I wasn't talking about the tiles - in fact, Oblivion is better in this way. Morrowind's dungeons were too itty bitty. Oblivion's are long enough that you feel like you're going deep in some cases, but not Daggerfalls insanity-causing hugeness.

I'm talking about dungeons being different. There is hand-placed stuff to discover. There are often ministories like a skeleton fisherman. With every morrowind dungeons I can name something unique about it. It's not a big thing, always, but it's something that makes the dungeon worth having in the first place, even with other dungeons available.

I have a mod that turns it off, but thank you

console users unfortunately don't have this option.

So true. I can count the unique, non-quest related dungeons in Oblivion on one hand and still have fingers left. I can't count the number of unique, non-quest related dungeons on both of my hands that are in Morrowind.

Or to put it another way, Morrowind is boring. Knowing where all of the good loot is, broken leveling, broken economy and broken alchemy destroy immersion because of the need to create so many self imposed rules to keep a character from being overpowered. Morrowind is simply too much like hard work to make a workable RPG experience out of it. For those of us who aren't masochists, Oblivion and FO3 give an equal experience for a 10th the effort. There are mods to fix everything with Oblivion, so the only real difference is the better engine and slightly improved graphics. You can keep playing Morrowind if you like, but most players have moved on to Oblivion and Fallout 3.

As for being a casual gamer, I've played Oblivion since a year after its release, with no plans to stop any time soon. I'm happy enough with Oblivion to delete the 22 gig of Morrowind mods I had saved, and throw out my copies of Morrowind.

Anybody who buys a Beth game for a console gets what they deserve

Beth games are barely playable out of the box, require any number of patches to just work, and mods to really shine. If I owned a console I'd stick to Games like Mass Effect, GTA, Max Payne or HL2, games from people who know how to produce finished products.

Well, you've got me there

Arena was ironically the only game of the main-branch TES series that was finished on release.

Both games have seriously flawed mechanics, broken levelling and broken economies. In both cases mods can greatly improve all that. I'd disagree about what the only real difference is. To me its that MW has an interesting and varied setting, Oblivion's is bland. I try replaying Oblivion ocasionally but its never interesting enough to keep me wanting to play the characters for long.

I have to disagree with this part. Self-imposed limits is what roleplaying is all about. When we roleplay our characters impose limits on what can and cannot be done. Now of course, there are players who don't roleplay so for them the idea of self-imposed limitations may be unappealing. But not for the rest of us.

Oblivion felt boring to me because everything in the game was so mechanically tied to my character's level. Knowing I would never, ever, under any circumstance - no matter what I did or where I went - see one single piece of glass armor until my character had reached a 'magic number' made Oblivion so boring for me that I actually stopped playing mere weeks after the game was released. This was very disappointing to me, as I had planned to play the game for months, continuously and maybe even start a fan web page on the game. But I just could not abide Oblivion's draconian item leveling any longer. Gods, how I longed to find even a few scattered pieces of hand-placed loot once in awhile!

I thought Morrowind's item and enemy leveling was almost perfect. The only thing I would change would be to keep it going past level 22.

True. Didn't think of that.



Aren't you refuting your own comment? gamesas had no trouble whatsoever disabling levitation in Mournhold without disabling it in the rest of Morrowind or even the rest of the expansion. Disabling levitation only inside the actual city cells shouldn't have been a problem. There was no reason to disable levitation everywhere else, unless they actually wanted to take out vertical exploration. Yes, you could argue that it would've looked silly if you levitated over city walls from the outside, but that's what invisible barriers are for anyway, isn't it?

There's a difference. Geographically, Mournhold was disconnected from Vvardenfell. No land surrounded Mournhold. The player "fast-transported" into the city and back out. Therefore, it was a simple matter to disable levitation only inside the city walls and leave the rest of the game world untouched.

In Oblivion there are two versions of each city: the "real" city (the one you see inside the walls) and a "dummy" city (the one you see from outside the walls). The dummy city cells are composed of low-poly building meshes the player cannot enter...and nothing else. If Bethesda had enabled levitation in the main game world players would be able to levitate over the walls into these "dummy" cities and discover there was nothing in there but grotesque-looking boxes that only resembled buildings from a distance.

