Over the past few days a friend of mine and I have been swooning over the long lost memories of the great game of Morrowind and how Oblivion utterly failed to come close to its awesomeness.

Morrowind was rich with atmosphere and experiences. There were more factions. Less leveling of every item and creature. More varied terrain and landscape and architectural styles. More political intrigue, from quarreling Great Houses to an uneasy occupation by Imperial armies to the ever-baneful presence of the cordoned-off Red Mountain, a strained population visibly struggling to get by while dealing with increased social strife from immigration and poverty and a corrupt monarchy led by a god-king that hadn't been seen in years.

Oblivion was bland and stale by comparison. Its landscape was basically a copy-paste of random trees in a lush green landscape, varied only with a bit of snow in the north and a bit more water in the south. Every city was standard and identical, made up of essentially the same stone walls and wooden buildings and stained glass windows. There was no great social strife; the death of the Emperor, while an interesting backdrop, didn't seem to have any actual effect on the goings-on of the rest of the Empire, no Counts or Lords or fractions of the imperial council vying for control. Your choice of dungeon consisted of caves, white ruins and grey ruins. Your choice of profession limited to Warrior, Mage, Thief or Assassin (in terms of what factions you could join).

It was a real let-down, a boring over-reaching game that failed to meet up to the bar set by Morrowind and by all the talk of "dynamic NPC interaction" promised.

So has Bethesda learned their lesson? Will Skyrim be another bland, repetitive copy-paste job? Or will it be an interesting, dynamic world for us to play our roles in?

I'm obviously hoping it helps rescue the floundering TES line and turns out to be another smashing success like Morrowind.

Has Bethesda learned their lesson?

If you mean have they learned how to make a game that sells millions and millions of copies, that gets great reviews and earns the adoration of the entire games industry, then yeah, I'd say they learned their lesson just fine.

what you have typed in, i hope so. a few things (that you missed) were improved in oblivion (notably combat and not having to walk nearly everywere)


they learnt a few lessons from fallout 3 too, so they may add those were appropriate

^^^ Blam.

Oblivion and Morrowind, while in the same series, are still very different games in a lot of ways. There are plenty of things that were better in Morrowind sure, but Oblivion also had its set of advantages over Morrowind. It's not really fair to say that Oblivion "utterly failed" at capturing Morrowind's "awesomeness". When they made Oblivion, they didn't set out to just make another game exactly like Morrowind, they clearly wanted to try new features and styles of gameplay that differed quite a bit from what was seen in previous games.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1151903-skyrim-will-have-a-more-unique-sense-of-culture-than-oblivion-had/page__p__16855488__fromsearch__1#entry16855488 :shrug:

You fail my good sir, you fail. :starwars: :gun: :flame: :swear: :flamethrower:

I agree with this. I had Morrowind originally when I was young, and I couldn't get into it due to the short attention span that I had at that age, as well as the clunky combat that really ticked me off. It wasn't until Oblivion that I really liked the TES series. They definitely tried something new with the game, such as replacing the hand placed trees and foilage that was Morrowind with that of random generation that is Oblivion. I kinda liked that it made the wilderness seem more like a wilderness and gave a certain thickness to it all, but it also detracted from the game as there wasn't very much to see that was actually unique and not copy-pasted.

The only real beefs that I had with both games is that Morrowind's combat system was total chore, while Oblivion lacked the sheer amount of content that Morrowind had. There were a lot more cities and side quests to do in Morrowind, and I felt that the guild system had a lot more content in that game as well. Each guild in Oblivion felt way too short. I was always expecting that since it didn't take too long to become guildmaster, that I was just reaching the half way point and that there was more things that I could do as the Gm. But that hope was shattered.

If anything, I would really like Morrowind's amount of content with a better version of Oblivion's combat. By better version, I'm using the mod "Deadly Reflex" as a good point of reference. Once I had that mod installed, I couldn't play the game without it. Just adding shield-bashing by itself would be a great improvement in the variety of combat.

So could we assume that the nords of skaal and thirsk displayed a great sense of culture? They seemed to draw many parallels to the common stereotype of early aboriginals to me...

People constantly forget the good rather than the bad. This can be said for Oblivion. At least the changes to the game were not as drastic as other AAA RPG titles like Fable or Mass Effect.

I think one must approach the whole Oblivion vs Morrowind debate in a relativistic manner. Take them each for what they are, and appreciate the faults, flaws, and gems of each game individually. For example, Morrowind's plot was decidedly superior to Oblivion's, but Oblivion's graphics were very amazing. Hopefully Skyrim can combine the best of both worlds. For some reason though, Morrowind sustained my interests for longer.

YOU BEAT ME TO IT!

