I played Morrowind to death (no mods, staunchly anti mod guy please don't recommend them). I was fairly disgusted with Oblivion as an entry into the TES series, so when Skyrim came along I just dismissed it out of hand.


I haven't been back to the Elder Scrolls world for years and years, but I've been getting more and more tempted to try Skyrim as I've heard from a friend it's sins are not as egregious as Oblivion's.


So I figured I'd ask the Morrowind veterans here, can Skyrim scratch that itch? Is it challenging? Atmospheric with a good story? Good, varied side quests with variable outcomes and solutions? Believable world? (Can an axe wielding savage with no knowledge of spells become leader of the Mage's guild, etc)


Appreciate your feedback guys

Skyrims not a bad game, but its not exactly like Morrowind, just like Morrowind wasn't like daggerfall..



as long as you keep an open mind, and don't go in expecting "Morrowind v2.0", you may very well like it or hate it.. thats the thing about games and personal taste, no one can truly tell if you'll like a game except you, because no two people on this world have the exact same tastes (similar maybe, but not exact"..



my suggestion, wait till its on a Steam sale (if your on PC) and give it a try.. just when you go into it, you have to think of it as a new kind of experience rather than an updated version of the Morrowind Experience..



there are Morrowind fans on these forums who love Skyrim, and there are those that hate it.. there is no mathematical formula to tell if you will like a game or not, all you can really do is try to keep an open mind and give it a try

You're going to get a wide variety of opinions here. Myself, I like Skyrim. But, then, I also like Oblivion, which you do not, so take that with a grain of salt. If you thought Oblivion was "dumbed down" it's possible you might not like Skyrim either.

Me, I love Skyrim's atmosphere. The Rift is my all-time favorite area of an Elder Scrolls game. I love its woods, autumnal colors, lakes, waterfalls, all of it. I happen to like Vikings and Nordic cultures in general, so Skyrim was right up my alley. Forgotten Vale is another of my favorites. And, of course, we get to revisit Solstheim.

I think the art design is phenomenal. The is no more amazing sight in any Elder Scrolls game than seeing Solitude or the College of Winterhold from a distance, in my opinion. I love Dwemer stuff and Skyrim is all filled with it as Morrowind.

Skyrim can be very challenging at times. It is not as level-scaled as Oblivion. The world is filled with more Morrowind-style statically leveled enemies than Oblivion. You will meet enemies who are level 30 and level 50 when you are level 1. many dungeons have a minimum level, ranging from level 6 up to level 24. Going into a level 24 dungeon at level 1 is a quick way to die.

The main quest has a "ChosenOne" story as most of Bethesda's games tend to do. It doesn't shove the main quest in your face quite as fast or as obnoxiously as Oblivion. I like the stories behind the guilds better than either Morrowind or Oblivion, but they tended to be far too short for my tastes. I thought that, in general, the important NPCs we interact with in the main quest and guild quests were more vivid and memorable than in Oblivion.

I happen to love the Perk system they introduced. I like dual-wielding and rune casting, two new combat mechanics. I'm not fond of Shouts but many people love them. generally speaking, I like the combat better than in previous games.

The game is not perfect. They removed classes, a few more skills, a few more spells, and spellmaking. Some people like killcams, some don't. Some people don't like the UI.

Your best bet is to watch a few videos on YouTube and see if anything about the game appeals to you. You may decide you like it, you may not. Some of us old-timers (like myself) like Skyrim, other old-timers hate it. Only you can decide.

I'll throw in my input here. I too am someone who has morrowind as a favourite and was disappointed by oblivion (even though I finished every quest every way you can in oblivion over the years).


Let's just say that I can no longer go back to oblivion for more than an hour, while I can go back to skyrim for at least a 30 hour play through (when I first got it, my characters would last anywhere from 80 to 110 hours a play through).



