It's funny how you come to exactly the opposite conclusions I do with regard to Oblivion vs. Skyrim/Morrowind.

First off, the fact that loot is pre-placed does nothing to me in Morrowind. I suspect the reason Oblivion's total homogenization worked better for you is because you're a powergamer lacking self-control. In Morrowind, powergaming would quickly overpower your character and result in a particular strategy. In Oblivion, it was pretty much necessary to survive the upper levels, but there was exactly one way to powergame: level correctly. (Well, that an spell customization... but if you're playing a wizard, well, that's what wizards do.) With all those loot-based options/temptations stripped, out, you were free to focus on the roleplaying. Am I correct?

As to stories on rails, I feel like Oblivion was the worst offender in this regard. Morrowind, of course, was fantastic, with several branching and intertwining storylines in the guild gameplay; the player had choices. Skyrim has substantially less of this, but at least you have a choice with regard to the conflict between the Stormcloaks and the Empire. I admit, I am annoyed with how aggressively the guilds recruit. The Thieves Guild is almost a requirement to advance in the main quest. But Oblivion felt like five completely separate games coincidentally taking place on a single map. There was no unity, no tapestry. Just five rails. Pick one, or two, or all five (or six once you got KoTN, or seven once you got SI); it didn't matter. There was no relationship between them, and no choices once you'd gotten on the rails except whether or not to continue.

And that main quest recruits far more aggressively than Skyrim's guilds do. And though there is an "end-of-the-world" element to Skyrim's main quest, they don't throw that at you in the very beginning. You can choose not to follow your chosen escort to Riverwood without your character knowing he's tempting the Apocalypse. You can choose to ignore the summons of the Graybeards. You can choose not to trust the Blades. You can choose a side in the War... or not... and the decision has consequences.

I do know I'm having more fun with Skyrim than I did with Oblivion. I'm also playing Morrowind from time to time. Oblivion... probably won't be revisiting vanilla Oblivion. Shivering Isles, maybe (and it is in this regard that level scaling is nice, in that I can just jump in to the expansion, unlike in Morrowind when I have to level a character up if I want to experience Tribunal and Bloodmoon). But Oblivion just felt like a theme park with a little pretty scenery and five rides to choose in succession. Skyrim feels like a living, breathing world to me, as Morrowind did. This may change as I get to know it better (and I'm putting a LOT of hours into it right now), but for now, I'm really liking it.

One thing I will admit: the scenery is a bit prettier in Oblivion (and Morrowind, if you can get past the graphics) than in Skyrim... but this is purely a matter of climate preference. In Oblivion, the Gold Coast and the Colovian Highland are especially pleasant to me. A lover of deserts, I also really, really like the Ashlands and Molag Amur in Morrowind (and the Bitter Coast, with it's soothing swamp sounds and cool shaded feel and such, comes a close second). Skyrim is a cold, hard land. Skyrim is SUPPOSED to be a cold, hard land, and it is in this regard I will praise Bethesda to the high heavens: I feel genuinely uncomfortable in Skyrim's terrain. I probably roleplay best as characters from warmer places, adventuring in Skyrim, but occasionally homesick for warmer climes.

I am guessing Oblivion was your first game, correct? Never underestimate the effect of nostalgia. I am still able to play Daggerfall and have a lot of fun with it, and I fully recognize the mess that game actually is.

What choices are there in Skyrim's guilds? Not only that, but how short are they? It's good, in a way, that the guilds in Oblivion are separate stories. However, they should have intertwined and affected the other guilds in some way. However, only if the story called for it. The guilds in Morrowind aren't anything special, just go kill some rats, retrieve a skull blah blah.

Also, can people form their own opinions instead of using cliche lines like "living breathing world." It's sickening.

Obviously, you've never really played Morrowind. Sure, you do chores at the lower levels. At the higher levels, the fates of several guilds (particularly those entangled with the Camonna Tong, particularly the Fighters Guild and, to a lesser extent, House Hlallu) hang upon your choices. And those lower level chores give you options, as well. Some of them will hurt your standing with other guilds worse than others. You can, for example, advance far in both the Mages Guild and House Telvanni if you are careful as to which jobs you accept.

