100% Agree with this, god the dullness of Oblivion.

Oblivion also has all of its DLC by now. Madmole also didn't mention hawks and fish; there are numerous varieties of fish, they swim around, and the salmon leap waterfalls, so in my book they count.

I'm sorry, but all of this is baseless and mostly lies. Towns with a purpose? What?!! Oblivion towns were absolute crap, no reason at all to visit them, and they looked horrendous. There was no variety in the cities at all. Most of the buildings were generic, most of the NPCs had no purpose/story WHATSOEVER. Skyrim has 40 creatures, and Oblivion had 41 creatures, so stop over exaggerating. I'm not sure about quests but someone (who has the guide book) said there was something like 200-250 quests (the person asked about non misc ones too, so they might all be non misc, but im not sure). Oblivion has around 175 (?) in vanilla.

I also find it ironic that you say it is a drop off in quality after saying the cities are smaller. Quality does not equal quantity. The cities in Skyrim are more unique, have more "purpose", more character, and more content, even if they are smaller. Therefore they are better quality.

No it's not.

Are you asking bethesda or the forums because I'm pretty sure the forum wont be able to tell you.

I love these Why? threads they're so damn funny.

Skyrim has a total of 405 quests - Oblivion has a total of 231.

Far as that goes I can't even see where the "heavily modified" part comes in. It's pretty much the exact same look and feel we've had since Oblivion with all the same performance issues and limitations, they just slapped better looking meshes and textures in. All this talk about "its so heavily modified we decided to call it by a whole new name" seems to just be marketing speak more than any real reflection of changes made.

I find the cities to be rather about the same as in Oblivion, slightly more detail put into them. Questing on the other hand seems a bit lacking. The main quest feels like it is about half the length of Oblivion's main quest and I haven't seen anything half as interesting as the DB quests in OB. I did try to start the Companions, then realized that guild at least is rather restrictive. Hopefully when I get to do the other guilds on other characters things get more interesting.

Some of the side quests I've stumbled onto though have been very good, it seems the main story lines are what is lacking. There's a rather small quantity of these so far though, hopefully I'll find more.

Really ? You're going to put all daedra into the same hat ? Aside from the daedra that are in Skyrim in Oblivion we also had...

Clannfears
Daedroths
Spider Daedra
Xivilai
Scamps

Five extra daedra, you can't just them all into one catagory. Especially considering many daedra had extra variants of it like there were not only scamlps but also stunted scamps and not only clannfears but clannfear runts and while Skyrim has one type of Dremora, the Dremora Kynreeve while Oblivion had like 13 different kinds of Dremora.

Odd, it took me about twice as long to complete Skyrim's MQ. I also found it much better than Oblivion's find-and-retrieve main quest.

are you just a troll? Brown/black bears are just bears. Goblins are all just freakin goblins. Should i name the different types of Draugir in Skyrim then? Oblivion had much less enemy type.

First steps I took into Riften a dude approached me and asked me to steal an item and plant it on a guy without him noticing so he could get framed for a crime. Literally that is the first quest I get in Riften. Not to give any spoilers away but I did a mini-quest, about 10 minutes long in Winterhold that was hilarious and awesome, defiantly a I've never seen this happen kind of thing. I even found an insane brother brother crying over his lost sister, I mean that was interesting. I mean when you boil it down to "Kill/Find item" you are really covering a lot of stuff, it's an RPG what do you do besides kill stuff and find stuff?

I was just thinking the places didn't feel big compared to oblivion. Even though there was lots of empty space in oblivion cities, you just got the feeling that you were more safe in a huge city where you could relax. Whiterun and Markarth are amazing to be sure, it was stunning when I first entered Markarth, but does anyone else have the feeling that the cities are so narrow? The "roads" in skyrim cities feel cramped and narrow. Solitude feels like just two narrow roads with houses on each side! Markarth has the most narrowest stairs and paths, you'd think it'd be wider with such a terrible fall possible at the higher level! There's nowhere really in the city to just be alone with your thoughts or relax, aside from your house, which is, again, very cramped. I can't think of a single place in whiterun that would be nice to just be alone. Everywhere you are you are within a few feet of some fences, a priest, a shop, or a house!

Then again, the idea of Markarth palace being a giant dwemer ruin was wonderful. It really is quite vast in there. But I can't say it enough, cities like chorol, anvil, most of them in fact, were all so different yet quite spacious. How many big cities were there in Oblivion? 7 I believe, including the HUGE imperial city. There are 5 medium sized cramped ones in Skyrim. Windhelm feels like a dump to me for some reason, but I think that's cause I'm on the imperials side. And speaking of cramped, riften is just a cluster of people and houses, not to mention the bottom level of riften is just one narrow line of houses and shops. There are really only the 3 cities I like, and without all the guilds and different types of shops in each city, it really is much smaller and feels like there is less to do in cities other than the same old fetch quest.

