PRE-EDIT: I am aware that Morrowind was an imperfect game, as was Oblivion and as is Skyrim. However, I am referencing Morrowind not for the purposes of nostalgia, but because I believed that some of the central game design ideas have been removed to the detriment of the game. Oblivion was my least favourite TES game thus far, and Skyrim is much better, but I still want to retain the great points from MW while taking the series forward. Please read below and my replies in thread for an expansion on this idea. This has been a hard thing to put into words, so bear with me.

I've been a long time TES fan, playing it back at Daggerfall and through to now with much anticipation.

Now, I've reached a point of frustration with the entire series that I'd like to articulate. If you are absolutely and blindly in love with Skyrim then it's best if you don't reply to this, as you're probably not going to have read any of it properly and I'll be triple explaining things in the thread.

Now, down to business.

I believe, like many TES fans, that the series reached a spiritual home and peak with Morrowind. I know that is a charged statement, but I'd like to explain what I believe is wrong with Bethesda's game design philosophy, and where things have gone drastically wrong in a big way, that contributes in a lot of small ways to the game feel, and in my opinion, greatly reduces the experience from what it was in Morrowind.

After much thought and discussion, I've come to the realisation that the huge problem is philosophical, and that it has trickled down in many ways. I am always loathe to say this, and I always want to measure where I do say it, if ever, but I really believe that Bethesda has “sold out”.

Many people have incorrectly thought of it as trying to appeal to newer players, or furthering that, trying to widen the target market by making it more accessible to those who already game. What I want to correct is that this is true, but ostensibly, what has changed is the centricity of the game design.

Put simply, Oblivion and Skyrim (to a lesser degree) were designed for time = reward. Morrowind was designed, primarily, for intelligence = reward.

Let me clarify this thesis, because I can imagine a lot of anger and discontent at that statement.

Essentially, the experience of Morrowind is decidedly one in which the player is thrown into the world with a blank canvas for them to make of themselves what they like. A player is forced to grow and learn and adapt and remember features of the world. There is no GPS system, no instantly proclaimed born/unproven/inherent “specialness” to the player, no implausible teleportation to wherever it is that you want to go. Instead, the world and its challenges are statically skilled and predictably (within the gameworld’s logic, not the logic of scaling) challenging and most importantly, the intelligence and savvy and entrepreneurialism of the player is encouraged. In Morrowind, there were one hundred ways to complete every challenge, there was a point to reading notes and books besides the World of Warcraft influenced ding received for completing or receiving a new quest. Exploring was a viable option, because it genuinely felt dangerous in certain environments (which you would subsequently conquer in Morrowind), and this made it exciting and scary. What impossible obstacle would separate me from my goal, and how would I overcome it? The greatest threat in Skyrim is that I might have to teleport back to relieve my encumbrance. Not one single time have I ever actually felt as though I wasn’t up to the challenge and that I might actually have to pace myself, or work out a way around.

What the developers have essentially failed to realise, is that the strength and individuality of their brand in Morrowind was not only open worlds, first person combat and vaster skill boards, but a system in which intelligence, creativity and daring of the actual player (which is different to being TOLD that you’re adventurous and daring because you visited a GPS, teleported cave filled with a creche of whatever the game thinks you’re ready to fight). They built an environment that modeled the system of the real world, in a fantastical way. The beauty of this was that they managed to achieve, in Morrowind, what very, very few games can - an internal and accurate sense of logic within the game world. Once that has been achieved, the satisfaction of the player, I believe, is unmatched by any other RPG game (and wider than this genre). Players are able to read books to research the location of items, characters and quests, they’re able to engage in conversations they need to care about (because it won’t be summated into a single compass point afterwards) and so on, and so on.

In fact, on a side note, I feel an irony that all gained through voice acting and emphatically acted story telling is completely undermined by the game design choices surrounding it. I’d argue that many of the newer features of the game are entirely undermined by the general ease afforded by the rest of the design.

