Just took some time from Skyrim and reinstalled Oblivion, I'm shocked how it can look good with Qarl's v3 texture pack and Oblivion Graphics Extender, specially the DoF bokeh effect, but one thing annoys me badly and Ive realized that on the first loading: The camera... it makes me dizzy, not a little, I mean very sick and nauseated... just by remembering...

Edit: Besides that, I hate the northern area of Cyrodiil, Bruma and all that ice... and as soon as Ive read the next TES would be in Skyrim I immediately went: "FECK" ... but I'm enjoying it, not the cold areas tho, avoiding Windhelm, Winterhold and High Hrothgar at all times.

Heh, it was the opposite with me. That area up around Bruma is my favorite area of Cyrodiil. I've played whole games in that area only (as I did with Solstheim in Morrowind). I was ecstatic when I heard that the next game would be set in Skyrim. I've not been disappointed either, I would say.

I don't mind optional handholding. It's nice that the tutorials let you play with the mechanics and there's at least the option of an arrow. (I wanna be able to turn it off but there's no real journal, so it's not gonna work). What I mind is that it's basicly a kiddie pool. There's no deeper level once you get the basics. I think that limits the audience because once you've played it one time, you've probably "finished it" because you've seen 90% of the content on a single playthrough, and there's nothing particularly difficult. There's also a problem in that there's no hidden secrets or hidden quests. In Oblivion, I played 3 characters before I found the statues and a nice quest to go with them. They weren't named something like "Mysterious Statues" they looked like loot. They had a rep so that you couldn't join everything, and it was often hard to find the way to join, though the rumors of the Oblivion DB were fairly obvious.

I have two thoughts about this.

1) It's awfully hard to say that simplifying the games limits the audience when the more Bethesda simplfies their games the larger their audience becomes. Bethesda's primary goal is getting you to buy one copy of their game. They would also like it if console users purchased a second copy for PC. But I think it's safe to say that they are less concerned about replayability. They already have your money. I don't see any "limiting of the audience" in any of this. Their audience is expanding.

2) What you say about replayability may - or may not - be true from the point-of-view of a console user. But much of these game's long-term popularity (their "legs" so to speak) comes from PC users who make and use mods. Take a look at the forums for Morrrowind, Oblivion and Fallout3. You'll see significantly more activity in all of the mods forums for those games than you'll see in General Discussion forums. Plus, as mentioned above, there are console users who have purchased a second copy of these games for PC so they can use mods. Mods provide the replayability for these users. There is no finishing a game when you can continually add mods to that game, extending its life almost indefinitely.

This truly is one of the most annoying things in the game. When the developers say they played the game I find it hard to believe that in all that time not a one of them pointed out how utterly ridiculous it is that the player is told "I work for Belethor at the general good store" every single time you come within a few feet of this character. The same goes for NPCs having the same exact conversation everytime I encounter them. How many times are you going to ask her if she still works at The Bannered Mare?

Actually you could, and I did once. The only guild that bothered to take a look at your rep was the Fighter's Guild, and their only problem was if you had a bounty or very high infamy prior to joining, so you could just join them before your infamy reached that level and then you could join every guild.

Same with quests. In fact, many quests couldn't actually be refused and only a handful offered more than one resolution. Morrowind was more the one for forbidding you from doing things (but even there with decent skills you could join every faction barring 2 of the Great Houses, though some careful planning of quest order was required).

Meh, I disagree. I feel like Skyrim had more geographical and cultural diversity between holds than Oblivion had between counties. I also feel that Skyrim's craggy mountains and foggy moors were more evocative of a mood and generally prettier, but these things are all subjective.

On the whole, I think Skyrim is a huge improvement over Oblivion. I think. Of course, I still love Oblivion, both visually and otherwise, so it's all good.

EDIT: But for the record, Morrowind is still my favorite. Just saying.

Skyrim had better diversity because of the technology. Oblivion had quite a lot of variation, it had what, 3 or 4 different biomes in the entire province? Quite nice.

And I do agree with you. I'm still going back to Oblivion 5 years after I bought it. I stopped playing Skyrim last month.

About that many, but the problem was that the biomes were essentially painted on. You had forest, green hills, snowy mountains, not snowy mountains, yellow hills, swamp and maybe some yellow mountains. This was a bit of a letdown compared to morrowind, which had swampland, green mushroom forests, ashlands, lava flows, mountains, plains, rocky shore, mushroom shores and rocky wastes. Skyrim is more like Morrowind in it's diversity, and there is also more detail like Morrowind. This was largely a product of how Skyrim and Morrowind had hand made forests whilst Oblivion went for procedural.

Given that it used procedural the end result isn't bad, but it shows that procedural wasn't ready or wasn't used to its full potential, unfortunately, hence Morrowind and Skyrim have the better landscapes.

Technically, Oblivion had, from memory, 9 or 10 different region environments.

@ZindroVokun- That's a meaningless argument. Besides the fact that Morrowind's environments were garbage (seriously, look at the Ascadian Isles unmodded. There's like 1 tree every 50 feet), I don't think anyone here would have even noticed if Bethesda hadn't told us.

The only real issue is Speedtree. It makes the differences between a pine tree, oak tree, and willow essentially a matter of which texture the bark and billboard leaves use.

Yes, there are quite a few. The differences are a lot more subtle than Morrowind's abrupt changes.

Anybody who really looks will have noticed that the mountains aren't just different colors; they have completely different vegetation on them, depending on the region. There are at least five different forest types, ranging from the dark green to autumnal, and from the dry West Weald to the southern swamp. The central grassland is completely different from the western grassland.

