Oblivionw as garbage, the soundtrack , it had the worst battle music I have ever heard in an rpg. Some of it was good. Had the worst dialog, level system, Ai was terrible.....

How can you say such a thing ? Oh god, I never understand you Morrowind fan boys (You are clearly one) Oblivion had the worst dialog ? Morrowind didn't have a dialog system ? Had the worst leveling system ? Morrowind pretty much was boring at 20, you could kill everything, and why exactly was the AI terrible ? Sure, it wasn't great but it sure did the job didn't it ? Oblivion wouldn't have gotten GOTY if it svcked as much as you just said.

bliviongate:

+1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Great post! You made a lot of points that I think are spot on.

Too many crutches, not enough creative thinking required of the player. RPG's used to be for those who wanted to think, and create things, and have that sense of discovery and success (and even do things like, oh, draw your own map as you go). Now, you can finish the main quest just by following the neon signs and ignoring everything else. "Finishing" a game seems more important to a lot of people than actually "playing" it - to say nothing of those who look for cheats as soon as the game comes out (I don't understand how finishing something via cheats can be considered a "win").

Last night I killed my first dragon, not because I wanted to at that point, but I was pushed into it. After delivering the Dragonstone, I really didn't care that there was a dragon seen at the West guard tower, I really didn't. I always put off the main quest and I just wanted to get back to exploring. Sure, maybe I could have just gone on my way, but then I'd know that the guards were standing there doing nothing, waiting for me. So instead I followed the woman with the ridiculous white arrow over her head (really? are we incapable of following someone just by knowing who she is and watching where she goes? how is that realistic?) and did what I was required to do, kill the dragon. Now people will know I'm Dragonborn (that inherent special-ness! I'm great just because I exist!).

I'm afraid TES is going to end up like Call of Duty or something: no real development and your character will end up essentially a "camera on a stick" - ooh, look at the pretty scenery as you run through and kill things from point A to point B!

Yes, I enjoy the game, but is it all it could have been? Don't think so.

You can't fast travel to a place you haven't discovered yet in Skyrim. You can take a cart, for a fee, to the major cities, kinda like in real life (which is part of the whole immersion thing so no big deal for me), but you cannot fast travel to a place you haven't been before, why would you think you could if you had played Skyrim?



Clearly you've never met a saber cat or a frost troll in Skyrim yet while you were a low level. It's really not as bad as you make it out to be.


I think the OP had a very well thought out topic that was intended to get some intelligent conversation, but some of these comments... I honestly don't think the people have even played either game before making them. Really. Some of the information from both sides of the argument is blatantly false. The first two pages are filled with people talking about how it's pointless to level up because the dungeons will scale with you, while being obviously and completely oblivious to the fact there's a level lock on them in Skyrim. Have you even played the game? Had you actually tried it and went back, you'd know that there was a lock. You were just saying that, weren't you, because you had absolutely no personal experience from having tried it yourself. The rest of the forum goes something like this, "I have an opinion." "Your opinion is wrong." "No yours." "Irrelevant WoW." "Opinion."

I think for the time and effort the OP put into writing this out, whether you agree or disagree with it, you could at least have played the game long enough to know whether or not what you were posting was even true or not. While I completely disagree with the OP, and for personal reasons, because we're two separate individuals - I happen to not like Morrowind near as much as I like Oblivion or Skryim - it doesn't make either of us wrong.

To actually address the whole map pointer, having your hand held stuff, it's a very obvious solution. Turn those options off. And don't replay again with, "It's impossible without them because there's no better information." You want them to be gone from the game because it hurts exploring, so turn them off and explore. But what you really want is still some hand holding, just less of it. You really just want Morrowind back. Skyrim isn't Morrowind. And everyone has their own opinions about whether that's a good thing or not. For me, I turned off all the leads in the game, and am exploring from corner to corner of the entire map. I've completed quests I didn't even have yet. Once I found some item of interest the quest for it popped up, and instead of it saying, "return to." It would say something like, "find the owner of." The game will work with you just fine because the quest system is dynamic. You find something that there's a quest for, the quest is given to you in a backwards fashion. You don't even have to have quests to explore Skyrim and still get things done. And you will come across areas you can't beat yet. You'll have to leave and go back. So if you really have a problem with the whole "rail" system, then simply get off and actually explore, except here you don't have any hand holding at all. It's fun, for me. But each to their own.

