So, I've been noticing a trend on these forums. From results of different polls, I have seen that most of the fans on these forums seem to like Morrowind the best and/or played Morrowind as their first TES game.

Look around at the poll results of the first two or three pages in general, and you'll see the Morrowind bias.

I was wondering why this might be.
Some thoughts:

• Morrowind is the awesomest game ever
  
• Morrowind fans are the most loyal (stick around the longest)
  
• The Oblivion fans are mostly on their Xbox, and not online forum types of people
  
• The forums came out around the time of Morrowind, so Morrowind fans are just forum fans, also

I dunno.
Does anyone else see this?

EDIT: Or maybe it's just Morrowind season right now. But just looked over the results of the polls on the first two pages again. Definitely overwhelmingly Morrowind.

These three,morrowind is an awesome game but it has some pretty big flaws.
most oblivion fans just move on to other games,they tend to not play games that are 4 years old.

It is a great game although as manwhocomesaround said with some pretty big flaws (the economy, gods, the economy)
If MW has loyal fans presumably theres a reason for that
Lots of console users amongst the MW fans
Why would the time the forums came out make a difference? The people I see on here a lot now aren't the same people for the most part as when I joined

For me Oblivion was a much more polished product than MW, better writing, improved gameplay, all sorts of things. It just lacked the creativity to make it as interesting as MW.

I admit Morrowind was the first ES game I played and when Oblivion came out I was disapointed in the scale of things, just didnt feel like nearly as much to do compared to Morrowind. I love them both but overall Morrowind just feels much larger and more deep to me.

In my opinion, oblivion is so much different, it can't even be compared to morrowind.

While morrowind focusses heavily on roleplaying, strategy, careful planning and story, oblivion is all about action, reactions, colorful special effects and some abilities, being useless to such a distinct, it's a shame.
some freaking warrior with 20 pt agi and 5 pt security can pick a 100 pt lock? wtf?
With 5 speechcraft, you can raise disps up to 75? wtf???
Additionally, Heavy Armor being completely equal to light armor at lev 100 is so much of a fail -_-

For me, both games have huge flaws but morrowind has more depth and allows for way more roleplaying(due to the fact, in mw, there are way more factions, which even fight against eachother)

I think because Morrowind has that depth to it that Oblivion lacks, people just stop playing Oblivion after a while because they get bored of it. Morrowind is the awesomest game ever and has a certain allure to it which keeps the player interested. I suppose people that had already played Morrowind expected something more out of Oblivion when it came out.

Well, this is coming from primarily a MW fan so, I'm biased.

Well, now that Oblivion is an old game by some standards, it's easier to evaluate the two, an 8 year old game vs. a 4 year old game. I did just that a year or so ago and decided that MW was the better game. It's deeper, larger and more interesting, at least to me. The graphics can be improved to be as good as OB's if that's a big factor. Morrowind is a highly styled artistic world compared to OB's attempt to be very realistic. The photorealism trend is apparent in the newest games but I don't think it's necessarily a good direction. It makes games more alike and it makes even minor graphics faults more noticeable IMHO.

Interestingly, in another 4 vs. 8 year old game comparison, (Gothic2 vs. Gothic3) I also prefer the older game. Maybe I'm just stuck in 2002

That first theory was kind of a joke, although it's cool to see how many people agree that Morrowind is the awesomest game ever.

Perhaps it's the fact that Morrowind's uniqueness has earned it a "cult following" whereas being graphics and action-oriented, like most games, Oblivion doesn't stand out from the others like Morrowind did in it's time or Daggerfall did in its time. While surpassing all other games in quality for that year, Oblivion played the safe route and wasn't unique enough to become timeless

That's the benefit of taking risks.

So why don't more Daggerfall fans frequent these forums like they used to? Is it the total lack of hope that any future Bethesda game will ever be like Daggerfall?

I think it's a combination of some things.
The MW fans have to be loyal, it's been 8 years now.
MW is a very good game.
OB felt like a slap in the face to many MW fans who saw it as oversimplified and generic. Some hated it for this and became a vocal minority.
The forums have more hardcoe MW fans than OB ones. Only the people who REALLY like morrowind will still play it now (excluding those just getting into it now) and many of them will hang around on these forums, particularly the mods forum to fix stuff. OB's fanbase is more casual, alot of the people will be in the forums to ask a question about a quest or two then leave, the mod library for OB is alot smaller.
And some other stuff

Morrowind tends to draw a more hardcoe crowd, it doesnt hold your hand. The hardcoe crowd tends to like to mod and discuss the game where as the more casual gamers, tend to go to Oblivion, so the forum is more densely populated with Mororwind fans. Plus Morrowind is much more kick ass than Oblivion

There are plenty of DF fans in the "past elder scroll games" section of the board.