Now, while it’s good to speak about the philosophy and wider practice of game design, I wanted to ask the question as to what a change to this looks like practically. In as much as, how can the franchise return to that ill-defined, unique and amazing quality that made Morrowind so great.

Practically, what that means a removal of the crutches introduced since Morrowind. Namely, the compass and map markers (that you yourself haven’t placed), the summarised quests, circular dungeon design, the too-early player-centric “thank the Lord you’ve just arrived to save the day, here, have my sword!” dialogue and storylines, and the reintroduction within the game world of powerful boons, deadly enemies and skills and magic that allow you to “exploit” (which, let’s be honest, is the entire point and attraction of magic - the exploitation of the laws of nature), pitch black, scary dungeons (give magelight an actual purpose) and the ability for the player to actually enjoy exploring with an incentive beyond “what is that valley like?”

The biggest practical change, of all, is a removal of scaling entirely. Scaling, in all my thinking, is the number one cause for the removal of this amazing quality - removing the keystone, if you will, of RPG games.

I believe the cons of scaling far, far outweigh the benefits, and I’d even argue that scaling is symptomatic of a broken and even lazy game design. It shows that the developers don’t have the inclination to build a world (beyond the geography, which is incredibly under-utilised as everything is signposted to death) that the player must be skilled to access, and instead seem to be so keen on rushing the player to the next reward or conversation that the developers have entirely missed out on what is the meat of their franchise.
In Morrowind, success was derived from understanding the sometimes vague directions to a writ target, to finding the place in which you were to perform a task, and obviously, with a much wider skill set and character build, the way in which you were to attempt it, or heaven forbid, put it off an actually build up your abilities (which doesn’t mean potion mashing) before you’re able to face it properly. Combat was almost a last priority, as there was so much intellectual lifting to do beforehand the satisfaction of combat was almost icing on the cake. In Skyrim, the icing is the entire cake. Everything else has been “streamlined” to death. Instead of Teleportation being a skill that you can increase (and thereby increase your range of teleportation so that, at the end of the game, you can cross the map in one go), it’s some clunky, obvious game feature. Instead of actually using and leveling Clairvoyance, I can just look at my compass, or the giant damn map.

The joy of Morrowind was being rewarded for hard, and fun, work. Adventure was rewarded by incredibly powerful items, interesting quests and tidbits and encounters with far superior enemies. In Oblivion and Skyrim, the developers seem to be saying “they can’t have that too early! It’s too overpowered, it’s not in our time frame,” which, I’m afraid was the EXACT point of Morrowind. If I’m never intrepid, never daring and never read anything, and never use my head, the majority of the game is not going to be accessible to me, just like real life. In Morrowind, if I identified the armoury of a fort, I could put two and two together to realise that powerful weapons and armour might be stored there. I would then scout the place out to work out what locks I would need to pass (three masters in a row, most likely), work out how many lockpicks I might need, work out how many guards I would need to sneak past, and if not sneak, execute, and if execute, how big the bounty would be, and if I had enough to pay it off. Then if I couldn’t sneak, I’d have to work out how else to get it. Can I jump or levitate up to a back door with fewer guards and locks? Can I make an invisibility potion to sneak past all for a quick snatch and so on and so on. Finally, once I was in, I’d be able to pick up one amazing glass dagger and three thousand gold, which would put me in amazing stead for the next few levels. Essentially, reward and the addiction in Morrowind was based on finding something that I really shouldn’t have. It put the fun in theft, and if I’d fought for it, it meant that I’d proven myself strong enough against the odds.

