It seems like with every game since Morrowind the game gets more and more dumbed down. Please Bethesda make a game that isn't so mainstream and dull.

Welcome to the forums. And no. People these days care more about graphics than they do about story and aesthetic.

No. Never shall it happen.

Much to our disappointment.

I love how elitist we are on this forum.

we've had to be... to make sure people never forget the splendor that is MORROWIND! Er... like they would forget anyway.

Elitist? Is it elitist to be more familiar with the better product? Well, maybe it is, but that doesn't mean we're wrong!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But anyway, no, these kind of games are not done anymore by the companies that aim their products at big audiences.

How about we call ourselves mature instead of elitist? *<:-D Oh, that would be elitism. I can't see a Morrowind liker NOT being an elitist in many eyes if he ever compares and praises Morrowind over newer TES titles. That's what being in a minor bandwagon does. And bandwagons must denounce other bandwagons, otherwise it wouldn't be fun at all.

The best way to describe Morrowind is as catering to a "niche market". If you're into that type of game, then it's perfect (or about as close to it as a game can get). If you're into FPS hack & slash, pure graphical content, or casual "ease of play" without a lot of tedious decisions and searching around for clues, then it's definitely not for you. The big developers have decided to ignore the traditional "character-based" RPG niche market, despite the fact that it's a fairly large niche (nobod'y sure how large, since nobody's made anything for that market in close to a decade), in hopes of capturing the untold millions of "non-traditional gamers" and "action gamers" out there. I also suspect that the markup on console games is higher (PC games begin to discount far sooner), and therefore the PC-based games are considered "less profitable", despite typically being at least as large a market segment as any individual console.

I don't have a lot of hope that Bethesda will make another game for "our" market segment again, unless they take a severe financial hit that makes them rethink their marketing and development strategy. Seeing how well "dumbed down" has sold over the last couple of games, it probably won't be anytime soon.

I do share your opinions about Morrowind though.

My 'Elitist comment' was made partially because I wanted to be ahead of some fan of the newer games who accidentally stumbles into the wrong forum.
But that's of course elitist.

Anyway - as said before - the market for games like Morrowind is too small to profit from.

Are you kidding? It won Game of the Year, was a huge commercial success, praised by critics and fans alike. Morrowind was catering to the mainstream pop-RPG market. Yes, times have changed, but Morrowind was a huge financial success in its day- the things we love about Morrowind were not foreign to most gamers. Morrowind wasn't a cult classic in 2002 like it has become now. So if we're going to talk about the trend of gaming, like I believe the OP was, we can talk about that trend, but don't make it sound like Morrowind was some underground cult movement that never got any respect. I think that the things that worked in 2002 can still work today, its just a myth that they can't. There were graphics driven noobs then, and there are graphics driven noobs now. I remember the first time I ever played Morrowind, it was on my friends Xbox, and at one point we just stopped to look at the water because we thought the graphics were so amazing. I'm sure the Daggerfall hardcoes had as much complaint then about Morrowind as we do about Skyrim and Oblivion.

Also, OP, welcome to the forums. Have a http://images.uesp.net/c/c4/Fishystick.jpg

Morrowind was a huge success by the Bethesda's standards in those days. But by the Bethesda standars of today? Not so much. Just look at the amount of posts on each of the various forums here.

Of course these do not tell the whole story but just for your information.

Morrowind: 167,000 Posts
Oblivion: 369,000 Posts
Skyrim: 2,212,000 Posts


I don't believe that a game like Morrowind is still viable for a huge company like Bethesda. Especially with the higher production costs we have now.

I think it’s very well with in the realm of possibility for Bethesda to do another game like morrowind. A game with the same mechanics as morrowind, the same scope, all the factions, quest, the works, with current standard of graphics and today’s game engine. I guess im saying they could do it, but do they want to do it? Plus if they tainted a game like morrowind with steam that would be a crime.

This is why there are projects such as Tamriel Rebuilt and Home of the Nords.

Hello josh1, welcome to the forums!
On topic, I feel like no elder scrolls game will ever hold a candle to the memories and fun I had (and still having) with Morrowind. I have said this before and I will say it again, I dont want Bethesda to make Morrowind 2.0, but I do want them to make an elder scrolls game.
Skyrim to me is nothing more then an action game with some rpg elements. It only lasted me about thirty hours before I just stopped playing altogether.

That being said, the shortcomings of the two modern ES installments (OB and Skyrim) made Morrowind all the sweeter for me. I spend alot less money on gaming then I did in the past, so thats one benefit. Heck, I havent bought a game in four months.

Im looking forward to Dishonored though...