I mean, sure, the gameplay is nothing to scream about... but that criticism says more about the player's ability to adapt to older games than it does about the game itself. Back in the old days, we had this thing called "imagination", which could make up for the technological limitations of the day.

Actually quite a few more NPCs than just shopkeepers stood in the same exact place 24/7. And of those that did move, they would just wander aimlessly 24/7 (it is a bit odd to see a supposed slave worker wandering around the middle of the road, while a drillmaster is staring off away from everything). It doesn't help that shops stay open 24/7, either.

Some NPCs in Oblivion and Skyrim may not have the most detailed set of packages, but they were still much improved. It was actually possible to catch people sleeping so you could stealth it (burglary in Morrowind basically amounted to using the back door and taking whatever they weren't looking at). You could actually watch people work and take food breaks.

It was so irritating trying to play a stealth character in Morrowind and being unable to successfully pickpocket a guy in one of my first thieves guild missions ever because he stood in the middle of a room and had someone looking at him 24/7. AI schedules are a lifesaver for the stealth character.

Morrowind had the best loot and and artifacts by far, but that should not stifle roleplaying at all. Your never forced to pick up anything in that game you have choice in that game to doom the world if you wished, for roleplaying reasons I had a character keep the Bitter Cup, that went in my wizards tower and stayed there. I never completed the fighters guild quest simply because I had a character who was a mage and they wanted that cup. Morrowind was by far the best in the series.

Oblivion was second best in the series despite some crushing flaws like level scaling and the copy pasted environment, those two flaws drove me crazy.

Skyrim, that is the most gutted game in the series magic is a joke, but the world equals what I liked about Vvardenfell but the lack of hand placed unique loot and loot in general take away from the world a tiny amount, what makes Skyrim the third for me here amoung these three games is the game breaking bugs that are so common in this game especially the enemy and plant respawn bugs, this bug kills the world so it becomes dull to go where you once traveled because the world has plants and people that never grow back.

And I can testify on this by the fact that I played Oblivion on ps3 which offers no mods, and I played it for 2-3 months. After that I was completely sick of it. I still play vanilla Morrowind from time to time, andI still play Skyrim and am still not sick of it. The only two mods I installed are mods I could live without in vanilla anyway (deadly dragons and Weapons of the 3rd Era).


And I agree with Tarvok that you either didn't play Morrowind much, or you don't recall 90% of the game. If Morrowind's guilds are nothing special then guilds in Skyrim and Oblivion are apsolute garbage. In Morrowind whelp starts as a whelp. You don't get to become the grandmaster over night as you do in last two games. In mages guild you start with little choirs, later you do bigger ones, and it lasts. In Oblivion 1st it's go to each town and to a fetch and bring back/kill every single time, then go here and kill this, go there and kill this OMG you're the arch mage. In Skyrim it's even worse, you practically find the critical spot at like 3rd quest and few quests after that you're the arch mage. Fighter's Guild in both games are virtually the same as Morrowind's so comments about killing rats are silly. If I recall correctly Oblivion has almost the same quest (except you now have to save rats and kill something else). The only one that deviated was infiltration among the Blackwood Company, that part had some more interesting quests. Not to mention that there are no consequences for joining specific guilds in Oblivion and Skyrim whatsoever, in Skyrim at least we got to choose the side of the civil war (which doesn't matter anyway since in the next game they will come up with the lore they want anyway), and in Oblivion you don't get to choose anything. Each character could join everything leading to most people going for a perfect save, which I'm not sure how did it not kill their gameplay considering all the whining about how Skyrim shoves the main quest down people's throats and other BS.
So don't try nitpicking about Morrowind's bad parts of quest designs because there's twice as much to be found in the next two games.

And about Morrowind's weird fighting system, NPCs standing around and whatnot, are people forgetting A. how old this game is, and B. the fact that it's not actually an action RPG? NPCs are either standing around or aimlessly roaming around a small area in all the games around 2000 and even years to come so Morrowind is nothing more special or inferior about that.


