I agree for the most part, but you have to allow for the possibility that Cyrodiil or Skyrim were actually envisioned as basically terrestrial. I wont say that's better, but there's definitely some silver lining there. It creates a nice aesthetic contrast between the real and the unreal, and it provides a believable cushion for the unbelievable phenomenon (trolls etc). All I'm saying is I dont think you should knock the artists for putting pine trees in a place where they're supposed to be putting pine trees.

I liked Morrowind more, but that had more to do with the fact that it seemed more concerned with what you could do than how good it looked letting you do that. Oblivion felt too showy, too shallow. Felt like a lot of dolls trying to be human, and morrowind was more a collection of action figures. More fun for me. And I completely agree that all the failure was very encouraging.

I meant I haven't heard any improvements to the The Elder Scrolls franchise (tongue twister) that Oblivion has aside from graphics, engine, voice acting, and just about everything you just said. I think the combat system is an improvement as well as horseback riding making a return. I can't think of that much but I suppose fans may prefer Cyrodiil's friendly and colorful environment over Morrowind's. I'm curious what people think because it is far too uncommon seeing Oblivion compliments. Will it be remembered for anything? Daggerfall was the largest and most diverse, Morrowind was the first in 3d tes and may have improved on some things (I've yet to play Daggerfall so I don't know) and Oblivion has...voice acting and a physics engine? Is that what it will be remembered for? Did anyone enjoy the Oblivion gates? I sure thought they grew old after a while but I can't as hell think of anything.

I saw its main attraction being the physics engine and the next generation of graphics. The latter is intertwined with the fact that it's too cheery colorful. I felt they mainly just liked to show off with the new great graphics. Oh, and I guess the Oblivion gates were supposed to be epic - c'mon, we're getting off Nirn, visiting other planes of reality! But yeah, they were pretty repetative after all.

I guess people are really divided with this. I'd say those who care about the graphics and possibly gameplay more than the stories that can be told or lore are playing Oblivion right now, not visiting the forums writing some deep lore sheit. We are either those candy coat loving players or the ones who don't care about the game's physical preferences that much, but like to learn of the world. There is very much to learn, read, study, find and just feel the immersion in Morrowind (its darkness actually being very important factor in this for me... keeps the excitement up). In Oblivion, not that much. This division is, of course, exaggerated, but I think you'll get my point.

The hand-crafted dungeons that invited exploration. And the presence of culture. I still like Oblivion though.

hey guys, this is kind of my first real post so here goes,

morrowind outdid oblivion in almost everyway except for graphics, combat and animation. morrowind had a beautiful sense of loneliness, of really being and outsider, entering a world that was truly alien, something other.

the rival factions, the geo-politics, even the rival religious beliefs. the world felt truly handcrafted as opposed to the cut and paste of oblivion. almost everything was unique, the caves felt organic and many had suprises that was sorely lacking in oblivion. i always love finding a daedric ruin at the end of a normal looking cave, one of my favourite moments was finding a statue of molag bal at the bottom of an underwater cave. it was completely incidental to the story but it gave me a true sense of wonder, like the world was ancient, unlike oblivion morrowind felt lived in. the settlements felt like they had grown over time, and you could see the different cultures come out through the architecture, i felt overwhelmed when i first visited vivec, i never felt that with the imperial city. ok so some of the dungeons in morrowind do feel samey, the dwemer ruins don't do much for me besides the loot, same with the egg mines (minus the loot) but they were the exception to the rule.

the diversity of the landscape, the varieties of weapons and armour, the weird creatures, being able to free slaves and slowly learning about the twin lamps.

the real difference was the sense of amazement is gives me, the feeling of wonder and awe. i've owned morrowind for about 3 years and it still suprises me, still locations i haven't found and i'm still finding new quests. i bled oblivion dry in about a year.

it's not that i don't love oblivion for what it is, i've sunk over 500 hours into it. but morrowind is still superior in so many ways.

Welcome to the party :celebrate:

I'd agree that the geo-politics of Morrowind was huge in making the world feel realistic. Conversely, Oblivion almost seemed like it was just a bunch of towns that got along swimmingly (an unlikely scenario in a world of competing economies).