Bethesda could have slapped invisible walls around the cities. But I see several problems with this. One, you would still be able to see the grotesque-looking boxes inside...and it's not a pretty sight. If you've ever seen them you know that they are really, really ugly. They make you wince. That, I believe, is why all the city walls are so high: to keep the player from seeing that there's nothing inside the walls.

Besides which, the existing invisible walls were one of the worst design decisions Bethesda made in Oblivion, in my opinion. I don't think the game needs any more invisible barriers. Invisible barriers, in my opinion, are antithetical to everything the Elder Scrolls series stands for.

Personally, I think the really immersion-breaking thing would be to peer over a wall and be able to see into a cell that didn't exist and, at the same time, get spammed with another pop-up message box saying "You cannot go that way. Turn back."

I've said no such thing. All I've said was that Oblivion is a good game tailored more for the action-adventure crowd rather than the hardcoe RPG crowd. This is, in my opinion, rather undeniable. Instead of focusing on details, the gamesas team focused on flashy elements. Elements that would suit action gamers.

I'm not at all suggesting that you're a moron or even a simpleton. I'm simply saying that you care more for an action-adventure whereas I care more for a stat-intensive game that resembles chess somewhat more than it resembles a typical action game. How you translate that into a flame is beyond me.


I'm sorry to be blunt, but that's [censored]. You can use the backdoor if you can open a lvl 100 lock. You need to "deal with" someone reasonably strong, pick up an item from his corpse, read the papers available in the room, find the dwarf, talk to him, and voila. You don't *need* to talk to Vivec at all to finish the MQ. It's rather obscure what you have to do, granted, but it's quite possible.


I don't care much about the fewer weapon types. What I care about is that their weapon types don't make much sense and that the omissions hurt the suspension of disbelief. Axes aren't blunt weapons, small knives aren't two-handed swords (and vice versa), and there's no way you'll not see a spear in a world with armoured horses. Those are just minor details, but they bother me. Heck, even Morrowinds mixing up of one-handers and two-handers is somewhat annoying but at least it tries to represent the major categories of weapons.

And as far as weapon balance is concerned, the optimal thing would be to just have one skill called "weapons" and then make everything governed by that one skill, but you wouldn't advocate that, would you? Why not? When you decide why you think that would be too extreme, add a couple of levels to your reply and you'll see why I think Oblivion went too far. Either way you turn it, the changes do dumb down the world. Suddenly highly intelligent and warlike Imperials can't think of using one of the simplest damn weapons in human history.


Again with the action-adventure approach to RPGs. Of course there has to be a drawback depending on your approach to combat. If you use spells all the time, you're not gaining physical skills. If you're using a bigass sword all the time then you don't become good at fencing with small blades. If you're using a shield a lot then you don't learn how to fight with two-handed weapons. Heck, using a bow doesn't teach you how to throw darts, daggers, or use a crossbow. Again, details. Important to the hardcoe crowd of RPG gamers but not so important to the action-adventure segment.

And no, this still isn't a flame. I like melodic death metal. You probably don't. Is it an insult when I suggest you're probably a softcoe pop-fan, like what, 70% of young people? Talking about action-adventure and RPG is the same thing. Just because you want to play a game that uses player skills over character skills doesn't mean you're a moron. It just means (that I think) you have a different preference that is less suited to computerized pen and paper roleplay and more suited to action games with flexible stories, akin to Deus Ex. Which, by the way, was an excellent game, even if it wasn't a hardcoe RPG. Just to spell it out, if you try to use your personal skills with a sword as a reason why your pen and paper mage can fence pretty well, your dungeon master is going to laugh and make your mage accidentally stab himself in the foot. That's P&P in a nutshell and there are people out there who like the concept. I happen to be one of them and Morrowind combat matched that concept a lot better than Oblivion.


