For some reason my favorite class to play in morrowind (this was before anyone even knew oblivion was being worked on) was an argonian who used spears and ranged weapons. Crossbows and throwing stars were my preference.

And then when oblivion came out....I.....I hated bethesda so much for taking all of those weapons away from me.

I was hoping for their return in Skyrim, but deep down inside I knew it wouldn't happen.

I agree with this. I think people are pretty nostalgia-blinded when it coems to morrowind. they only remember how deep as story was, not how litttle user friendly it was and how shallow the combat system was.

I think the elder scrolls fans is that the majority are so focused on the tradituional sense of an rpg. By that I of course mean a game where there are no physics or skill that are really taken into account. Only numbers, I find this tho be much better solved in skyrim when I often find myself feeling a sense of dynamic combat in most situation. I think in skyrim and I heavily enjoy the feeling of triumph when I block and enemies power atatck, send them reeling backwards with a shield bash and leap in to finish them whiel they are distracted. Can this be broken through the abuse of the enchanting/blacksmith system? Sure. Bu tthat doesnt mean you have to do it. Regardless I still I find this situation much better in comparison to morrowinds shoddy system that in all hoensty completely broke ANY sense of realism I had in the game.

Was morrowidns story better? Sure it was. It was a lot deeper to be sure. But if morrowind was really as great as everyone seems to proclaim it is in all spects then why are playing skyrim? Shouldnt you be downloading the texture mod for morrowind instead?

rose colored glasses.

Morrowind was tedious, infuriating, and frustrating. It had some nice moments, but for the most part it was a chore to finish the main quest. I liked the alien environment, though, and it was the first thing I missed about Oblivion. The second was the lack of crossbows, and the third was the lack of levitation spells. Thankfully we didn't need levitation spells. Judicious use of the console takes care of that.

Skyrim continues the trend toward reducing the number of tools to use while adventuring. The removal of a lot of spells, equipment, item slots, spell making, restricting the items you can actually craft, etc. The addition of Dragons and shouts is the main culprit in this I believe. Since the game cant exceed a certain size due to constraining factors, the things we liked and relied on were cut to make room for other stuff, for better or worse.

The way that both games work, speaking strictly on the design of the games, they are about equal in how deep they are.

Morrowind was better able to convey story through it's dialogue; being all text, you can fit a lot more into a smaller space as well as spend production costs elsewhere to improve on those areas. More skills != more depth. The way that things worked together in Morrowind, you actually had less "workable" hybrids than you could with a smaller skill set and no attributes; especially when you don't need to switch between weapons and spells like you get with Skyrim.

Both games look and feel like they took a lot of time and care to build. Maybe not enough time to convey everything the developer wanted to (which can be due to any number of things from budget to general feeling about how a mechanic works), as you can tell from content that was half-removed, but remnants still remain. But Bethesda's games are all MASSIVE projects. The only other set of games I have ever played that have as much detail put into them to make the game's world feel almost real, and not just in terms of visuals, are the Ultima games, especially Ultima Online.

Pardon my boot-licking, but Skyrim has restored my faith in the company after it had faltered with Oblivion. Despite it's shortcomings, it's still the best game I've played in the past couple of years. And, even though I consider Oblivion to be the worst TES in the series, it is STILL a God among Men when compared to every other game of it's generation.

My first TES game was Arena.. Then Daggerfall.. Then a few in between. Then Oblivion and Finally Skyrim. I have never really played Morrowind. We all have stuff we like. Everyone has opinions. I don't know why I never played Morrowind other than I probably wasn't aware it had even come out til after Oblivion came out.

I do admit I tried it.. to just past the boat ride and the 1st city... but by that time (and playing many other better graphical games.. I just couldn't get into it. Perhaps if I had discovered it just when it came out, my rose colored glasses would have allowed me to get into it.. but it just wasn't meant to be for me.

I never even played Oblivion until after I got my 1st xbox (never even knowing at the time it was out on PC at the time) Oblivion graphics did actually blow me away at the time.

I had lots of fun in Arena and Daggerfall. Lots more fun in Oblivion and now Skyrim. I've tried playing Arena and Daggerfall again and like Morrowind.. I just couldn't get back into them nor feel the same while playing other than to think.. why on earth could I stand playing with these graphics.. even if I liked the stories. In the end.. I supposed what matters to me is now... not what was in the past. Kinda like when I played Asherons Call. Loved it when I played it... went back to try it again a short time back and quickly left because the graphics were so hideous to my now perception as to my then perception.

Lots of things seem great in rose colored glasses.. but the reality is, we just evolve and adapt and outgrow what we once were. We can't hold onto the past forever when we live in the now heading towards the wonderful and mysterious future. Sure our pasts have made us who we are today.. but there are times to let go in anticipation for the future.

I quite thoroughly enjoy Skyrim for now and look forward to more TES titles to see just what they can come up with

If both games came out today, no one would claim Morrowind was better. If Skyrim came out first- and Morrowind (as is) came after, all of these elitists heads would EXPLODE with complaints and gripes about what they miss from Skyrim. You think they miss spell making now, just imagine what they'd miss from Skyrim if Morrowind was its successor.

could you imagine all of the " i miss marriages" threads there would be!!! "it was so deep and complex"

I truly don't understand this sentiment at all.

It seems so silly to me to force the player to decide early on what specific type of weapon to use and essentially make it so that he can never really change that decision later on because he will do terrible damage and not hit anything with any other weapon type. This is how it is in Morrowind. You can't change weapon types without gimping yourself hugely for quite a while. If your character uses Short Blades and you find an amazing Long Blade, can you use it effectively? No, not really.

This is a flaw in my opinion.

