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Morrowind was dumbed down from Daggerfall, there will never be another TES game like Daggerfall bla bla bla

The post count for the different forums by the way, i'm sure they reset after a certain amount of time.

Fully functioning world? Yeah, I'd so. Realistic NPCs? Nope, wayyy off. They repeatedly spout off one-liners if you get within 15 feet of them. Sure Morrowind's NPCs were text dispensers, but at least they didn't reside in the uncanny valley that Skyrim's NPCs do.

I think there's a difference between Skyrim and Morrowind that in some ways makes Morrowind feel alive.

For example, you walk into Caius Cosade's house and you see his skooma pipe, he's a crazy shirtless guy, you just immediately picture him sitting there smoking when you're not around. The game doesn't try to show him doing anything else, your imagination just naturally steps in.

In Skyrim and Oblivion, they try and take some of your imagination out of things by actually showing AI characters walking around, eating, sleeping, talking. So if you actually pay attention it automatically becomes ludicrous how silly it is to see an NPC sit down and eat a piece of bread for three hours in a day, then walk in circles for another three hours. By trying to fill in for your imagination and be impressive, what the game actually does is try and do something it can never reflect even 1/100th accurately with modern technology, and thus fails.

Skyrim is a step in the right direction when compared to Oblivion. Far less cartoonish and introducing new lore that fits with the old (and doesn't just blast old lore into tiny bits), better planned and built cities and dungeons (and without copy pasting huge amounts of stuff.... closing Oblivion gates was totally boring) and even oposing factions! Yes the Legion/ Stormcloak quests aren't very good but at least you can't just do all the content in a single game and at least the quests have a detailed background (unlike the arena quests from Oblivion). This said Morrowind is the better game both because character customization, features like levitation, dialogue and world (the world was alien and weird without being over the top) and lots of content that you simply can't explore with one character. But I have to say that Skyrim is a step in the right direction... it just needed more development time.

Not to mention that the level scaling is a whole lot better than in Oblivion.
Yes, you make very good points to which I can agree to an extent.
I would have gladly waited another year for Skyrim. Maybe some of my largest dissapointments, the NPC's and their dialogue, particularly pertaining to quests, would have been better.
Maybe Stormcloaks would actually care if I wore Imperial gear in Whiterun.
Still, the difference between Daggerfall and Morrowind on the one hand and Oblivion and Skyrim on the other is staggering.
I could have believed them not to be from the same game series, and that hurts.
Its a human response, I have invested a lot of time and am therefore emotionally attached to them.
Its painful to see what has happened to the series, especially so because naturally the new 'shallow action game' direction
has drawn in a lot of shallow action gamers who literally just dont understand what has been lost, and are adamantly against things that made the series great for me, they think armour degradation is boring, and levitation 'overpowered' (Whatever that means).

So the series is now for a different market, one I do not belong to and frankly look down upon, and it hurts.
Its not like I can just go to one of the many others of deep, open-world RPG's as there arent any.
On the other hand, there are many sort of RGP-lite action games.
I find it extremely dissapointing that instead of utilising their solid market position as a vestige of great RPG-ing, Bethesda has decided to fold and make games like all the others make them.

I hope there will be a TES game like Morrowind (or even better) in the future, so we don't get this whining anymore.

Exactly. I'm getting tired of whining. If SOMEBODY would actually test the market with a real "character-skill based" RPG for the first time in close to a decade, maybe we'd have something else to do (like play a new game) besides complain about everything since DF and MW.

Always wondered why the all-knowing mod community won't, say, found a gaming company and actually make the new game happen. There's so much talent, ambition and deep thinking there.

The one year would have made a difference: just look at Morrowind and how the game is totally filled with content. Devs simply need time to test and implement their ideas and to kill the bugs. It may not really be their fault that Skyrim was very buggy until version 1.4 but more time would have fixed most of that.




The problem is that 'hardcoe' RPGs are still viewed as a tiny niche of games that have poor graphics and lots of dice rolls. That shouldn't be a problem for TES games that have always had a niche part because they are single player games so they indeed cater to a very large niche. Secondly the RPG quality isn't given by the number of dice rolls per minute- its given by coherent plots, good dialogue and by using character skills (that are for whatever reason hated and replaced when possible with minigames or hunted down and mercilessly cut-> why?! People don't play TES for the unlocking minigame so giving them an autounlock based on skill or an open spell or both would actually make more buyers happy and take very little time). This whole fear of redundancy and of giving the player too many numbers is silly since a well designed character interface should be easy to use and offer any information the player needs and the more ways a character can be defined the better.

