» Thu May 03, 2012 8:35 am
1. 99% of the NPCs use SOME of the same topics. A fairly decent percentage of them (I'd venture to guess at about 15-20%) had at least one "unique" topic (generally quest-related), and the vast majority had at least one or two topics that were limited to a small number of NPCs, either by faction, region, race, or some other criteria. Unless you "unlock" those topics by your actions or other conversations, you won't see them, so the game actually starts out looking like what you describe, but improves. The newer games throw the majority of their dialog and topics at you from the start, so you see it all right away. As the game progresses, you begin to wonder "isn't there anything more?" Morrowind made you work at it, but rewarded you for it.
2. All NPCs were relatively lifeless in terms of schedules, walking paths, animations and voiced dialog, compared to those done 5-10 years later. That's largely a technical and financial limitation. They could have been better, but not a whole lot better at the time. As for "personality", I felt the same about MW's generic commoner dialog as I did with Oblivion's random NPC conversations: not much of anything. Neither were very inspiring, although Bethesda spent a lot more time and effort on the latter.
3. Combat in MW can be boring, especially at low level when you have trouble hitting a target. Combat in Oblivion could be boring too, whittling down some Goblin Warlord's hundreds of hitpoints a few at a time. It's not one of MW's strongpoints, but wasn't the focus of the game nearly as much as it became in later games. Oddly, MW's combat got better as the game progressed, whereas I felt that OB's got worse.
4. The "cave" dungeons in Morrowind were at least partially (if not mostly) hand-built from individual panels and pieces, not using anywhere near as many "cookie cutter" sections as was done in Oblivion. Building interiors and tombs used more of a "mixed" approach, but still with more "pieces" than comparable OB interiors. There's actually a HUGE amount of variety in MW's dungeons, but it's generally more subtle, and the number of "sets" of pieces to choose from wasn't a whole lot more than OB's. The MW dungeons were often smaller than in OB, though.
5. "Easy" is a difficult term to define. In some ways, Morrowind was absurdly simple, and you could take a terrible build and eventually "outlast" the game by gradual improvement, or exploit any of a dozen different mechanisms to become overpowered. In other ways it was difficult, where you could easily step in somewhere way over your head and get slaughtered. The later games were designed to offer a blandly flat level of challenge that I find boring, but depending on how well you "kept pace" with the scaling "rat race", it could become either too easy or too hard, with no way to fix the latter.
6. Race mattered more in MW than in the later games, and probably as much as or more than in the earlier ones. Not only were the starting abilities, Attribute adjustments, and skill adjustments more than in the later games, but the inability of the beast races to wear boots or closed helmets was at least more significant than anything that distinguished them from a gameplay standpoint in Skyrim.
7-8. Stats were fine. The level-up multiplier system that both MW and OB used was complete garbage. At least in MW, the Attributes mattered, and defined WHO your character was, while Skills defined how much they learned. Many of those Attributes were rendered all but pointless in OB, and then removed in SR.
9. Each game had a few good quests and a lot of "filler". Morrowind typically started you out with more "filler" at low rank, but a few of the higher-level quests were pretty decent. Oblivion had its share of both good and bad quests as well. I haven't played SR, although I understand that they cut the amount of "filler" by simply cutting the number of faction quests.
10. The various weapon skills COULD have been really excellent in MW, and there were variations in length, weight, and other factors that did impact gameplay (Spears come to mind), but unfortunately, the game didn't make as much use of the differences as it could have. There were 3 different types of attacks, reminiscent of DF's 4 attacks, but where DF used each of them as a different tradeoff between hit probability and damage, MW made no distinction as to hit probability, only different damage and animations. What had the potential to be a decent blend of player skill and character skill was left unfinished. Oblivion simply removed "character skill" from combat, except as a modifier to damage, making it a better FPS game, but a far poorer RPG.
11. Pre-defined "classes" are merely a way of skipping the character creation process and jumping straight into the game. The character's overall class of Fighter, Mage, Thief was a bit simplistic, but gave a slight boost to related starting skills and also made those skills advance more easily. It was far from ideal, but no worse than what we got in the next installment of the series.
I readily admit that Morrowind was far from the "pefect game", and I've noted some of its shortcomings along with a few strengths above. So far, however, I have yet to find another game that suits my tastes any better. The sequels essentially took out of the game almost all of the points that I enjoyed it for, and left what feels to me like a hollow shell that holds nothing of interest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lo0qD6rOz8
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And on xbox, once your game gets screwy, there isn't much you can do to help it...