In Skyrim, this situation does not happen because very rarely (I’d argue never) is there anything valuable enough, with enough importance to actually make it worth stealing (besides a heavily controlled stat upgrade). Essentially, as soon as you put scaling in the game, you’re immediately killing the freedom and sense of entrepreneurialism the player has. I’ve been a long time TES player, and I realised suddenly that I just didn’t want to quest like I used to in Morrowind, because I KNEW categorically, that whatever cave I would go into would bear no special reward. If a cave was too hard, I would instantly die - there would be no way around, and if it wasn’t instant death, I could still get to the end and find the relative “reward” allotted to me at that level bracket. With scaling in the game at all, you’re destroying the immersion and the age old system of work and reward (which is different to the completion of equally difficult tasks), and the ability for a player to think for themselves and to make of the game, and the world, what they would. If there was no scaling, a player’s internal and honest gameworld logic would apply (which is incredibly different to external logic applied to the game).

Essentially, what is left after all of this is removed is the last place a player’s skill can be tested: in the choosing of perks, the way combat is carried out and the ability to leave with all the loot presented you. Similarly, with actual geography and the hunting for the target out of the way, nothing is epic, or mystic, or secretive anymore. The Dark Brotherhood? Pop by the cave entrance with the big skull on it just off the road. There’s a big arrow on your compass and on the map, despite the fact that blind Freddy could have found the place on one line of instruction. Easy as you like. No reading, discernment or proactive thinking required. The super secretive base of an assassins guild located itself with a big bloody skull door right next to a main thoroughfare. There goes the mystery of any kind of subterfuge. It’s too damn easy. And this is the point - that destroys the story. It has already totally undermined it for me. If the darkest and most infamous organisation can be that stupid and easy to find, where is the portence, the gravity, of being a member?
Do the developers not see that? Can they not remember how the assassins guild used to feel actually secret in Morrowind? Can they not remember that a player felt privileged because it was actually difficult to join the guild? Now, it feels as if the developers are so scared of being accused of inaccessible that they’ve thrown “challenging” out the window entirely.

Now, what many will say is that I can turn off the GPS marker on my screen (not in any other way, though), and that mods can make the game harder for me, as I require it. While this is true, the reality is that this is an address to the way the series is going. It’s an address to the entire mindset behind the creation of such a huge game. It’s an address to the money and the thought that goes into these games, and what they think that players want. I would bet, that if you gave the players the option of choosing the fast playstyle we have now, with the normal RPG playstyle of Morrowind, 80-90% would choose the normative, challenging playstyle. Bear in mind that to finish the game you have to sink 100+ hours into it anyway. Basically, what I tried to expound over the course of this article, is that the mindset of the developer needs to drastically reassess what makes their brand so unique and amazing, and not to lose sight of that in the wake of the ghost train Fable series and “streamlining” in general.

In conclusion, I’ve really reached the end of the game and absolutely loved playing it. I really did. However, what to me is the fundamental attraction to the series is still not back in the mix. The thing that set the brand apart in a huge way; the depth of the immersion, is still halfway from where it needs to be, and I still feel that the developers don’t understand why it was so good in Morrowind. In this essay (haha) I hope I’ve come some way to explaining that.

Do you agree? (And thanks for reading until the end!)

EDIT 1:
I think I should put my cards on the table a bit to clarify things.
What I personally envisaged at this stage of the series was:

* A map system similar that was entirely unrevealed but with the markers of Skyrim once the place has been discovered.
* No instant fast travel except via carriage - probably borrow from WoW and maybe even take you on it physically so that it felt like you were legitimately travelling.
* Teleport could be perked up to allow short range fast travel (range increases on skill increase).
* NPC's gave you a written description of the dungeon location, along with a journal entry for you to refer to. This would increase the length and immersion and natural exploration of the game. The place is beautiful, you may as well explore it with a purpose. Also, looking for particular landmarks was always satisfying.
* No regenerating health. Keep the wild as a dangerous place. Taking shelter in caves etc. and resting for a while added to the immersion and meant that you weren't always questing at night.
* Remove scaling entirely. Have everything statically placed. If you're too weak for one place, try to think a way around it, or just go and do something else.
* Place rare and unique weapons and items in impossible to reach, incredibly obscure or incredibly dangerous places to give the player a sense of daring in trying to get them, and give adventuring a point again.
* Alter acrobatics and athletics so that they were the same things, and the perks allowed you to run faster and jump higher, and use weapons and cast while jumping. Also give you more encumbrance. Tie jumping to stamina as well.
* Fix up spellcrafting so that it has a much better interface.
* Darken caves up so the magelight has a point.

