The quest compass actually annoyed me and all the things and developer directions you found lacking I found excessive as long time rpg gamer.

if you want to enjoy Morrowind all you have to do is change how you play and perceive the game. In oblivion you are given everything at the same time and lots of it, and you don't have to take effort in acquiring it its all just given to you and you are guided to key points. Its like you are tourist to the game and you are on quick ride for sight seeing.

In Morrowind its different, you have to just stop, take a deep breath and look around, study world around you. And its not about quest and rushing through the game as much as it is about exploring. Don't worry about completing objectives, just walk around as you wish and you'll complete most of them along the way.

like your frustration with vivec, Don't try to just look for the exits or how to go down. enter the first door you see and explore, look how everything is setup in place, and you'll start seeing pattern. You'll notice there is big hallway in the center with stairs leading up and down, and that they will lead to upper and lower sections of canton. you'll notice halls on the sides and that they have doors that lead to exterior. you'll notice there are shops and houses in the center and along the walls.
explore some more and you'll find the canton consists of several levels. Middle level is where houses and shops are, lower levels have tombs and storerooms and trapdoors that lead to canols, where criminals, monsters and rats are. at the top you'll find plaza that is sort of VIP part of canton where noble manors and guild houses are.

Take it piece by piece and you'll figure out everything and it will not seem frustrating.

Take your time, talk to people, visit shops, ask for rumors. unlike Oblivion there is lot of information about each place here, and its all in dialogue.

A good way to learn the game is to go to Balmora and join Mages guild and fighters guild. their quests are designed as tutorials to help you find your way around the game.

and remeber its not about completing goals and objectives and moving on, in Morrowind its journey that matters more.

Indeed, Morrowind is more challenging, more rewarding and alltogether better game. In Oblivion guiding-compass is good help but thne it is terrible waste of roleplaying gaming. And opponents are so wussy. Just hack-em. No challenge, no tough guys. Your ?bercharacter beats all. -yawn- Where is the challenge?

In Morrowind my ass was wiped in the first cave I found. Hooray!!!! Challenge at last!!!

I agree that the fast travel system is the main culprit but I think it also has to do with the structure of the land. Cryodiil is essentially a fairly smooth bowl with the Imperial City in it's center. If you want to travel from one side to the other you can do so in a mostly straight line that passes along the IC. Vvardenfell though is a volcano and there are plenty of steep hills that make traveling in a straight line nigh impossible unless you can levitate. And even if there weren't the Ghostfence would still be in your way if you wanted to travel straight from Seeyda Neen to Tel Vos.

Everything you just wrote about, I liked, maybe that's the difference between players who prefer one of these games over the other. It's completely understandable that you felt lost and rigth after playing Oblivion I would've felt thrown off at first too, but when I played Morrowind for the first time, I loved it. It really was as if I visited another land and had to learn everything there was about it to survive. As for findin your way in cities - I don't walk around with a compass or gps, even if I'm in another town, do you? If I have to, I ask for directions, and that's how Morrowind was, realistic (of course only in that and a few other aspects, but still). If you had trouble finding your way you only had the map (which I found perfectly sufficient, the minimap showed all the neccessary elements), no magical finger pointing where you should go, noone telling you what to do next, just you, a few tools, and your own desires. I think the freedom was the key to it all, in Oblivion I constantly felt pressed to do something and I don't respond good to pressure...once I ended up wiping out Chorrol:P

I think it should be about Character Skill on all skills, except block. Why should a guy with 1 personality/1 speechcraft, be able to persuade someone as well as someone with 100 personality/100 speechcraft?

I like sandbox games, I just never really liked Morrowind that much. :shrug:

I've wiped out... most of the towns before. Actually I made one character specifically for killing everybody. I got up to 230 murders and I was bored. And then Dagon saw me as a rival... and well... bliviongate:

But, dragged into the Oblivion Realm or not, what I liked more about Oblivion was simply that game mechanics were better, it was so much harder to go back in time to a game I didn't even know existed until after I played through Oblivion in 2008.