But because Daggerfall is not very amenable to modding (though that hasn't stopped some fearless folks) the Daggerfall community is bound to be less dynamic. In Daggerfall you, err, play Daggerfall. And occasionally swap stories about crazy things that happen. Morrowind and Oblivion, on the other hand, are still in the process of being made.

Exclusively Oblivion fans tend to stick in the Oblivion section, probably due to the hate towards Oblivion in the other parts of the Elder Scrolls part of the forums, including the TES general section. Oblivion will be a classic and those who claim Morrowind didn't have amazing graphics must not realize just how good looking it was back in 2002. On the back of my GOTY Morrowind case, Morrowind is being praised for its graphics. It was meant to look amazing and it had advanced graphics for 2002. Morrowind was strongly hated on these forums at one point in time, but now it is accepted as a great game more commonly on these forums. Wait and see. The same will happen with Oblivion. Many are still playing Oblivion, myself included.

I believe you are absolutely right. Morrrowind got much hate on these forums when it was released, and for quite awhile afterwards. But when Oblivion was released Morrowind turned into everybody's favorite game of all time. It's bound to happen again when TESV comes out. People will hate so many new features in TESV that, retroactively, Oblivion will begin to look good to them by comparison.

Either that may happen, or many older fans will decide it's time to give up on the series and leave the forums, leaving the place for the Oblivion fans. Then, a new group of people, the Oblivion elitists, will rise to rule the forums. Perhaps a combination of the two will happen.

"TES V is too casual. Let's go back to our hardcoe Oblivion."

Though, I have to admit, vampirism is more versatile in Oblivion.

In Morrowind, being a vampire means, being some invincible steel colossus, steamrolling through the world and onehitting everything with a huge hammer(Quarra), some overpowered spell spamming machine, disintegrating everything with godlike spells, having up to no cost or some fast, invisible shade, just going through everything unnoticed.
In Oblivion, vampires suffer from the fact, raising skills above 100 has no effect and the overall bonusses just being lower BUT you can still talk to people, which is huge!

to me, both of these aren't perfect but I can live with either.
The Morrowind vampirism just means, you can have some fun after finishing all quests and maxing everything and the Oblivion vampirism is more of a funny addition, you can use while raising up your char to get some nice bonusses or just have fun, sneaking around and svcking blood.

Unfortunately, the Oblivion vampirism just looks like having been implemented for the sake of it just being there for Elder Scrolls without vampires looks stupid.
It has almost no drawbacks and greatly helps some kind of characters to get high sneak etc. without wallhugging close to some skeletton for 3 hrs(kinda dislike that one anyway, in MW, you need to be actually in the line of SIGHT to gain experience)

For me, vampirism is an excellent example as to why morrowind is better than oblivion.
For Oblivion, bethesda highly polished up the graphics, physics engine etc. and then dumped it onto some plain, simple and kinda boring world.
Oblivion is kinda reduced to the main quest with the rest being mere some way to get Items, needed to beat the main quest with the ridiculous stat scaling of opponents.
For morrowind, the main quest is merely the back bone. There is so much stuff out there in Vvardenfel, you can really get lost in the pile of quests and information, everyone throws at you.
At a Sidenote, in Oblivion, this is pretty simple - just fast travel to the position of the quest marker and finish the quest -_-

I don't find Cyrodiil to be boring at all. In fact, the case can be made that it is a step up from Morrowind's Disneyland-esque 'zones': from "Bitter-Coast-Land" to "Ascadian-Isles-Land" to "Azura's-Coast-Land". The zones in Morrowind are almost as distinct and color-coded as zones in World of Warcraft, it might be argued. Cyrodiil could be said to represent a more 'mature', less cartoony approach to designing game worlds.




Again, I disagree. The player is no more reduced to a mandatory main quest when playing Oblivion than he is when playing Morrowind. Either main quest can be ignored, or postponed. The one difference that I will admit to is this: once Oblivion's main quest begins in earnest it does tend to continually push the player into finishing it. I prefer Morrowind's more relaxed approach, myself.




Yes, if one chooses to play that way. But, as always in an Elder Scrolls game, the player is in control, not the game. Any player who cedes control to the game, who allows the game to dictate what he does and doesn't do has only himself to blame. The freedom to play however we want is what sets Elder Scrolls games apart from nearly all other games on the market.

I love both Morrowind and Oblivion for different reasons. I've been playing Morrowind since 2005, and I love the scale of the game, the greater number of joinable factions, the existence of politics (e.g., Great House politics, religious politics, imperialism, faction conflict), the strangeness of the land, etc.