Additions I hoped to have seen and would consider possible areas of advancement of the series (note, I know there may be technical difficulties with things such as the battles, but the point of advancement is to work out ways around those type of technical problems, and to introduce new and expansive game mechanics):

* Have settlement quests where you can build a settlement of your style/choice as in Bloodmoon.
* Have a working economy that can be effected by the player.
* Have a few new factions (Morag Tong/Imperial Cult/Houses type thing).
* Have bigger pitched battles or even a war (thinking Kingdom Under Fire type 100 man battles)
* Have better and more choice of mounts, and mounted combat.
* Introduce new weapon types, including reintroducing the Halberd.
* Do business ownership and establishment properly (as opposed to Fable).
* Finally work out a good speechcraft system.
* Some varied external architecture or magical landscapes besides the staple of that particular land.

And there are more that I'm not aware of but will come back to later!

I do indeed agree, Morrowind is what I started with and I still think it's the best (Although I seem to have a higher opinion of Oblivion than most people who started TES before it) In truth Skyrim doesn't even feel like TES to me. I'm trying all these different things because I want desperately to like it, more than anything. But all playing Skyrim makes me want to do is play Oblivion or Morrowind and that makes me downright disappointed. For me it just doesn't have the addicting feeling that the past two titles had and it's because of all these changes to the core of the game.

"Intelligence = reward' can be rewarded as "whoever bothers to min/max the hardest through some simple planning and boring spreadsheets".

Morrowind is highly overrated here. Take your nostalgia goggles off and play it again, its not as great as everybody here says.

the thing is, it actually is.

I'm not saying by any means that Morrowind was a perfect game. In fact, much of the stat work was imperfect in the way it was communicated to the player. However, the intelligence I refer to is the fact that practical and lateral thinking could overcome insurmountable odds in Morrowind in regards to nearly all parts of the game. That is not the case in Skyrim. I don't think that because they didn't communicate spell crafting or limit it properly that it should be entirely thrown out. I think a good game designer looks at spell crafting and attempts to tackle the problems of it and communicate it to the player in a fun way and interesting way. For instance, they could have quite easily delivered the fundamentals of the system by tying it to some kind of nonspecific command. For instance, tying the whole process to an economy of runes. In as much as, you can learn the spell, but to craft it differently you need to shout the word at different volumes to give it different strengths of power. What that would look like is you arranging at your "spell desk", different words (much like enchanting) and then choosing the volume at which you shout them, adding different strengths. In any case, this needs much more time and a much better solution than I've come up with, but you get the idea. To me, that is the entire point of a sequel. You refine the aspects that don't work, not remove the immersion with shortcut gimmicks. For one, I'm still irritated that they haven't added in physics to the combat system. In as much as, if I swing my sword at a person, my sword stops, it doesn't sweep past my face in one unbroken swing (unless I've killed them). Having your weapon actually "hit" the thing in front of you and stop, and act like an actual sword or mace would do so much for the combat and really help people time and direct their swings, as well as work out distance.


I played through the entire game last year. The fundamental design choices, while restricted by the technology of the time, were as I decribed above - they were deep, immersive and rewarded the players autonomy and intelligence. Sure, some aspects have dated, and the combat and spell crafting systems were clunky and complicated, but that doesn't mean you cut them out and signpost the entire thing, essentially alienating the players who shouted Morrowinds praises from the rooftop.

Well constructed, well written, honest and undeniably true. Its unfortunate that you are not likely to get as thoughtful response, but I applaud the effort here to start a worthwhile conversation.

