I really am not playing Daggerfall just to pick on Morrowind. Oblivion is my favorite game in the series, Morrowind is my second favorite, Daggerfall is my third favorite, and Arena is my least favorite. I love them all, but I do want some things from Daggerfall back, the simpler things that overall made the game more complex and more realistic, despite their age. Holidays, seasons, a court system, and variety all are things I want in future Elder Scrolls games. Just because I criticize a game doesn't mean I don't like it. Daggerfall has many problems. The dungeons are endless labyrinths(I hate Daggerfall's dungeons) the world is a boring, randomly generated wasteland(I hate this as well), and the game doesn't have those hidden stories and surprises hand-placed locations do. I do like the variety and small details of Daggerfall that make the game special though, things that were lost in Morrowind. I also love Daggerfall's lore. I've read a book in Daggerfall that I've never heard of before. It gave me a better understanding of light and dark. I love Morrowind for its terrain variety, its detail, and especially its wonderful soundtrack(which I hope is part of TES V). I love Oblivion for its graphics, its more realistic AI, its physics system(which could use some work though), its soundtrack, its detail, and the fact that it is the first Elder Scrolls game I've ever played. I love Arena for starting my favorite series.

All ES games are somewhat complex. Even Oblivion. But that's all relative to the market they're in.
I don't suppose you'd be satisfied by the answer "Different Morrowind is different", would you?

I'm satisfied with such an answer, and I never said Daggerfall is insanely complex, but I love those little features like seasons and a basic court system. Small, simple things make a game more complex.

Well to begin you just started the game not too long ago so it's not hard for one to say you're doing it to raise your credibility. Another thing you keep pressing on about is graphics. Graphics isnt the reason why a lot of us prefer it over daggerfall and oblivion. It's true that daggerfall had more skills than in morrowind,but daggerfall also had a giant landmass that was randomly generated. morrowind could have 12 square miles of land that was just randomly generated with the same level of graphics that it currently has, but it didnt, it was a lot more detailed than daggerfall and the developers took the time to handcraft the cells. Oblivion had prettier graphics, but it managed to take even more away from the gameplay and instead of handtailoring a dungeon, the developers decided to just have everything level with you. As someone said earlier, graphics is nothing more than the icing on the cake.

So, because I play an Elder Scrolls game, I am doing so to raise my credibility? No. You insult me with your words. I'm playing the game because I like the game.

I meant no offense.

:violin:
Damn near makes me weep everytime I hear it. :rock:

The Morrowind theme doesn't capture me like it used, because I've heard it so many times. It's kinda sad really.

They're all good games, each with their defects and different people will have different views. There's no need to insult anyone and make accusations.

Same way I feel,some might not realize but Oblivion resembles Daggerfall(but failed)more than Morrowind and even the the Main Quest in Oblivion resembles Arena to extent.

Lets look at similarities in Oblivion from Daggerfall:
-Horse back riding was brought back.
-The Dark Brother Guild was brought back as joinable guild.
-Mannimarco(But far to weak)this can be debaited if this was the TRUE Mannimarco or the Dragon Break Mannimarco,I'm gonna leave it at that.
-Brought back fast travel but not like in Daggerfall.
Thats all I can think of right now,if missed any I'm sorry.

I suppose you could also count the creatures and the enviroment. Morrowind did a lot of things better than Daggerfall as well though.
I guess people were peeved because some of the features that made Morrowind great did not appear or were replaced in Oblivion. :shrug:

I would never consider that impostor as the "true" Mannimarco, Dragon Break or not.

If you like creepy games, you should also try Thief: The Dark Project and Thief: Deadly Shadows, levels with the undead can get real scary i.e. 'Robbing the Cradle' and 'Return to the Cathedral'

I don't ether but like I said it's debaitable.

Wasn't a consencus reached that there are now eight Mannimarcos? One of which became God of Worms?

My theory was that only things directly affected one way or the other by the Mantella outcomes would have duplicates following the Dragon Break. Daggerfall, Wayrest, and Sentinel each have a scenario each in which they subdue the other kingdoms and in which they are subdued by one of the other two. All the lesser kingdoms were absorbed as that would have happened no matter which kingdom acquired the Mantella. Simply put, just imagine taking a map of the Iliac Bay and spilling wine over Daggerfall, Wayrest, and Sentinel. The stain, as it spreads, is that kingdom's political and territorial acquisitions after using the Numidium. Overlapping areas cancel out, which is obviously why all three expanded but did not destroy the other following the Dragon Break.

