ummm are you playing the same game that I am? Or maybe you're just being sarcastic. God, I hope you're being sarcastic. There's no way anyone can say this franchise hasn't been dumbed down over the years and keep a straight face.

Anyways, Skryim is an enjoyable fantasy based FPS. Morrowind is the best RPG ever made. At least in my opinion anyways.

? So if I habit of calling my guy friends "buddy" or "dude" and I use that all the time, that also falls into this category of "safely be ignored"? Be careful, your "choice of words" reveals much about your ego.

Its really hard to compare those two.. Im not sure I can without letting nostalgia affect my judgement. But anyway, I think Morrowind had more to explore, better quests, better story, and better armor.

I think Skyrim has better combat, better visuals, and better overall gameplay(as in quality of life stuff).

If you gave Morrowind the same graphics and combat system as Skyrim... I would have to say I much prefer Morrowind I think, but its still a close one personally... I love snow and Nord culture.

No, Skyrim isn't FPS. Skyrim is great RPG - It's large sandbox where you can roam the world and create your own stories and quests. My opinion is that Skyrim is much better game for roleplaying than the ones before it. Morrowind was great game and I liked it a lot. But I wouldn't say it to be any better RPG than Skyrim. Of course the quest lines were longer and there were some other RPG aspects made better in Morrowind but the world wasn't favoring free roleplaying as much as Skyrim does.

I've played every TES game and Morrowind was the only one I didn't finish.

Didn't like the game...at all.

I've argued with people about this till I'm sick of it. Skyrim is not an RPG. I grew up playing real RPG's. Skyrim isn't one. Not in my opinion anyways. Its an FPS.

I am a lazy person by nature, and for that reason, I love Skyrim's leveling system. I play TES to learn the overall story behind it, so actual gameplay and mechanics are just things I have to work through in order to get that story--anything to make that process easier is okay by me. For people who care about that stuff, though, Skyrim is very, very simplified in that way.

As far as that story goes, Skyrim's not bad when taken on its own. Like Oblivion's storyline and backstory, if you put it next to the games that came before it, you'll find quite a few inconsistencies and changes. For me, that makes Skyrim a poor addition to the series, but as long as I'm willing to accept the inconsistencies in the ancient history and metaphysics in order to learn about the very interesting current events that Skyrim reveals, I still have plenty of fun. Skyrim also lacks what Oblivion and Morrowind provide in spades: a detailed history that leads into the current problem (Skyrim gives us a general outline, but very little real information about it). On the other hand, Skyrim provides where Oblivion fails: an interesting present-day setting with at least one faction questline that asks you to make a decision that could affect issues across the continent for years after the scope of the game itself (I'm thinking of the civil war specifically, with its implications to an Empire that's already crumbling and still facing the Thalmor threat on the opposite side of the continent). Morrowind didn't have any comparable faction or side quests, IIRC, but its main quest (and Tribunal DLC) was just as politically-motivated, and just as important in terms of the course of the future (even if you as the player didn't really have a choice in which side you took; thanks a bunch, Azura). Basically, I believe that Morrowind provided both an interesting current setting and an interesting backstory to build it; the following games did half the job, but didn't manage the other half nearly as well. That said, I admit that most of my opinion about Oblivion's current setting is colored by the hints of what it could have been that came in Morrowind and previous games, and thus disappointment that I didn't see those things in the game itself. My opinion about Skyrim's backstory is slightly more objective: Once I realized that I was willing to accept some of Oblivion's lore changes if I found information that made them interesting or plausible enough, I started to look for that kind of information in Skyrim's backstory, and found a whole lot of nothing for my trouble. There's not much information about it at all, which as you might imagine makes for a pretty vague and uninteresting story.

tl;dr: Skyrim's backstory is a blank slate, compared to Morrowind's as well as Oblivion's. But its present-day setting, current events, and other current story tidbits are much better written, and are at least just as good as the setting of Morrowind. And I like Skyrim's gameplay and leveling system better for the most part (though I'm pretty lazy, so that opinion probably doesn't help anyway). Taken on its own, Skyrim is a good game--I would say better than Oblivion in terms of current setting and gameplay--but when placed in the series as a whole, it seems shallow in terms of writing and story, where those questlines that have a good story are poorly written and repetitive, or perhaps more accurately rushed. Skyrim's faction quests also feature a problem present in Oblivion, where the factions don't seem to interact with each other or the world around them--at least in Morrowind we were reminded that these factions existed in the same world when they would interact (if only to try to fight one another), but in the last two games their questlines have been very self-centered in comparison.