Think of the division between the castle and the rest of the city. You'd think there WOULD be a big one since you can fast travel to the keep/hold of each city. Yet in Solitude, what SOUNDS like the capital of Skyrim since the High King lived there, the blue palace, is separated from the rest of the city by 1 guard and a few pillars. Contrast this to Oblivion where usually the CASTLE was separated from the city with tons of guards, entrances, and a giant hall/many rooms in said castle. Whiterun sort of has this going on, and Markarth as well. Maybe that's why Ulfric was able to kill the High King so easily! Was it cheydinhal that did it best, with the huge bridge leading to the palace? Spacious dining halls, barracks, prisons. All gone!

I wouldn't have minded so much no guild halls since there was one big college for mages, but that itself was quite unspectacular. The midden was an interesting twist, but wasn't used enough probably.

So 5 big cities, and winterhold is the Kvatch of skyrim I suppose? That place has, I think, 4 buildings. I don't know HOW they function with a jarl and guards, when the population is around 10 or less....

That leaves 3 other "towns" that aren't within walls. For some reason, I can never bring myself to like those places as much as either Skyrim's walled cities, or Oblivion's walled cities. Something about not being walled doesn't feel right. It does feel more natural and makes sense of course, but again, it feels like there's not much to do there, and no reason to stay in cities, walled or not, too long. Often they're as simple as 2 shops, a tavern, and the jarl's house.

Anyway, I'm level 75 and hundreds of hours into my character, loving the game. I just needed to vent this little bit since I was always a fan of big towns/cities in all types of games. Loved the feeling of spacious safeness with shops for everything and a largish population. People say there's less "filler" in skyrim cities? Yet there are those typical 3 booths of vendors almost nobody uses. What happened to random giant bookstore we would never use but would love to visit. And the imperial marketplace was a dream come true for the business inclined elder scroll gamers. There were almost more shops in that district than all of skyrims cities! Seems like a lack of variety in the choice of shops and buildings in cities.

Oh, another example of crampedness is the chapels. I can't measure, but I feel like Oblivion's chapels were at least twice the size of the ones in Skyrim. You could pinpoint them from anywhere in the city usually, but in Skyrim, you can't really identify where it would be. And when you go in, it feels dark, gloomy, and of course, cramped. Perhaps the spacious dungeons in skyrim compensate for the cramped cities, while the opposite is true for Oblivion. I can't give away any spoilers here, but there are some RIDICULOUSLY big "dungeons". But really, just needed the cities a bit bigger, few more shops, wider roads in them, and if you're going to sack winterhold yet still call it a city, improve the other unwalled cities! Even dawnstar probably only has a population of 15 or so.

it probably didn't

in fact i'd put money on it

part of the reason i'd do so is because i know why the armour was condensed into a single piece rather than what ? 3 ?: doing so allowed them to use the freed up IDs for other entitys in the game world. in other words it was specifically done to squeeze more out the existing engine and allow more "stuff" in the new game.

I got bored of this game in 8 days... Haven't touched it since. Once you do the "main" and "guild chains" there's very little replayability.

No point trying a new "build" since you can literally have a "jack of all trades" on your first guy, all the "radiant" quests are typical ADHD side quests after you do 4 of 'em you basically experienced the premise of all of 'em.

One you finished "exploring" you hit the wall...

Game was dumbed down for the console gamer crowd and because of such the replayability was killed as well...

Skyrim has more critters. It has fewer monsters. Those if us interested in a high fantasy kind of setting have been disappointed by one major thing. We have 4 [censored] daedra to choose from and encounter. THAT is a quantity equals quality loss imo. More Daedra is necessary in this game series imo.

Only counting Vanilla games as Skyrim has not gotten any DLC yet to be fair.

Skyrim critters=http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Creatures#See_also although the vast majority are animals. You have to take the variants of Draugr, Dragons, and such into account as well. Still have to include werewolves even though they do NOT wander the wilds. This list is missing a few things though. Not much though

Oblivions crittersr=44 unique types without including DLC

Morrowind critters=54 unique types without including DLC

Monsters, daedra and undead are sadly very lacking in Skyrim. About 21 of them. So those of us who like more high fantasy type things have been disapointed with the game in that respect. That does not mean we do not love the game. Small complaints are allowed. That is what will improve the next game. What do people like and dislike? That is what they devs are asking. So every time one of you people hate on someone complaining without really looking at their complaint you are potentially hindering the next games development.

