well i to somewhat liked morrowind better (three cheers for better story and no leveled loot enemies and weapons) but you got to admit that the shivering isles was the real elder scrolls 4 . also glad to see your opinion isnt based on nostalgia but yes i liked oblivion for its better combat and stealth and yes even for its ragdoll physics

Duke Nukem 3D and Thief. The level of innovation and gameplay in these games are unmatched in their genres. Devs are not even trying. I feel lucky if I can get duplicates of maybe 1 or 2 features in one new game. All games are scripted cutscene borefests, I count myself lucky if cutscenes are actually good. What a shame.

Morrowind is a timeless masterpiece. There is no way for me to accept walled cities. I can't even accept Mournhold. And I can't even believe how level scaling found its way into Oblivion nor I can understand the removal of travel services. Oblivion cost too much and I have no idea why.

I wish it was nostalgia.

Anyway, I love TES universe. With mods, they are all giving me the same feeling. :tes:

I don't want to play the nostalgia or the "make it less like Oblivion" card, so let's try this properly.

Hilariously Specific, Non-Gameplay Reasons Morrowind was More Engrossing than Oblivion!

• Fog. Yes, fog. A heavy part of the atmosphere in Morrowind was looking off into the distance, wondering what lay beyond the next steep hill mountain. In every sense of the word, Morrowind had a very strong, adventurous "pioneer" vibe to it. You often felt very isolated due to the fog, which kind of made you ruminate more deeply on what was happening elsewhere in the world: it also made expeditions and the like feel a lot more dangerous. In Oblivion it wasn't a big deal, because you could see every other town and dungeon from anywhere in the province. But really, I'm hoping that Skyrim will go out of its way to still make the player feel lonely now and then in the world. It doesn't even have to be a rigid, opaque render-distance fog: just some subtle tint would really help to make the world feel more expansive.
  
• I think another nice element in Morrowind was the shops. I'm not sure what it was, but it felt as if there were a lot more of them but they were very understocked and had a far more mixed selection of items than in Skyrim. It was interesting to be browsing through these shady dens of antiquity and finding things like odd books, silverware and shoes strewn about. It helped the world feel more mystical, in a way.
  
• The lighting, too - please, less bloom, ambient lighting, and inexplicable blue "glows" in every dungeon this time around. Morrowind's locations were very evenly-lit for the most part, making every area with a colored lantern or candle feel all the more exotic. But again, I really enjoyed this "sleepy" atmosphere in the game - it made it feel as if you weren't anybody special, and the world felt more real in a way because of how imperfect it looked. In Oblivion, the brightly-lit interiors and glowing glass windows kind of made the world feel more "organic", as if it were deliberately trying to impress you every step of the way. Which is where the telltale "fantasy theme park" label comes from.
  
• More vertical architecture. Be it the winding Telvanni towers or the shadowy canols of Vivec, or even the subtle terrace that the Balmora houses were built along, I definitely don't want everything to feel flat again like it did in Chorrol. It makes the towns feel a lot more sterile, if you ask me.

Yes I absolutely loved Shivering Isles. It kind of reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, which was one of my favorite books as a kid. The feeling I got from SI was so maddeningly amazing!

Minus the combat system...that was extremely infuriating at low levels

They might be adding Cliffracers for all we know, that'll definitely make Skyrim feel more like Morrowind :whistling:

I love morrowind. It does have a magical, mystical feeling to it that pulls you in in ways that no other game can do. The "stranger in a strange land" feeling is incredible. Todd says he doesn't want that feeling for Skyrim. I can't see why. Perhaps they just can't do it again.

That said, I also know that my love for Morrowind has nothing to do with nostalgia. I bought it on steam when the first skyrim trailer came out. I play it to this day, recently, a few days ago. I love every minute of it and I still find my self entranced and mystified by the incredible feel and environment. Morrowind was the perfect world. It wasn't the perfect RPG, but it was the perfect world, and it may well be that not even Bethesda can do it again.

as someone brilliantly pointed out. how can it be nostalgia if you are still playing the game? i guarantee you that after skyrim is released and some time passes that the morrowind community will be more active than the oblivion community. people are going to abandon oblivion in droves.

I think Skyrim should have its own feel and not just another games, and I never really got into the feel of Morrowind, the graphics were just so bad, I was spoiled by Oblivion, yeh after a while I got used to it but then it didnt seem so forlorn to me

Yep. The problem with Oblivion is that it doesn't fill any sort of niche. There's nothing really unique or "first time" ish about it. When people play morrowind for the first time, they find things they've never seen before. They experience magic. But Oblivion? It's just another game. It's a great game, but it's just a game. The only reason I play it is because it's the most modern TES engine available.

Once Skyrim comes out Oblivion won't even be the most modern engine, and I probably will find myself playing Skyrim and Morrowind and almost never going back to Oblivion. Why would I? What's to go back to? What is it that I might hope to revive by firing up Oblivion one more time? There's really no spark there to re-ignite.

A map full of obstacles (mountains) rather than a giant plain with mountains on the border. A map where you can say "I'm going to explore this valley completely, then move on to that island and explore it." A world that feels big because you can break it down into smaller parts.