As for unique dungeons I think we don't have to worry about that in Skyrim. If memory serves they said they are hand making dungeons. My concern is having the world physically change in response to your actions such as the creation of strongholds for the House factions, the reconstruction of the broken underwater Daedric statue, and even the mining camp in Solstheim.

heya thanks for the welcome yeah the polotics was a big one for me. i realise that cyrodiil was a single state and vvardenfell was a group of occupied feifdoms, it might work as far as the lore is concerned, but it doesn't make for much of an interesting story. i did feel a lack of dramatic tention in oblivion as far as the different groups were concerned, the fighters guild vs the blackwood company just wasn't as interesting as the house wars or the imperial occupation itself. it was also missing the racial tention, like how the dunmer treated the khajiit and argonians as inferior, or how the ashlanders were complete outcasts and were driven out to live as tribals in the most inhospitable parts of the island. i also noticed that people treated my character differently depending on what race i chose, i don't remember that happening in oblivion.

i'm cautiously optomistic about skyrim, it would be great if they could change the world like that, it's possible, if they can do it in morrowind they can do it in skyrim. i enjoyed furnishing my own house in oblivion but it didn't feel the same as having my very own stronghold. as long as skyrim has the same hand crafted quality that morrowind had it shoudl be ok, F3 had the same feel so i think beth are back on track with their world creation. hopefully they bring back the same number and diversity of quests again. oh yeah and bring back the origional dunmer voices, they sounded awful in oblivion. i actually think morrowind had better voice acting, sure there wasn't as much of it but it suited the game better and felt more realistic, the voice acting was woeful in oblivion for the most part. and i didn't realise the daedric satue gets reconstructed, sounds like a quest i haven't found yet.

I'm trying to think of what Oblivion had that Morrowind didn't and the only thing I'm really coming up with is the hit system not being chance based, but even that didn't go well it was just bashing at a blocking oponent. thwack weapon recoil sends you off balance they drop guard from the recoil you both recover pretty mucht he same time repeat ad nasuem someone pulls off a 5% chance at knockdown and gets in a few extra hits. No point in leveling up a warrior past 100 strength and 100 weapon skill as you will start doing less damage fortifying past that doesn't help any at all while enemies continue to get stronger.
Magic system was the saving grace for me there, except it was really slimmed down from Morrowind and in some ways really relied on exploiting a stack of weakness spells effects combined with the magic choices being slimmed down a ton.
There was just less choice in Oblivion, Morrowind had a ton of freedom to it when it came to what equipment and how to use it.

I still poke around and play Oblivion but whereas Morrowind I just came to instinctually like, Oblivion on the other hand takes a bit of an effort and I play it more for the story aspect than the actually game play.

Sorry for the off-topic, but in case no one has properly welcomed you... here, have a http://images.uesp.net//c/c4/Fishystick.jpg!

I like not having an arrow to tell you where to go, you were just given directions and then had to go find it on your own.
Another thing is the fast travel anywhere, it was a lot more realistic to take a boat or silt strider to get around.

lol cheers, a fishy stick for my very own.

Pauldrons and wearing clothes over and under your armor. And that's basically it for me. :shrug: Oh and enchanted weapons that recharge over time, simply because.

I think the Great Houses and other factions and the related conflicts are something I miss in Oblivion.

Also the lack of skill requirements for advancing in guilds.

Maybe an unarmored skill would also have been nice in Oblivion. Also Mark/Recall (I use a mod to add that to Oblivion).

I don't mind the different more "realistic" or "typical mythic" environment in Oblivion. Though the more unique creatures are certainly nice in Morrowind.

(BTW, I strongly disagree with the claim that Oblivion dungeons are cookie cutter, but I won't start that debate here, since its kind of off topic.)

The feeling of being in a different world than ours. Morrowind had a very intricate culture and way of life, and I really enjoyed the feeling of going from hated n'wah to worshipped horator

I miss levitation. I want my levitation back. I thought for sure in Oblivion it would have been improved but it was taken away. So I thought Skyrim would do an awsome job with it. It is not in Skyrim either, so that is telling me that Bethesda can't do a proper job with levitation or they can't do a proper job in developing thier world because of inner and outer cells.

But no big deal since I am use to it I guess. I guess for those on the PC ~TCL will give you Levitation of some sorts, but sadly not on the 360 which I will be playing on.