Towns feel much better than oblivion tbh but frankly the quests, especially the faction ones are very shallow and short with mediocre writing at best.

I agree with this, and besides who says you need a quest? go explore! lots of dungeons make your own quest!!!

well i dont know or care about exact numbers because the only thing the customer has to worry about is how much variety you FEEL the game has: clever pallete swapping can produce far more diverse results than a game with a dozen different models. i find it funny how people always jump to the mathematical answer as opposed to the artistic one, considering these are games meant to be fun and not formulas meant to be solved.

quite frankly, whatever the numbers, skyrim feels like everything is much smaller. the creatures are far too segregated; i have seen 3 skeletons in one outdoor area, a couple werewolves in one companion quest who werent even enemies, and ONE atronach that wasnt a summon. for the most part you are fighting draugr and bandits inside, wolves and cats outside, while most everything else only comes along once in a great while.

he towns, while having much greater diversity, are really just too small. they are smaller and less populated than oblivion, and no amount of uniqueness can make them feel any less dead. if you want to go with the lore excuse, keep in mind that none of these towns are to scale, and if you really think every game is supposed to be to scale with the others, than the imperial city is smaller than pretty much any given city in hammerfell and high rock . granted oblivion wasnt exactly bustling, but sequels are supposed to have more, not less, and at the very least the same.

im sure there are more quests in skyrim considering the game automatically shoves another dozen into my journal every time i walk into a town for the first time, but most of them are tiny miscellaneous objectives. moreover, you almost never have to seek out any quests because the game loves to throw every possible objective at you the moment youre within 12ft of anything tangentially related to the subject (im sorry, but i REALLY hate how skyrim does that...). you might have more quests, but they all start to feel like work, as if youre just doing them to get them out of your quest log because you never wanted them in the first place. without any effort and/or discovery on the player's end, getting quests is much less exciting, and frankly the only things i consider quests are those where i actually have to talk to someone and actually inquire about them; everything the game throws into my journal automatically is a job to me, as they certainly feel like jobs... but thats a bit of a tangent; objectively im sure skyrim has more quests, if you really care about the numbers.

one thing skyrim did right was the overworld. its probably smaller than OB, but its quite brilliantly designed in a way that makes it feel much larger. the winding roads and region diversity make traveling on the roads feel like much more of a journey. bethesda has wised up a bit and actually put some fairly unique locations and events along the roads instead of relying solely on random wolf spawns to keep the journey interesting. of course, since the pizza slice of omnipotence is all you have to navigate with most of the time, you will probably never seen any of this cool stuff and go on these epic journeys because running in a straight line over mountains and through rivers is almost always easier than finding and following the actual path.

and just a side note; why do half the signs at 3-way intersections not tell you where the 3rd path goes? is there any good reason for that?!

Agreed. I do not understand people's "boring" radiant/random quests statements. I have done over 150 misc objective quests and enjoyed the majority of them. I am at 9 main quests with about 215 hours playtime. I am still debating if I should complete more main quests or continue exploring to pick up the random ones.

No it doesn't have 8 buildings... it has 11. Chorrol has 23.

It doesn't, it just has a better variety of creatures in dungeons, which is noticeable, very noticeable. It also had more dungeons inhabited by people of various types.



Because there is a LORE behind TES. Oblivion's towns were larger and with more NPCs, I can see the reason behind that being the fact that Skyrim's engine is already pushing the Consoles to their limits but I suspect on the PC their will be mods that make the cities bigger since right now... they're tiny.



I'm not sure it has more quests, however Oblivion has more quests invested into the guilds and quest lines which is one area I am disappointed in, in skyrim as these areas are rather lacking in quests/content. I think Skyrim adds a few fed-ex type quests tho which are annoying.

What are you talking about? Towns, yeah oblivion had more. Its the center of the whole empire. Creatures? GTFO

Than Sacred 2 has even more content than Skyrim. And you can mod Sacred 2, too. With a gigantic landscape.

I like how skyrim does it's villages. In oblivion a village consited of three tiny shacks usualy that was it. In Skyrim the villages feel more like real villages often having inns and sometimes even shops. It is kind of nice knowing that my character can get a nights sleep in rorikstead if I am not close to any major cities and it is getting late or I can sell and unload my gear in Riverwood without having to go all the way back to Whiterun.

This post is [censored]. What are you even talking about.

And Chorrol had almost twice that many. There was a reason it was in a walled game space.