I don't know that it is a mistake, at least not for my part. While yes I expect them to expand on OB and make things better, I don't want OB 2.0 which is where I think the MW lover's disappointment with OB comes from. No it's not MW 2.0, it improved a lot of things and did some things differently. I don't expect Skyrim will let me down the same way these folks were disappointed in OB since I'm not expecting OB 2.0.

I find it annoying when people use the "Skyrim will be Skyrim, not Oblivion or Morrowind 2.0" as a way to undermind and discredit people with valid and genuine concerns about the game and information presented thus far, no one Literally wants Oblivion and Morrowind repackaged and sold again, they want what made Oblivion and Morrowind asskicking games, and those concepts placed in Skyrim and for Skyrim to run with that ***** and last I checked every series released has the preceeding THE ELDER SCROLLS infront of it, So no Morrowind isnt morrowind, oblivion isnt Oblivion and Skyrim isnt Skyrim, they are all THE ELDER SCROLLS..

I personally would like Bethesda to start smoking whatever they were smoking when they made Daggerfall and Morrowind, and apply it to Skyrim, Graphics and Tech are a given to time, Skyrim doesn't have that Morrowind to Oblivion advantage in graphics and gameplay so it has to rely on its own CONTENT.

and ffs TES does need influences from Lotr or Conan, there is enough lore and content in the series to make several games many times over, seriosuly which is more interesting, the Generic sterotypically Mentaly handicapped Barbarian Drunkard, or a Noble straight to the point, pivotal in the history of men able to shout you blind Warrior race that basically came in and said this belongs to us, want it? come get it.

Meh, still nostalgia when I hear that the dialog was better in Morrowind or the graphics better in Morrowind.

I was excited for Oblivion, I looked forward to it. It met my expectations and I've had a blast. Morrowind was my first real taste of The Elder Scrolls world, and it was fun too. I still go back and play both, though I find myself visiting Daggerfall more often of late. There are no mods for me, by the way, I'm not a big lover of those things. Tried them before, they didn't take.

Skyrim is number one on my list to get when it comes out, and I know I'll enjoy it as much as the others. I enjoyed Oblivion because it was Oblivion, Morrowind because it was Morrowind, Daggerfall because it was Daggerfall, Arena because it was Arena. I'll enjoy Skyrim because it will be Skyrim.

Was playing Morrowind, and I was really excited about Oblivion, which is why I joined the forums.
Even then, people started noticing things in the teaser videos, like seeing Cyrodiil's grass growing in front of them.
Then of course we were expecting shadows on everything, as shown in one of those videos.
Finally horses, Yay!!!! now some people think the horses are stupid (not me).
Played it for 120 hours vanilla and loved it. but then of course saw what needed modded and not surprisingly, mods were then available for such 'fixes'.
Of course Skyrim is going to absolutely rock, but we will see what actually appears in the game or not.
TES fans are critical because we love the series.

the dialogue was better in morrowind - there was more of it, and it was better written. The only thing oblivion had going for it is it was all voice acted.
How anyone could ever say morrowind graphics are better than oblivion is beyond me. Unless, of course, you're talking about modded morrowind, in which case, yes, it probably is better looking.

Actually, the tree stuff does stay 2-D. Sure you can walk around the trunk, but look at all the leaves. They stay the same no matter how much you walk around.

I wasn't on the forums back then, but I was watching Oblivions release and was very excited. The news of the lack of crossbows didn't bother me, because I thought they were dumb anyways. The E3 demos looked very good. I didn't really know what I was missing until a few weeks into playing, Lack of Dwemer Ruins(my favorite things to explore in Morrowind), less skills, no spears, radiant AI wasn't as good as in the E3 demo, still surprises me sometimes though). I didn't know about graphics until I finally upgraded my parents archaic computer(no dynamic shadows). And the finer nuances of Level Scaling, until I looked up artifacts and realized that their stats were Dependant on what level you acquired the item.

Not very impressed. It sounded to be so good. I am afraid the features advertised here for Skyrim will not entirely be implemented or not as good on release. Radiant Story for one.

I was totally expecting Oblivion to be an improved version of Morrowind, and was really looking forward to exploring a brand new providence . . . with greatly improved graphics. Morrowind was my first RPG, and I totally fell in love with that game, so my expectations were huge.

And I was very disappointed after I had played Oblivion for a while. I received my copy of Oblivion on March 23, 2006, but I was a full time college student at the time, so my game play time was quite limited. But even so, in less than a month I had stopped playing the game completely . . . that's how disappointed I was. This is a small portion of what I wrote in my http://amito.freehostia.com/Oblivion/OB.htm#second_problem about my initial disappointment:

"Oblivion is graphically a gorgeous game, but I honestly feel that Morrowind is still a much better RPG. And most of you know that I'm a HUGE fan of Bethesda! Ok, so I'm not exactly an expert on Role Playing Games. But I do know games, and I do have a pretty good idea about what makes a game a really good RPG (at least for me). At first I was amazed at Oblivion because it looks so great visually. And it does do some things extremely well (I'll cover all them a bit later on in my journal).

