I liked Morrowind because it wasn't just journal entries that were in the journal. Any topic that you spoke of to any character was listed in there. Am I right in saying that Oblivion didn't have that?

Morrowind is better than Oblivion, but Oblivion's mods are usually superior to those of Morrowind.

I voted OMG POTATOES!!!!!!!!!! because I think they get quite equal in the end. Oblivion's mods being more advanced overall, but Morrowind being a better game.

Oblivion didn't, no. I completely forgot about that. Then again, there wasn't much dialogue in Oblivion.

Oooo, score 1000 for Morrowind.

Umm... Was that sarcasm? That was really useful. If I wanted to check over some real specific directions, I'd check my dialogues. If I want to see what people think about some NPC, I could check back what people have told me about him. I use it all the time.

I'm with the pantsless hunter on this - I really liked how Morrowind's journal felt like an actual journal. I enjoyed looking over notes about guilds and landmarks to help me orient myself and think about what was in store for me. The actual book was pretty disorganized even post-Tribunal, but I really did like how all the entires were written from first person. I don't really mind Oblivion's streamlined quest log, and I certainly think if they kept Morrowind's it would've been overkill in Oblivion, where there aren't really any cryptic riddles or locations to hunt for. The one thing I disliked about Oblivion's system was the writing style - your character was literally a walkthrough talking in the first person. "I found a key. I should see if the locked door I found earlier is opened by it."

Otherwise, both served their purposes quite well.

Really? I felt like Morrowind did that too.

I agree with the pantsless wannabe god. :goodjob:

Edit: Doesn't really work as well when it's just an avatar... :sadvaultboy:

Having recently started a new Morrowind character ... the world draws me in just as it did on release. I believe there were a lot of gameplay improvements (active blocking, radiant AI, updated graphics, etc.) with Oblivion but there's nothing comparable to questions like, "Should my character join the temple?" and, pre-expansion, "Is the Tribunal worthy of worship?" I also like the way Caius says things like, "I need to study these documents for awhile. Go do some freelance work and come back when you're ready for an assignment.

In general, I'd say that constant failure is less fun than achieving very modest successes at low levels. I also prefer having all skills levelable at low levels rather than relying on training until you achieve enough proficiency to actually level through use. I dislike mechanisms, e.g. Oblivion lock-picking that rely on player reflexes more than character skill. It might seem contradictory that I enjoyed active blocking, but that's not quite so twitch-based.

It's my impression that I'm almost alone in thinking they hit the right note with character conversations in Oblivion. Most of what people say is mundane--on a par with "I saw a mudcrab the other day." More memorable anecdotes would also be more jarring if heard over and over and in an open-ended game, you either get repetition or eventually the NPCs are going to run out of things to say. If the purpose was to add a bit of life to the world, I think they got the tone right. Not to say that I'm not eager to see what advances they make in the next game, but I think they're on the right track.

Anyway, POTATOES!!!!!

I agree with you. Those mundane, overheard conversations are something that should have been in Morrowind to begin with. They add a lot. I was just saying that voice-recording every last bit of spoken dialogue in the entire game really limits the amount of content the devs can add.

I like both.

Yeah I know, I sound like a person wanting to avoid an argument or to make both sides of the discussion not dislike me, but facts are facts, and both games are phenomenal. Oblivion and Morrowind had interesting additions to lore, great gameplay, fun quests, and interesting worlds. I would have loved Oblivion a lot more than I do if some of it's "lore-described" aspects were there, but I can see where they weren't fully capable of that. They were mentioned, but not wholly there. Morrowind had its unique alien aspects, and Oblivion had its pleasant familiarity.

Honestly, to me they felt like VERY similar games after playing Morrowind for long enough. It's not like they just ditched everything with Oblivion, Oblivion felt like a "2006 Morrowind" after playing Morrowind. The main differences were combat, and voiced dialogue. But other than that, they seem like they're pretty-much the same. Yeah, there are the little unimportant details like how journals were set up, and physics; but you can really see how they mesh together to create a beautiful game series. I don't see them as separate anymore. It's just different parts of the world, some people enjoyed the wonderful giant mushrooms, while others enjoyed the familiar deciduous forests. Some liked the towns inside of giant shells of Ald'Ruhn, while others liked the stone buildings of Anvil.

For modding, I prefer Oblivion, and thus for role-playing I sort-of prefer Oblivion (I even make new clothes for my characters, not to mention homes, families, objects, and other things). But as for being good games, both Morrowind and Oblivion are astounding at what they do, and I hope Bethesda gives us some news on TES:V soon, because if they don't I'm going to explode.


It doesn't really if you think about it. They write the scripts, the voice actors get a description of the characters and the situation, and then they say them into a microphone a bunch of times until the people who want it said a certain way are happy. The Oblivion GOTY Edition took 2 discs to install, because of all the content, so it's not like that's impossible. Adding voices doesn't limit how much you can add to something, because it doesn't take up too much space, I've had to install 4 discs for some games before, it's not that big of a deal.

It wasn't sarcasm. He made a really good point. I used it, too. And it would be a great thing to have with Oblivions more organized quest log.

Thank you. As shocking as it may be, Oblivion IS Morrowind's sequel.

Thought this was going to be locked :toughninja:

The thing is, combat and voiced dialogue really impacted many other aspects of the game (moreso voiced dialogue). That's why the arguments always come down to them.



Fair enough. You know how the internet is...

It's being monitored closely by the mods (as per their posts in this thread) and it'll get locked if it gets out of hand again like it apparently has once or twice already (which the mods have cleaned up).

It's nice to have a mature discussion regarding the two games, IMO.