It was an alright game, but to me it felt like I was just going through the motions for most of it.
Like in Morrowind there would be some quests that would send me off searching for something I would have a reason to stop look around and search around a bit. Quests would make me stop and think about it like I like brain teasers like that, oblivion didn't have much in that way for me it was more of a go straight to this area kill all grab valuable give valuable to quest giver. The theives guild and one or two dark brotherhood quests was a bit of a reprieve in Oblivion for me in that respect but then I'm stuck with this very narrow morality system of fame and infamy that most plainly punishes you for infamy.

"Morrowind sure looks pretty, but in the end, it's just huge, empty brownish wastelands that take an eternity to travel."
"Morrowind's NPCs are utterly lifeless, spouting the same greetings and the same dialogue lines over and over."
"Morrowind's main quest is hard to find, lacks focus and is poorly presented."
It's not that Morrowind came without criticism, and that's not even considering what the Daggerfall "hardcoe" RPG fans had to say.
And Edit to sneakers just above: The Puzzle Canol thing was basically the only "puzzle" worth the moniker in Morrowind. In that regard, Morrowind quests were, honestly, not very good. And they, too, often simply boiled down to "go there, kill this, fetch that, get back". Fed-ex quests were one of the more frequent complains that I could have added to my quotes above.

It very much depends on your immersion, your taste and your personal experience which characters stick to your memory, what you remember and what you forget, and how "deep" a game is. I don't think that there haven't been good RPGs for a decade or so - I liked the Witcher very much, even Dragon Age was really nice (or is it anathema to praise a Bioware title in a Bethesda forum? ). But your mileage may vary whether their characters, worlds and gameplay was memorable and intense - just as it did for people with Morrowind.

Apart from many things already said, one of the main recent developments (affecting the ES series, as well), is ease of access. Morrowind had a very detailed world and lore, was beautiful in a rather strange way, and could keep you busy for a very long time (and still can). But it took its time to get into it - I know quite a few people, most of them used to RPGs with skill checks and the like, who took a look at Morrowind, even played it halfway through the main quest, and got bored or didn't like it. Newer games try to lower that threshhold, and with "diagnostics" from tools like Steam about how many people played the game for how long, how many finished it or gave up at roughly what point, that will continue: You have to hook the player right at the beginning; if you don't get his attention early, he will leave you for good. So you have to throw action and content at him fast, you have to present your world concisely and streamlined. Games that require a longer attention span will be fewer and fewer.

Regarding the ES series, I think that Skyrim has been a step back in the right direction. In Morrowind, you were presented three competing Great Houses, several other factions with conflicting interests, and a grey-and-grey morality that didn't exactly favour one over the other. Anyone remember the "House war" discussions - Telvanni dissing Hlaalu insulting Redoran and then back? Even Dagoth Ur, as much Evil incarnate as Morrowind got, had his fans and supporters.
I found that aspect entirely lacking in Oblivion. You basically got a very clear Evil Overlord - as far as I know, very few if any rooted for Mehrunes Dagon destroying the world. What could have been interesting: eight very distinct and competing lords (the cities of Cyrodiil) fighting over influence in a power vacuum without an emperor, and the legion in between - that was entirely left out of the game. It had absolutely no consequences, there were few quests, they just sat in their castles and waited. Oh, and Alessia Caro got clobbered by random Minotaurs on the way now and then. That, apart from the bubble-gum graphics, was my main gripe with Oblivion: I found it, in comparison, incredibly shallow.
Skyrim tried to reintroduce some of what was missing. It's not as fleshed out as in Morrowind, but you have competing factions, there are discussions over there whether Stormcloaks or Legion is better - generally, morally, politically, whatever -, and there's no clear-cut answer. Sure, the Thalmor have few fans, but they're mortals with a cause, not evil just because. It falls short of Morrowind, but it's a definite step for/backwards from Oblivion.

And that is, IMHO, more important than skill checks and Willpower. Sure, the rules system of Skyrim is very simple and basic - though, thanks to perks, not completely without tactical decisions, just in a somewhat different way than earlier installments (and could have been done better here and there, of course). But in the end, the presentation of the world is more important than number crunching. And let's be honest, the leveling of Morrowind and Oblivion was a very flawed system - when you're better off in the long run taking your most used skills as Minors to avoid leveling too fast and get those x5 multipliers, there's something very wrong.

