» Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:36 pm
Morrowind did really capture the magic of exploring with caution and aforethought a hostile and varied landscape and ingratiating oneself with the local factions, towns and merchants much more than Oblivion did. Though you might rightly say that Oblivion as a game with a instantaneous fast travel system is disadvantaged in the comparison because you could simply warp everywhere and didn't have to worry about establishing a deep connection with an area rather than breezing right through it, I felt when playing Fallout NV a strange sense of not only more familiarity with that series' past installments but the same sort of feeling that I think Morrowind instilled. So I think it is possible, and I would like to see them go back in many respects and really see what things were special about Morrowind, things like having the little side room that I appropriated in the Ald'ruhn Mages Guild and filled my junk with whenever I came into the area, or being out in the isolated area of the Ashlander camp, considerably far away from any fast travel, or coming upon the Telvanni mushroom houses that you had to levitate inside to get to certain NPCs, or navigating the cantons of Vivec for the first time, and smiling upon learning about the floating chunk of rock that was the Ministry of Truth. Finding a new town shouldn't just be comprised of finding a hub of new architecture, different ground textures, different trees, a different frequency of race, and a different name. It should be all of those things, all at once: an entirely different experience. For some reason, Morrowind got the precise balance of sameness and novelty between regions and settlements and factions really well, and that' s one of the several reasons why it's still so popular.
But going back myself after a few years away, there were some things that were bloody inconvenient that hadn't bothered me before, that really made me appreciate the jump to Oblivion more in terms of its technical and gameplay improvements (AI, Controls, Combat, Graphical Effects, Animations, Walk Speeds) if not the changes made to its immersion, the simplicity of its story, its atmosphere and lore depth, its inventory, its creativity, and some of the things that were done with consolidating magic and crafting.
As for what I expect, Skyrim will undoubtedly be more like Oblivion, in that you can already see the developers' concerted efforts to, for better or worse, streamline things and the fact that it has to be a more modern game in terms of accessibility and polish and that this doesn't need to be a bad thing. I just really hope to see a lot of little familiar touches, and that Skyrim will try to as much as possible, take the best little details from both Oblivion and Morrowind and make a synthesis of the two - more of the Morrowind mindset for creating an atmosphere and a feeling transplanted into an engine with all of the lessons learned in making Oblivion, the creativity of the latter's quests and a world that is novel and uniquely Skyrim.