These changes among the kingdoms are a gradual and compromised scenario. With Mannimarco, it was either "he became a God" or "he didn't become a God", so I guess the multiple instances in which he did not acquire the Mantella would result in multiple non-divine Mannimarcos. But that still doesn't explain why we have that puny Altmer in Oblivion - even before his apotheosis, the King of Worms in Daggerfall looked pretty damn powerful. Hell, he was already a Lich, wasn't he? Maybe something happened like the powers of each non-divine Mannimarco were channeled to the God of Worms. I don't know. :shrug:

The complex fast travel was lost because Morrowind did away with manual fast travel and instead brought us silt striders and travel boats. Then when Oblivion brought back fast travel they just started from scratch instead of reinstating Daggerfall's system. However, to be honest Daggefall's complex fast travel wouldn't work nearly as well in the later games due to reduced landmass. Traveling from one end of the DF map to the other supposedly takes a week of real time. I've never tried to do it myself, but it seems plausible. You can travel from one side of Vvardenfell to the other in about an hour and there probably won't be any inns along the way either.

To put it a little differently, Daggerfalls fast travel requires a humongous gameworld to realize it's full potential.



Here's a trick: after you've traveled recklesly to reach a city you fast travel again to that same city cautiously. Since the distance is zero this will simply move you forward in time to daybreak and restore your health to full.

Yes, it is an abuse of the system, but you can imagine it as traveling recklessly at first, then slowing down and traveling more cautiously when you aproach your target with plenty of time to spare.



I think the dumbing down as you call it is the result of several factors. They're trying to appeal to a wider auidence with each game and the more money they make and the bigger the company gets, the less they can afford to risk. 3 guys in a garage can try to do pretty much anything and if it doesn't work out it just doesn't work out and life goes on. But if a large company risks too much and fails tens or maybe even hundred of people (depending on the size of the company and the magnitude of the failure) may no longer be able to put food on their table.

So after each game as gamesas become bigger and bigger they have to play it increasingly more safely and business takes ever more precedent before art. And business means spending as little time and money as possible on something that as many people as possible will want to buy. So things like shiny graphics, voiced dialog, and Patric Stewart become more important than political intrigue between various factions. Business also means that people buying the game is more important than people playing the game. Sure, people playing the game creates promotion for the game and it is important for the long term success of the series, but in the short term it's people buying the game that creates the profit.

To be honest Bethesda isn't quite as hardcoe business as it might have been and they still care about the art, but business is still becoming more important with every isntallment.



We did get a better stealth system and greatly improved animations. Though I agree it's a rather poor tradeoff.



No, but there is a way to listen to Morrowind's music while playing Daggerfall. Simply set the music volume in DF to zero and play the MW music with a music player. It won't be situation specific though and it's best to stick to the exploration music.



The Enchant skill in Morrowind is far from useless. It is true that it's less useful than it could have been (because of the messed up NPC enchanters), but it still reduces the charge used by enchantments and makes recharging with soulgems more effective. If the NPC enchanters would have only been able to use the spell effect that they know instead of spell effects that you know and were somehow limited by their skill, then the Enchant skill would have been one of the best skills in the game, right along with Alchemy.

And while it is true that DF features many skill that are essentially worthless when compared to the others, there exist several different types of balance. You can read an excellent essay about them http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/balance-types.html.

When most people talk about balance these days they mean concept balance and it is true that multiplayer games should be balanced that way. But TES games are not multiplayer games (and many people pray they never will be). Daggerfall strives for character options and naturalistic balance. If you want to play a scholarly linguist you should be able to do so, but it isn't realistic that a scholarly linguist would be as good at dungeoncrawling as a barbarian.

So I wouldn't really hold these additional options against it. You're always free not to use them.



I agree that it would be great to have all that, but but I have doubts whether it would really be so easy to implement them all. For example, in order to faithfully simulate seasons you'd have to invent a way that would swap the textures of the landscape and exterior objects. While it's certainly doable I have my doubts on whether it would have been worth the trouble. Especially if you consider how hard it was already to run MW as is on the average PC of 2002.



The graphic in Morrowind did take away from some elements of gameplay, but contributed to others. Traveling between cities is made much more enjoyable for one. And one thing about Morrowind is that a lot of people are saying how it's a true RPG, unlike Oblivion. I disagree. Morrowind is a better RPG than Oblivion (at least according to my own personal standards of what makes a good RPG), but I find it's focus to be more on exploration and lore than on actual rolepalying. The TES series always had strong adventure game lements (arguably so does every RPG), but I dare say that ever since Redguard TES games these elements have taken over to the point where the games became more adventure games than RPGs. One major difference between MW and OB is on the focus of the adventure and exploration, with Morrowind being more focused on exploring for the sake of learning about the game world and Oblivion being more focused on exploring for the sake of finding shiny loot and some asses to kick.