Skyrim is challenging if you up the difficulty. With the dlc there are also two extremely hard optional bosses that you need to be a really high level to beat (one doesn't show up until level 80, which in my over 2000 hours of playing skyrim I've never got because I don't play that way and it basically requires you to use every skill to get that high, unless you legendary skills - resets them to 15 - to keep leveling up).


As for atmospheric. Yes, it's almost as atmospheric as morrowind, and way above oblivion in that regard. Only thing missing is the political diversity and atmosphere we had in morrowind, which is admittedly shallow in skyrim.

But each hold (state /province/county,etc) has it's own landscape style and government (you get a bounty for every hold separate from each other, which I love), even though the governments are really just a couple different npcs and palette swapped guards.


As for side quests. Yes, there are a lot of side quests, and as far as guildless quests (or freelance quests) I think they have the most in the series.

Unfortunately there is really no different outcomes for quests besides "do the quest or don't".

Except the daedra lord quests, I think every one if them has a choice, and they're all pretty unique (and I think the daedra lord quests are the best in the series).


Unfortunately guilds really svck. There are like 5 main quests for each guild, and a few generic side quests in them. Though most of them have unlimited random generated quests. Where in morrowind and oblivion I'd model my characters and playthrough around what guilds my characters join, in this I Maybe join a guild or two, or sometimes not at all. Though they do have nice stories, they are just too damn short and underwhelming. (When the mages guild starts to get really Cool and deep, suddenly it just ends and you feel like it was missing something).


The civil war quests are the worst though. You go in a couple dungeons, then attack a couple forts with a dozen or two level scaled down guards who die in two hits and suddenly you control the hold. The city sieges aren't much better either.


However the dlc main quests are superb. The dawnguard dlc is basically a new guild (either vampires or vampire hunters) that are the way the guilds should have been in the main game.


The main story isn't that well written or super engaging. While it has more lore behind it than oblivion, it's pretty much an "end of the world is nigh and up to only you to save it" again. It's definitely no morrowind main quest.


And unfortunately the guilds are like oblivion. You can be leader of the mages guild while only having and using the base two spells you start with. You can join the imperial legion and at the same time be dark brotherhood and assassinate the emperor.

And of course, no skill requirements for ranks to give the illusion of not joining contradiction sides like morrowind. In fact, guilds don't have ranks. They are all virtually, you join guild, rank up once, then you are hailed as leader (dark brotherhood I [censored] you not has you do an intro quest, do three basic kill side quests, then the night mother tells you you're the leader and saviour right at the beginning).


The only guild that actually feels like a guild is the thieves guild and it's probably the best one in my opinion.


Also as a bonus, you can kill the thieves guild and the dark brotherhood, which is nice to have the option. But otherwise essential characters are much more abundant than oblivion.



And just as a side note, not sure if you've played it or even like the franchise, but I'd recommend fallout new Vegas. As a morrowind fan, new Vegas is the closest game to morrowind since it came out, with a much deeper quest structure and dialogue system as well as skill and attribute system. It's my favourite game ever as well as morrowind is.

Fair enough. If we are only considering vanilla, then Skyrim is by far my least favorite of the last three TES games. But full disclosure here, modded Skyrim is hands down my all time favorite game in the world. I won't play Skyrim without mods anymore (and I mostly only mod game mechanics), but I did play vanilla Skyrim for several years on Xbox and have also played at least 500 hours of vanilla Morrowind and over 1,000 hours of vanilla Oblivion. So I will base my answers on those experiences only, not my experience with a modded game.

I will focus on game mechanics rather than atmosphere, since that is what I am most concerned with (I liked the atmosphere from all three games) so I will let others discuss the respective differences in atmosphere and focus only on game mechanics.