Morrowind was simply magic. I loved being ignorant to everything. When I tried to steal the Daedric Greaves from Orvas Dren's skooma plantation and was cut down in one hit, I had to come back much later to be able to claim them. I was thrilled when after a five minute battle with an ordinator which involved me levitating through the foreign quarters I was able to kill him and take his armor for myself.

Playing Oblivion i really miss being able to taunt an NPC into attacking me. That alone made speechcraft a useful skill for me. Even though I could kill a guard with a glance I still dont want to have to. Recently just played the mages guild quest (OB not MW) where you had to clear the vamp nest near Skingrad and get rid of the vamp slayers. Well somehow I messed up and ended having to murder all the vamp slayers in cold blood. I did not enjoy my armorer skill decreasing two points after a short jail stay for I had just mastered it. If the devs are reading, please let me taunt NPCs in TES V.

Secondly, wtf is up with no mark/recall or levitation? Just make all the cities open like in MW. I had the most wonderful dream that I was flying around Cyrodill. It was beautiful.

Third, how exactly does an axe count as a blunt weapon?

It was the closed off cities that made it so you couldn't do levitation. And I don't know how an axe got classified as a blunt weapon, it just did.

You could use Frenzy on an NPC in Oblivion. Just get third disposition low and use Frenzy.

I messed up in that quest too, sadly. Those were my first murders.

I'm a battle mage, mostly combat. Only magic school I'm adept in is destruction sadly

If you use it enough the edge will get blunted.

Jokes aside, grouping maces and axes in one skill isn't that bad sicne both weapons get used in a similair way, they just didn't give the combined skill a good name. "Hafted weapons" would be a more suitable name.

You said it yourself, it's too much imagination for you to handle. I think they sell imagination packs at the market. You really should buy some.



Really? REALLY? Are you taking the micky or what? Are you saying the speechcraft minigame made any sense in Oblivion? It's hands down the most retarded minigame in the history of games.

Morrowind has a very unique atmosphere. It doesn't have level scaling and it's in general more complex and more demanding than Oblivion - yet not as ridicously hard as Daggerfall. There are more factions, more quests and more to do, with inter-faction rivalry and politics. I also liked how there were more quests in a guild than you needed to do to advance. That way, you could pick and choose your quests depending on what you liked. It also meant that going through a guild twice could be two different experiences. (Which is a much better solution than the random quests in DF and the streamlined ones in OB).

What makes me still like Oblivion better, though, is that the world seem friendlier and more familiar. Morrowind is alien and unique, but the alienness of it makes me always feel a tad uncomfortable. I want to live in Cyrodiil. I don't want to live in Vvardenfell. In addition, I find some small gameplay aspects a bit more cumbersome in Morrowind than in Oblivion, but that just have to do with the game aging.

These are all reasons i liked the game.

I've tried liking Morrowind, I just don't that much.

I honestly gave it my all, even tried to establish a group of NPCs that I deemed my friends, or tried to explore.

I ended up dying, somehow offending the people, or getting bored and jumping around a bridge.

I understand that people have a different mindset than me, which is why I still say Morrowind is a good game. I just like Oblivion better. :shrug:

However, I'm going to try revisiting it a... 5th time.

The main reason I like Morrowind more than Oblivion is the text. You get to hear the characters speak to you, after a while I "hear" the text spoken in the characters voice. To me the text makes the game more immersive.

I do love Oblivion, great fun.

Finally, someone else who agrees that the text system is a lot better than the voice system.

Strangely I preferred Oblivion over Morrowind but Daggerfall over Morrowind too

I didn't play Morrowind for long at all, so I should probably give it another change. I just found there was nothing to do. Yeah Oblivion is less immersive and realistic but you can instantly get to the action, explore places, take quests, ect.

