It's a new engine and their first time using it. My prediction is the next TES will have more stuff in it than even Morrowind "the greatest rpg evar"

haha no they just remodified the gamebryo engine or whatever. that is unless the bethesda peeps are wrong and you know more about their game than they do.

I wish Bethesda would give Fallout 4 to another developer and work on Elder Scrolls VI for the next 5 years. They'll need it.

I liked FNV more than F3 so I wouldn't mind seeing obsidian take over the fallout series, I think the Elder Scrolls is the type of game that requires years of hard work to perfect, don't get me wrong the game is good but there was a lot of doors left closed that could have been opened.

I do find that fascinating and have commented on it many times, yes.

Isn't that exactly what their doing? As long as Obsidian doesn't touch it, I'll get it.

A-[censored]ing-men.

That is not the reason I posted my response like that. The poster clearly capitalized the word MORE, this mean that the intent of the sentence is that they are simply making a flat blanket argument with no supporting details. What I am trying to point out is that the critics of Skyrim seem to be much worse than those for previous games. At least he could of made a substantial argument by maybe listing each games creatures, towns and quest and compare the raw number and quality of each. Instead the poster decided to simply complain about a most agreed upon good game, from people with valid arguments who discuss the pros and cons in depth.

Let me now address the posters concern,

Oblivion took approximately 20min on foot at a normal running speed to cross from the eastern most point to the western. The main paths in the region of Cyrodil focused around a major city in the middle, in a somewhat shallow valley surrounded by low to medium mountains and some foot hills. Also to note the Plains of Oblivion were not separate and could be traversed in the same manner as the over-world map. The only interesting points where the towers.

Skyrim on the other hand has a number of small settlements, such as mills and camps and old Forts dotted around a much more mountainous region. Due to the nature of mountains with sharp inclines and sometimes impassable slopes it takes a much longer time to traverse the land. At a gradient of about 30 to 40 degrees this expands the linear path of travel about 1.7 times. In 20 minutes I can barely get from Whiterun to Ivarsted.

To address the creatures, Oblivion had a small handful of creatures from the basic land animals, such as deer and the ever common mudcrab to a variety of daedra.
Skyrim has the same basic land creatures and monsters, such as atronachs. In addition Skyrim boast some rather impressive, yet less frequently encountered creatures, such as Mammoths, giants, and of course Dragons, with various abilities. Within dungeons there is a rather frequent use of Draugrs, skeletons, and spiders, however same can be said for the plains of Oblivion which was mostly littered with scamps, clanfear, and the occasional Deadra warriors.

As for quest quantity and quality, so far in my 30 hours of play on Skyrim, I have completed a small number of quest which I found to be refreshing adaptations of the normal quest types. Instead of simply say, go kill this bandit, it now becomes a dynamic between two factions, where from one side of the story there is a bandit and the other side there is someone attempting to do something noble and the original quest giver is actually the real bandit. I then have the choice to ignore both sides, pick a side, or simply leave the issue to settle itself out. Also the way quest are generated are truly natural and flow from actions you make. Over hear someone in the town gossiping about someone, go find said someone, get a quest that has personality and depth. Sure there are the go collect X of Z quest, but the way in which you complete these tasks are now more unique and entertaining.

So here are some counterpoints to the original posters lack of any argument what so ever.

That's how you turn it on us.

More =/= Better.

Just because there are more buildings in a town doesn't make it more unique, same with the number of quests and creatures.
Cities are MUCH more unique in Skyrim. Cities like Markhath, Riften, Solitude, Whiterun, Winterhold and Windhelm have their own unique story. They each contain different major factions, not the bland every faction in every city approach to Oblivion. Design of cities in Skyrim is much better, they genuinely play and feel different.

Quests? They are better in skyrim, who cares about the amount of quests if they're in the same monotonous dungeons. There are very few truly unique dungeons in Oblivion. There are TONS in Skyrim.

Monsters? I doubt there are more monsters in Oblivion. Btw, if you're trying name all the different types of daedra, you're cheating.

It reads a bit to me (sorry if I am misreading) that you are saying quanity equals quality - "Oblivion had more of this, why the drop in quality?"

Indeed i do.

I have noticed a distinct lack of enemy variety. It could easily be my imagination, though.

Let's see, there are (stop reading now if you don't want a rundown of monsters): dragons, spiders, wraiths, ghosts, thralls, wisps, spriggans, trolls, draugr, skeletons, falmer, chauruses, frost atronachs, fire atronachs, storm atronachs, vampires, werewolves, slaughterfish, mudcrabs, skeevers, saber cats, wolves, mammoths, giants, dremora, misc. daedric enemies... as pure humans go, there are also Forsworn, enemy mage groups, enemy bandit troupes, wandering thieves, various "hit squads" (Thalmor, theft revenge, DB, etc.), Imperials/Stormcloaks (depending on your flavor), and probably a fair bit of other stuff I'm not thinking of.