Frankly, I think that some people are too busy running from one quest to another to stop and actually look at what they are standing next to. Oblivion trees and plants are based on actual plant species. There are maples and oaks and birches, and several distinct species of evergreen. There are rhododendrons and other non-harvestable flowering plants all over the place. The place is a botanist's paradise, and the various species are generally placed logically for where they would grow in nature.

That's not a fair criticism. Morrowind's graphics were well received at the time, and the amount of trees and such were limited by the technology and computers of the time. I play Morrowind modded on a modern day gaming laptop, and the Ascadian Isles with a bunch of pretty stuff can lag it up. For that matter, vanilla, 100% vanilla Morrowind often lagged on my Xbox back in the day when I was a fresh faced, bright-eyed console gamer. I think for its time there wasn't much else that vanilla Morrowind could've done that wouldn't have excluded the Xbox and some of the weaker computers of the day.

There's nothing wrong about having an environment with sparse trees anyway. Vvardenfell is not supposed to have dense forests.

The Isles are a fertile lowland that were basically untouched by previous volcanic eruptions. Looking at the lush flowers, shrubs, moss and ivy, and the trees themselves, there's no way it wasn't intended to be a very lush enironment.

And that's fine about technological limits, but people are comparing it to Oblivion and saying it's better because all five trees in the province were hand-placed, and I'm saying that the only way MW's environments are even comparable to OB's is through extensive modding. And even in 2003, I thought the environmental design was pretty weak.

It's meant to be relatively open, that's why all the farms are there. It's easier to make farmland in a field than a jungle. And there is a fairly dense area as well, the Bitter coast. http://pnmedia.gamespy.com/planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/fms/images/mods/5897/1203157222_fullres.jpg

Well my most recent experience visiting the Ascadian Isles at length was picking flowers for Ajira in the Balmora Mage's Guild. I saw plenty of farms and plantations, a big lake, and a ton of flowers and foliage. Pretty lush to me, Dragonbone is right 'fertile' land does not equate a jungle, and I think the many farms and plantations in the region reflect this.

Now as for how this relates to Oblivion I agree with you that Morrowind's forests aren't necessarily better than Oblivion. Oblivion does forests very well. The problem for me is that while Oblivion may have all these different types of trees, and shifts in terrain, but they're simply too subtle and alike to 'get credit' so to speak. In Morrowind the volcanic Ashlands looks different than the swamps, which looks different from the swamps, which look different from the grazelands, which look different from the archipelagos. Oblivion might have a great variety of forests, but a forest is still a forest even if the leaves in the branches and the trunks on the trees are a bit different in each area.

But that was more realistic, I think. Vvardenfell is a fairly small island (on maps, it's only slightly bigger than the Imperial Isle), but it has these radically different environments right next to each other. There are areas where you can literally have one foot in a dense swamp and one in an arid highland. It feels almost like WoW, with all these themed zones in a big confused jumble.

The transitions are overly flat, I agree, but in terms of gameworld size, Vvardenfell was not that much smaller than Cyrodiil, and in terms of actual land size (What it would be in lore, not the games), it's an absolutely enormous island, varied landscape is entirely believable.

Keep in mind that though Vvardenfell may only be about as large as the Imperial Isle, each game is only 1/10th of the scale it would be in real life. So the size of the island may be a little larger than it may have initially seemed.

Furthermore, the terrain that does exist on Vvardenfell is surprisingly well justified in the island's terrain. There are archipelagos in the North, East, and South which you would expect in an island with a history of volcanic activity and flooding (Vivec flooding Morrowind). Also, the Bittercoast is contained within a 'shield' of mountains and hills in the South East of Vvardenfell. In real life geography this is plausible. The mountains form a 'rain shield' (that may be the wrong term) which would make moisture coming off the nearby sea gather, blocked from drifting deeper inland by the mountains. Then it turns into precipitation which contributes to the swampy, rainy environment of the Bitter Coast. Likewise the Ashlands are mostly self contained behind their own mountain chains, meaning that the Grazelands and West Gash are also plausible given their moist (but not oversatured) environment.

So no, it's not perfect but I think it's actually a lot better thought out than you give it credit for.

It's not the same size, though, anyway. If you look at the Tamriel map, you can see it's about 10 times the size or even more.

Oh wow, you're totally right. I had just accepted what Jiub said without really thinking about it, but here https://images.nonexiste.net/popular/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Map-of-Tamriel-Elder-Scrolls-Continent-1861x1202-.gif

Or here http://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/races_tamriel_map.gif

Oh geez, my apologies. I'd seen a map a while back that had them much closer in terms of size, I don't know how I got that turned around.

That's okay, easy mistake. In my mind I didn't realize there was such a large size different between Vvardenfell and Cyrodiil either.

Eh, I'm not saying Oblivion didn't have some variety, but it often... well, felt like the vegetation was palette swapped. Not literally, but it was as if they laid out a heightmap, dictated where trees would go, then divided it into regions and changed the tree model depending on the region. The subtlety of the change was good, but the problem was that ultimately there was little to the landscape. I found it was particularly noticeable if you turn off the grass. The Great Forest looks like a bunch of randomly placed trees and the occasional rock.

Problem is Morrowind's vanilla environments had a better layout and design, where things didn't feel just allotted by a computer according to basic algorithm. Now, you could argue that this gave Oblivion a more natural environment (because nature is random/"procedural" itself) but the problem is it only ever made uninteresting pieces of land, there were no great set pieces, the land was mostly fairly generic feeling. I'm not saying there weren't different biomes, I'm just saying that for all intents and purposes they were essentially vegetation and palette swaps of each other, mountains only existing because of a heightmap.

Bland environment was quite the criticism of the game when it came out as I recall, hence the development of the Unique Landscapes mod series to combat it. I couldn't play Oblivion without it.