Hello. I've been play Skyrim and I am enjoying it pretty well.

Two days ago and yesterday I started a new character for Morrowind. I went with an Argonian nightblade. Basically a stealthy character that uses magic to aide him with his stealth and maybe cast a shield if you're in combat.

So... I remember when I was about 13 or 12 years old and I played Morrowind for the first time, it seemed really awesome and really polished and super cool. My friends played it -- in fact that's why I got it, whenever I went to my friend's house him and his brother liked playing it and it was fun watching his brother go through with his warrior at the end game part with Dagoth Ur and the squid guys, and all of that jazz. Now that I am playing Morrowind again as a more informed, mature, and wiser person I feel like it was uncomplete even after it's official patches.

Right now I think Morrowind was a decent game, obviously for when it came out it was good -- but I do not think it aged well. I do not think that games that come after the initial titles are better, like I think some things in Morrowind is superior to it's counterparts. Heck, I'd even say Daggerfall has some nifty things in it that the other games do not possess. Before I played Morrowind again I really had a high image of what it was like, and... now that I think about it two things kind of got to me. One, I was very nostalgic about it so that clouded my thinking, as well as I kind of didn't want to be in the "normal" group. Kind of being a hipster, really.

'Everybody likes Skyrim! But man, I sure don't. I prefer Daggerfall over that clump of garbage, Daggerfall was an artistic triumph that mere mortals cannot understand. I shall eat my finger sandwiches and laugh at you silly kids now, muhahaha.'

Anyways, I am asking all of you what you think about how games age and if they age well or don't. I also said this partly just to give some insight about it, because when I played Morrowind again I found there were MANY more bugs than I remembered there were. Skyrim seems to have many less bugs, and it hasn't been out for a super long time, either.

Just for the record, I actually haven't played Oblivion. So no comment on that.

Ok, first of all, lets just clear something up-- there are only three constants in life: death, taxes, and buggy Bethesda games. Seriously, skyrim was unplayable for me for awhile because an official patch made it crash randomly.

That said, I basically agree that the games haven't aged well. Thats what the modding communities are for, to infuse new life into them.

No no, I wasn't disputing that it was buggy. I was saying that Morrowind is still buggy, after all this time. Right now most of the bugs are ironed out of Skyrim, by the bethesda team itself. With Morrowind, jumping can be weird and sometimes weird things happen. You have to use 3rd party mods to fix the stuff, for example the unarmored glitch is still there. The one where you have to wear one piece of armor for it to count.

When you say "aged well" I suppose you mean graphics? Because I don't see how gameplay can age. If a game had good gameplay features in 1996 or 2002 those gameplay features are going to be good in 2012 as far as I'm concerned.

If you are playing Morrowind on a decent system (faster processor speed, not necessarily multicore since it doesn't take advantage of that) why not take advantage of all the great mods that are available to update the game? The most obvious being the Morrowind graphics extender, all the many wonderful texture replacers, and the most needed (to me) the various NPC face replacers - not to mention a seamless body replacer that fixes that 'segmented' body style of the vanilla game.

Aside from the graphics, the core game is still very much enjoyable today, but I wouldn't stop at graphics, as there are many many mods that you can use to tailor the game to your liking. I'd recommend abot's real time travel mods to take a silt strider and enjoy the scenery (with your new graphics updates) or enjoy a gondola ride through Vivec's canols or even sail around Vvardenfell. I could go on and on, but you get the point. There are tons of mods that improve the game.

The 'vanilla' or unmodded game, yeah, maybe not so easy on the eyes, but honestly, if I want to, I could dust off my original xbox right here and stick Morrowind GotY in and play and enjoy it just as much or more than most modern console games (though I'd really rather play on PC with mods). I still find it playable, but like it much better with mods.

I played Morrowind after Oblivion and it had already 'not aged well' in 2006. But it's still may favorite game, and nostalgia doesn't explain it (though forum lore and mods might).

I love Skyrim and think it's twice the game Oblivion was, but I have noticeably cooled on it before hitting 100 hours. I think maybe there is some cumulative franchise fatigue going on, where an open world Bethesda game has already surprised me in most of the ways it's ever going to.

Putting patches out as they are today was simply not the norm back then, especially on consoles, where hardly anyone connected them to the internet.

So the odd bug is to be expected; if Skyrim was released in such conditions, well... yeah. (They probably would have had to delay it).
I only had the load screen crash problem on XBox release myself, so it wasn't that bad for me, though admittedly worse than any other game I'd played at the time.

