What were your attitudes towards the information being released (so the promotional stuff BEFORE the game was released, like how we are with Skyrim now)? Were you as positive about it as you were about Skyrim? Did you overgauge your expectations from the information Bethesda was releasing promotionally? Or did it appear about as good in the marketing stage as it turned out to be? Just wanted to know. Don't want to get too ahead of myself and expect things I won't get, so I thought the last game would be a good event to compare it too. And out of curiousity, how were your first reactions to Cyrodiil not being jungle?

I was slightly disappointed, but Morrowind is my favorite game ever and it is hard to live up to that.

I was disappointed in the number of guilds, the way characters leveled with you (especially later on when every bandit had glass armor, I hated that). But overall I wouldn't say I was trully disappointed, Oblivion still is a sollid game and it lasted a long time. Oblivion isn't to Bethesda what Dragon Age 2 is to Bioware. I was annoyed to find out it was not a jungle, partly because it felt they changed that because of LOTR. They wanted to make their own LOTR-like experience and they abused Cyrodiil for it. I missed the Roman feel the Empire had in Morrowind, the legion was much better in that.

But I never had a problem with the more action packed gameplay or the removal of some skills. As long as the core gameplay, the sense of progressions and exploration remains. So I'm very positive about Skyrim, more so then I was about Oblivion. The changes made to the Skyrim leveling system are some I welcome. The original system was broken, even in Morrowind. The only thing I fear for is the radiant quests, I think they will feel repetitive at some point even though there are many variables. When you make a quest by hand you can add something unique between the location, the quest characters and the objective. I think that will be missing in the radiant quests.

Other then that Skyrim is looking better then Oblivion did 6 months before release. They've gone for a style of their own. It might be based on nordic culture but they've made it their own, and by the looks of some of the locations it is real high fantasy. Not unbelievable as in a JRPG but still much more fantastical then Oblivion's forrests.

I didn't miss the jungle, but I missed the feeling that I'm finally at the centre of the Empire. Cyrodiil felt so small and provincial.
I remember seeing the IC for the first time on some screenshot before the release and I thought that I'm looking at some minor town or some wizard's tower.
I found it a bit disappointing that on that screenshot I actually saw some 40% of the in game world.

Really? The Imperial City is physically larger than every city in MW except Vivec, I'm not sure what would make you think it was a small town or wizards tower.

To be honest I just massively hate imperials so ob was a bit of a letdown.. I like nords tho so skyrim is good. I realy want to see the lands of the bretons and altmer tho and argonians.

The real problem for me with ob was the leveling system realy irked me and the autoleveling REALY irked me and even tho the landmass is fairly large the runspeed and general layout of the land made it feel 10x smaller then it is.

But I still played it over 4-500 hours before I moved on to fallout 3. Had about 200 mods for it by then too tho;/

As for skyrim.... As with falout 3 and fallout new vegas I think skyrim will be the first elder scrolls I play through BEFORE I start adding mods. I think it will be that good in plain form.

I would need to find the pic to show you. On the pic you can see just outer walls and the tower. Looked small. And almost the whole province is just a single basin.
But for what you said, I'm not sure if it's bigger then Vivec.

Yeah, I suppose the fact that it's a perfect circle for most of it and that you can't see any of the buildings behind the walls might make it seem smaller than it is (and the fact that the tower in the middle is taller than the city is wide).

EDIT: And speaking of the IC promo pics, what's up with this http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/1/15399/738046-imperial_city_large.jpg golden-bronze version?

I was positive, I thought pfftt this is new technology Daggerfall and morrowind were great and now that beth has a hand in this new technology + its Cyrodiil the largest Province in Tamriel, this is going to rock my *****ing socks if Morrowind had little things tucked away here and there Imagine Cyrodiil! and with each news, lower skills, no cross bows or spears, no more piece meal armor, I still stood fast, I "knew" the Imperial city alone would blow my ass away, and voice acting? EVERYONE voice acted? holy **** you don't sneeze at that and we're being Invaded from Oblivion? I'm like lol this is going to be so sixy fighting off the various Daedra of the many princes, specifically the ones of the house of troubles!.


and then came the disappointments, the Imperial city? hah, the same voices for 4 3 2 races in succession? meh and then levelscaling to be honest I wasn't one of the vets screaming ITS TOO EASY AT THE END, but I was lulled into the PR line about how the game evolves with you and tailors to your're growing, Yeah sure you didnt tell me EVERYTHING would be a fuzzing tedious battle........the fact that the game didnt even live up to its title Oblivion? pffft All I saw were Dagons Deadlands, period....last I checked in the Lore Deadlands was not Oblivion...........and don't get me started when I watched the end cinimatic (I havent even bothered to finish the MQ all these years) :confused:

Oh Oblivion..............you could have been so much more, and apparently you were, but Voice acting in part took some of that away...who knows what else you lost.