You're telling me not to flame and calling me an elitist bugger in the same post? o_O

No, I don't mind at all that the game is made more accessible. What I do mind is that the detail-rich world of Morrowind is replaced with what I consider a flashy bling-bling world in Oblivion. My computer can't handle all the eye candy anyway, so how does all the bling help me? The story isn't as good, the atmosphere svcks, the leveling scheme is terrible, the leveling system is still the counter-intuitive crap from Morrowind (which by the way is odd, seeing as the devs wanted to streamline the game), and exploration isn't half the fun it used to be.

And by the way, I'd like to stress that any anger I may or may not seem to display is directed solely towards what I consider intentional design choices made by Bethesda Softworks. I don't blame the Oblivion players at all. They've done nothing wrong. They're simply belong to a bigger segment than I do and so they get games tailored to them and I don't. Not their fault one bit. And while I'm explaining myself anyway, you really shouldn't take offense from me using the word "segment". I'm a business student (and a cynical one too) and they nut-slapped me with a rotten fish until the term was all but stapled onto my neocortex.

True, but if they're pretending that levitation isn't working in cities anyway, it would make sense to block people from falling to their deaths by levitating over the city walls. The alternative would be that gamesas would've had to configure the engine to automatically load the indoor city area whenever you cross over the walls. I don't know if that's technically feasible, but I'm reasonably sure it would've been if gamesas had wanted it to be from the beginning.

I don't know, though. Maybe they simplt couldn't make it work, but it just seems crazy to take out vertical design in 100% of the game for the sake of a mere nine damn indoor city cells. I'll cede that maybe the gamesas crew wasn't just lazy, but I still consider it a problem that they expect us to buy, that not a single rogue wizard out there would care to violate the ban on levitation and hide his fat loot up under the roof, where it would be much harder for some bumbling fool of an adventurer to put his greasy hands on it.

I... I couldn't agree more. I was going to try to reply to his quotes with smaller responses in the same manner, but you've totally stolen the words from my mouth and multiplied them tenfold. :thumbsup:

Believe it or not, many of us who prefer Oblivion aren't action junkies. I don't like action games and don't usually play anything other than RPGs. My first was Baldur's Gate II(been almost-exclusively playing RPGs since then), which I still love, but Oblivion is my favorite. I am also a fan of Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind, but I still like Oblivion the most, as an RPG fan. For me, the atmosphere is great(you say generic, I say not an large, boring ashland, but a vibrant, serene, and immersive land that I love to explore), and I love to slip away into the Shivering Isles occasionally(much more unique than Vvardenfell, if you ask me). Role-playing(with my own restricions placed on myself) is always a part of my Oblivion experience. Some Morrowind players complain about fast-travel and say they can't explore with it, yet, many people in the Oblivion section say they go out and explore and many don't use fast-travel. Role-playing Oblivion fans(Morrowind had plenty of casual players, too; Morrowind's not as difficult and avoiding of action as you claim) have mastered role-playing, but many role-playing Morrowind players seem to need mechanics to force them to do what they claim to want to do.

What Oblivion does better than Morrowind:
-smoother combat, magic, and stealth systems(I know, how dare the action elements of series be improved; Oblivion's predecessors have just as much action as Oblivion, but Oblivion just makes that action fun)
-better alchemy(creation of poisons is now possible)
-every location being marked on my map(love being able to see all the areas I've already been to
-(in my opinion)quest marker(don't care if it's more "casual", since it's more fun; games don't need to be "realistic" or tedious)
-larger, more immersive dungeons(Morrowind's were puny and lacked their own music; rarely find anything of actual interest in Morrowind's dungeons, no more than I find interesting stuff in Oblivion's dungeons)
-graphics(I know, just the advance of technology, doesn't add anything to the game, other than immersion and detail, which aren't important at all; Bethesda should have never improved their graphics past Arena because graphics don't matter, and it's not like Morrowind was ever considered eyecandy :rolleyes:)
-original quests(fewer in number than in Morrowind, but more creative)
-interesting characters(Morrowind had some, but in Oblivion, I find characters to be more convincing and many are interesting people; instead of being text boxes as in Morrowind, they show off their specific personalities with emotion and tone of voice in Oblivion)
-AI
-(in my opinion)more immersive world
-(in my opinion)better setting
-horses(useful for me and good for role-playing)
-buyable houses with unlimited storage per container(don't have to scatter my possesions all across the province and tediously walk to my storage areas; don't have to dishoneslty get myself a house)
-the simple ability to sit
-decent movement speed
-fast-travel(don't need everything instantly, but running everywhere in Morrowind wasn't immersive or fun, but rather tedious and annoying; when I want to explore, I explore, when I don't want to run through the same area several times, I shouldn't have to)
-commonly found roadside inns(for role-playing purposes)

