of lengthy quests" with "lack of sheer number and variety in type of lengthy quests" from the beginning of the game. I'll still never forget the visit-every-shrine quest from Morrowind, with only vague book hints in some cases of where to find them. And of course, no compass, directional pointers, or spells that magically show your exact path.


I could have been clearer--I will be, now. In Morrowind, each dungeon had a sort of mini-plot going. Creatures were chosen for it according to a large series of differing reasons. You might find eight named characters, six named thieves and two named warriors, guarding a pack of six slaves. Or a renegade mage and her pet atronachs. Or just a wolf pack and a few human skeletons. Or a tomb, with the odd skeleton or two, or a place crawling with mummies, or any number of other arrangements. In Skyrim, things are just in the dungeons, usually (though not always) without a specific purpose. Got it cleared? Miraculously, more will show up in a few days. I suppose we can blame travel agents. Morrowind was the way it was, though, in response to complaints that Daggerfall's dungeons felt very generic and cookie cutter--which they mostly are. Skyrim, like Oblivion, is a reaction to a desire to get the hack-and-slash Diablo/Sacred players involved. Nothing wrong with that. It makes more money for gamesas. But it does mean generic, reflling dungeons, as opposed to unique ones.


And in my first four Morrowind hours, I'd barely begun to scratch the surface of the game, and realized that fact. I really liked those distinctive dungeons in Morrowind, the far more carefully developed landscaping, the three Houses at odds with one another, the numerous styles of architecture, the two temples and four religious paths to join (3 for the Imperial temple, 1 for the Dummer), upgradeable alchemy equipment, etc. Want to disagree with me? Fine; as I said, this is a matter of opinion. I feel no need to argue that your views aren't right--for you. Want to get into an argument that only your view is correct? You might want to find someone else, since I have no interest in that.

Great image you linked to. But I've seen no one suggest that's typical. What I've seen of Skyrim--and read of it--so far doesn't lead me believe it it possesses the visual variety in terrain, architecture, or plant life in Skyrim that Morrowind has.

I've got to at least provide you with one example of a dungeon in Skyrim with a great backstory. It might be a bit spoilerish.

Ok, so you go into this Dwemer ruin buried in the snow and find a Khajiit talking to himself. He'll attack you. Next to him is a dead Khajiit lying on a bedroll with a journal next to him. In this journal, you'll see that they're brothers and they volunteered to uncover this ruin. You also find out that the Khajiit is suffering from Skooma withdrawal, and that there've been several disappearences within the rest of the crew. You go on and it's your average Dwemer ruin with centurions and all. There are at least two or three other journals from other missing crew members scattered around with backstory information. Finally, after you think you're done with the dungeon, you'll find a large descending staircase that opens up into a huge cavern (the one I linked before). And I can't stress this enough: it's huge. It's also dark (pitch black in some places), with floating mushrooms all over the place. There's a scattering of Dwemer buildings and monsters around here, each with their own purpose. When you come to a specific building for the quest, you'll discovered a skeleton lying in a huge puzzle room. He's got a journal, which explains that he's trapped in there (too many falmer and dwemer constructs), and he's absolutely obsessed with solving the puzzle. So you solve the puzzle and achieve your goal.

Point is, dungeons in Skyrim have backstories. Perhaps not as many as Morrowind (and even in Morrowind, not all of them were particularly unique), but they're there, and they're awesome.

Also, you can turn your quest marker/s on and off as you so please.

I'm not trying to say my opinion is better/more valid, I just think you gave up on Skyrim too quickly.

The dungeon description you provided does sound great, but as you pointed out, it's only true of a few. Morrowind set out to make each of several hudnred dungeons individual, from small to large. It makes a difference to me; clearly it doesn't, to you. And that's fine.


Please show me where I wrote that I'd given up on playing Skyrim. I remarked, "There's very little to do compared to Morrowind," and I explained why. Doesn't mean that Skyrim isn't a valid game in its own right, and some people love it; and that their experience of it is just as valid as mine. I find it good in some respects, very annoying (that UI) in others, a less compelling game than Morrowind that I will keep playing now and then in small doses. I suspect it will be much improved if the construction set allows for really deep modding. That will be worth seeing.

When I said "give up on Skyrim", I wasn't under the impression you were going to stop playing it. I just think you wrote it off as "not as good as Morrowind" too quickly.