So - "will there be another game like Morrowind" very much depends on what you like about it, and that can be quite different from other people's views.

I agree that Skyrim might be a step in the right direction but it's still a few hundred miles from where it needs to be. If this were Morrowind then you'd be able to join the Silver Hand and fight against the Companions. Factions in Skyrim have devolved into a glorified quest line with services. No good miscellaneous quests besides the randomly generated ones, no side-branches, side-stories or sub-plots in factions any longer. Everything is focused on the main plot behind a faction, to the point where since I'm not doing much 'Normal' Companions stuff, and they let me into their inner circle after knowing me for 12 hours.

And I definitely wouldn't call the Imperials vs Stormcloaks line a credit to the game. It was so horribly, generically, unemotionally done. Bethesda in the Skyrim era is a story of unrealized potential. It's pretty sad, I was definitely looking forward to being able to join the legion again, but instead I got what I consider the most unsatisfying major quest line of any TES game. And it was such a big deal to the game plot and should've been a kind of secondary main quest. All the NPCs talk about it, but it's one huge let down...

Maybe if Bethesda made an Akavir and doesn't leave spellmaking and attributes out there wouldn't be any comparing anymore... new lore will shut everybody up.

Visiting Akavir (or at least a part of it) is a very interesting idea, and I'm not certain how I would react to it. There are so many unknowns about the land and its people that it's hard to know what to expect.

If they were to do an Akavir game though, I'd want to retain 'flavors' or old influences from the other games, and I don't see how that's possible given the fractured and weakened state of Tamriel as it is now. A game set in a time where a strong Empire can land on Akavir and establish settlements might be interesting, and give a lot of that old tension dynamic from Morrowind with Imperial vs. Nativist forces.

Maybe if they stopped removing things, that made the game an RPG....... and instead, added features that the community always seems to want... (horse combat for instance) we could make more folks happy.

Yeah, i know what you mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zxIHPfi-yI

Whoa, I'd never seen that video before. Some of that stuff was pretty awesome, and would be a great addition to the game. Look how awesome spears were in that six second shot of them!

That was really cool, but I feel like there might have been a bit too much focus on graphical innovations, gameplay tweaks, etc. Would really like them to have a week like that where they focused on quests, writing, and factions.

You have some good points, Varana.
I disagree about the puzzel canol there are a few other quests in the game which I won't go into so I don't have to use spoiler tags.

Skyrim I still can't really comment much on I played 20 minutes before I messed up my character and had to restart. After I got my new character out of the million times longer than picking a character sheet intro and got to a town I ended up talking to some bard. He was going droning on about something so I picked a question dialog line to find out a bit more and he ends up shoving something into my inventory and sending me on a quest. No talk about reward or if I even want to do it, it was so very contrived feeling to me. Morrowind had a if you don't ask you'll never learn thing to it, Skyrim had a if I ask you I have stuff shoved at me to get rid of.

Skills wise leveling up Morrowind was fine. You didn't need to worry about 5x's if you wanted a 5x attribute level up all you had to do is find a trainer. The trainers in Morrowind at least felt like a part of the world they were often mentioned in books which established their personalities and skill feats while enriching the lore of the place.
Oblivion just had random trainers that happened to be around and super skilled, and the training limits made it pretty difficult to advance efficiently.
Can't really comment on Skyrims skill system other than the perk tree is meant to be navigated with nothing but a mouse super difficult to get to specific perks with a d-pad or anolog stick.

It's like sitting in a room while a bunch of old codgers talk about how every generation svcks but theirs. I would however like to make my own observations. Yes, I am going to be obnoxious.


I'd like to remind you people that the heart is an organ that pumps blood around a body, and it's a rubbish metaphor. Ironically, the stories of some FF games (okay, just FF6, maybe 4) did more to evoke emotions for me than any Elder Scrolls games. To me, Elder Scroll games have presented worlds and stories that were fasinating and vast, rather than emotive.


For all the boasts about Morrowind's law, and it's impressive to be sure, Dagoth Ur was actually very cliched in many ways. Not as much as Mankar was, but I just prefer Alduin more. When you strip down the lore prettying him up, Dagoth Ur feels like a Sauron clone (he's a dark lord who lives in a tower and acts through his servants), or like Zemus from FF4. He's a threat by proxy; the kind of villain that appears far too often in fantasy games. As much as I want to like Dagoth Ur for all his depth, that is just something I cannot forgive. He's a case of all substance, but no style.