Those post numbers, and more importantly the sales figures for the three games, reflect two totally different trends. The first trend is the overall growth of the gaming industry over the past decade, the second is the change from focusing on a "niche" market to a more general type of game. Nobody can be quite sure of how much of those numbers is due to which of those changes, because there are no recent games for that "niche" market to compare against. While it's a "niche", it's a BIG one, and I suspect that about half of the Skyrim fans would have bought and enjoyed a more tightly focused and "harder" game, with at least some elements of "hardcoe" gameplay. 167,000 fairly recent posts (since the last crash) for a game approaching 10 years old is not a trivial number, and most games are all but forgotten by that time.

My suspicion is that some upcoming "midsized" company is going to produce the next "classic character-based RPG", since Bethesda is now too large and "bloated" to be satisfied with that, or to take any risks, which will be to their ultimate undoing when the market changes and leaves them behind.

Morrowind is the wrong style to sell properly in today's market.

A slow paced 90's style RPG can only viable to be created by indie team now, as the audience for them isn't anywhere near as big as those that want the next big action game.


Lets face it, every half decade or so, games change style dramatically. Depending when you got into games, you will like a certain era more.....personally, most of my favourite games are from the 90's up to about 2005. Aka, DOS era games, up until proper 3D games.

I actually think that nowadays they're lacking some know-how about their lore, considering MK & Co. aren't working there anymore. In many lore topics considering Oblivion and Skyrim, the people that are into lore often complain that this-and-that doesn't make sense lore-wise. All this and this general moving away from a story-driven game have given me the vibes that storytelling or lore-wise, they couldn't do it anymore. Besides, they don't have to, since the lore leaves so many backdoors for them, for example everything from the birth of Anu/Padomay to a goat walking in Falkreath in Skyrim is a dream of a mad god (more or less Bethesda itself, if we mix up the layers of storytelling a little, which is IMO a genius concept all in all: not only deliberating but also very inventive), and that dream could basically change any way possible. Yet I don't know if the mainstream audience could swallow it if we teleported to Fifth Era in TES VI and everything looked more like Fall Out than Tolkien (as I think it would; not completely sure though). Of course, that wouldn't be a wise idea anyway since the Fall Out and TES fanbases are different. (Now that I think of it, it would be kind of surprising if they made TES "merge" into Fall-Out; as if they were the future and past of the same fantasy world all the time. Hah. Not productive, but surprising. I haven't played Fall Outs so I don't actually know whether this could be even possible; I doubt it. Just a side thought.)

Yet I've read in these forums that Morrowind, at its time, was just the kind of game Bethesda wanted to do. Clearly either their desires and/or zeitgeist has changed a lot between these ten years. IMO for the worse, since these more action-based-looking-good kind of products (like Skyrim - compared to Morrowind) are everywhere, but role-play-first-and-deep-world kind are not. And I like the latter better, but that's just me, and it's my and a few other people's loss that this is happening, and if I had a product-selling company of my own, I couldn't care less myself.

peoples' -> people's...

Point 1. I'm not sure post counts in the forums (individual's post-counts stayed) stayed when the forums crossed. Point 2. I don't think any game forum anywhere had a post count of 2,000,000+ in 2002. Other than those two minor points, I accept that there's a pretty serious difference in cultures between Morrowind and Skyrim.

No, I suppose being elitist means bashing others for either not being as familiar as you are with a product or not liking it as much as you do.

If they would just remove the quest marker. I hate being told exactly where to go.
Sure in Skyrim I can remove it from the journal, but then its just plain impossible to find places via quests, because in Morrowind the npc's gave you directions to locations and you had a detailed world map that was included with the game disc.
All the quests are being revolved around the quest marker.

Skyrim wasn't around for the forum purge.

Since everyone is taking the forum example so seriously. I will show you another one.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/UESPWiki:Statistics

On this graph you can see that since Oblivion there had been many times more activity than before. The same happened with Skyrim.

Does that tell about popularity (of course it does...), or just gaming style? I bet an average Skyrim player, who usually gets everything on a silver platter following the game's directions, immediately looks up everything on UESP if (s)he doesn't find it right off the bat... Whereas more complex the game, the more the players enjoy things like, you know, finding things themselves... sense of adventure. But you know what? I think I've been using the Wiki exceptionally lot with Skyrim. I think this is because Skyrim is so linear. I like to find an easy solution in Skyrim to stay in that sense of linearity; otherwise I feel I'm stuck. As for, say, Morrowind, being stuck (or rather getting forward steady but slow) is more like the most common pace! That's because people need to figure out things, find locations, etc., and they want to do it themselves.

One more thing. A new game. Oh course there will be more things to look up from the net. Huuuge hype all over, too. And the sales have been through the roof and so UESPWiki's usage must've increased tremendously, too. The sales are through the roof, and thus is the UESPWiki usage, mainly because the game matches some ideals today: looking good, epic and atmospheric, good playability and easy enough for everyone to handle.

Could the increased forum post count possibly have something to do with the trivial fact that people spend far more time on the internet now than 10 years ago?

Also, is there any "realistic" count for posts since MW was released, not the count since the last "purge", which wiped out most of the MW posts, many of the OB posts, and none of SR because it wasn't released yet?