Again, I neither said nor implied that. I wrote in effect in first post, "Skyrim's a fine game, and so is Morrowind, but for me, these things in Skyrim make it far less interesting than Morrowind." It would be just as easy I'm sure for someone else to write, "Morrowind's a fine game, and so is Skyrim, but for me, these things in Morrowind make it far less interesting than Skyrim." People weight different features as more or less important in a given game, so a person who prefers Skyrim is just as right as I am. That said, I know what I like best, what's important to me. Skyrim's missing some of the things I really consider essential in an ES title, as it stands. And there were several others I could mention, like a decent UI, but won't. Suffice to say, vanilla Skyrim just doesn't have it for me, no matter how much it does for you.

Which is frankly fine. It would be a dull world in which everybody thought and felt alike.

I just turned Skyrim off in the middle of a quest. I can't take it anymore - I've completely lost interest. It's so bland and broken in so many ways.

I think I'll be starting up a new Morrowind character soon. Maybe a thief that dabbles in alchemy...

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I just dusted off my old Xbox. I'm starting up a Temple pilgrim.

I don't know why people fall into the trap of saying better than Morrowind or nothing. Morrowind has a great deal of nostalgia for many of us and nothing will probably compare. Just because something isn't as good as Morrowind doesn't mean it isn't inherently good.

I have played Skyrim for 6 hours since it came out.
I have played Morrowind 3 times as much in the same time frame.

That might be a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? Morrowind did a great job, but there are still a good number of ancestral tombs in Morrowind that are fairly generic, nothing special. Same for egg mines. And some daedric shrines are nothing more than a room with a statue, a few hostile worshippers and the predictable cursed gem that summons a Dremora Lord behind your back.

True. But personally, I don't think Skyrim is inherently good as an Elder Scrolls game. (Of course, this is just my opinion.)

To elaborate a little bit, let me first say that I don't really play many games anymore - I mostly just keep up with a few series from my past. I picked up Skyrim because it was an ES game, and as such I had certain expectations. Skyrim might be great compared to the average game of today, but as an ES game it left me very unsatisfied. I couldn't play it without having my experience influenced by the fact that I was expecting a worthy successor to Daggerfall and Morrowind. Because of this, things that would normally annoy me a little bit annoyed me a lot, as I knew Bethesda could do better. I really tried to love Skyrim - just like I tried to love Oblivion - but it kept letting me down. Lots of the old problems are still present, lots of new problems have been introduced, and lots of old features that I enjoyed have been removed. I also couldn't help but feel that many (but not all) of the improvements Skyrim had to offer were ultimately superficial.

My way of looking at it puts a prime value on the cause for a dungeon's existence, instead of a "it's here because it's here" feeling. So for example, in Mororwind you might find that there was an underground slave market in one, and that there were a few other such groups spotted over the hundreds of dungeons, but each had unique people in different numbers and of different trades. Yes, the daedric shrines were sometimes little more than a room with a statue, but I wasn't discussing detailed graphics, only purpose. To me, the uniqueness of not knowing what awaited you behind the door, or the level it had, or the treasure it might possess (because there was very little scaling) was important. This is missing except in a very dungeons (and modded dungeons) in Oblivion, and from what I understand, in Skyrim, as well. Certainly the dungeons my character has seen in the latter follow this trend. There are simply generic enemies waiting to slaughter or be slaughtered.

Don't get me wrong. I love the traps, and the combat AI is better in the last two games (though the physics I find a bad, bad joke). It's just that I find the specific purpose and lack of scaling in most Morrowind dungeons is one of the game's joys, one of the many things that draws me back, again and again. I don't think vanilla Oblivion and vanilla Skyrim are bad games. I can easily see why people who employ different systems assessing the value of each title would rate one or the other as their favorite. But this is my choice.

The way you describe it, it's like every single dungeon has a unique artifact. Most of the loot is just levelled gold/scrolls/amulets, and all of the enemies are just as generic. I really like the dragon priest masks in Skyrim. There are eight of them (plus another if you find them all) and they all have distinct, powerful enchantments. Word walls are great loot as well.

Good.

Skyrim is a great game dont get me wrong, but there is something truly magical about the early TES games.

Skyrim for me has some minor flaws such as third person finishers, regenerating health, consolized, and on PC you need to play it through Steam.

Morrowind remains my favorite game, and its not just nostalgia speaking, seeing as Ive played it since I was 9.

The only thing that remains a thorn for me is how terrible Vista is for modding in general. I cant even see the textures.

Playing OB and MW again.