And I do not see any corresponding positive to having all those weapon distinctions. What does anyone gain from it? If you want to focus only on axes, just decide your character is an axe user and only use axes. To me, all the Morrowind system does is limit your ability to change how you fight stuff (and honestly, I'd find it hard to have a character go through an entire TES game without ever changing his battle strategy up a bit; it gets repetitive otherwise).

EDIT: With that said, I really do like the idea in Morrowind of different weapons being better suited to different attacks (ie. spears working better for jabs, axes for chops, swords for slashes, etc). It makes the weapons actually feel different and make them more suited to specific ways of attacking that correspond with how that weapon actually is used.

Comparing a 2002 game to 2012 game and the poll is still close.

It had been quite a while.. but when I try to remember Morro release what I know for sure is clearly the game defined the graphics back then. Everybody here got access to internet, and it cant be hard to check the games released in 2002 and compare them to Morrowind. To me Morrowind had better graphics not because it has better graphics compared to Skyrim but because it left my jaw open the first time i saw the game. It was the first step a TES game made into 3D world. Can we say the same for Skyrim? Clearly not as Batman, BF or any other candidate for GOTY is ahead of Skyrim visually. Hell.. even games released in 2009+ got better graphics(AC2, RDR, etc).

What made Skyim sell more is simply with better marketing, advertising, hype, consoles, growth of gameing industry and fanbase that grew over DF/Morro/Oblivion; the game began appealing to more people.

After all, I'm quite pleased with voice acting and sound in Skyrim which is major improvement over past games but in the end game lost its TES feeling.

Quoted for Truth

I think you're very wrong.

Skyrim has nothing to compete with a mage, who invented super-jump, but forgot about landing.

Skyrim is a good game, but apart from graphics (and diversity in towns, people, behaviours... but that comes with the technological advancing too) doesn't really have much to offer that wasn't in Morrowind and better. In fact, a lot of things got cut out instead.

Skyrim dialog is greatly stripped, among many other things that involved any depth in Skyrims story. Morrwind was bursting with content. Unfortunately we have a new generation of gamers who don't care to read anymore and like visually seeing their interpretations of what a story is then reading about it and you miss a lot of content by taking that away. Why do you think the books are always better then the movies.

I don't think many people considered "young generation" think books are better than movies.
Great, now I made myself feel really old.

i dont know about this...i mean skyrim has so much going on in the world, as far as the mechanics of the world itself, all the things you can do...its better. as far as being an interesting setting? morrowind wins that catagory....for all time probably .

skyrim has the better systems, morrowind is the better rpg elements. daggerfall had everything except stability and graphics

Again:

Skyrim and Morrowind are both open-world TES games. This is an "irrefutable fact". It can easily be verified by anyone and has its basis in objective reality.

As for which game is better...THAT is an opinion. Regardless of how much effort you put into attempting to convince people that one is superior over the other, there will always be people who will disagree and hold a contrary viewpoint. Thus, an opinion has its foundation in subjective reality. Everyone perceives the games differently and as such its impossible to establish adequate empirical evidence to turn these opinions into fact...so, ultimately, the claim that Morrowind is a better open-world RPG as an "irrefutable fact" is simply...irrefutably untrue.

Btw, the votes show that far less than 100% of voters agree with you...I'd think that that alone should be proof enough for what I just proposed. :shrug:

This goes for everybody: The fact that we are still discussing Morrowind, Morrowind is having the last laugh.

Skyrim is light years better IMO.

Morrowind was very shallow, had terrible combat, and primitive quests. Including many broken or unfinished ones. Had 2 shoddy expansions.

For 5 years, Oblivion crashed for me twice, but Morrowind crashed regularly, and had several corrupted saves.

Remember endless stream of errors when you turned on both Bloodmoon & Tribunal?
Remember when your TOP and MRK files was not working?
Remember "Cannot load TheAwesomeMod.CEL, will now exit'?

When people say about Morrowind 'depth' I wonder did they played the same game as I did.

In an open world game, options aren't optional. Morrowind clearly wins here. I also think that Morrowind did a much, much better job in presenting a coherent and believable fantasy world. In Skyri, everythings feels so disconnected from each other, with the "guilds" exclusive to certain cities and such. The world is not as unique as I had hoped. There is next to no religious context in this game, except for the banned worship ot Talos. Why is there only one temple of Talos if this is such an important aspect to Nordic culture? Morrowind did a better job at weaving all those different aspects - the religions, the guilds, the houses - together into one interesting world.

Maybe it's time to realize that I'm not a TES, but a Morrowind-Fan. I'm still in denial though, and hope for interesting Skyrim DLC.

What made Morrowind great?

Answer: The Elder Scrolls Construction Set.

I played it nearly everyday for at least 3-4 hours. And it crashed once or twice. So in your own words
Did you play the same game I did?

If you are assuming that MW was more shallower than Skyrim, then you are delusional. It had weak combat system and other stuff but to say the game was very shallow is hilarious. Many folks back then didn't like the game because there was too much text to read and finding something was hard. The learning curve was too high for many including me(because I was playing Tomb Raider 24/7 back then). After the modders brought the amazing patches MW became even better.

Graphics can't be non-withstanding. If you're comparing MW and Skyrim, you have to compare everything equally, not say "it's not fair to compare graphics as Skyrim is newer.".

While MW had weak combat compared to Skyrim, it at least had more RPG elements to make up for it. Skyrim still can't compete with recent games in terms of combat and action. It abandons the nerdy RPG-crowd by trying to hang out with the cool action-kids, but it ultimately fails and is wanted by neither group.

Those voting for Skyrim either

1) Never played Morrowind

2) Are to young to appreciate a quality game