But the more that I played the game, the more I saw that this game wasn't at all what I had expected it to be. And I was starting to notice that it was taking a lot of work for me to really role play in Oblivion. The thing is . . . Role playing had always been very easy for me in Morrowind. Now I was getting totally bummed out! I had sooo been looking forward to this game, and now I found that I was having serious issues with it. At first I wondered if I was being fair to Bethesda. Had my expectations perhaps been just a bit too high? And I hadn't even played all that much yet, so was I being premature, and just jumping to conclusions?

After thinking about this some more, and trying to be totally objective, I knew that all my feelings about Oblivion were correct. The thing was that when I first started playing the game, my feelings toward Bethesda couldn't have been more positive. I truly wanted to love this game, but, to my dismay, I soon discovered that I couldn't do that. Something was very wrong with it. The sequel to Morrowind really shouldn't have these kind of issues. I guess the main thing was that I felt that Oblivion should be at least as good as Morrowind. But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't anywhere near as good as Morrowind - and that just seemed totally wrong to me." . . .

Eventually I ended up playing a heavily modded version of Oblivion. If it hadn't been for mods, I would never have played the game for more than those first few hours, after realized that Oblivion was not even close to the game that I had been expecting. I'm hoping that this will not be the case with Skyrim . . . but my elf-sense is tingling like crazy . . . so I'm prepared this time not too expect too much . . . but I hope that my intuition is wrong.

I'm not going to say his name, but he was sort of ranting.
To be fair you have to compare Modded Morrowind to Modded Oblivion. OBGE is still not as good as MGE, but Modded Oblivion still looks better.
About the dialog, more of it was not better. Normal people don't speak in gigantic paragraphs. Not to mention the generic responses Morrowind characters had to topics they don't know about.

Oh well. I'm off to work, don't expect me to reply to anything for the next 8 hours.

I got svcked in so bad. Then it came out and was so much disappointment. I don't think I played it past a few days.

I was actually impressed by what they were able to achieve at the time. Sure there are some flaws here and there, but overall Oblivion was a great game for its time and I had a lot of fun playing it over and over again. But yeah, in no way a perfect game.

Skyrim = new game, new opportunities and new problems attached to it.

What made Morrowind great, was the amount of subtle detail in every part of the game that sold the atmosphere.

Most of the changes from MW to Oblivion came in lots of fundamental gameplay improvements. I don't think anyone can logically argue that the Combat was Better in Morrowind than it was in Oblivion. They may have liked Morrowind's combat better, but in terms of function, Morrowind had Terrible combat. The same can be said for Stealth. Morrowind's stealth was laughable, at least Oblivion tried to make it more dynamic (And largely succeeded at the time). However, all that seemed to have been at the expense of what made Morrowind so special, that being the atmosphere of the game. It's not that the atmosphere of Oblivion was different, it was that there was largely no atmosphere to speak of. It was "By the books" fantasy. You can occasionally see hints that they had begun to fill the world with the details that would have sold it on that level, but come launch day, it remained unfinished.

I'm surprised people can't see it so plainly, the evidence comes in the contrast that the Expansion Shivering Isles has with the game itself. The city of New Sheoth is every bit an equal to Balmora, Vivec, Ald'Ruhn, and even though it's decidedly abstract and alien, it actually comes off as a more believable world.

As would Todd Howard.

The biggest lesson I got out of the run-up to the release of Oblivion is "don't believe the hype." And yeah - I know how much of my posting here comes across. That's pretty much deliberate. Every time I see someone post, "We know that Skyrim is going to be ________ because Todd said so," I want to scream at them. We've already had a vivid example of the enormous gap between what Todd says the game is going to be and what the game actually ends up being.

It's a classic "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" sort of thing, and all I can guess is that the people who are insisting that the game is going to be exactly what Todd says it's going to be weren't around to get fooled the first time. The lesson of history is plain - if Todd says that removing this thing won't diminish the game, it will. If he says that this new gimmick they're addiing will make up for it, it won't.

Yes, but that's not the tree. That's small groups of leaves.

You know Todd is the Game Director, not the Lead Designer, right? I'm pretty sure he wasn't for Oblivion either.

He was also the Project Lead for Morrowind. (Not the Lead Designer again also)

So I think really, you're flinging crap at the wrong person.

That's the part that bothers me. The leaves on the trees, the grass, the flowers. I don't want to spin around them and have the same side staring at me all the while like a ghost stalker.