The idea that its been a straight downward progression from DF to Oblivion ignores the many improvements that MW added and the few that Oblivion added.

MW added more choice of weapons (crossbows, spears and throwing weapons).

Although DF has more factions there is no difference apart from name between the various knightly orders. They all choose quests from the same random quests list. There is also no interaction between them unlike the Great Houses in MW. The difference between the various Temples and Templar Orders amounts to some minor benefits and 1 unique quest for each, nothing like the marked difference between the IC and Tribunal in MW.
MW also introduced innovative Alchemy and stolen goods systems, both of which Oblivion improved on.

There are things I liked about DF (some clever mechanics, some interesting background lore, and a good MQ) but outside the MQ I found DF mediocre. Towns with no atmosphere, characters with no character, and those awful interminable random dungeons.

I have always felt Daggerfall was overcomplex and needed more explaining. The fact the graphics are so old makes it even harder to understand at points. On the flip side, Oblivion was a like a shiney toy, fun to play with for a while, but eventually you get bored and do something else, or go play with an older favorite toy.

Its my opinion that most people will like whatever game in the series they played first, hence why I enjoy the simplicity of Arena and the Depth of Morrowind, as they were my first Elder Scrolls games to play.

In terms of graphics and shinies over content, until beth pulls out of the gaming graphics race, I fear the depth will suffer. You can see however they have tried fixing the depth problem between oblivion and fallout 3 (smaller area, more detail).

Morrowind was unique in the way Elder scrolls should be,morrowind was very different from any other RPG game (in the way of ideas) but oblivion seemed to suddenly fall back into the generic medieval rut again (which you can play any old game to get some of), with trolls, unicorns, imps, minotuars, instead of silt striders, nix hounds, coprus beasts. The story deperpartment made the MQ too forced (you have to save the world right now!!!) instead of morrowinds more casual approach, which allowed a RPer to skip the MQ for some time. Oblivion missed all the politics, new lore, background and storys that both morrowind and Daggerfall had, which made everyone seem a little 2 deminsional and boring, who says I want to kill the necromancers, maybe I want to help them? in morrowind you could normally choose your side (if accidentally at time), oblivion you cant which stop RPing again.

I understand that they tried this new spoken dialogue in oblivion, and tey will no doubt stick with it as it is becoming the norm now and (other) people will blacklist the game if they have to start reading again. This restricts dialogue, do the missing info must then be made up with other thing, like the horrible quest arrows, as directions are quicker that way then having them all spoken. Hopefully they will put the effort back into adding this so that the crutchs can be removed, but seeing as alot of thier money comes from casuals now i dont see the game getting any more complex like morrowind or daggerfall again.

However, things like the AI have gotten so much better, before oblivion the AI was nearly no exsistant, but it has made the game seem so much more alive...at least in the few areas that actually have NPCs.

My prediction: Graphics will imprvoe, depth might improve a bit better, AI will improve, the games will be buggy as hell like normal and they will become semi-generic

I think Bethesda will return some depth, though I do not expect it becoming any deeper than Morrowind. But if the world Bethesda creates for us to play within is believable, overflowing with memorable characters and political turmoil, a world that rewards curiosity and exploration, then I will be satisfied. Oblivion's medieval theme isn't bad, especially considering Arena and Daggerfall pursued them and still were met with oodles of fan praise. What makes it appear inferior to Morrowind is that Morrowind had such a sheer amount of "little touches" (dungeons which each had their own story, NPCs of varied background, or even all the easter eggs!) put into it that the world has a charm all its own, even when disregarding the architectural styles and the outlandish creatures.

In Morrowind, you felt as if you were a part of the world - a dynamic, changing world. A world with a scope and scale far beyond your own actions. For instance, even when you weren't running an errand for a Great House, you could still feel its presence in the world, and witness the ways in which it has affected the setting of the game. Basically, it felt as if things were going on in the background that were completely detached from you. In Oblivion it feels as if everything that is there in the world was placed by the developers solely for your own entertainment and not to reinforce any sort of immersion.

Oblivion is just too consistent, too predictable, too tame.

The trouble as I see it is, the more complicated games are to make, the less depth there is. People blame casual gamers for the "dumbing-down" (hate that phrase) of ES, but as I see it, it takes a lot less to add more features in a game like Daggerfall, than a game like Oblivion.

Real time graphics still have a very long way to go.

Something like Crysis looks better than Oblivion but neither are even close to what can be done with pre-rendered landscapes.

FPS can claim to be getting close to "photo realism" in confined spaces but current games are hopeless at depicting open spaces.

How is Oblivion "more complicated"?

Graphically and other factors of a more realistic picture and feel, like sound.

Actually the phrase used was "complicated to make" which has nothing to do with it being a complex game.