Skyrim

- Pretty skies
- Excellent Troll design.
- Daedra depictions are pretty good.
- Faces for most races (dremora are bland, bretons are too human)
- Khajit voices.
- Warhamer size (i find this ironic, In that morrowind had good size for swords, 1h axes and blunt weapons whilst also having ridiculous 2h axes and warhammers and skyrim did the exact opposite with it's silly swords)
- Carriages as an optional feature for people who dislike fast travel
- Random encounters
- Sprint
- Decent running speed
- No multipliers on level up

Oblivion
- Content in questlines. Some with interesting ways to play
- No constant fog
- began talking using speech (not that it was any good, but it was on the way forward)
- Npc's didn't have a ludicrous amount of dialogue options.
- Fast travel
- Some truly glorious quests (which may have taken advantage of the game's poor ai and dialogue- i of course refer to "whodunnit" )



Morrowind
- Had a great artistic direction. Whilst the graphics held everything back it delivered in architecture and armour design. With a few exceptions- Creature design was also very good.
- Pulled no punches in lore development or main quest storyline. (from Books to dialogue to architecture to the weight of glass weapons and the sophistication in orcish armor). Rarely attempted to make things boring for newer players
- Didn't make the player the chosen one for every guild.
- Had A great variety of tools, Weapons and magic which weren't featured in later tes games (Throwing, polearm, Shortblade, crossbows,levitate, jump, blind etc)
- Gave the player choices to make
- Provided a sense of progression which latter games failed to emulate.
- Allowed male players to wear skirts without them turning into trousers. Also allowed for LAYERS (as an ogre i find the lack of layers in the next few games offensive)
- Allowed players to find Treasures. (items of considerable power for the player's level which may allow them to defeat enemies above their level) and use spells to complex for their skill.
- Dumner voices
- Had different ways to do quests (shoot, levitate , talk, taunt)
- Good variety of groups to join
- Can be scary to some players - hear a vampire? RUN!!!!



Things none of these games have achieved

- Great combat. (for all builds- Monk to juggernaut, archer to sorcerer)
- Great stealth
- Great acrobatics
- Great socialisation
- or any perfection on any skill. (fun alchemy, many uses for security, deep and ballanced enchanting, wonders to summon with conjuration)
- Realistic characters that A: say normal things and B: The player can attach too or at least feel bad for killing them and c: interact with the world well
- A big world that feels Real. (large cities, large farmland/woodland/tundra/mountains, Seasons, flora/fauna , City night-life )
- No shallow stereotyping. ( i refer to accents here. Like how skyrim gives English accents to theives,thalmor,easily desposable legionares and badguys, although doesn't put a single khajiit in the theives guild)
- a ui good on all platforms (or seperate ui for each platform)

Everything? All 6000 pages of it?

These were all things I disliked about Oblivion and modded them out where I could. Thanks the gods for the PC version of Oblivion.

Yep.
Morrowind fog was more a limitation of the game engine and power at that time: they simply didn't include LOD and distant land rendering in the engine.
When they finally did, with Oblivion, they were so excited about it that they went wrong in the other direction and cut fog almost entirely. The same in Skyrim - you can see way too far even in "foggy" weather (at least Riften has weather conditions that like to be fog, but fail), or snow storms.

Full voice acting killed intelligent and extensive dialogue more than any other thing. And with that any chance of getting "great socialisation" and "realistic characters".

---
Correct. Great combat would be turn-based.