Many of these things may be just due to my personal tastes, such as prefering the Ayleids over the Dwemer(which I do), but I believe Oblivion is better than Morrowind. I still love Morrowind, but I honestly belive people criticize Oblivion far too much.

Translation:
"As long as the graphics are shiny"--> As long as there's something bright and colorful and pretty on the screen to make me ooh and ahh.

"story doesn't require too much active thought"--> Giant middle finger to the guy you're arguing with.

Full disclosure-- Outside of the Elder Scrolls series, a couple of my favorite games are The Witcher and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and I don't usually play FPS's in general (Halo, Gears of War, and so on). I was disappointed as the rest of the Internet when Bioware completely stripped out the inventory and limited the stat customization in ME 2 as much as they did. As it turns out, a person can enjoy action-oriented combat and still expect other aspects of the game, like the story, to be deeper

Oh, and I hate pop music.

My offense comes from the assumptions you're making about me based on this one argument we're having. So I'll retract my implications of elitism, if only because I'm pretty much guaranteed to meet my hypocrisy quota for the day out there in the real world anyway

Now then, because I am so enjoying this:

Again with regard to the main quest, I'm sorry, I managed to confuse myself. The point I was making is that you can't TALK to him until you've gotten far enough in the game. You can "deal with" him as soon as you get in his room, obviously, but if you don't want to murder him (as I didn't), you can't go around murdering other people.

I had no issue with my suspension of disbelief. I don't know if maybe you consider Dragon Age to be "casual" as well, but that was another game that stuck to the core weapons types (blunts, axes, and blades) and still managed to be quite fun, immersive, and deep, in my opinion.

Don't do that. If you take anything to its furthest logical extreme, it sounds bad. Look at politics, look at religion. The world consists of middle grounds and shades of grey. So no, I don't think having one "weapons" skill would be a good idea. I also don't think it'd be a good idea to have a full virtual reality which you can plug directly into your brain and which is dictated by artificial intelligences much more complex then ourselves. If you think that's a bad idea, maybe you should stop playing video games

The point here remains the same, then. You see a lot of places where the game did go wrong, and then you allowed that, it seems, to color your opinion of the rest of the game. I love Oblivion's story, and I love not being the center of the universe. At the end of the game, I still felt like a badass, and a hero, but the entire world wasn't saying "e-e-e-excuse me, sera..." The story, in my opinion, was a lot more mature than Morrowind's, because you have to accept not being the hero that everyone will be writing songs about. Of course, the humility factor was tempered somewhat by the fact that you could become the master of every guild, slay multiple gods, become a god in your own right, and still have time to collect slaughterfish scales for the fisherman :rock: Likewise, if you go into Oblivion not expecting a return to Morrowind (which they pretty much gave us with Shivering Isles, anyway), I don't get why it's less immersive or atmospheric. I don't think this is a "bling-bling" thing, because even if the games had been switched chonologically and they got Oblivion out of their system while the tech was more limited, even if the gameplay of the two games remained unchanged (Oblivion still action oriented, Morrowind still stat-based), I think it would still be one of my favorite games of all time. It's a more realistic world, but that doesn't make it less beautiful. Reality is pretty nice looking too, you know Don't get me started on what Morrowind would be like, though :drool:

Morrowind bias or Oblivion,some things about one title I clearly prefer from the other,most of the time morrowind wins I admit.

Fun thing comes to mind, with rather high acrobatics you can jump over the city walls in oblivion,depressing view,or like one char of mine,clime every chapel in oblivion,it isn′t much to see beoynd the walls.