With Morrowind I was incredibly trepedatious with every step and I felt like a mouse amongst men. I couldn't really go dungeon diving cause I'd just get annahilated. I couldn't go exploring cause I'd get destroyed by cliff racers. Also, running drains your fatigue, so you either walk everywhere which takes FOREVER or run and lose every fight cause your fatigue is low and you miss every hit

One thing Morrowind definetly has over Oblivion is the atmosphere. The music, the towns, the landscapes, I was taken back by the beauty of it. I really do agree that Cyrodill is dull in comparison. However, whilst the world around me was stunning, I couldn't explore it. My only way forward was to take a few boring low level quests, keep getting lost and I keep getting more and more frustrated

In comparison to Oblivion, I think it lacks in freedom. Whilst places are open to explore, you can't go there without dying, which defeats the purpose. I understand that some areas will be dangerous to tread, but why is every nook and cranny of this island filled with instant death zones? I just didn't feel like tediously making my character stronger

I'll give it a chance again in the future, but I've gone back to Oblivion for now

It's strange because I never had trouble about difficulty in Morrowind, maybe you made bad character choice? But anyway, I like it that way since the sense of accomplishment is greater if you succeed o/

Just went with Nord warrior, axe, heavy armor, block ect. Got a decent set of steel/iron armor and an axe after scavenging and selling stuff in the starting port. Talked to the shopkeeper and they told me about a cave full of bandits so I though, great, must be a starter quest. Strolled on down there and got killed by the second guy I came across

Oblivion can be pretty tough at lower levels as well. Getting over the wall that is the lower levels in an Elder Scrolls game is always the most difficult part of an Elder Scrolls game. However, Oblivion is actually more difficult than Morrowind at higher levels, since enemies don't scale to one's level in Morrowind. That is what I like about Morrowind. There is a clearer progression of power in Morrowind while things scale to one's level in Oblivion. Overall, I like Oblivion more than Morrowind, but I prefer Morrowind's style of character progression, which is a result of no level-scaling. Morrowind starts out harder than Oblivion, but it eventually becomes easier than Oblivion.

Well...i found morrowind expansive, and fun but...the main quest was boring and tedious (go ask the houses and dirt elf tribes for their blessing? that matters?), and it was unimmersive (I love how folks kept thinking i was addressing them when i so much as walked by).

Oblivion's main quest was fun, but terribly short, by the time i was in the groove of it and hoping for more, well imperial city is under attack! climix time!

It also does better in the sidequest department, how they're kinda found in main cities and not in the ass end of nowhere, and it's about a lost merchant or something. Though morrowind had more fun expansions, LOVED tribunal and bloodmoon.

And to top it all off, both games feel...well depressing when you finish with all the content, the world feels stagnet and false, you're done, funs over, the end.

One thing I forgot to add to my earlier post, as the citizens get to know you they start using your name. This REALLY adds to the immersion. Oblivion cannot match that.

There is just one thing which was better in Oblivion - side-quests. The rest is a tragedy.
Unique world, atmosphere, artifacts, more spells, more armor - all these things which make Morrowind an absolute masterpiece have already been mentioned, but there is more:

- no collision - your stuff stays there where you put it ( was absolutely terrible in Oblivion - you make a step and swords and armor which lay on the floor three steps away from you fly in the air as if they are made of paper )

- no day routine for NPCs - you don?t have to wait for three days for some guy who must sell his stuff but prefers to stay outdoors and stare holes in the air

- balance - you really, really need to learn alchemy and enchanting - it made absolutely no sense in Oblivion, levelling made sense ( oh sorry that?s repeating) but it was a VERY nice feeling to kick some ... which killed you before

- housing - you get the first place where you can put your stuff and sleep before you finish tutorial, you can have your first house in the first village and the second in Balmora ( my home for the rest of the game )

- enemies - I HATE games with this standard-pack - wolves, bears, skeletons, and absolutely all enemies which appear in both games looked better in Morrowind

- Easter-eggs - Morrowind was practically one big Easter-egg - I just say - Caldera - surely you remember it?

- and, well, how to put it? Morrowind is the only game which you can and must play more than once - because it takes a lot of time to master it and because its always different in this big free world

And, and, and.. But I stop boring you. just one more thing - it was a VERY BIG MISTAKE to make no more addons for Morrowind, and if a miracle happens and "Morrowind reloaded" appears - without ANY changes or new areas, just a lot more quests - well I will surely be not the only one who will buy it at once!
I LIVED in Morrowind and yawned in Oblivion!

WHERE? If it takes you three blows instead of one to kill every rat and bandit you meet its not "more difficult" its just boring. And if thats not so then your levelling is false or your armor and weapon are not "up to date", sorry.