I do not know how Bethesda plans to implement that more unique sense of culture, but I am pretty confident that the few Nord settlements we encountered on Bloodmoon don't reflect the entire province of Skyrim. Bethesda isn't bound to follow what they made the Nords like in Bloodmoon.

Thank goodness Seti hasn't read this yet! Anyways, its already been stated that the 2 games are different and each are great in their own way.

This. Morrowind and Oblivion are both good games, and are liek none other, be thankful for that.

Morrowind's graphics were groundbreaking for the time as well.

Agreed. But I just meant looking back on it.

I'd think it's only natural to improve the things that people disliked. It's just good business. In Morrowind, people hated the combat. It was improved in Oblivion. In Oblivion, people hated the story. I'd like to think that they'd fix that as well. If you share a popular opinion, and you make your voice heard, I don't think it will have fallen on deaf ears.

Everyones always hating on oblivion but im sure they can agree that oblivions gamplay like the movement, combat system, inventory, journal were all way better put together. The magic system was much better as well making it less of a hassle to use. also being able to use a shield seperately. You can complete all the guilds and never worry about accidentally killing someone ur not suppsoed to kill at any point. I mean seriously. Oblivion was better as far as gampelay and graphics. And Cyrodil was gorgeous in my opinion. I liked all the trees and boulders. I dont know why everyone complained so much. And if you think morrowind relaly had good graphics man...psh yeah right. Even for the time those graphics really were not that good. The first Spiderman movie game had better graphics. Morrowind sacrificed graphics for gamplay and map size. Because it takes alot of memory to save and for pc users that wuld use alot of Gigs i think. I'm not into pc so im not all that sure. But yeahh i had an old xbox and morrowind looked bad even for back in the day dude. at least for xbox standards. On the other hand morrowind had a longer and better story. It held more replay value but all in all i say they r about the same. Morrowind felt alot larger i know that tho. And you could do more with magic and enchantments. But in morrowind if u clear out a cavern since all npc's were unique they were gone FOREVER. so i hated how i had pretty much killed everything in the game. It got to the point where i was bored because i never had anything to fight in the caves. All the people were dead. I don't worry about that in oblivion because they come back. Everything comes back. Thats a huge advantage. So yeah now on skyrim. I'm sure skyrim will learn from the few mistakes in oblivion so yes it may look a little more unique but gameplay wise oblivion was nearly perfect. Maybe the characters floated around a little too much when they ran i thot it felt like he was sliding across the ground but thats a minor and easy fix. I think over all the game is going to play alot different so lets get oblivion off the mind and expect something brand new. The story...has dragons...how bad can it be? we get dragons... we've been asking for dragons for a very long time now. So we finally got them.

i believe that at least in the "enviroment and atmosphere" region the new TES will be better than Oblivion

I know, that lots of Morrowind fans, me included, were let down by simplifying different aspects of Oblivion to catch wider range of audience.

But from what I've seen in their Fallout games, and what I read after that, I'm very positive that they have learned their lesson quite well.

From what I've seen from the trends on their game development, they experience with a set of ideals, and watch the responses, and from the previous responses, and the current need of the market, they choose other set of ides, and develop them in the next game, and wait for the next responses.

But they jump from one extreme to another, and make some previous fans a bit let down, and gather new fans, and this cycle repeats itself, but I hope this is a damping oscillation and it is getting nearer to the mid point equilibrium that could in theory satisfy most of the previous fans of the series, except for the most radical ones.

I'm really excited about Skyrim! :happy:

As someone who prefers Oblivion I don't mind when people express their concerns over the way in which the TES series is heading. Actually, I find it kinda interesting

What annoys me is when those people decide to speak for everyone. Has Bethesda learned their lesson? Well, I don't know, Oblivion was only largely praised as one of the best if not the best open world RPGs of all time, won multiple awards, near 10 ratings across the board, huge modding community, still shifting copies to this day

Have people repeatedly complaining about them on their own forums taught them a lesson? Probably not

Justin Bieber also sells millions. Your argument is invalid.

Oh, [censored]. Let's not complain, because Bethesda won awards. Certainly not in their own forums, those licentious bastards. Clearly, the magazine public knows what makes good fantasy.

Not that I'm a fan of the guy, but do you think his record company is going to change his image soon? Probably not

Just because a few die hard Morrowind fans don't like Oblivion doesn't mean it's the worst thing to happen to RPGs ever. Some things that are popular are bad, yes, Justin Bieber, but there's usually a reason they're popular, and it's because the overwhelming majority of people like them

Oh, true, I suppose Bethesda would go after money and additional bloom rather than quality.

On a side note, I'm also not going to fall for any claims they make prior to the game's release. Bethesda already tried that with Oblivion and destroyed their credibility. There was a huge list of false claims made by the Bethesda devs during Oblivion's development somewhere that did nothing but talk the game up to a ridiculous extent.