I do agree with you. Despite the fact that I do enjoy modern day RPGs in many ways the association between roleplaying games of the pencil and paper variety and the term RPG in computer games has grown a wider gap with each year and each new release from any developer not just this one.

The industries opinion of the gamer is quite low, like television and movies that have been reduced to the lowest common denominator, PC RPGs have been reduced to hand holding narrative partially interactive novels. That said its worth mentioning that the talent to create is still there. Skyrim is a very pretty game, its lean gameplay is fun and its leanier storys are great theme rides, but I agree that simply put the games have been severly dumbed down. The average gamer expects direct, clear instructions on how to win and where once games where challenging and entertaining today they are simply entertaining.

Truth is however that there really is not much that will change, Skyrim is the representation of the future of rpg gaming on the pc.

The problem is that not everyone has the time or the patience (or perhaps intelligence) for an immersive and intricate story telling/gameplay.

If you enjoyed the game, then that is pretty much job done as far as Beth are concerned. There are a million and ones things I would like to see added to the game, but that's just tailoring to my specific preferences, and I understand that those preferences would alienate other players if developed, so ...

My biggest gripe and a major biggie is that they should have ensured the UI for the PC was sorted before release. I've stopped playing until there is an official patch that does this.

I have not played Morrowind before, so im going to compare Skyrim with Oblivion:

Would you say that Skyrim does require you to use more logic than in oblivion? I really liked the addition of mini puzzles in dungeons, at least.

Morrowind wasn't as much "intelligence = reward" as it was "knowledge from the wiki = reward". There was tonnes of stuff that you only had to kill some rats for that could get you amazing sums of money or lots of power. Hell, one of the first dungeons I entered as a low level was an ebony mine with only rats in it. A few trips to the town and back, and I got myself a proper pile of gold.

And also, level scaling was definately in morrowind. If you leveled too fast, the roads would be littered with blighted creatures. It really became the worst of both worlds at times. Step into the wrong mine, you die in 2 hits before you know what's going on. You level too fast off of non combat skills? you can't travel safely anymore.

I am happy with skyrim having less level scaling than oblivion. Maybe you haven't encountered it yet, but there's a lot of places that'll totally kick your ass if you go there too early. And you'll find proper loot there too.

Yes, Morrowind IS a great game, and still holds the top spot for best Elder Scrolls. Grafix wise, yes, it's ugly as sin. Game play wise, Incredible. Skyrim does hold the addictive magic for me. I LOVE Skyrim and everything about it. GPS or no GPS the games are still long and give ya PLENTY to do. I miss Morrowind, but there are somethings I don't miss.

I agree that you need to build a 'real' world with real rules and cause and effects. But I don't think it is as easy as that.

Nowadays games put the emphasis on 'gaming' much higher than on immersion and world building.

Thats because the lowest denominator in the gaming world is always the one aimed for to reach the greatest masses.

But you will always have to make some compromises between world building and 'gaming' because if you really made a world as real as possible (in a fantastical way) you'd also have things like having to walkf or weeks to get to a certain area etc.

The problem is simply that games went too far to the extreme of streamlining everything.

You can play skyrim exactly the same way you played Morrowind. You don't need to use the fast travel. The nostalgia you're feeling is based on the newness that MW had. Now, you EXPECT. It's this expectation that's the problem... not the game design. When ever you expect something to behaive a certain way and it doesn't, you get disappointed. That's not the game's fault. It's your fault for expecting it to behaive the way you want. Play the game. Enjoy it. Or don't. But quit telling everyone what you expect in a game. It doesn't matter a lick.

One word missing from the argument... fun. Which TES game is more fun, exciting, immersive?

Plus things move on and in doing so change or wither. My wife loved Morrowind.. still plays it now and then. I tried it and the freedom to be what you wanted was great. But he dreadful (and they were even for the time) graphics stopped me playing - and I'm not a graphics really devoted fan........