There's still some thinking to be done. It took me awhile before I realized you could shoot down those lights and set the liquid on the floor on fire to roast your enemies, now it's a strategy I never forget to use. Things like that happen in the game when you're playing it at face value and not trying to make a comparison to another game.

Morrowind is pure nostalgia. Once you compare that to another game the comparison becomes invalid. Morrowind has worse reviews then Oblivion and Skyrim.

Some mainstream sites who cater to the casual masss give it GOTY awards in 2006 when it had no competition ROFL. Think for yourself. oblivion was a weak RPG, Ok as an action adventure game.

+1 :celebration:

I, under orders of the emperor Titus Mede II , rightly censor the foul word "Morrowind"
From now on.

Please tell me your joking? Reviews? You mean todays reviews whose game scores are grossly too high? Every modern game thats good gets 9.5's and tens. The game press is very immature, gaming needs independant professional reviewers. reviews mean squat different era's, different standards for one.

Morrowind with skyrims graphics wipe the floor with it.

Intelligence. Not many have it.

That was the essence that the gaming industry learned from World of Warcraft, and that they can reach to millions of customers beyond expectation if they would go that way. As a result the "casual gaming" world appeared out of nowhere and took over the entire industry. Nowadays if you need to push more than one button to "win", people rush to the forum and start complaining. However those, who are bored by such trivial gameplay either just quit these games or - should they speak out their mind - get flamed by 'kiddies' for saying something bad about their game.

But if you followed the directions of World of Warcraft closely, you notice that winning without challenge is as well the death for a game that is supposed to entertain you more than a few minutes. Blizzard realized that and tried to adjust the difficulty, forcing the play to think and play smart, but then slammed the entire concept against a wall of stupid "I have to press more than one button to win?? Nerf!!" zombies. Their futile attempts to correct the current expansion (Cataclysm) feels like they have been completely surprised by the request for challenge. For their next expansion however, they will try to merge both: easy game-play with challenging elements.

How does this relate to Skyrim?
With the 'simplified' UI and several little helpers like the quest direction indicator Bethesda has gone into a similar direction: making the game easier. Now if I want, I can just hop from quest indicator to quest indicator and smash my sword into everything on the way. And like Blizzard, they forgot about those people who love this game for the challenge. In the essence: they jumped on the band-wagon to earn more money with 'casual' gaming.

What makes and breaks a game?
I want to create and personalize my character, I want to explore a huge, mystical world and be entertained by a capturing story at the same time, I want challenge in fighting, puzzles and decisions with a consequence and I want to feel like I win with whatever I do because I took the right decisions. Bethesda put everything into this game, but tried at the same time to keep it simple but challenging. You see this with the puzzles, that always consist of only 5 signs so you can remember them. Enemies that always appear in carefully placed groups that you can easily dispatch and decisions that appear to have a consequence, while actually having none at all. And all of this comes in various levels of quality. Some quests are so extremely good that you're literally glued to your chair because you need to know how the story ends. Some dungeons are so well designed, that it is just pure entertainment to walk through them. Some puzzles are so challenging but yet give you the slap-your-forhead effect once you solved them, that you feel the game is playing with you. And then you find that one place in the huge world that confirms that all that time spent exploring was worth it. But that's not everywhere, in fact other parts of the game are the absolute opposite, which brings us to the next point.

Polishing makes or breaks a game
Every break in immersion, logic of the game world or for technical reasons (crash to desktop, bad UI) breaks the experience and Skyrim has many of these. Sometimes you ask yourself why the hell you just can't walk that way or how these bandits got into the totally locked-up dungeon. You slaughter through enemies like a hot knife through butter or get one-hitted by a standard bandit. People you pass by for some reason all feel like telling you the story of their life even if you never asked, or forget to remember that you have just rescued their daughter or are the arch-mage of this college. Or you have to pause the game every 2 seconds to switch spells, got stuck in annoying slow-motions of a kill on a rat or from one second to the next end up on desktop. And each time you ask yourself: why the hell didn't they fix that? And the answer is: time (aka money) was spent elsewhere or not at all. And especially polishing is something that doesn't help a thing on earning money, its just a cost factor.