As an aside, I can't use the magic system in Skyrim nearly as well as I can for the other two games. Skyrim's spell-charging mechanic ensures that I always mistime my on-target spells. Coincidentally, Skyrim has managed to fix everything I hated about archery, so even though I'd prefer to be an awesome mage, my overall ranged combat effectiveness is better than ever. Figures.

Then there's no need to argue about it. I grew up playing original RPGs with pens, papers, dies and books. Skyrim is nearer to the experience I had with them than Morrowind and Oblivion were. With Skyrim getting into your character and roleplaying as him feels much better than previous TES. In Skyrim the freedom to do different things and to play without HUD fortifies the roleplaying experience more than it was possible with Morrowind or Oblivion. The greatness of Skyrim is that player himself is the character but also the gameleader and the game is actually just the rulebook and lore if compared to original RPGs. Morrowind and Oblivion did half of the gameleaders job when player had only character and the other half of gameleading. With Skyrims system the roleplaying experience is more free and the player have better possibilities to create and lead all his quests and adventures by himself with. That's how I see it.

I'd just disagree simply because Skyrim is too streamlined to actually feel like a tabletop RPG (I played and beat the GBA port of Final Fantasy I recently, and oh man did that game feel like a D&D campaign). I haven't played Morrowind, but I'd imagine the emphasis on stats and a chosen class is a bit closer to the AD&D I played a few years ago than Skyrim's "you have a race that barely means anything past level 5, and you can basically level anything you want, class build be damned".

...not that has anything to really do with Skyrim vs. Morrowind, but I just wanted to put in my two cents.

IMO, Skyrim really does feel less strategic than all of the other RPGs I've played, and in fact I'd agree with the assertion that it's an open-world fantasy-based FPS with RPG leveling elements, because that's what feels like, especially with how clunky the melee combat feels, which basically makes the ranged stuff that plays like FPS combat far more fun and viable. Now, that doesn't mean "zomg Skyrim svcks and Morrowind is awesome", it just means that it's pretty much fundamentally different from Morrowind, and trying to compare the two on that level is really hard.

Honestly, if you're used to RPGs like the old-school Final Fantasies, Shin Megami Tensei titles, or just plain pen-and-paper Advanced Dungeons & Dragons sessions, Morrowind is probably for you. However, Skyrim is a great introduction to the series in basic mechanics and lore, so I might actually recommend picking that up over Morrowind for the time being, especially since Steam has this tendency to have these ridiculous sales on Morrowind (it was about $6 a week or so ago!!).

I do not feel that Skyrim is the game that it should have been, given how long there was between Skyrim and Morrowind. For me, Skyrim feels more static, because there is more technologically available to make it dynamic, and it doesn't achieve the expectations I have of it.

Side quests are great! The issue with faction and main quests is that a lot of the time, it introduces the idea that you are reverting the world back to some equilibrium point (i.e. the quest will change the world for the worse, and you are restoring the balance)

In practice, the chaotic nature of the world is never truly realised, and so you don't seem to be restoring anything. Making the endings anti-climatic. The story-line isn't always solid enough for this to be justified. However, the more personal storylines don't have this issue.

This. Right. Here.

In Morrowind, combat was decided by how good my CHARACTER was at combat. Not me. In Skyrim, there is fundamentally no difference in the way my character fights whether he has a one handed skill of 1 or 100. Which is why, along with a host of other reasons, I call it a FPS. Its not a bad game. I enjoy it for what it is. But, to me, it doesn't fit my defintion of an RPG. I do admit that Morrowind had flaws (archery for example), it wasn't perfect. But, Morrowind is still the closest thing to a true RPG than any video game I have ever played. Which is why its my personal favorite of TES franchise.