Morrowind is the compact disk version of crack.

Oblivion surely beats most other RPGs.

I think Skyrim is going to be the best of both worlds -- even better.

Well they do both have an R and an M in the title. Seems though they are striving to push forward and build on what they've already done.

I hope not

This.

Okay, bows was a bit extreme, I'll admit it. But the point can be filled just as easily with, say, claymores. Someone's who's good a fighting with claymores in Oblivion can very easily keep from ever getting hit by an enemy. You have to really know how to use claymores to do so, but you had to really know spears to avoId getting hit in Morrowind as well. So does that mean claymores should be removed? No! Because they were doing what they were supposed to do. They filled the same niche spears did, only with less style.

And I actually like your suggestions on fixing levatation and
clothing layers, to be honest. Although, I would personally rather see a time limit (like 25 seconds) on levatation than a movment area.

-agree with the magic compass

-Leveled creatures and items wasn't hand holding, in fact it made the game more difficult as you leveled, so it was the opposite effect. However level-scaling was too much in Oblivion so it made you feel like you weren't accomplishing much if anything while Morrowind had too little level-scaling and made the game too easy.

-Guild requirements could stand to come back but once again, not hand holding and only reinforces the fact that you can do what you want in an RPG. Besides, you were never really asked to use magic in the mages guild, you were asked a few times to use knowledge to get past an obstacle but for the most part they used you more as an enforcer than and actual member.

-You still have to improve skills, there has not been any gravitation from that, in Oblivion there were only a few skills that there was no point in leveling and they could stand to be just removed in light of their minigame such as speechcraft and lockpicking. It's not really boring, it's an actual challenge compared to equipping a lock pick in as your weapon and just pressing the attack button hoping to unlock the box or door. It hasn't gravitated from character skills to player skills, it just made player skills a factor also, like it should be, and they are eliminating the dice rolls from the game, which dice rolls in a video game has outlived it's usefulness. I mean, player skill was a big part of Arena and Daggerfall and kind've slumped in Morrowind and came back a bit in Oblivion.

-Yes they could use a more vertical build on dungeons again but they didn't fit in the Oblivion dungeon builds and didn't need to, also levitation needs to be fixed and extremely limited before put it back in. Also, they should have other options to scale the dungeons than levitation. You can't limit certain areas in the game to only mages, it's not fair. Making grappling hooks for melee and ranged could help as well.

- Are you kidding? Morrowind was as dead in believability as it can get. If you knew real geography, there aren't 10 different climates on a single 10 square mile island. Also, they are the same culture, they live on an island, there is no real distinction except between cities and I wouldn't call that culture, they are too similar. Of course there wasn't a rivalry between factions in Cyrodiil, why would there be? If you need believability and drama, just look at how the cities wouldn't lend troops to the aid of the emperor until they were safe and then they claimed that their guards would do more for the empire than another cities would. You would also see the tension the counties of Cyrodiil had against the Imperial Legion and Chancellor Ocato because they couldn't spare troops to help them fend off the Oblivion gates. Oblivion was had a FAR more believable and lively world than any other TES game, period. Also I don't see how it was any easier to mod for Morrowind than Oblivion <_<

*Cracks knuckles* I'd rather not have to write a list of the flaws of Morrowind, I would run out of space in the thread page. I will if I have to but I've done it somewhere else in these forums and that was just a fraction of the flaws. If people really want to start a discussion of flaws between Morrowind and Oblivion, I'll be more than willing to show how flawed Morrowind is. It's basically just a MQ line sitting on top of a giant pile of flaws.



With claymores, they are slow and you would have to side step to not be hit. The difference is with spears they can keep those at a range while staggering them and they can't retaliate without any effort, you can stand still and just have to hit the attack button at the right time catch them before they can finish their attack animation. I'm fine with spears coming back if they are fixed where you can just poke people to keep them away. I'd rather not have spears return because I don't see how they can pull off not making it unbalanced but I'm all for halberds or bardiches because they swing so they can be balanced the same as any other weapon. I just don't see how you can have spears without having people perpetually poking someone to death without being in danger.

i hope skyrim will be the best yet.

Well, I hope that Skyrim will be again a game entirely surprising and unique, which will *surpass* Oblivion's gameplay and quests (think Whodunnit, or that one with the painter), Morrowind's atmosphere, lore and politics and Daggerfall's attention to choice and consequence and resulting multiple quests paths.