It's my imagination — there are plenty of enemies. Even within the same type there are variants (bandit archers and melee fighters, mages of different schools, falmer archers and gloomwalkers, etc.).

Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot dwemer centurions and crawlers. And then there are non-aggressive animals, fish, insects and birds, not to mention the major DLCs will probably add a few.

Not really. There are those of us who recognize the difference between constructive criticism and whining, but the "we hate complainers" group seems to label everyone who says anything negative about the game — no matter how reasonable, in-depth or well thought-out the feedback may be — as a "complainer". Seriously, someone could spend three hours taking screen shots, doing tests, and then posting a few well thought-out paragraphs about a particular problem, and right away some tool will pop into the thread and post, "omg stop complaining i hat winers".

I feel that the towns are more differentiated in Skyrim though.
But about the variety of monsters..yea they don't seem to have changed much. The dungeons are much improved though.

It's not a new engine. Just a heavily modified Gamebryo.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have the same exact ashpile bug Fallout 3 has, among other bugs from past Beth games.
;)

Skyrim cities take the belt when it comes to character. A lot of Oblivion storefronts, residencies, and general populace where copypaste background noise to fill in the spaces. In skyrim there is no space to fill, every nook and cranny is crammed with content. No person is has no purpose. ie, no morrowind "commoners." There are family trees and relationships that exist way before you stumbled into town. And every souls has a place they fit. Execpt you, and the kahjiits...

Skyrim feels like it has more history behind the cities, the people... even the war and racism.

And when you got a multitiered boardwalk lakeside city on one side of the map and on the other a city that is built into a moutain running smoothly into a moria style dwemer ruin, well... compare chorral and cheydinhal.

One thing I miss though is specialty shops. Books, shields, staffs.....

There is just too much name calling and I wish it would stop.

Lore could be said for the city sizes.

Same difference :spotted owl: Hopefully next gen they will have a new engine.

Another factor is Skyrim's slower running speed. Oblivion's base running speed was faster. On top of that, Oblivion's Birthsign and racial bonuses, ect, allowed certain characters to run faster than base speed.

To the people saying the cities are more interesting,

I have spent so much time in the cities, just trying to find interesting little things.

Is there anything close to the Anvil docks, with quests like burglaries and the lighthouse? Or interesting characters like the lady who slept with everyone? All the people seem to have just a boring daily routine, no easter eggs in terms of interactions or anything of the sort.

People out of towns along the roads either attack me, brush me off, or are a hunter selling skins.

I have yet to find a quest requiring me to plant any sort of evidence on someone or do anything other than "Kill/Find item" The most interesting quest I have done so far was the Abandoned House in Markrath and I've got loads of quests under my belt.

Even the Dark Brotherhood managed to be short and boring.

I DO like the mountain exploration, but I mean mountains get very repetitive.

I believe the OP is working with his imagination rather than facts. Can you confirm less creatures?

Oblivion/Skyrim

rats/skeevers
goblins/falmer
ogres/giants
deer/deer & elk
horses/horses
skeletons/skeletons
zombies/draugr + 2-3 variants
liches/something basically the same, can't remember their name, the things that pop out of coffins
vampires/vampires
spriggan/spriggan
deadra/deadra
nothing/butterflies, luna moth, dragonflies
willowisp/magic anomaly
minotaur/charus
nothing/cows and horkers
trolls/trolls
imp/spider
Dreugh/wispmother

bandits & marauders in both games

We still have werewolves, dragons, kids... so as far as I can tell Skyrim has several more monsters than Oblivion did.

As for towns... Oblivion's exterior small towns were virtually NOTHING. A couple houses with zero quests (maybe 3-4 very small stupid quests like fetch me some wine or potatos quests) and hackdirt being the only one remotely close to the settlements in Skyrim like Riverwood which are bustling with quests and activity.

As for quests... you are completely nuts. You can't go anywhere in Skyrim without getting another 20 quests to do. Maybe a lot of them are small fetch quests, but still there seems to be endless small quests, and a large number of real quests.

The main thing though if you follow Bethesda is that Skyrim is not the capital city so the towns are on the smaller side. It's not meant to dwarf Imperial City and shouldn't. To me though the quality is superior. Each area looks unique and NPC's have more life and purpose than in Oblivion, although I do think Oblivion had a few more NPC's which stuck out and had some interest to them. Glarthir was annoying but his quest was very entertaining because you could play it a couple of ways. I always liked most of the side quests in Oblivion you got in the cities, like Thorimir, the vampire murder quest in Bruma, and several others were pretty memorable.

Go on UESP and look at the lists of creatures for both games.

Oblivion has a higher count.

Skyrim > Oblivion (whichever arrow is greater than but I think I got that right) Oblivion is dull and bland in comparison to Skyrim.