Where is my money?
If you take a look at the recent decision for Steam you understand that Bethesda starts to think like a company: they do not want to entertain you, they want to make money and they do that by selling entertainment. Steam was chosen for exactly that one reason: more money. And with this mind-set it makes more sense to not polish some parts, because they just cost money and people will buy the game with or without. There are several ways of earning money with a software, one of them is reducing the overall quality, because quality is expensive. Why spend another 3 month paying a good amount of people fixing bugs if you can just release the game now and invest the money you gain right now (just consider the interest of investment if they would have just put the money on a bank account).

What is however not taken into consideration in this calculation is the next game. How many customers will refuse to buy the next Bethesda game because they a) were annoyed by the bugs, B) hated the lack of quality in story, quests and gameplay or c) got pissed-off by having to accept some rip-off terms in the Steam contract?

Blizzard woke up already after they lost about 1.3 million subscribers. When will Bethesda wake up?

Could you care to explain why Oblivion is a ok action adventure game ? That doesn't make sense, a action adventure game doesn't let you play for 200 + hours does it ? Oblivion is a RPG, and a incredible one at that.

Let's not do that typical "reviews don't matter" child statements. You may not like the reviews but they tend to get them right. But that's not the point. I loved Morrowind. Playing that huge 3D graphical, open-world game for the first time blew me away. The story and all the side quests were amazing. But that's because I've never seen anything like that before form the Elder Scrolls.

Now, in 2011, I know how to separate my nostalgia from the present games. Maybe in 7 years you'll be saying the next two games were nothing like Skyrim. Think about it.

No reviews in gaming IS a joke always has been too many high rated games, no one rates big budget games below 8.... compare that to moviews where anything above 8 is not that common,. Soorry but gaming press is immature, and has a long way to go to be taken serious.

Not 1 other industry reviews directly profit from advertising the same product.

Exactly these morrowind whiners are full of nostalgia and when you call them on it, they just deny it. I have disputed a lOt of points that were made that we're straight up wrong about skyrim. It makes me think these morrowind fan boys haven't even played it or gave it a chance.

Excuse me but, you make no sense at all. :spotted owl:

it took me a year and a half to finish morrowind, and its expansions..finishing off with a lvl 85 mage..and not once in that time was i bored. I agree with what you have written but i dont think most folk understand what you are saying, and unfortunately never will.It is merely a symptom of gaming growing as fast as it has with the commercial success of accessibility for the unthinking majority.The same problems that plague music, film and television unfortunately is now becoming the norm in gaming.Hell even the once uber rockstar is falling into the same dull deluge of mindless entertainment, instead of constantly pushing the bounds of their given art.All is not lost though, sure there will be a decent dev team that will come up with something that can invigorate the industry once more.And untill then, i will still enjoy playing Skyrim because at the end of the day, with all its flaws is still an elder scrolls game and perhaps the only reason i shall continue playing it is because of my nostalgia of what playing an elder scrolls game used to be like..man thats deppressing *sigh* oh well...there a cup of coffee with a quest marker waiting for me.

::ahem:: http://www.gamespot.com/the-legend-of-zelda-skyward-sword

I get what you're saying regarding the rewarding of intrepidness. In Baldur's Gate 2, I'd get a real kick out of heading to some high-level area and through careful planning and perfect play get my hands on a powerful item much earlier than normal. It was a great feeling. Until said powerful item made the rest of the game boring. In the end, I stopped doing that. And this is why I'm in favor of some level of scaling, so I can have a consistent and high level of challenge throughout.

Also, stepping in an out-of-depth dungeon and getting wrecked is not fun. "Oh, but you can always return to it later." I hear you say. No, that is metagaming and I loathe that kind of thinking.