Alduin in some ways is the opposite. While he might be considered "shallow", I loved the fact that he had an actual physical presence, which made him feel more dangerous and threatening. The moment I encountered Alduin in the wilderness of Skyrim while on my travels, as he was bringing to live one of his minions, cemented him as a character I really liked. He's a villain who doesn't strike me as being afraid to get down and dirty, and do things with his own two claws. Alduin had style, baby. (hopefully by now you'll have noticed that I've been reversing the usual style and substance stuff by giving due credit to style, who is too often treated like the bad guy out of the two). To me, Alduin felt like a cool take on dragons, while Dagoth Ur was another Sauron with an obviously evil religion mixed in. While neither of them are candidates for best villain ever, Alduin just had a stronger impact than Dagoth Ur.


Funny you mention enchanting, considering that unless you abused the game mechanics to raise intelligence, making your own enchantments was pointless. Either that, or you had to spend a ton of money. Not a lot of freedom for people who wanted to play the game in a down to earth manner, like myself.


That's not at all emotionally charged [censored] from someone with the open mindedness on a par with a religious fundamentalist.


First off; visit a British pub, maybe then you'll see all the whacky things people can do for three hours with just a bit of booze.

Secondly; video games are a visual and interactive medium, they're meant to do the leg work for us in term of visualising. Are you honestly trying to suggest that Bethesda shouldn't have tried to make any sort of attempt to progress the look or interactivity of the actors in the world just because you cannot find a better outlet for your imagination than a video game? Besides, if your imagination could work with static models in Morrowind, can't you just imagine that the Skyrim NPCs are doing more? I don't have any problem doing it with both.

A flawed attempt to something new is better than stagnation.


So because the series took out something you liked, you denounce it all the bane of everything that's good in the world of gaming. Add to that the fact that you view anyone who enjoys the new game as "shallow" and inferior. Honestly, you really are like a religious fundamentalist who rails against anything that doesn't include their treasured traditions and longs for a lofty "golden age". Stop being so melodramatic for goodness sake.

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To answer to the question of the OP, I will say that I doubt Bethesda will make another game like Morrowind, because they already made it and I for one don't like repetition. As great as Morrowind was, and despite my contrary opinions to many here I truely do love the game (I'm mostly contrary because I can't stand the fanboyish attitude of some people), I would consider it immoral to nag at Bethesda to do it again.The part of me that sees Bethesda as a company says that they have every right to target a new, and more profitable, market, even if I might not like that market. That's just how business works. It's tough toe-nails for some; nothing can change that. The other part of me that see Bethesda as the artists behind one of my most treasured games says that creativity should not be restricted, and they should be free to make the game they want, not what one narrow group wants from them. Asking them to make nothing but games like Morrowind would be the same as asking Da Vinci to paint nothing but pictures like the Mona Lisa. Morrowind is a work of art, and as such any replica would not evoke the same great emotions as the original. Just like all the Tolkien knock offs today are rubbish when held up to Tolkien's own work.

And that leads the next point. If Bethesda did make a game just like Morrowind, nothing would be different. I would place money that people would still be here, voicing their opinions that this new TES game is just a knock off and hails in comparison to Morrowind. The irony there, is that I would find that more justified, because I think they would probably be right in that case.

At the end of the day trying to recreate the past, no matter how pure and noble the intention, won't end well. Perhaps I'm laid back about this because enjoy Skyrim as well, and am thus certainly shallow in the eyes of some people. But even if I didn't enjoy Skyrim, even if it had ruined TES for me, I can be sure I wouldn't be haunting this place like a vengeful ghoul. I'd just look for the new game to tickle my fancy.

I dont want another Morrowind.
But I would love another Textbased RPG from Bethesda.
I know its not gonna happen, but Text is soo much superior to voice acting.
Sure, for games like Mass Effect etc, voice acting may be awesome, but an open world RPG needs more lore than a few lines from every NPC.
I realise MW was not perfect at this, either, but if Oblivion and Skyrim were Textbased, they could have made so much more out of the recources that were spent on... well... medicre voiceacting. They could have an enourmous amount of Lore around the world.
I do apreciate, that Bethesda did not kick out readable books, though.

started with oblivion then skyrim now in morrowind. Even before I played morrowind I was having fun in skyrim but one thing really stuck with me thru the entire game. The designers u can tell pour thier heart into there work with exceptkon of lack of underwater areas but the writers...seemed more interested in getting the actors to show emotion in their voices without really putting any meat ingo the stories. I liked quite a few of the directions they were going but as far as rpg story...it really stuck out tjere wanting it to be more of an action game than really fleshy out ur charector or making u get attached to him besides how op he starts out as. I dunno seems lkke the flow is going aaay from rpg and into more of an openworld god of war or something.