So now I hold more criticism, not cynical or pessimism no, Critical, Skyrim doesn't have Oblivions -given- advantages over Morrowind , the gameplay,Graphics, VO are all products of time,age and tech. either Skyrim rests on its own two feat and blows both of them away with its own content or not, I will enjoy Skyrim for its Content, not just because its Skyrim.

Oblivion was very generic/LOTR. Don't get me wrong, I like LOTR, but I want my TES to remain separate and distinct. I too miss the Roman feel the Empire had.



It didn't feel like the capital province. It didn't have the infrastructure and setup to be a capital. The only thing that felt big was the bridge leading to the Imperial City.

It's hard to say. I'm not as excited for Skyrim as I was for Oblivion, but I actually expect to enjoy it better. I'm still disappointed that Beth is not making innovative gameplay, and is once again focusing on the single player main quest.

I feel like Morrowind's tagline was "go anywhere, be anything" with a subplot of being the reincarnation of a folk hero destined to destroy an ancient evil. I feel like Skyrim's tagline is "YOU are the DRAGONBORN. Punch DRAGONS in the FACE!"

It's just so much more bombastic, and I hate to use the phrase, but..mainstream. It's just not an intellectual pitch. It's your typical "let's compete with WoW" style overt epic fantasy theme.

Overall I loved Oblivion but like any game there were definitely areas where it was over-hyped. For instance, they announced that every single line of dialogue would be voiced with talent including Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean and Terence Stamp. That sounded great until you realized that the remaining 95% of dialogue was voiced by only a handful of actors.

However for the most part I think the areas where Oblivion was disappointing were probably just as much a disappointment to Bethesda. There was a lot of pre-launch hype about Radiant AI and, in actual fact, there's a pretty powerful system there but it doesn't come across to the player as well as it should have done.

A couple of the most disappointing things about Oblivion completely blind-sided me and had little to do with hype:
- Having played Morrowind I had my own expectations that the main story would be just as good in Oblivion.
- I don't remember level-scaling being hyped and I still think it's not a bad idea. They just implemented it really badly in Oblivion.

If you have an hour to kill there is quite an interesting http://bethblog.com/podcast/ in which they talk about the development of Oblivion. It gives a good insight into the developers' perspective, how Oblivion was quite rushed in some respects and how not everything made it into the final game.

I started out very excited because there was such a huge wait, in my opinion it was huge, for another TES game since the release or Morrowind. I still was very much a huge supporter of Oblivion and Bethesda and the dev team during the production. I was blinded by another TES game to really look at what was going on and the flaws that some were concerned about, way before the release. It wasn't until I actually played the game that I finally saw the flaws and realized that Oblivion was just a shell of TES and that what made TES so special was missing in Oblivion. It didn't even bother me that they changed Cyrodill from Jungle to LOTR type universe.

Now fast foward to Skyrim. I've leanred my lesson and I'm extremely skeptical because I see some of the same crap happening again. The quest compass, mini games, the rumors of spell making being removed, the removal of classes and birthsigns. TES was unique in how it did things, now it's being trimmed and reduced so that before long there won't be a difference between TES, Gothic and Fable. It will be just another RPG in sea of RPG's and nothing unique about it anymore.

I see TES declining further and further and it's a shame. I'm still going to buy Skyrim because it's TES, but that doesn't mean I'll play it for years like I did with Morrowind.... the BEST TES game to date.

Thanks for the link!

:rofl: I agree with you.
I was way too excited about OB. MW was(is) my favorite game, so when I saw the tech advances, I thought, "It will be the perfect game. It will be everything MW was, plus all the voice acting and amazing graphics." I was wrong. It's a great game that surpassed MW in some ways, but it was inferior in other ways. I'm hoping that Skyrim will be what I was hoping OB could be, but I'm not as hyped up as I was for OB.

It didn't help that I watched that radiant AI video a bunch of times. I was a svcker for that stuff. Being pessimistic is an investment in my later enjoyment of a wonderful game.