So there. Why settle ?

I say to you the same thing others tell people who complain about Oblivion's easy button green arrow of fun: You don't have to use it. I've never abused levitation, I've never abused spears, hell, i've never even picked up a spear before in Morrowind. I've also only ever over-powered myself one time with enchantable equipment, and ya know what? Thats my right. I should be given that option. Taking it away is taking away choices from the player. If someone wants to "steamroll through the game" as you claimed you did(and if you did, why did you do it? You didn't have to abuse those mechanics ya know. All it takes is a little bit of will-power. You can't complain about something being over-powered, yet abuse that overpowering yourself, it's damn well hypocritical, which is certainly how you are coming off in your post), that is their prerogative. If they want to roleplay their character to a very high degree, also their prerogative. If they want to under-power themselves? Again, their choice. That is what makes TES games FUN AND ENJOYABLE. CHOICE. Taking away stuff like levitation was a huge mistake, it removed much of the fun, and all it really does is inspire people to hack the game using console commands, like I did because I wanted to see what was in the top of the cave in Sideways Cave in Oblivion. Had to hack acrobatics so I could jump up top since I couldn't just levitate up there(and would ya believe, there was not a damn thing there?, which btw, was fun and fine in Morrowind, cuz I could do it without hacking the game).

Bah, that turned into quite the long-winded rant. Basically, stop being a hypocrite, talking about things being vastly over-powered, yet proudly claiming to having used those game-breaking abilities yourself. Oh, and, more choice is better and more fun!

My sentiments exactly. Thought it's going to be hard to surpass Whodunnit.

Umm no, it would be hypocritical of me if I abused them because I had prior knowledge of them being abusable. I just used the abilities and spears and they were inherently broken. Also, I never said I steamrolled using these abusable aspects, I blew through the game because Morrowind was easy but having those items to abuse would truly let you "steamroll" through the game. Choice makes TES a great game, but choice to have a broken, godmode feature in the game isn't one of those choices, sorry. Basically your argument is that you want to be a god as you level up and those that don't, have to purposely gimp themselves so they don't become a god just by playing. If your only fun is being able to fly which doesn't fit TES lore, then go play Aeon or WoW, they allow you to fly all you want or better yet, go sky diving, it's fun. Don't call me a hypocrite when I never once said I used the features because I knew about them and could so it made the game easy, the game was inherently easy and I stumbled across the broken features. They are broken and don't need to be put back in the game unless they are fixed. Your basically saying that you need to have inherent godmode in the game so that people don't use the console to hack, after all, like you said, it's their choice if they want to hack or not :biggrin: see how that works. Another thing that bothered me is why there was even loot in some of the places in Morrowind where you levitate to, it makes no sense on most of them <_<

I just checked OB's and it specifically mentioned mastery level restrictions.

And I know it could be some other variation, but honestly, if you consider chance of failure to be crimson, then we are looking at a deep red in a poorly lit area, at least. I am going to guess it to be crimson for simplicity's sake.


But I should let everyone get back to arguing.
[]

And actually, between Sleign and Starwulf.
It is an overarching game design. ME is a game in which things need to be appropriately balanced because it is an action RPG-story. In Call of Duty things need to be relatively balanced. In Oblivion some things were handicapped in the spirit of action RPG-ism. But in MW and from what I can make of DF that kind of a balance was secondary, because the MQ and combat challenge was not even the main focus of the game. Kick ass open world and plot structures were the main focus. And the skills followed. Honestly the culture and open world are more important to me, and if "balance" gets in the way of variances and different things we can do I say trash it.

Morrowind was 10 x more deep than Oblivion ever was, thats for sure I've played both Morrowind and Oblivion hundreds of hours, Morrowind maybe 600 hours or something so I know the difference in depht from Morrowind to Oblivion. I hope Skyrim will take many elements from Morrowind, but I also want it to be a very different game from any other elder scrolls game. I think bethesda has done alot of unique things with this game, and I think they have worked hard to get rid of flaws and mistakes from other elder scrolls games. So we just have to wait and see

:)


You might look at what I wrote, and this was not an example of hand holding, but loosing enjoyment of some aspects of the game, which was leveling up, exploration and triumph over challenges that had defeated you before, and I wrote about the joy of stumbling upon un-leveled monsters and items in odd places, which was removed in universally leveled environment of Oblivion.


