» Thu Dec 08, 2011 10:54 pm
I'm a bit ashamed that I never tried Arena or Daggerfall, but I guess Morrowind will always be my favourite TES game. Many Morrowind detractors love to point out our nostalgia when it comes to preferring Morrowind, but they always forget we come up with reasons. Oblivion was a HUGE step down for me, and Skyrim managed to be a strong step up from it, but it still doesn't come particularly close to Morrowind.
Oblivion's biggest problem was definitely the level scaling, which Skyrim fixed. Having every enemy from everywhere level up the same time as you, not taking into account which attributes or skills you leveled up in the process was incredibly stupid. I don't think I need to remind everyone the reasons. And for this, Skyrim brings back memories and a certain feel from Morrowind. Get too far off the road early on, and it becomes dangerous fast, get almost killed (if not killed) or get several diseases. I haven't played enough of Skyrim yet, but it might be better than Morrowind on the adventure aspect. The environment is also a lot more exciting than in Oblivion and is just great for exploration. They even brought artifacts back! But there's less of them, and it seems there's no random dungeon with artifacts anymore, that they are all quest related, even if they are not from daedric quests, but it's still a big step up from Oblivion here.
But being brief here, Skyrim's problem compared to Morrowind is the RPG and quests aspects. I liked the attributes and astrological signs the way they were, I loved when you had more weapons type, more armor types and pieces. Spears or throwing stars anyone? Nobody liked to no use a pauldron or to find the left and right ones of the daedric set? Morrowind had much more quests and factions too. I'm glad that we have something like the bard's guild or that you can join the imperial legion again (or fight it), but I think there still could be more, and longes quest lines too. I mean, in Morrowind there was the Fighter's Guild, the Mages guild, the Thieves guild, the Morag Tong, the Imperial Legion, the Imperial Cult, all 3 Houses, the Tribunal Temple and all 3 vampire clans. You could have a very specific character type and have plenty to do, guilds could conflict too. Even if the Telvanni Great House was the one for mages, they despised the Mages guild. The Imperial Cult and Tribunal Temple are similar guilds, but aimed either for the lovers of the Empire or the Tribunal, or for those who just cared about adventures. Plus the miscellaneous quests, Morrowind feels like an endless game even if you did go through every (and couldn't) factions unlike Oblivion. It's hard to judge in Skyrim, but it sure is better than in Oblivion but I bet it's not at the same level as Morrownid. And to progress through factions you had skills you needed to be at a certain level.
And something some people will throw me rocks at. Voice acting. Get rid of voice acting in dialogues (only). We all loathed it in Oblivion, but while it's certainly better in Skyrim, it's still a big weight on the game that makes it more simple than it should be. Sure, keep all the voiced lines when not directly speaking to someone, Morrowind had that and it greatly helped with immersion. But you don't even hear your own voice, it's not necessary to hear NPCs do all theirs. It's at these moments you can get bothered by the same actors popping up or when the acting isn't all that good. Sometimes you just hope people spoke faster too. BUT, the big thing here, is the amount of dialogues. I can understand why you can't talk to everyone in Skyrim, and I have no problems with this after playing Oblivion, but there's a reason for this. In Morrowind, you could speak to everyone, ask everyone about their backgrounds, ask everyone about rumors and such, everyone. You could ask people in a city about finding some place there. Quest givers would give you real directions to go somewhere, tell you what you need to find and where, rather than telling you to find some item, its location only getting displayed after you get the quest and being visible on the map. I'll return to the journal and this aspect of quests later. So, in Oblivion and Skyrim, you can only talk to important people about very specific things, because you'd have to record countless of lines otherwise and it just can't happen. For a system like in Morrowind, you can still have some more voice acting outside dialogues, but if you want more quests, more dialogues, more everything that is related with a discussion, it only costs programming those lines in the game, rather than record every single one of them with different voice actors if necessary. That makes for longer questlines and more factions, among other things. For example, something I loved about one of my Morrowind playthroughs.
Got in the Seyda Neen trade center, talked to some random imperial about rumors, and he told me some fools lost an important ring in a ruin along the bitter coast. No journal entry, no go fetch me this, just a rumor I asked for. Being curious, I left Seyda Neen and followed the bitter coast, first ancestral tomb I find, I enter it. At the very end, in an urn, I find the ring, which was an artifact. Unrelated to a quest, only found it from a rumor. And some artifacts require you to just stumble upon them. It seems since Bethesda got more renown and look at their games and game development through different eyes, they fail to see some of the little things that helped make Morrowind so great, like this. Some call this nostalgia.
As for the journal, I loved it when it was actually a real journal. You know, a book where you write your thoughts or information you need, not a quest log. I don't want to see ''quest completed'' or ''active quests''. A quest is completed or active when I deem so. I also want to be able to sell or drop quest items I don't care about. And I want to be able to kill anyone if that means scraping up a questline, it only means the game, the world is more dynamic, real and responsive. For the map, I want a real map, and I don't want it filled with the location of every single cave there. I want to be able to mark locations myself, and unless someone knows the more or less specific location, I don't want it on my map. If someone mentions me Azura's shrine, does it means he knows where it is? I loved when the quest giver would give me directions to follow, or refer me to someone/somewhere for them. I think that since Oblivion Bethesda removed some of the most interesting aspects of adventuring. And I was forgetting, fast travel. Won't get into the laundry list of reasons why it svcked and why it svcked ignoring it in Oblivion, but they almost totally fixed that in Skyrim. Carriages are back, which is neat, and I love that you can ask about the cities, but you should be able to travel by boat or use teleportation from the jarl's mages too. Almsilvi or Divine intervention too, mark and recall...
I like the implementation of perks, but I think they took too many skills away. Why can everyone swim? It could be at least a perk or something. Maybe a heavy or light armor perk to be able to swim with these armors? What about climbing? What about acrobatics and athletics? Spears?
I didn't want this to be this long, but in short, Morrowind is the best, Oblivion the worst, but Skyrim takes a step back with two (or three) steps forward, it gets relatively close to Morrowind's level of quality. Some aspects of the game are good or almost as good as ever, while some other aspects are either non-existent or less well made.