My best memory of a game was the original Goldeneye and I could say the modern FPS have gone downhill since then. But market forces dictate what commercial companies do to survive. I think in the present climate - where games as limited in their imagination as COD or GOW are hailed as industry standards and GOTY contenders - Bethesda should be given the credit due for producing a 'thinking' gamer's game - and so huge to boot!

Having read many of the "Morrowind is better than Skyrim" threads recently, I decided to revisit Morrowind to see how much has changed. Yes, things have changed, yes Morrowind is almost a different game to Skyrim, but is it any better? No.

I've watched the evolution of games for over 30 years. You will always get a series of games that appear to differ from their predecessors, Skyrim is one of them.

With Morrowind, I found the UI almost unbearable. I found the quests in no way as intricate or as fun than in Skyrim. The graphics engine hasn't aged at all well either. In all honesty? I was bored after 30 minutes and promptly loaded up Skyrim again and marvelled at how far the genre had come.

Bottom line - Skyrim (and Oblivion for that matter) has(have) changed the TES series in some rather extreme ways, but to sit there with nostalgia glasses on and whine about how it isn't the same game is to really miss the point of evolution. It's funny how human beings don't like change.

All I know is, I'll go home from work tonight and sink several hours into Skyrim, and maybe give Morrowind (and Oblivion) a thought or two whenever I stumble across a book that reminds me of it, but I doubt I'll be venturing through it's (now) aged towns and quests.

And just to note: I'm not blindly in love with Skyrim, or any other game for that matter. But I know what I like in a game series, and that is a sense of evolution, a sense of progression. Skyrim delivers that to the series.

Just my tuppence worth.

It's sad that everyone forgets this - Morrowind had enemy and loot scaling! There was low level loot for your lower levels, and as you progressed the loot got better and better, just like in Skyrim. Enemies were scaled, too. Yes, enemies were scaled too.

The game adjusted itself based on your skill level, just as Oblivion and Skyrim did. Morrowind simply did it in a better, less obvious way. (Can't speak for Skyrim's noticibility of scaling. I'm only level 11 so far.)

I totally understand that, however, I believe that the average gamer is going to sink 20-100 hours into Skyrim as is, and that therefore qualifies a gamer to have as much time as they like! Similarly, TES have made a name for themselves as delivering a re-playable, enormous experience that is meant to last years.

Similarly, I do fully agree on intelligence. What I want to clarify is that my love of Morrowind was that my 13 year old brother could play it and get through it, but that the way he played, and the way I played were much different. One huge noticeable thing was that this time around it felt very much like we were ticking stuff off a list in terms of both armour sets and daedric shrine quests. In Morrowind, he was very adventurous and would stumble on incredibly rare weapons hidden in barrels by Ghost gate after a gruelling six hour death march through pain lane, and that was fun for him. For me, I loved breaking in to search for rare gear in vaults of Vivec, and to follow the guild quests, and outsmart the quests in a different and more satisfying way than he would. Afterwards, he would ask how I did such and such, and I would tell him, and my way would be much quicker, but on the other hand, sometimes he would know exactly where some really great items or small quests were located by all his adventuring. Basically, Morrowind's experience allowed players a far different experience to one another, and the ways in which things would be dealt with.

Lastly, in terms of tailoring to specific needs, I really think, if you look at the way COD has gone, that they've noticably stepped away from the roots of what made their game successful (fighting as one of 100 Russian peasants in realistic war scenarios and unremarkable terrain with a limited armoury) and that they're now the shorthand way of saying "crap and idiotic" in the gaming industry.

The problem I have with TES, is that if nobody complains, then they keep "streamlining" until we get to a game like the latest COD, which is essentially a gimmicky, shallow, easy joke. Similarly, I'm not asking for tailoring to my needs, I'm asking for basic immersive realism. At the moment with scaling in particular, it'd be like if I wasn't to see a Ferrari until I was 55, because that is when I could afford one. Basically, I love this series, and I don't want it to die to 13 year olds and become a pale shadow of what made it so great in the first place. Similarly, they are owning the huge, immersive, intelligent, RPG genre at the moment, and the way they're going, they're moving more and more off what made their product strong, which is the first rule of bad brand development. Anyway, this is a good discussion!

I completely agree with the OP.

I just wrote on another thread:

You cant say: this dungeon is too hard to me, Ill get stronger and come back later.

Because if you get 3 more levels and come back, all the enemies in that dungeon are now 3 levels stronger too. What makes little sense for a RPG.

Whats the point in getting stronger?

The only satisfaction is your own sense of improvement, because to the rest of skyrim you still are the same.


Also, I can say that the NPCs on Skyrim are way worse than the NPCs on other modern RPGs. They have no memory, they dont react to your actions properly, they dont recognize your improvemnet.

Its impossible to built your character history in this game, because no one in the world seems to care. You can literally save the world, not even the main NPCs will say thank you.

That was an excellent post, and well worth reading.

Morrowind is still my favourite game, whilst I'm loving Skyrim. And yes, something as simple as how easy it is to find the Dark Brotherhood really irritated me. The Morag Tong this is most definitely not.

What happened to this radiant AI? Once again beth hypes the AI and its some of the worst in modern RPG's, you can save the world, be arch mage and no one even acknowledges this..... Even oblivion was better in this regard.

Agreed.. Even though am only level 15, on my way to Riften i decided to visit a bandit fort thinking am gonna kick their behinds back to [insert random race homeland]..

Ended up with me getting my behind handed 3 times in a row before i gave up and moved along

evolution

fun >>> mind games and thinking . Really less theory crafting better , i may like it at certain degree , but cba with all the real problems we do now , i play skyrim and enjoy it for what it is simple and very friendly , i dont need like in oblivion make a custom class : chose main atributes to be secondary and main to be some hard ones i wont use so i can control when to level up , and with what skills .... Now i can just play it , and have fun it has some chalenges other stuff is easy , and so on .

You can't play it the same way, for all the reasons listed above. Similarly, to never criticise constructively (which I believe I've done) is pretty unhealthy when you're the consumer. Also, it's impossible to play it like MW. For one, I can't turn the map off because nobody tells me where I'm going, ever. Ever. They just say "I"ll meet you at the Shrine", and bam, the shrine is marked on my map 10 miles away and on top of a mountain, and there are many more problems than that (why is magelight in a game filled with dungeons that are never dark enough to need a light?)

And what you've said is true. I expected something that the original (Morrowind) had sold me on. Saying it's my fault because I expected something different is like me going to your house every Christmas and giving you a present when you open the door, but instead, just this year, I punch you in the face. When you get upset, I can hardly say "well, it's your fault because you expected something different."

Morrowind is overrated. So is intelligence.

Skyrim manages to take the good parts of both Oblivion and Morrowind and puts them into one game, a better game. Sure there's still lots that can be improved but it easily surpasses the others.

If you can't see the genius of Skyrim while claiming to be a TES fan, you should take off your rose-tinted glasses.

I can agree with this on the larger theme of your meaning to working hard to earn the game. But, IMO, Morrowind (and I absolutely loved Morrowind) was beginning of the downward trend of what you're alluding to. MY emphasis is more on heavy role playing where my choices (player agency) has effects on the main story and can change many aspects of the plot states. Morrowind began getting away from that and it was also the first to go console. In lore, story and RP'ing, Morrowind cannot hold a candle to what I think is still the greatest of all of the TES series, Daggerfall. Heck, being able to have 6 different endings with real differences to how the story ends was mind boggling. I love Skyrim so far, but I agree with your "overall" feeling on your essay (LOL).

If you haven't played it and don't mind not having a huge world to carve out your adventures, Dragon Age: Origins was for me, the last great RPG that filled the parts in that I so described above that is important to me and it is an incredible game.