Candles and portable light sources.

Heaps heaps other things, too, but theres no reason to list them all.

Both are fantastic games that I've spent hundreds hours of my life playing.

However, Morrowind feels more like "home". Eevrything seems more real, despite it being so alien. It feels like an actual world.

The biggest things Oblivion lacked for me where:

- Reason to explore. In Morrowind there was always the chance of clearing out a ruin and finding Chrysamere (sp) or Mentor's Ring at relatively low level. I also liked going into a dungeon not knowing if I could clear it out, or if I'd have to come back later.
- Intra-guild politics.

Reason to explore is the main one for me too, though a lot of it was not artifact hunting, but actually just wanting to see what's inside.
There are a lot of interesting places in Vvardenfell, and you don't need to take up a quest to explore them.

The levelling system in Oblivion locks you into a course of task oriented behavior so that there is less freedom to develop your character. I felt a lack of risk and flow that made MW enjoyable and challenging.
Others have pointed out (and I agree) that being a despised and disoriented Outlander gives my char a sense of achievement just getting along with others. When I began playing MW it was often necessary to kill an NPC to achieve a goal. As my game playing evolved I found that a lot could be achieved by Personality and Speechcraft where enemies often helped even became friends.
Interaction with NPCs seemed much more realistic and my chars grew accordingly.

Thread title alone skews the topic, hon. It is what it is, and you seemed to have glossed over the fact that I noted people were being civil. I could've modified the topic title, but that would have been a bit jerky on my part. I guess I still just find it odd that the veiled Oblivion-isn't-Morrowind threads still regularly crop up after all this time, not so much the fact that many people prefer MW over OB. At least now things are discussed a bit more calmly. Heh. It was pretty hellacious for a very long while, and nothing stated here wasn't said already, if more angrily, in March/April 2006.

And developer post-release post-mortems are common practice in the game industry. There is nothing unusual in that.

I have gone on record many times with how much I think MW is an amazing game. But I still had 100s upon 100s of hours into Oblivion too, and it taught me more, because I learned about modding, which I wish I had known about when I was initially playing MW for a couple years. I later went back and added mods to MW to add some features that were (to me) missing (but in Oblivion in one form or another). And yeah, conversely, I modded OB to make some things more similar to how MW played. Funny how that works.

I guess I mostly miss the enchanting and spellmaking in Morrowind. I miss enchanting a Riekling Lance with a Riekling Raider soul with Absorb Health on strike on the fly and naming my new self enchanted weapon "Riekling Lance of the Leech". The unique shape of the soulgems and how the soulgems showed what soul was captured in them. All of my characters had massive soulgem collections. The idea of needing to be in the Mage's guild and have access to the Archane University or buy DLC to have access to spellmaking and enchanting services is immersion breaking to me. For non magic inclined characters there should have been a better alternative because with level scaling you must have enchanted weapons to be successful. I now have to come up with a new naming system for any enchanted items I make. The soulgems in Oblivion are so bland.

I also miss Spears too. Legions have always had spears in their inventories as a very important weapon.

I love Oblivion, but now I'm going back to Morrowind because of the things I miss:

The music, Morrowind's was just so much better in my opinion,
Argonians that looked like lizardmen not lizard-men,
Being able to wear clothing and armour,
The Dunmer houses (particularly Telvanni),
The number of factions you could join,
Actually having to be proficient to rise through a faction,
The fast travel system,
Teleportation, levitation, mages staff (Oblivion's were disappointing imo),
Creeper, the guy was just great.

Although there are some things I didn't miss (looking at you cliff racers :flamethrower: )

Mark and Recall

I miss the numerous factions that were in Morrowind, and how they offered so many quests. I also loved becoming a werewolf. Anything else that I would have missed from Morrowind was more than made up for in Shivering Isles :biggrin:

I miss quite a few things including all the clutter and hidden items you could stumble across in cities or wilderness, oblivion did have much in that category. =( Also the ability to sneak into shops and peoples homes and steal useful armor and weapons, wasn't it just epic when you spent 30 minutes of careful planning to snag a shiny new pair of glass bracers? Even though it could be a little OP to gain good armor that way, its boring when there is nothing but fake items in all the display cases in Oblivion.