Buuut hopefully Skyrim won't have that problem.

I only hated the sprite-based trees when you went under them, and they were still "looking at you", in the Trailer for Skyrim, you can clearly see this is no longer the case.

I religiously followed Oblivion throughout its development cycle. The staff would post excerpts from books, and we'd try to decipher it here on the forums.

As usual, the lore masters went insane and made the game more than it was cut out to be. Its happening with Skyen rim and all this Alduin talk...its a natural thing.

Anyways, when I played the game for the first time, I wasn't disappointed with it at all, however I didn't get that same feeling I had attained from playing Morrowind. If anything was disappointing in oblivion...it was the ending. I was kinda sad that I just sat on the sidelines as Akatosh and Dagon duked it out...(while standing still)

I'm certain I didn't say anything different. I apologize if I implied anything different.

My entire point is that Todd is the one who does the interviews and says all the things with which he's credited. He is, and was, the one regarding whom the forum-users say, "This is going to be this because Todd said so in _______ interview." And thus he's the one who was most often saying the things about Oblivion that didn't turn out to be quite true.

I neither said nor meant to imply that the failures of the game were his - merely that he's the "authority" to which people on this forum most often point, just as he was the "authority" to which people most often pointed during Oblivion's development. The gap between what was said during the run-up to Oblivion and what we actually got is most obvious if one reviews the things Todd said in interviews. So specifically when people repeat things here as absolute fact because Todd said it in an interview, I can only shake my head.

Again - that's not to say or even imply that the shortcomings of the game are his responsibility - simply to point out that "Todd says it so it's true" is a demonstrably flawed viewpoint.

yeah, good point. You see all these new posters with amazing amounts of optimism, and alot of it is misplaced I think. It is just too easy to get svcked up in the hype, and imagine skyrim to be some sort of near-perfect gaming experience. I mean it's ok to be optimistic, just as it is ok to be pessimistic (I like to call it being a realist : P), but it sure is annoying when people will simply not hear any complaint, and think folks are just trying to [censored] on their parade.

Oblivion was my 1st game, and was the very 1st time I even heard of TES. Of course like many other "1st time TES players+Oblivion being thier 1st game", I was all like "OMG this is like the perfect game!!!!" and when I heard about Morrowind, I was a little skeptical, so I asked around (internet and IRL) and everyone was like "Morrowind is the crap version!" (Ya they actually said that) so I stayed away from it but then I thought to myself "meh" so I got it and once I played it....lets say I wish I punched those people who I asked about Morrowind right in the face! And then I started putting 2 and 2 together and saw how Morrowind fans were disappointed and Oblivion fans basically crapping on Morrowind.

My point is that if I was a Morrowind fan (and believe me I really, really WISH that I was a TES fan before Oblvion) and Oblivion came out, I would be disappointed too.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZrB9NrUciM explains it pretty good. And yes after playing Morrowind and Oblivion, I watched the E3 demo of Oblivion and I was kinda chuckling inside after seeing it (a star packed voice cast? really?)

I will end this post (and the long text, sorry! I tend to ramble about something passionate of mine bliviongate:) by saying that I am THRILLED about Skyrim, and look forward to it but also afraid about the same feeling on how you Morrowind fans felt about Oblivion. You saw how Oblivion was LOTR-experimental (well you know :confused:) and I am afraid Skyrim was a bit too influenced by something like Fallout 3, idk.

Okay, that makes a lot more sense, but I've just seen a lot of your posts that are seemingly nothing more than Todd Bashes, and it's like blaming the Regional Manager because your food was overdone at a restaurant.

I do agree, people do take his word as the word of the Nine themselves. I know I did in Oblivion. And you know, it's not that he "lied" so much as the game failed to deliver on implied promises. Aside from Dynamic Soft Shadows, was there really anything Promised that wasn't technically fulfilled in Oblivion?

There was a massive storm of anger and rage when we got news that there were no dynamic shadows in the game. Rage so furious it caused global warming.

I wasn't really angry, but I was disappointed. Now, the skill cuts, loss of crossbows, loss of certain spells, etc, miffed me. I wasn't super disappointed, though, just a little sad that we lost those things.

No, it took actually buying and playing the game for several months for me to truly become disappointed. I couldn't dislike the game until I saw the lack of culture, the bland world, the horrific level scaling, and the overblown AI. Sure, the additions like the new casting system, combat, and other things were great and all, but they just couldn't make up for the rest of the game.

Well only one way to find out if they deliver on some of their promises.

I don't expect much from radiant AI than just the actual few examples we've gotten and a few NPC take-overs to the quest we try to complete.

Maybe they learned their lesson on overstating their capabilities, nd maybe some people learned their lesson into looking too hard at a feature and expecting more.