The story behind Dagoth Ur is a lot more convoluted than you might expect, which you gradually unravel pieces of as the MQ unfolds, a case where he was charged with protecting something by a "good guy" friend which the other "good guys" wanted from him. Like most of the rest of the situations in the game, there are shades of gray and conflicting stories as to what happened, with everyone trying to put a "spin" on it to support their own questionable actions. In the end, he is irrevocably evil, but may have had good intentions, at least in the beginning.

That's a bit less simplistic than the background behind Sauron in The Silmarillion, as a former sidekick of Melchior (the LoTR equivalent of the Devil).

Actually, Mankar Cameron's little speech about his rationale and reasoning was one of the best parts of the whole Oblivion MQ, in my opinion. Unfortunately, it was a case of "too little, too late" to prevent him from being just another stereotype baddie.

Enchanting in Morrowind was awesome! I've made several Enchanter or semi-enchanter characters, and you CAN make very modest enchantments without stat fortifications even with a starting character. If you keep the total spell power well under 0.5 points (you have to estimate, since it only shows whole numbers), making your own Enchantment is about a 50-50 chance with a moderate 30-40 in Enchanting and average Intel and Will. I've even done it with Enchanting as a Minor skill, although the odds aren't very good. That's good enough for a "better" healing ring, a weak waterwalk or waterbreathing item, or even a few points of Strength attribute repair for those undesirable encounters with Greater Bonewalkers, etc. The only "issues" I have with it are that it's not intuitive to a new player, the value of filled soulgems is absurdly high, and the difficulty of making Constant Effect enchantments absolutely requires massive fortification of skills and/or attributes (well into the high hundreds), or else a large fortune and a filled gem worth another fortune to have made. Rather than fix the balance issues, Bethesda scrapped the system, as they did with most of the rest of the RPG mechanics.

I don't want another Morrowind, I want a game with the same depth and freedom, with the best of what Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim have to offer. I DON'T want yet another TES game that does even less than its predecessors (even MW can be faulted for removing several interesting features that were in Daggerfall, like the different attack options having different balances of hit-chance versus damage).

I have to really take issue with this too.

I can definitely see the comparison you could draw between Dagoth Ur and Sauron, or even the Red Mountain area and Mordor, all of which are fair comparisons. Still, I feel Dagoth Ur is something of an 'intellectual', and in some ways a mirror of Vivec. Both living-Gods stay in their fortresses, orchestrating the war from afar, virtually all of their tremendous thought and power bent on a sort of divine sparring match through their proxies and a mutual power struggle with the Ghostfence. Plus there's also the fact that he reaches out to your character through dreams, and even 'ambassadors', and that his minions even refer to you as 'Lord Nerevar' and talk about the coming conflict with sorrow or regret. It really builds up the final encounter nicely, and then when you finally meet Dagoth Ur in person he greets you, and you can have an actual discussion with him about seven or eight different topics, where he asks you questions and you ask him questions. Like a gentleman, just like how one of his ash vampires offers you a drink before you duel. It's all so unexpected, but frankly very absorbing. And then once you're finished talking he tells you that first blow goes to you as the challenger, whenever you're ready Lord Nerevar. Classy.

Alduin suffers from an aesthetic Mehrunes Dagon syndrome in that he's this big (way bigger than an average man), all-power god-like entity with an incredibly threatening or obviously evil appearance. Was Alduin ultimately a better enemy than Dagon? Eh. I guess... Really he reminded me SO MUCH of Deathwing from World of Warcraft, if you really want to draw cliche comparisons. Big, scary black dragon. He even acts the same way, in that though you encounter him several times over the course of your game he doesn't really acknowledge you. You're just a spectator who happens to glimpse him from time to time.

Yeah, totally agreed. It's really strange to criticize Dagoth Ur as cliche, and then go to town praising the big black dragon. The appearances outside of the final fight do not make him unique or any less cliched.

That said, most games have cliched last bosses, it's a VERY little thing to pick away at.
Asking Bethesda to go back on their old systems and go to basics? Well I'll say this, hope a good company makes a small spin off game for a portable platform, or something.
That's the only conceivable way you'll get it, Bethesda are set in their tracks for better or worse, and evolving to their market. And the majority like the newer mechanics, as much as that annoys me in some areas. ;P