Technically yes you could. But the only thing it really did was nothing, except sometimes made people immortal (no joke. was a glitch lol)

people assume that people like me who want features back that were in MW just want a MW2, thats not how it is to me. I don't care if it feels more like MW or OB as long as it makes improvements to its features rather than removing them all together and put something mediocre and new in their place, if at all.


this, OB was a good game (better than MW in fact) but what made people, me, think it was lacking was because MW was practically groundbreaking while OB made some improvements and focused too much on being its own game rather than improving upon systems and content from the previous title.

btw, I am sure people who started on OB feel more nastolgic about it than MW. its hard to go from being used to OB and then go on to MW.

Since we're talking about Morrowind can we talk about why everyone is so afraid of the cliff racers? Sure, I have been attacked by more than 1 at a time but i've never had a problem taking them down. Even at level 1, it was like 2 successful thrusts for a kill. Why so afraid?

Because apparently nobody understood just how important Fatigue and Agility were, so nobody could manage to kill that Mudcrab outside of Seyda Neen let alone Cliff Racers.

more like annoyance than fear. they pop up every where and alot of times they take a long time to hover down to your level if directly above you.

I never thought I'd feel bitter toward Morrowind until I started actively visiting these forums. Oblivion gets such a bad rap for little to no reason.

Morrowind certainly had its own unique feeling, and I believe we'll get nothing similar from Skyrim. Morrowind is supposed to be this alien-esque crazy place. Skyrim is the land of the Nords, the first race of men. I expect it to be far more similar to Cyrodiil than Vvardenfell. If it was more like Vvardenfell, I'd be pretty irritated.

Yeah, I restarted my first character after realizing the same thing. An Argonian with all the agility I could ever ask for. I guess other people realized too late, or were just plain stubborn. :biggrin:

Cliff-racers were a mistake, literally. The devs accidentally put too many in.

What I miss from Morrow isn't the setting, although I did love it, it was the depth. Did OB have depth in different places that Morrow didnt? Definitely, did Oblivion handle some things better? Yeah, but I just want the depth back. Asking for Daggerfall depth would be too much, I dont think people would be happy with the graphics if they made a TES that deep for all platforms. I'd love it though. The more the better.

I kinda agree that the sentiment is misplaced that not feeling like MW makes it not a good game. every game should have its own feel, but it should not be achieved by giving content a make over so it feels different rather than improving it and making it feel better. (I am reffering to things in OB like the map, weapons, and enemy leveling) *although I have to give the benefit of the doubt on enemy leveling, it did not turn out right but they probably meant it as an improvement*

thats some things that I did not like OB as much as MW, but overall OB was a better game but barely and mostly for graphical and combat reasons. it could have been so much better if they focused less on making it feel different than the previous instead of making it feel like its improved at a rate consistant to MW.

1) Better writing
Everything in Oblivion was so... flat. Morrowind felt like they locked an author, a political science PHD, and an anthropologist in a room until they developed the perfect backdrop. Interplay between the Empire and layers of aboriginals was simply amazing. Not only was there friction between the Empire and Dunmer in general, but then the drama between the Great Houses and the Ashlanders, to say nothing about the competition between the Houses themselves. Add to this undertones of slavery, necromancy, ancestor worship, vampirism, and competing religions and you've got a fertile ground to grow a compelling story.

2) Better item placement
Such a small thing... but it keys into a HUGE psychological gaming mechanic: the trophy effect. If you asked me to name one thing I remembered about Oblivion housing, I'd tell you how useless it was. Since I couldn't place anything nicely, I just put everything in chests. Ask me the same question about Morrowind and I'll tell you about obsessively sorted and displayed soul gems, dwemer table settings, fully stocked libraries, cellars full of matze, desks heaped with alchemical reagents, or tables of beautifully arrayed rare weapons and artifacts. And maybe a bowl loaded with fistfulls of gems.

3) Named Soul Gems
Which is more fun to look at: "filled" or "Terrible Tusk Beast of Terror!" Which one reminds you of past adventures?

I've tried to anolyze it, and account for it. I continued to play Morrowind long after I stopped playing Oblivion, and I continued to think about it long after I stopped playing. Why?

I think part of it is nostalgia, surely. Being 13 can make a lot of simple experiences quite awesome. Also, not having played anything like it before, the experience would probably have been pretty amazing even today. On top of that, there are definitely also some specific game design choices that make it superior (in my opinion) to Oblivion.

And that used to scare me, because I realized that even if Bethesda made a game as good (in my opinion) as Morrowind, I would still not feel exactly the same way. Then I realized that, hey, Morrowind did have flaws, or gaps, or areas for improvement. The reason I was so excited, and ultimately let down by Oblivion was that I imagined it would keep all the old great stuff, remove the bad stuff, and add new great stuff. Instead, it just made new great stuff AND new bad stuff.

So now I'm waiting for a game that's even better than Morrowind. And I don't think Skyrim (great as it should be) will be that game. It will entertain me, but it won't give me that "Morrowind feelin'."

Well it's been stated by the man himself (Todd) that Skyrim will have a feeling that's between Oblivion and Morrowind; It'll have its traditional fantasy settings (Oblivion), but it will also have the weird, stranger in a new land sort of feeling that you got in MW as well.

So Bethesda is aiming to please both crowds, and I bet it'll turn out quite nicely

what is it you liked about morrowind? was it the loneliness? strangeness of the land? or somethingelse?
nothign sarcastic in my question.

In my opinion, what they would do to make it feel like Morrowind is make a game not quite as good as Oblivion, so... stop assuming Morrowind was a flat-out improvement that everyone likes more than Oblivion or any other Elder Scrolls game, for that matter. :shrug: