will there ever be another game like morrowind? if i ever learn to code then you can bet your granny on it. it's up there with learning to play the guitar and learnig to fly an airplane

Instead of comparing the Morrowind and Skyrim post counts, you would be better off by comparing the Skyrim and Oblivion post counts. Skyrim still has far more posts than Oblivion while Oblivion isn't that old.

I think we've about reached the limit of "mainstreaming" in games. The average gamer today is in his 30's -- he isn't into the same kind of stuff as a 14 year old kid. Something like Morrowind might be more profitable in the near future simply because more complexity and more thought required are both things that advlt gamers find attractive. Look at other forms of media -- do you find TV getting dumber since 1980 or smarter? In the 1980's when most of us were kids, sitcoms were very simple -- one off plotlines with a laugh track, no complex themes, and everything solved within 30 minutes and still have time for a nice hug and a "lesson". That's not what you get with modern TV. In 1980, scifi was ST:TNG and much the same -- one story, one plotline, and everything closed off in the hour-long episode (except for the season ending cliff-hangers), compared to things like LOST, Battlestar Gallactica, and Heros, in which you had to pay close attention for an entire season and piece together puzzles over a whole season to figure out what was going on. It seems like games and TV are going in opposite directions in that way -- MOrrowind is Battlestar Gallactica and Skyrim is much more like Star Trek . As games get simpler and gamers want more complex stuff, I think there's eventually going to be either a return to more complex gaming or a decline in the popularity of gaming.

I personally switched from the FF series to Suikoden and later to TES for much that reason. FF is clearly aimed at young teens, and as I reached my late teens and early 20's, the idea of playing the role of yet another teenage world-saver who falls for a 14-year-old girl lost it's appeal. Suikoden was a bit different in that you were still a teen saving the world, but the world was somewhat more complex than the FF universes. eventually I suppose I outgrew that as well, so I moved on to TES where it wasn't necessarily the world that you saved, and where the people you were working for weren't always on the good side. And then there were the assasins and the thieves. Now I feel like I'm outgrowing TES at times especially of late when it seems like everything is easy (still not as bad as the FFX Seymore battle where they tell you how to win on the screen) and the stories are simpler than the last round.

the setting of skyrim seemed morrowindish to me, hell the guild quests had the same complexity of the morrowind guild quests, really i think bethesda is going back toward the feeling of morrowind. I say that as morrowind feels like it has its own culture, skyrim also has this feeling to it as well.

i suppose what your really talking about is the removal of underused skills, and the horrible leveling system in morrowind an oblivion. i personally don't have any problem with that, but i'll be in the minority posting that here, what really made morrowind great for me was the feeling of densisty that the world had, it was rich in its lore, it setting showed it, to me skyrim really returns to that feeling.

1.9 million of skyrims post i would argue would be about a. bugs, b. when they will get new DLC because everyone and their brother beat the game in 2 weeks and is bored with it already.

Large companies often have more than 1 production team and in addition to their large Big budget production teams they also have smaller production teams for low/medium budget productions.I doubt that the market for RPG's is big enough to support lavish productions like Skyrim but low/medium budget RPG's like Morrowind are feasible it means that the budget is mostly invested in creating depth and content whilst skimping on the graphics and visual effects. RPG's draw on the imagination of the players who typically like their brains to be flooded with facts and figures, puzzles, plans, records , stories , lore etc so graphics tend to take a backseat, which are nice to have but not too important as the mind tends to be focussed on other things most of the time. I don't think bethesda are big enough to support production teams catering for smaller markets nor have they reached the stage where growing profits requires them to do so either.They could also farm out the work to smaller companies but i doubt the potential rewards are worth the risk .

Trying to make a game that would appeal to a small and finicky niche market is a big gamble though ,given that the design of most games is at best average and in the majority of instances, mediocre so the likelihood of creating something on par with or better than Morrowind is not good, and the chance of commercial failure is high. Of all the companies that made RPG's in the past , how many of them are still around and making RPG's today ? Action/Adventure is the more popular spinoff genre which the Elderscrolls has also morphed into and for purely commercial reasons makes no sense for Bethesda to revert back to their RPG roots.

The content of the posts barely matters. Even though you may consider these Skyrim fans 'unworthy' of the elder scrolls. They still paid the same amount for their copy as the rest of us.

It would have been a huge improvement if Bethesda had included NPC which gave you directions. As a result there might have been more distinct spots in the gameworld.
I supppose that is not easily to be modded in (at least with voice acting).

Relevant to the OP is this discussion of voice-acting. A game like Morrowind can never be made again if they're dedicated to having most or all the dialogue be voice-acted. This takes up space, time, and money, and really doesn't add anything too valuable to the game in my opinion. I know that we've all spent countless hours reading through various dialogues (especially when one comes across a Savant!) learning about lore, game details, and other various information. What does voice acting do, but reduce the amount of what is said, in a reduced number of topics, and make it painfully redundant when you hear it from the same 5 voice actors over and over. At least when you came across old dialogue in Morrowind it wasn't offensive to the ear!

I believe that they could have gone with a "mostly voiced" dialog system, where all of the MQ and major quests would have been fully voiced, along with introductory greetings as in MW, yet kept many of the "deeper" subjects text-based. The action players who really had no interest in reading lore would rarely or never encountered the text, but the info would be there for those who cared about it.

Going with "full voicing" puts a major obstacle in the way of branching quests, involved conversations, and discourses on background information, since any changes to the quests or topics due to bugs or improvements require fresh voice acting, and all of it costs money and disc space or download time (if they can even get the voice actors back for another session). It also makes modding more difficult.

No, and there doesn't need to be. Modded Morrowind is better than anything Bethesda will ever do.

I don't know how you came to the conclusion that my post was a slam on the fans of skyrim. You might like to think it was for whatever personal reason you have to do so, but it isn't.

Then there's a misunderstanding.

But I quote you again: "1.9 million of skyrims post i would argue would be about a. bugs, b. when they will get new DLC because everyone and their brother beat the game in 2 weeks and is bored with it already."

Please tell me how that is not bashing the people who are currently hanging around on the Skyrim forums.

Try reading it again. Its really not about the posters.

So you are saying that the post counts are way off because the content in the Skyrim posts isn't as extensive.

That's how I understood it, Panda.

So on this forum we can have extensive and serious posts while on the Skyrim forum they mostly have "Bug found!" , and "Moar DLC" posts.

Dont read into the post counts, they get reset every now an again when the forum gets pruned.

The majority of Morrowind's posts have long since been deleted.....only reason Skyrim has so many is because its the newest game.

Most of the useless skills were "useless" only in the sense that they were never a viable solution to the problems the game threw at you. Speechcraft didn't get you a cup of coffee in oblivion -- no fast talking past the guards, no tricking a guy into letting you into the secret base. Same with Acrobatics -- post-morrowind, there wasn't much point because it was never a viable option for getting around an obstacle. You could fall farther, but that was it. Athletics was somewhat useful as you could occasionally outrun something. It's much much more important in MW because if you run out of stamina, you get pwned by mudcrabs. In short the reason that those skill became redundant in the first place is that the designers failed to make them useful in solving the missions. When fatigue doesn't mean anything, it doesn't matter if you have an athletics skill. When you can bribe or brawl your way into any information, it doesn't make any sense to use speechcraft. Not because it's not a potentially useful skill, but because all instances where such a skill would be needed are gone. Arcobatics is also potentially useful -- IF there were a hidden path over the nest of bandits, or a treasure that you have to climb to reach. Just jumping higher because Dovahkiin is half kangaroo is stupid, but going around and above a danger is interesting. Playing the speechcraft game in oblivion for no good reason is boring, but if it's the only way to find out about some secret, then it's more interesting. It's not about the skills being useless -- I could find ways to use the language skill from daggerfall -- but it's the lazy quest design that never makes use of the skills without providing an easy way to avoid it. If I have to learn Khajiit to get the huge sword of Dro'shanji, then it gives me a reason to work on my language skills. If I can do the same thing by brawling, you've rendered the first option useless.

I agree with this, a skill is only useless if you make the game that way......how great would speechcraft be in Oblivion if quests had enough depth to offer speechcraft solutions.....instead of "Your only choice is to kill X"

Could a Fallout 1 & 2 approach worked re: give "full voicing" dialog only to hugely important characters, as an emphasis on who are absolutely essential?

I believe that would be "insufficient" on today's market. Most of the quests, including all of the MQ and major factions, would need full voicing to compete. Many of the side-quests could use a voiced intro, but have some of the "less essential" or alternatives text-based. Conversations about the culture and mythology could be almost all text-based. The developers would still need to produce bug-free main and major quests, but changes to the lesser-side quests and other conversations could be changed after the fact without requiring equally-jarring changes of voice in mid-conversation for a character (like the beggers in OB, who switched back and forth between "beggar voice" and "normal voice").

The fact of some characters being "essential" was in itself a problem for many players. I don't think it would be that difficult to voice the intro line for each character (even purely "generic commoner" NPCs could use random entries from a list, as was done in FO3). Anything beyond that leads to either a bloated dialog budget, or a major blatant shortage of NPCs and conversation in general.

One can always hope that smaller companies create quality old school rpgs in the future for the love of the game right? I look at it kinda like the movie industry. Every once in a while you get a movie that doesn't follow the normal required production values of top box office productions and even though it doesn't make much money, its there for the enjoyment of those that make it and those that appreciate it.

And just every once in a while you get an indie movie like Pulp Fiction that not only turns a whole generation on to old school methods but is forward looking at the same time, so you get all the good of the old and something new and substantial mixed into one. Could be we get an rpg like that down the road.

Edit: Oh an my other thought was it usually takes at least 2 generations removed for an older school to be appreciated again. You see it with music. Look at all the 80s influenced bands these days. In the 90s grunge looked back to the 70s, etc.

Anyway just a bunch of babble on my part due to lack of sleep.

don't forget the numbers of posts that goes "OMG SKYRIM ISN*T LIKE X TES game amagad!!!"

Quite a few of those going about actually

Sooo.... You're actually saying Skyrim is better than Morrowind?

Wouldn't Morrowind be more like Star Trek, with a lower special effects budget and awkward fighting (Kirk's 2-fisted punch technique), but good writing, emotional attachment to the characters, etc. and wouldn't Skyrim be more like Battlestar Galactica (the newer one) with its flashy graphics, cool fight scenes and complex storylines (bad anology) but overall, less fullfilling story and missing alot of the 'magic' of older series (Star Trek/Morrowind)?

(Just for the record, I am a fan of both Star Trek and ST:TNG and I also liked the BSG reboot)
Some of the wording in your 2nd and 3rd sentence is a bit confusing, but I know what you meant - Since Oblivion and even moreso in Skyrim it seems quest destinations are given solely by location name and a marker appears on your world map. It feels lazy as opposed to an NPC giving you directions and getting a journal entry that actually tells you something about the quest. Also, it takes alot away from the feeling of being an explorer and being immersed in the game world if you are practically forced to use a GPS system to find your way as opposed to an NPC saying something like "follow the river North until you reach some old Daedric ruins, then head East..."

Some people would argue "well you can just turn it off" (the quest compass), which I have done in Skyrim (and Oblivion) but it makes it really difficult (and not in a fun way) to find something by exploration if all you have to go on is a place name in your journal entry.
Daggerfall had NPCs either give you directions or mark places on your map if you were really close to your destination. Morrowind has this, although sometimes the directions are flatout wrong or misleading - perhaps complaints about this contributed to them switching to GPS quest markers? In Oblivion it seems like they had some half-assed attempts to give directions this way, but ultimately, you were supposed to rely on the quest markers. I guess while doing Skyrim, they just gave up entirely on any quest directive apart from "Well, Ritalin kids, you're in luck; you have a magical GPS system. Go Here - The coordinates have been entered on your GPS". Convenient, but not exactly great for immersion in a huge fantasy game world.

Oh, and to the OP's query: Simply put; No. Since the Dev team has assuredly changed since Morrowind, it may be like asking lightning to strike twice... It seemed like everything from the concept art, to storyline, to the final implementation in the game itself was just "inspired". Skyrim has beauty and atmosphere, but it doesn't feel as original or as deep as Morrowind. To try to capture the type of feeling that Morrowind's setting did they'd probably have to do Elsweyr or Black Marsh and be extremely creative with it. They also should return to having more options for quest completion and also allow more than one outcome for quests (including the main quest).