I have never been as excited for a game as I was for oblivion, because it was the sequel to morrowind, and that meant it could only be absolutely amazing at the very worst. So yeah, I was very disappointed after about a month with oblivion, when I started to realise the shortcomings, and lack of depth, in comparison to the previous game.
So now here we are waiting for skyrim, and I've noticed I'm not anywhere near as uncontrollably excited as I was for oblivion, just for the simple fact that skyrim is the sequel to oblivion, not morrowind. Instead of wanting it to live up to morrowind, I simply want it to surpass oblivion.
I just remember seeing that first video of a forest in oblivion, and thinking oh my god, this is going to be a hyper-realistic morrowind. I literally could not believe my eyes.
Now days I'm a little more jaded.

That is from the Intro film. You can notice several differences between the video and the game considering landscape relief, different trees, water, more snow etc. Probably some other game version or a version created just for the film.

I always think that they had developed the game, then that something (bad) happened and that they had to revert to some early version and finish it quickly. There's also map loop video that has the lost city.

Going from the podcast, it sounds like they might have had different detail versions of things, because they didn't know what the final specs for the consoles were going to be, so they might have had to get rid of a bit of that.

I was pretty enthusiastic about Oblivion when information started to trickle in. Everything sounded so revolutionary and amazing. Hell, even the Level Scaling sounded good the way PR spun it.

At the same time, I didn't have the education in gaming as I do now. I didn't actually understand why I loved Morrowind so much, and what made it so special. Thinking back, I'm sure a few red-flags would have been thrown up at things like "Procedurally generated World".

I now have a much more comprehensive grasp on why I find certain games so captivating. Armed with this new frame of reference, once the "OMG NEW ELDERSCROLLS GAME" hype wore off at Skyrim's announcement, I did start to take a better look at what was being said about it. Now, pretty much nothing could stop me from Buying Skyrim, but I need to make sure I keep a reasonable level of expectation for it. Definitely part of the reason Oblivion didn't resonate with me as much, was, I had totally unreasonable expectations for it. Some of that is Bethesda's fault, more of it is my fault.

I've come a long way. I followed Fallout 3 as closely as I did Oblivion, and Mass Effect 2 as Closely as any of them. But because of the slight burn I got from Oblivion, I had learned how certain things can be taken out of context, misinterpreted or just not fully understood. I learned to embrace the hype, without really buying into it. Most of all, I learned that no game will ever be perfect, as my signature says, imperfection is an integral part of art, and the process thereof.

So with all that, a lot of what I've seen and heard about Skyrim says it's going in the right direction, with occasional hiccups. Not all of what I've heard has been a "Hell Yeah" moment, though nothing that I've heard has been overtly bad, or at least it has been justifiable design choice[Removal of the 8 Attributes, for example].

I played Morrowind for 200+ hours never completing the main mission and barely doing a quest. There was just so much to do in finding new places and collecting new items but then I was relatively naive to video games and never thought any other way. I was therefore extremely excited for Oblivion and was equally happy when I first played it but then after playing for a while I found I couldn't play in the same way. Oblivion is still one of my favourite games but it isn't a shadow of Morrowind.

With Skyrim I'm looking at it as a new game, a game which I'm incredibly excited about off its own merits from what we've seen so far. I don't think it will touch Morrowind in my mind but then that's not logical for a profit orientated business, now that gaming is more mainstream so it needs to be simplified thus appealing to a wider market.

I would say I was more excited about Oblivion because I looked at it as a modern Morrowind but I have no doubt that Skyrim will be a better game.

some of the forum goers that seem to insist the only reason we love morrowind is 'nostalgia', would do really well to read this thread.

I'd say two parallel independent versions (not necessarily at the same time) instead of full and reduced one. Of course, that's only a speculation and I doubt that any one would ever confirm it even if it was true.

Anyway, I really hope Skyrim will have best from both MW and OB.

I still fire it up for a good play(50-100hr) every couple months. Granted, I have tons of Graphical mods to make it look better. But, aside from a few personal balance tweaks, the core of the game is completely unchanged. I've got Oblivion for the PC as well, so it's not just because of the Mods for Morrowind.

Here are some captions from the intro. Actually now I think that it is dummy worldspace made only for video. But the heightmap is still different from final game.

Also, check out the trees on the last pic. Maybe Speedtrees weren't in original plan? (again, just speculations)
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll54/pero_lozhach/OB%20intro/01.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll54/pero_lozhach/OB%20intro/02.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll54/pero_lozhach/OB%20intro/03.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll54/pero_lozhach/OB%20intro/04.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll54/pero_lozhach/OB%20intro/05.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll54/pero_lozhach/OB%20intro/06.jpg

Does No5 make the city seem way smaller than it is, or am I remembering the Imperial City wrong?

Looks like there is some difference in scale.