Your characterization of casual gamers as 'whiny babies' who 'don't want anything to do with a challenge, or immersion' is ignorant and insulting. It is also hypocritical, coming from someone who has just praised fast travel because it "comes in handy."




Quest markers were necessary in Oblivion the instant Bethesda decided to use Radiant AI. In a previous post I mentioned Quill-Weave traveling from Anvil to Chorrol. Now Quill-Weave is a quest-related NPC. It would be impossible to to locate Quill-Weave without an arrow once she has left Anvil. It would be like constantly moving the Puzzle Box around and not telling players where it is.




Two. One of the options you listed for Morrowind is also available in Oblivion: you are perfectly free to just go look for it without help. There's also another option: back when I played vanilla Oblivion I used to set my active quest to either the Nirnroot quest (if I was doing the main quest) or the main quest (if I was not doing the main quest).

Personally, I think a compromise would be best when they get around to designing TES V: compass markers for those times when we need them and a toggle button in Options to turn them off.




I agree about levitation. But I disagree with your implication that it was taken out because of casual gamers. Levitation was removed because cities were in their own world spaces. And this was most likely done because of the XBox. The Open Cites mod has shown us that Morrowind-style cities do not damage frame rates on the computer, leading me to believe that Bethesda placed cities in their own world space in an attempt to comply with XBox frame rate requirements. Once that decision was made Bethesda had no choice but to remove levitation.




This is also a necessary consequence of using Radiant AI. To go back to my previous example: if Quill-Weave had gotten killed by a Minotaur on her travels from Anvil to Chorrol and all the way back to Anvil (a pretty perilous journey) that would immediately end any possibility of finishing that quest. Imagine the screams of outrage if players could not finish a quest because the game killed off their quest-giver while they were in the middle of a quest. Morrrowind NPCs didn't need to be essential because they never went anywhere, they never did anything. They just stood in one place twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, waiting for the player to talk to them. I don't know about anybody else, but I wouldn't call that an amazing experience. I'd rather have Radiant AI, with all its problems.

Again I mean no offense, and I agree with most of you points. But there has to be a way to have a good balance for the hardcoe players and the casual gamer. More research is needed but it would be worth it in my opinion.

Am I the only one who felt Oblivion rather lifeless? BIG chunks of land had nothing but pretty landscapes and dungeons. In Morrowind, there were cities all around, strongholds, dungeons with quests or artifacts to get. Morrowind was FILLED with things to do everywhere, Oblivion is mostly dead outside cities and too far off main roads.

They wanted to grab a younger, larger market, while keeping some of their older audience. So quests were dumbed down, a "gee, golly, look at how far that body traveled when I hit it" physics engine was employed, map markers were added to make things still easier, the game became a shooter so you always hit, enchanting became much easier, etc. This really isn't rocket science. And it's useless complaining. I love Morrowind myself, but the closest thing to it in Oblivion is going to be achieved through adding mods.

"What was wrong with Morrowind"

10 years of playing it = obviously not much, compared to the very short game-life of every game these days. Hell, everything needs 'achievements' and stuff just to get you to play it more. Sigh

people need a pat on the back, rather than the satisfaction of adventure.

Totally agreed. When I last tried to play Oblivion, I made some sort of assassin. I abandoned the game because I couldn't level up my character as I wanted without creating a deeper and deeper strength gap between me and the enemies. They'd crush me and it would take me dozens and dozens of arrows (poisoned or not didn't even mattered anymore) because the enemies' level scaled why I got to higher levels without constantly putting skill points in strength and such, for some reason the game thought I was the strongest warrior of Cyrodiil like my Nord character was. True rpgs shouldn't have level scaling, not only it [censored]s with levelling up how you want to with any type of character you want to, it destroys the sense of exploration and immersion when you get somewhere particularly dangerous, the main roads should always be safe too, otherwise merchants wouldn't risk getting face to face with a Minotaur I have problems killing when I could kill them in an instant.

I'd bet the exclusion of more rare armor pieces and artifacts in general is just because people want everything and don't want to be exploring everywhere in order to find artifacts which are not necessarily the ultimate weapon. Hell, what if I get 5 chest armor pieces?! Which to use? It doesn't make any sense!