Voted potatoes. What can I do? I'm half-Irish

As has been stated before, I play and love both games for different reasons. I think Oblivion was simplified, but I don't think that's a bad thing, and I don't think it's directly tied to the improvement of technology ("Developers only care about making games pretty now"), because video games have always fought to be on the visual cutting edge. Video games, at their inception, were a very niche pastime (for the most part, the stereotype of the overweight programmer in his mom's basemant was a fair one for a while there ), and games were developed pretty much for that niche. But videogames have become very mainstream, with a massive audience of people who don't always want punishing difficulty or an overwhelming number of skills (referring to Daggerfall here, not so much Morrowind). There's nothing like the Elder Scrolls games on the market-- in terms of the world and atmosphere, it's unparalleled. The other "hardcoe" fantasy RPGs on the market (Dragon Age and the Witcher) have their own unique worlds to explore, and games like Halo, while superficially comparable in terms of gameplay, can't ever compare in the world they build. So I think it's an unfair expectation for the Elder Scrolls games to remain inaccessible to anyone except hardcoe Elder Scrolls fans, and for everyone else to "go back to Halo," because there's nothing even close. If more people get to immerse themselves in Tamriel and its lore because the gameplay was made more accessible, I'm fine with that. And if they use the newest game as a jumping point into the older games, hey, even better. Just my thoughts on the matter. :shrug:

Even though Oblivion is considered a 'sequel', I just see them as two different games - three, if we include Daggerfall. There are things I do and don't like about all of them, but I don't really compare one to the other.

Regardless of the niggling little things, I still LOVE all of them for what they are. B)

Potatoes FTW! :clap:

In Morrowind when asked "latest rumors" everybody said the same things. Same things with "services", "advice", and "background". I've gone into the CS to figure out what they did and things in there aren't all specially catered to every person. There are people who will simply say things about the town based on what "cell" they're in, . There are many dialogue topics in Oblivion, you just can't ask everybody everything. When people talk to you for a very long time IRL, you usually know them pretty well. I usually don't get into a huge conversation about "The Imperial Legion" with every police officer I see. And I'm not saying this to mock anyone or anything like that, so please don't take it like that in any way, I mean no offense. It's just that the Morrowind system for dialogue was rather simple, and Oblivion's was basically the same system with the addition of voice. You still had a "menu of topics" to choose from, and some people still had unique introductions while others would just say "What?" or "I'm listening.", and saying certain things would result in a disposition change or would advance you in a quest. The differences were the length, and the voices.

The length of dialogue is understandable, sense it was their first time around. But many people in Fallout 3 will talk to you for a long time about the history of a place, what they do, how they got there, etc. So I think that's a good sign for the next TES game. They also hired more voice actors in Fallout 3 (more than 50, iirc). And they weren't all "big names", they were very talented voice actors that often-times you couldn't tell they voice acted more than one person. As for combat voices, they had special ones for certain characters, and then for others they just had a drop-down menu for voice types so that everybody didn't sound exactly the same. There were also many options to finishing dialogue, from telling people that they should quit doing drugs, to telling them it's none of your business and you want no part of it. There were even people who in the middle of talking would mention that they can stop talking if you want them to.

Voice dialogue has improved since 2006 where it was relatively new, and that shouldn't be ignored.

Oh ok, thats nice to know, I can't really say anything on the mods for either game since I play on xbox/360

Not talking just space, but time and money and effort.

The fact remains that there was drastically less dialogue options and misc. topics in Oblivion, plus no choices in the quests. And when they added choices to the quests, in FO3, we ended up with a hundred less quests.

Something is killing content and I can't think of a bigger culprit than voice acting. Think of it, it's so much less restricting to just write what you want and stick it in the game than to consider the fact that whatever you write has to travel from studio to studio being recorded and edited and yadda, yadda.

Ok, ready? It's repeat myself time!



But, seriously, if something else is killing the content, let me know so I can stop wrongfully accusing fully-voiced dialogue.

Just for the record, when I say, "Fallout 3 had less quests because they insisted on having every last spoken line recorded", I'm not dissing Fallout 3, which I loved, I'm simply saying, "Fallout 3 had less quests because they insisted on having every last spoken line recorded," because it's a fact to be considered.

P.S. I'm not relentlessly forcing my opinion that Morrowind is flawless (especially since I don't think Morrowind is flawless and I've been known to defend Oblivion) onto people like some accuse me of. I'm just relentlessly trying to make my point known, since people comment on my opinion but refuse to read it first.

And linking to old comments, if they're relevant, is not spam.

no need for my comment, now.

Since Fallout 3 was originally supposed to end at the end of the MQ, I'm not entirely sure they meant for there to be many quests. But there were plenty of quests, just not as many NPCs to give 'em. A world based around radiation and nuclear fallout isn't bound to have many people in it.

The dialogue in Oblivion, as I said, was their first attempt at doing it, and Fallout 3 was meant to end at the end of the main quest, which is what they based the entire game on. I'm talking about what they improved on by the time they made Fallout 3, not what they did specifically for Fallout 3 due to its unique circumstances.

Ok, an alternate theory, I'll buy it. I don't think there were plenty of quests, because I definitely noticed the lack thereof. But I do agree that there were less people in FO3 and that it wasn't meant to be as open as a TES game and that a lot of Oblivion's elements were largely experimental.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens with TESV.

Cross your fingers.

I've been crossing them for a while.

We just need to have faith in Bethesda, and we know that they read what we have to say.

TES games, I think, are more important to them because it's something they came up with. Fallout was originally made by somebody else. I'm really hoping that's the case.