My view is that Oblivion was an overreaction to the complaints that Morrowind was too easy at high levels, so Bethesda went overboard with world leveling and world scaling, which exacerbated issues inherent with Morrowind's character leveling system in terms of incentivising the player to chase attribute increases by "efficient leveling." In addition, Bethesda wanted to "streamline" the game to attract a wider base. So, we got a game with simpler game play mechanics, fewer skills and spells, no chance to "fail" (skill level only affects the strength of skills, not whether you can do something in the first place), an attribute/class system that did not work very well and over the top world leveling/scaling. But Oblivion also had voice acting, better sneak detection mechanics, better archery with arrow drop, physics affecting objects, more fluid combat mechanics, higher resolution graphics, etc.

With Skyrim, Bethesda continued the trends from Oblivion, but this time they did a much better job of world leveling/scaling. Skyrim's world leveling/scaling is more in line with Morrowind's world leveling, where you can meet high level enemies at low level and you will never see all bandits donning glass or all marauders donning daedric (bandits in daedric is a misnomer since bandits wear light armor in Oblivion, so you NEVER see them in daedric, but I digress).

Morrowind is actually a highly leveled world (the only things that aren't leveled are named NPCs, a few hand placed enemies, and hand placed loot). People forget that sometimes. Although I am a huge critic of vanilla Skyrim (and huge Morrowind fan), I view Skyrim's world leveling/scaling to be superior to Morrowind's world leveling. Skyrim challenges you with some high level content like Morrowind, but Skyrim's world leveling/scaling will challenge you longer than Morrowind's, which starts to get pretty easy by level 20 or so. Still, both games suffer from the issue of being able to outlevel enemies if you play long enough.

Anyway, if the over the top world leveling from Oblivion was what turned you off of it, you will find Skyrim improves that aspect quite a bit and is closer to the way Morrowind handled it.

Skyrim solved the character leveling by simply deleting attributes and classes entirely and replacing them with a pick your perk on level up system.

Bethesda continued the streamlining trend with Skyrim by removing yet more skills and removing a bunch of spells and spell effects and spellmaking, removing the ability to manipulate an NPCs disposition directly and removing many other things that many individual players held dear. They brought back enchanting but in a much more simple streamlined form.

Skyrim added in a few new spell types like runes and wards, but those are not implemented well in the vanilla game for various reasons. Skyrim made further improvements to sneak detection mechanics and combat is more fluid and quite enjoyable for me. Archery is further improved and quite enjoyable.

Overall, I prefer vanilla Oblivion to vanilla Skyrim because Skyrim removes too many features I find dear in its attempts to streamline the franchise for the modern gamer. But if you can get past the streamlining, you might enjoy Skyrim because it does quite a few things right, and world leveling/scaling is definitely improved over Oblivion.

You most certainly can. But no two Elder Scrolls games are the same, and don't go into it expecting that you will get, like funnybunny said, "Morrowind 2.0". I started with Skyrim first, and I had made that mistake when going into Oblivion, and subsequently expecting Morrowind to be similar to Oblivion (I learned my lesson by the time I got to Arena and Daggerfall). After I went into them more openly and gave them a chance, I grew to love them too. Each game has things I don't like, but ultimately the pros outweigh the cons for me.

In this case, there are things I think Skyrim does better and there are things I think Morrowind does better. Even though I came into the series late, I think you may find the difference between Morrowind and Skyrim a little less jarring than between Morrowind and Oblivion (if we are talking about more than streamlined mechanics), even though I enjoy all three.

-Is it challenging? Some parts are, and you can find more challenges at higher levels with the difficulty up than you could in Morrowind. This was my experience, at least.

-Atmospheric with a good story? Yes, but arguably not as much as Morrowind's. In general, here is still a great deal of depth to it, but just not as much as Morrowind's. This can somewhat vary depending on which stories in the game we are talking about.

-Good, varied side quests? Yes, although interestingly enough I thought Oblivion did this better than both Morrowind and Skyrim. Of course, there are some exceptions (like in the other games), but I don't want to spoil too much for you.

-Believable world? Well, that is a bit vague, but yes.