Why do you think that all my examples was about hand holding?

RPG is about role playing and efforts to win situations and developing your characters to be able to reach places and ranks that you could not before, not being able to do all the things at at any situation without the need to develop your character.

An arch-mage should be a great spell caster, or do you want to role play in a universe that had no rules and no cause and effect coherence? Kill a dragon with a punch and be defeated by a mere goblin?


I really enjoy how you only take a small part of my examples, and ignore some key words of the explanation and expand the rest, stripped from those key words, and reach conclusions. I suggest that you read my previous explanation.

In Oblivion they moved from the focus role playing aspects like the gradual joy of character development, losing oneself in the game environment for a while, the triumph of the final conquer after an early defeat by challenges of a world, toward more action based, fast paced, instant gratification of a fight or jumping from one quest or fight to another one, without the need to explore, and the like.

I.e. Moving from a deep challenging game to a shallow game full of actions after actions that let casual players loose some instant steam but does not have depth enough to keep those who want it.


Why the option for more variety in new dimension would not fit in any dungeon design? And why there was no need for them? Why not fix the levitation mechanism, or at least make under-water dungeons and caverns, where there would be no need for levitation to introduce a new dimension for creativity?

I do not understand the track of your mind.


I live in an area where it has more variety and uniqueness of climates and environment, in smaller area than Morrowind, so your reasoning fails again here, and I say the more culture difference and variety and trauma and rivalry and trickery in a game, of any side, the better.

We do not want a straightforward, one way, simple environment and factions, with no rivalry and little culture, a game made for casual gamers tha just want to hop in and lose some steam, and then hop out. Just give it more depth and let casual players hike on the surface, but let deeper players delve into the depth of the game.

I said easier to mod to give more background and life to people and more culture and stories to the land, I leave it to your powerful mind to guess the reason.

Edit: A quick research resulted in an interesting place on the earth, a point on Andes mountain range, which is rock and snow, but to the west of this place is Atacama desert, the driest place on the earth, and to the east of it is Amazon, the lushest place on the earth, so it has to be a really interesting place. So much variety in such a small area.


Go ahead, but be just and look at the technology advancements and new elements that became available between the two game, like better graphic rendering, physics engine and Radiant AI, new fighting mechanism, and the like, as those are the tools, but look at the features that give depth to a game, and then count as much flaws as you like.

I'm ready to receive them.

Edit:

As for my examples about culture and leveling and most of the rest, those are topics that Todd Howard himself agreed that was better implemented in Morrowind and lost their touch in Oblivion.

He also stated that in each game they make some new, bold, and epic decisions, some of which prospers, but some of them fails as well.

I apologize then, but it did sound like you were basically saying you steamrolled through Morrowind because you deliberately abused the combat system. Regardless, once you realized how over-powered spear was, once you realized no enemy(besides cliff-racers/mages) could hit you while you were in the air, did you stop using that method? Surely you made the logical conclusion that if you continued to do so, you would be abusing a game mechanic to virtually make yourself un-killable, right? If so, why didn't you stop? Because you didn't want to. You consciously made the choice to continue to fight that way, because you ENJOYED IT. Just like others enjoy not using that method to play. My whole point, is it's FUN to do things one way, and FUN to do things another. Removing Player A's choice to satisfy Player B because player B complained, is ridiculous and a bit pretentious, don't you think? If something is game-breaking, don't use it. If you enjoy it, use it. Simple as that. Just give us the choice, that's all I want. I don't want to have to hack the game to play it the way I want, especially when previous iterations of the game allowed me to do so previously, and got me used to playing in that particular manner.

Too funny. :clap:

BUT.. i do hope it is more along the feel of Morrowind.. it had such a deep immersion factor to it, something I thought Oblivion lacked a lot of. Let's hope they balance it out this time around.

haha, a scrib was the first creature i killed with my iron dagger

I'm going to say even less than Oblivion.

Which isn't a bad thing really. I would prefer the games still be unique from each other, and perhaps we'll get a game that we like even more than Morrowind (or Oblivion, or Daggerfall for people with those as a favorite ES game).