Personally I haven't experienced this, everything grows back for me. But they sure have too much to fix.

It's not about becoming grandmaster. In fact a lot of people, including myself, would like it if you couldn't become the grandmaster of the guilds. It honestly doesn't make sense given that it doesn't take years in game to complete the quest lines, and there's often people who've been around far longer than you and with more qualifications (who either remain silent on the issue or just go "Oh, I didn't want it anyway"). Doesn't it seem odd that you're the only one raising through the ranks?

What it's about is having a sense of progression and story. With my current playthrough in Morrowind, I'm at level 12 going through the Fighters Guild and Imperial Legion, and so far all I've been asked to do is inane disconnected chores. The quests I'm doing now don't feel any more important or connected than quests I started with. I'm definitely not feeling like I'm rising through the ranks in the guilds (despite having a number of "advancements", which just give me a new title and ho-hum gear that's barely worth selling), nor am I seeing a reason to continue other than because they're a source of "random" quests to level with.

Oblivion's lack of choices and requirements with guilds was a let down, and the lengths may have left something to be desired, but it was still much more interesting and rewarding to work through them because there was a sense of purpose and progression. You actually felt accomplished when you got admittance to the Arcane University, or when you attracted the attention of the Gray Fox. You did errands that brought you all around Cyrodiil, finding or doing something new at each step, then got rewarded when the next big stage hit, all the while meeting interesting characters and being part of an interesting story. In Morrowind, it's feeling like one basic disconnected fetch/kill quest after another, meeting one generic NPC after another, until an important event triggers out of nowhere.

Morrowind is very much an action RPG. All the combat is in real-time and dependent on responsive player input. It just automated a few things with "dice rolls" because the combat AI was dumb.

I wouldn't fault Morrowind on its own for having static NPCs (though Daggerfall 6 years prior did have shop schedules, with different things happening at nighttime compared to daytime), but I wouldn't say Oblivion hasn't improved NPCs by a ton.

It's not really that funny. Different people like different things. Some people have a harder time accepting that than others.


I'm guessing this is your first post? Welcome to the Forums. Fishy sticks are on me.

As mentioned above I've played "Morrowind" (more specifically Game Of The Year Edition), "Oblivion" and "Skyrim".

I played and enjoyed them in that order when each was originally released.

All good natured humour to one side I understand where you and others are coming from with the things you love about "Morrowind" or "Skyrim" and have no trouble with anyone else enjoying either of the other 2 more.

To your credit you hit the nail on the head with this:

.

Some of us were able to weave together a tapestry that was a wonder to behold.

Az

besides spellcrafting I think they already did with Skyrim

Nah Skyrim isn't all that great. Alchemy svcks in skyrim along with no spellcrafting. The thieves guild questline isn't too great. Same goes for the mages guild.

Aside from graphics, level-scaling, dungeons, large-scale battles, and gameworld detail, i'd say almost everything about Skyrim is worse than Oblivion, with some things being about equal.

And the things I listed above as improvements are more like minor improvements with a lot still left to be desired, rather than big leaps forward.

Overall, while I consider Skyrim to be a good game, I think it's a poor TES open-world RPG and the worst i've played in the series (haven't played Arena properly - only Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim)

Can someone explain why bethesda insists on removing features of past games instead of refining them?

Once again, it's really just your thread title that is making a dangerous number of people choke on their coffee.

Someone in the office thinks up a new gimmick, they find out it doesn't go well with an old feature, and the old feature gets the cut.

or

"This feature is flawed, so let's remove it instead of taking the time to fix it."

or

"We need to streamline things as much as possible to make the game accessible to every gamer on the face of the earth, regardless of whether they even like open-world RPGs. This can go, and this can go, this is too confusing, this can go... and this... and this..."

..

Probably a mix of all three.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DUF5i6xCSIUw&v=UF5i6xCSIUw&gl=US

Yet someone could make the exact same thread about morrowind and that would be fine? Even though morrowind was really the beginning of streamlining TES.