Less fun, oblivion alchemy are limited firmly to your characters achieved level of expertice,can′t do any potion beoynd that,of course as expert/master you can make anything but before that it is a frustrating experience, morrowind doesn′t have that limitation,other than you don′t see the effects until you reached a certain skill,you′re still able to do potions.

Other than that,don′t have much more to add.

My opinion is that you just have to accept both Oblivion and Morrowind for what they are.

To me, Morrowind is the deeper game, while Oblivion is the funner game. Oblivion is the game I play when I only have like a hour to play. Morrowind is what I play when I have a couple. Both of the games are good, except for several major flaws, which both games have. Morrowind is tougher gameplay. Oblivion has broken leveling. I still enjoy them both.

I say that this silly feud between the games just needs to end. They are both Elder Scrolls games, so why can't we just get along?

Because if we all smile and nod when Bethesda asks us how much we loved Oblivion, TESV will be even worse.

Hey, I'm not saying we can't address the flaws that are present in Oblivion. However, we can at least do it in a helpful and polite manner, can't we? Getting in fights over Morrowind and Oblivion doesn't really help anyone.

Especially since this thread isn't really supposed to be about Oblivion versus Morrowind to begin with.

Guess I opened this can of worms, though. Should have known better.

Sorry :facepalm:

Its always going to happen. You guys still play Morrowind and so have a thing about Oblivion, I have stopped playing Morrowind and so prefer Oblivion. FO3 actually has the best mechanics of the 3 which should make TES V, whenever it comes out, better than either. Every problem mentioned with Oblivion has been addressed by mods, random loot, open cities and levitation are all possible with the right mods.

Oblivion is the product of years of whining on this forum. In 2005 every second post was "this game has a bug!!! I just killed everybody in Balmora and now I can't complete any quests" The other question being "why can't I join all of the factions with the same character"

That combined with only about 20% of the people who bought the game actually finishing it was why Beth made the game smaller, more linear, and more idiot proof. Just because I completed off of the faction quests and the main quest about 5 times each dosen't have any bearing on the fact that 2 of my friends who bought the game abandoned it because it was simply too big and they didn't have the time to devote to it. Its also a lot cheaper and less effort to make a game like Oblivion compared to Morrowind. Beth don't get a lot of return for their input. A linear game like HL2 is the same price as Oblivion, which makes it hard for them to compete. Saying your happy to pay $150.000 for TES V is probably the most significant thing you can tell Beth if you want the game not to be as cheap and lowbrow as Oblivion provided to be.

That said, the worst thing for me about Oblivion was the landscape, if it had been nearly anywhere else and had a few giant mushrooms, tree cities, and the odd weird critter I would have been much happier with it.

@Orphanix, I'm not a fan of raising speed or alchemy, so I'm not quite sure if I will ever notice high alchemy or speed effects in any Elder Scrolls game. For dungeons, I can't give you the locations of areas with good loot in Oblivion, but for interesting, non-quest-related dungeons, check Vilverin, Black Rock Caverns, Sideways Cave(this one is my favorite), Goblin Jim's Cave, and Fort Urasek. The last two are the least interesting, but I found them to be amusing.

Perhaps I should explore a bit more in Morrowind, but, by chance, it seems I have found just as much in Oblivion, which is surprising since I haven't explored much of Oblivion, either(don't know how I haven't in all this time).

Both games have their strong point(s)
Oblivion
-AI (albeit buggy)
-Improved, smoother combat
-(A trend that most modern games seem to be following) I can haz moar graphicx. (Note: those graphics are great for people who can run them, unlike myself)
Morrowind
-More active\continuous modding community
--Related; easier to mod (Dialog...)
-More immersive
-Better setting (IMO)
-More open ended

The unique loot is generally the main thing. I hate the leveled lists. >_<

I'm surprised you forgot Lost Boy Cavern. Though pretty generic, it has a pretty good backstory. You might want to check it out if you haven't been there already.

And yeah, Vilverin is my favorite dungeon in Oblivion.