Skyrim is a big improvement over Oblivion, no doubt about that. All in all, however, the series has been on a constant decline since Daggerfall with its staggering amount of options. Too much complexity and depth got removed for the sake of technical improvements. The return of randomly generated quests is a big improvement (remember, Daggerfall already had those), but on the other hand it's sad to see the guilds having been reduced to shallow and brief questlines instead of the full fledged organizations we had in the previous games.

The problem is that Bethesda wants you give you an open sandbox environment, but insists on linear and fast-paced storytelling with next to no choices and consequences - two approaches that don't mix well. In my opinion, Mount and Blade Warband should have been required study material on how to create an organic sandbox world that reacts and changes dynamically to the player's actions - not to mention the superior combat (including mounted combat!).

While your text needs a spell checker and a lesson in grammer, you've hit on a really great point. What Skyrim took away from Morrowind, it made up for in different ways.

First of all, I'm HUGE Morrowind and Daggerfall fan. I didn't like Oblivion too much. Morrowind has been my top single-player RPG of all time for a very, very long time - so this is coming from a die-hard fan and I very much agree with the OP.

HOWEVER...

Even though Skyrim has stripped away many of the things I loved about Morrowind, at the same time has replaced it with some equally great things to match them. The world of Skyrim is less rich than Morrowind, but it is far more dynamic. Instead of coming up with 100 ways to loot or get past a dungeon, instead, the game is giving us 100 different dynamic stories to experience. It is providing us with those "OMG" moments, when your battling three trolls and your almost dead, and a dragon swoops out of nowhere saving your butt. NOBODY else is getting that same story as I just got. What we've got is Dwarf Fortress meets The Elder Scrolls.

In my opinion, the unique radiant story and AI system that Skyrim has, is more valuable than all the depth and unforgiving difficult of Morrowind. But just barely. I think with some nice modding and a few expansions/dlc, Skryim will end up being my new top favorite.

But you forget to think about all the things that are added and expanded over the course of the series. I am so impressed with the companions in this one. I remember in Morrowind how your companion would follow your exact steps. so if you walked 20 paces to the left and back then onward, your companion would walk the 20 paces to the left before continuing with you. In Skyrim, I've never had to turn around and hope my companion didn't get stuck on anything, or wait up for him/her. They are extremely independent, and I am always surprised to see when I jump down some rocks and swim across a flowing river how my companion is the little engine that could keep up with me. Not to mention the fact that you can issue commands to them and have them hold your things

Things like that are amazing improvements over the predecessors, and I cherish the realism that it adds. The fighting, the physics, and the spellcasting (like raising corpses, or ultimate room unleashing spells) are some other major improvements to think about, too.

I agree. The main quest feels like a complete railroad where you're just following one arrow to the next, waiting for the next script sequence to kick in.

svcks that you have to kill the first dragon to get random dragons to show up.

Welcome to Beth's forums, where any TES svcks because it's not morrowind. It kind of reminds me of /v/, and the nonsense rambling about how good Baldur's Gate was... Pure nostalgia, Ok, some things would have been better if they had remained unchanged, but seriously... do you remember how [censored] boring the ashlands were? how [censored] the combat system was? how exploitable the whole thing became? (Boots of blinding speed, levitate, enchantings, getting [censored] rich 20 minutes after starting the main quest). The main qest, except for the [censored] BORING quests of getting recognized by the ashlanders and houses was also short and a letdown, the battle with Daggoth'Ur being borderline [censored]...

Now, really, despite what I said, Morrowind was a damn good game, just not as good as some of you may remember it... It's called nostalgia, You've probably heard your grandpa talking about it.

I think a lot of people would disagree with that. I was playing Morrowind the week before Skyrim came out almost every day and having a lot of fun. Of course, I was using several mods to enhance the graphics, but it's still a very, VERY fun game even in 2011. I have put in 1000 hours into that game over the past 8 years, and still have only seen maybe 50% of the entire world. How many other games can you name with that kind of longevity?

Edit:

Having said that, I am loving Skyrim. Like I said above, Skyrim is doing a lot of great things over Morrowind. They added Daggerfall-style random quests back in, they now have several crafting professions, AI is very good, etc. Skyrim is a great game and about equal with Morrowind to me right now.