Morrowind
-Bizarre landscape
-Faction conflicts (Fighters/Thieves Guild, Telvanni/Mages Guild, Great Houses, Imperial Cult/Temple)
-Racism & Slavery (I like that the issues were covered and in Morrowind shows how horrible they can be)
-Very limited level scaling (Don't fight that Ogrim Titan at level 4!)
-Daedric Shrines (Some were filled with crazy bad guys, others with friendlies and wealth beyond measure)
-The Main Quest was fantastic. Plot twists and mind****s aplenty
-More Dialogue (Thanks to most of the NPCs using text instead of audio and a Hyperlink style of dialogue choices you could have deep conversations with them. Payoff comes with many NPCs having something special to say and are the only ones to say.)
-Levitation (Flying is fun)
-Go anywhere at anytime. No level/quest restrictions to any dungeon or place
-Exploration (Sometimes it's worth going off the beaten path)
-Breaking the game was more fun
-Varied Fast Travel system (Mark/Recall, Interventions, Guild Guides, Silt Striders, Propylon Chambers)
-More Armor/Clothes Slots and choices
-More skills
-Number of quests and the multiple ways of solving them
-Decent UI
-Vampire Clans & Clan specific quests

Oblivion
-Combat took a step in the right direction
-Random Oblivion gates popping up (Yea that might have been only 5-6 designs but this premise of randomness was sound)
-Radiant AI dialogue between NPCs (It was corny after the 12,000th time of mudcrab sighting talk but it made the cities seem more alive with activity)
-NPC Scheduling (You better get your armor repaired before 8pm or you're boned.)
-Scripted Spells (The possibilities are almost endless)
-Distant Land (It's nice to be able to see the Imperial City from almost anywhere)
-Journal System
-Quests had more variety than the fetch this, kill that to them
-The Arena!
-Players interaction with people is noticeable in 3rd person
-Players and NPCs show emotion on their faces

Skyrim
-Dynamic Shadows
-Perks
-Radiant Encounters
-Radiant Quests
-Fog and clouds on the Distant Mountains
-Carriage fast travel
-Regional Crime
-Harvesting ingredients affects the environment
-Dual Wield
-Crafting Stations


That's all I can think of now.

i hated the Radiant Quests imo they should have never dune that and just stuck with the how they did the quests in OB. the quest were way beter than the ones in SKYRIM beacuse they were all hand writen and were so much better. othere than skyrim were every single Radiant Quests was the same 3or 4 things

Morrowind: atmosphere, story

Oblivion: combat got better

Skyrim: BEARDS!!!

Thought of another thing Oblivion had going for it. The enemies wouldn't leave you alone just because you transitioned cells. No more "I made it to the house, I'm safe" crap. Your *** is grass if you don't turn around and fight.

For me Morrowind made exploration a joy, even in the most depressing areas one could find something interesting, since devs hand placed many items all over the map. MW atmosphere is still one of the best I've seen; it is its soul.

Oblivion, well, its hard for me to put a finger on what I really like about that installment of the series. I guess the only thing I found amazing(at that time) was that it was fully voiced. As for Skyrim, I enjoyed the well designed world specially the architecture.

----double post---

I'm not sure about this one. I agree with your lists in general but I find the random encounters pretty lame. Dragons are obnoxious, and a pain to deal with. I was once jumped on the road by an Argonian 'Thief' wearing Imperial Light Armor, who I killed in one stab and dumped in the nearby river. And once I got attacked by three thugs hired by the Blacksmith in Riverwood who apparently found out that I 'borrowed' one of his iron ingots to smith something at lower levels, causing him to hate me enough to spend 500 gold on thieves, despite all of the [censored] I sold or bought from him. Then the thugs have a note on their corpses talking about the guy's nefarious deeds but I can't even confront him about it.


This is something else I take issue with. I mean okay, some of the more 'eccentric' playstyles don't always work well. But in Skyrim especially I feel that the combat is fun and satisfying. I like strategically shield-bashing or bow-punching to break power attacks, and it's fun to get killcams. Even in Morrowind I felt that the combat had 'style' despite the limitations of the engine. In order to get the best attack you had to maneuver - if you used a spear you'd dart backwards and forwards, representing the footwork required to use a spear. If you had a sword with a high slash skill you moved left and right, kind of being a mobile swordsman using a 'finesse' attack. Likewise if your axe or sword had a high 'chop' value you stood in one place, bashing down with brute force.

Okay, maybe 'great' isn't the word I'd use either, but I think it's 'better than it has to be' for the TES franchise which is already so far ahead of the game with their world design, story, etc. And overall I'm pretty satisfied with the combat.