But I love Oblivion because magic in Morrowind is terrible! :facepalm:

Oblivion was horribly disappointing. But for me it seems Morrowind never really disappoints. It is one of the greatest RPGs of all time imo. The worst part about morrowind is the feel of all the quests. There is no sense of urgency, or no sense that you are a part of something big. For example, Mass Effect 1 had one of the greatest stories because you truly felt like you were doing something important in the game, but in Morrowind you don't really get any of that... For instance the last quest:

"Go kill dagoth ur so you save the world!!!"

"ok one sec plz im just gonna go decorate my house with some new itemz i got lol thanx tho"

In my opinion:

Oblivion Vanilla < Morrowind Vanilla

Oblivion Modded = Morrowind Vanilla

Oblivion Modded < Morrowind Modded

Just my opinion on the matter, though I do love both games dearly.

And yes, for the most part, I agree with you, OP.

If TESV can be called casual, compared to Oblivion, then all my worst fears will have come true.

Remembering the forums when Morrowind came out, there were many more complaints about not being able to find Cauis than complaints about it not being like Daggerfall.

In other words, the majority of hatred towards Morrowind was expressed by action-loving console gamers who purchased the game and were frustrated that they couldn't beat it in a week.

Remembering the forums when Oblivion came out. The majority of complaints were most definitely by Morrowind fans who felt like they had been slapped in the face by Bethesda. I was really angry back then. I've calmed down since. I still think Oblivion was overtly less good than it could have been just for the sake of saving time, but I now no longer expect any game to ever be as good as Morrowind.

But anyway, you really can't compare Oblivion's reception with Morrowind's until TESV comes out. But, I can tell you it already has more enemies than Morrowind did on these forums. I can tell you frustrations about Oblivion's flaws are still making people a lot more angry than Morrowind's flaws were four years after the fact.

And I can also tell you, judging by the improvements made in F3 and SI, that people will not be complaining that TESV is dumbed down. It is my sincere hope that people will be complaining that TESV is too confusing.

But anyway, here's my point:
It's no surprise to me that Morrowind is more popular than Oblivion, especially now after reading these posts. My real question is, where have all the Daggerfall fans gone?

I've been to the Past Games forum now and then. There's really maybe a handful of fans there, and some of them are people who downloaded Daggerfall recently and have questions.

EDIT: oh, and by the way, this really isn't a place for comparing the games, it's more of a place for pondering why Morrowind fans seem to be the most loyal/ stick around the longest

Ehm, no. Morrowind never had amazing graphics per se. The water was awesome as hell and the sky wasn't bad either but the textures were always muddy, the faces horrible, and there's a good reason why better bodies is so popular.

Compare with Gothic 2, which came out about the same time in Europe and, if memory serves, a bit earlier in Germany. Gothic 2 had realistic NPCs, good-looking creatures with good-looking animations, fantastic skies, walls that looked like walls, reasonable shadows as far as I recall, grass that didn't look like a moldy carpet, and various swampy particle effects where relevant. That was awesome graphics for 2002.

The text on the backside of the GOTY case suggesting that "Morrowind sets a new standard in gaming with its incredible graphics" is out and out marketing [censored]. The graphics were certainly adequate and even rather good considering the scope of the game, but they were never "incredible" for a PC game.

I play and love both. I'm playing them both concurrently, in fact. For me, Oblivion's graphics are breathtakingly beautiful and realistic, and one of the reasons I wanted the game so badly in the first place. Morrowind on the other hand is, for me, infinitely more artistic. There are times I feel as though I'm walking through a dream or a highly imaginitive painting. The landscape and sound effects evoke real emotions in me (fear in the West Gash and Ashlands at night, peace and contentment in the Ascadian Isles region, and Alice in Wonderland feeling in the Telvanni cities of Azura's coast).

I thought Gothic 2 came out a while later than Morrowind. Something like late 2003.
Being released more than a year later, of course it can have better graphics. About NPCs, correct me if I'm wrong but, weren't they all one race, humans? Kinda makes things easier when you have only 1 race of NPCs and 1 hero to draw/create. Then again, that might just be my MW fan-boy side acting up...

Oh, about the topic:

I think it's only natural due to Oblivion being more a casual game that the players don't stick around for long. Once they "beat" the game, they find another and move on.

2003 was when the NOTR expansion came out. The base game was out in 2002.

Gothic was a rather different game, it has to be said, but the overall premises were the same. Fantasy world, exploration, and doing more or less what you want when you want to. True, Gothic only had humans and orcs, which narrows down the artistic scope somewhat. Also true that all orcs look exactly alike but humans tended to be much more diverse to make up for it.

Don't get me wrong, I like Morrowind a lot (or I wouldn't be here) but graphics is the one area where I feel Gothic 2 blew it away without any contest whatsoever.