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I was still happily playing MW last November. Modded graphics but apart from adding GCD to improve character levelling same gameplay mechanics as when it came out and I still like it

Just installed Morrowind month ago since I got new laptop. Installed high texture pack, TR: map 1 & 2 and few gameplay mods, now enjoying it more than ever. For me it has got better after playing Skyrim and Oblivion. Personally Oblivion was huge disappointment for me, I liked Skyrim a lot more. Blame nostalgia but: (#1 Morrowind #2 Skyrim #3 Oblivion) for me.
Never really played Daggerfall or Arena.

I think Morrowind aged well. Even graphics wise. It still has a decent style to it. And it was made before Bethesda got hung up on trying to make things look realistic. I think games that try too hard to look realistic date much quicker. Games developed with a specific art style in mind don't. Hell, Blizzard cashes in on this fact. They make games with antiquated graphics, but they know how to personalize their titles with distinctive style. People still play warcraft and diablo, not to mention WoW, which has a crappy engine itself.

I LOVE Daggerfall. I really like Morrowind.

But i can't play either of them anymore really, mostly because of the gameplay, not the graphics.


Daggerfall had a lot of awesome stuff in there but in the end, it noly had the main quest. Anything else is randomly generated and after a while it just gtes increcibly tiring (and when i say random, i mean random, not like radiant quest does it). Dungeons are awesome at first but quickly get tiring and boring. Gameplay is purely roll of the dice unless you do magic, which hasn't been implemented very well.

Morrowind's combat is dreary. It feels even more dice-rollingly than Daggerfall did (because it is, mostly). Classes were superfluous, the only thing class skills did was determine when you level up, though this also goes for Daggerfall and Oblivion. It was actually favourable to level skills NOT in your class so the game becomes a lot easier in the long term. The way covnersations were structured was also horrid in Daggerfall and Morrowind. The first was... Well, Daggerfall. Convresations were basically balloons of text pushed in your face with no interaction.

Morrowind's conversations were like browing a wiki rather than having any actual talk with someone.

Oblivion.... Well, deathstares, weird speechcraft minigame that made no sense and generally the same wiki sense of conversations, only with spoken text.

All these games were great, but it's not the graphics that let people down nowadays. The gameplay is old school in that it's complexity for complexity's sake, which is [b[not good[/b] and i don't understand why people think it is. Skyrim has it's flaws for sure, but it iterates on what makes TES great. I agree, climbing should be in there and stuff like that, but overall it's an improvement over the previous games in almost every respect. While i've played the previous games to death, i just can't see myself playing them anymore now that Skyrim is around.

Don't take the above as a rant, just a blunt expression of my opinion ;p

Out of curiousity, what reasons are there to prefer playing the older games?

Good gameplay never ages. Graphics, animations, sound effects, voices, and other "tech" aspects do, and quickly. Of course, "good gameplay" means different things to different players, and what interests a character-based RPG player will not appeal to a FPS action player, and vice versa.

Daggerfall's primitive graphics are horrendously dated, but the underlying depth of character creation (with in-game effects and consequences for your actions), and a heavily character-based focus, still garners a following even now.

Morrowind, an odd compromise between a stat-based RPG and an action/adventure game, is still loaded on my PC and gets played frequently (it's been over 3 weeks since I fired it up, which may be the longest lapse since OB came out and briefly diverted my attention). Combat is clunky and doesn't show why you keep missing, but the underlying game mechanics are mostly solid, although not well balanced. [ Note to PC players: The Morrowind Patch Project and the Morrowind Code Patch fix many (several thousand, actually) of the bugs with the game, including a few major ones that defied correction up until last year. ]

Oblivion removed the stat-based checks, making it "all about the player" instead of the character. The non-combat mechanics were simply removed, leaving an empty shell except for a combat engine and some "mini-games". The stats still existed, but several of them did very little, except to trigger Perks. That and the blatant scaling drove me away from it after about a month and a half. It looked spectacular for its day, but I found it boring otherwise.

Skyrim seems to lean even more in the "player based" gameplay category, with very little of interest to a "character-based RPG" player. The underlying stats that used to define the character have been removed completely and replaced with Perks that don't do the same thing. I still haven't bought it (and won't, as long as it requires Steam).

Like Jiub said, whatever is awesome or doesn't 'age well' can be fixed by mods. Especially bugs.