I don't think I've ever killed a scrib. Why would you harm something so docile? :stare:

Uh? When and where did I miss the legendariness of the scrib? :lmao:

It looked so scary at the time. I missed with my dagger about a 100 times though since I had a really low short blade skill. got paralyzed by the little bugger too

excactly.Oblivion was great and so was Morrowind. both had there strengths and weakness.so Skyrim will be great and somthing new while still sticking true to the TES series

Elitist is a term used by the unendeared when they think themselves morally superior and it's frankly irritating, especially coming from someone so willing to come to the defense of Oblivion than declare to the world how much better it is than it's predecessor whilst only providing flimsy arguments and topping it off with name calling (in respect to both me and the games).

Simplification/streamlining essentially equates to dumbing down as you seem to misunderstand the term.

Brain stimulating incites thoughts of deep consideration, forethought and strategy, the two instances you mentioned are little more than mini-games with less content, intrigue and brain stimulation than your average bargain cellphone time-waster.



Good developers balance games by weakening/removing/consolidating anything they may view as overpowered, great developers take that overpowered item and add a distinctive and relative downside to counter to it and force it into controlled use, rather than completely remove it or nerf it to the point of utter uselessness while letting other aspects of the game inherently suffer from it's lack (IE dungeon design, loot hunting and travel).



Again my, previous point, the good has to always be balanced with the bad, your idea of balance equates to either an entire removal of said feature or the simplification and weakening of it to such an extent that it's rendered useless (see Energy Weapons in New Vegas pre-patch). The key word here is balance; to even a scale you don't take everything off of it, but rather, add weight to the other side so that it levels out, which in the case of TES would equate to adding an inbuilt downside rather than a complete removal of the aforementioned offending item followed by deep admonishment by blinded fans.



When compared with Oblivion's meager dungeon crawls, you actually had to pay attention when engaging in it in Morrowind, you had to watch for secret levers, listen for enemies that may be hidden behind secret walls with even more secret means of which to enter and most importantly pay attention to every subtle detail given by a quest-giver whose explanations were often and entertainingly either realistically vague or naturally general, requiring you to have to both pay attention to more than just a glowering red/green arrow placed dead center on your compass and have the proper items bought and at the ready for when and if they were needed. In Oblivion it essentially revolved to droopingly following the guide of your ever present, omnisciently godlike arrow, magically and inexplicably pointing you to your exact location, removing all sense of actual adventure and even the pretense of forethought. If that doesn't equate to dumbing down than I suppose Call Of Duty has been progressively getting more well-thought-out and complex for years now.



Actually I played through the entirety of Oblivion only mentally referencing lore I learned in Morrowind when it came up, I never even installed a mod that made it even similar to Morrowind as far as my memory serves. I thought it was a steaming pile of refuse because the story was, as previously mentioned, about as shallow and dull as a rain puddle in your driveway on a particularly dreary morning, there was no intrigue, there was no forethought, it essentially revolved around "this guy is evil, he's trying to destroy the world because he has the opportunity to do so and is inexplicably conspiring with mortals to do it, stop him/help this boring guy with inborn powers that isn't you stop him" but even that explanation does it more justice than it does itself. The biggest twist in the game revolving around Martin having to sacrifice himself dramatically in the end which was made all the more distasteful by the fact that he had the personality of a bent thumbscrew and the character of a blank piece of parchment.

The only interesting questline I played through to the end, storywise that is, was the Dark Brotherhood and that was only really made interesting by a certain ingenious twist involving Lucien Lachance and some shockingly, even horrifyingly disturbing orders placed upon you from upon on-high.



People are so quick to forget the fact that, as with the vast majority of open world games, when comparing actual, factual geographical lore and in-game personifications limited by technology topped by the toil and tedium that would come from having to navigate (not to mention design and map) a believably scaled map, that the in-game personification of the gameworlds are just scaled counterparts to what their comparable lore environments attribute to. Do you really think the three capital cities (Vivec, Mournhold (though only representing a part of the whole) and the Imperial City respectively) are in fact the factual and flawlessly scaled representations of their lore-contained counterparts, what with being smaller in scale than an average college campus with the population of maybe a city block? If so than I dare say you're quite off your rocker as that's just disturbingly absurd.

Also, onto the 'masses of different environments packed into a small gameworld' issue, I think it's safe to say Oblivion suffers from the same disease, what with swamps, plains, thin forests, thick forests, rolling green hill strewn valleys, deep snowy tundra and tall snow soaked mountains all being contained within one gameworld.

Keep in mind, I don't hate Oblivion, my two hundred plus hours in it saying quite the contrary, but there are so many aspects of the game that are just absolutely wrong that it's hard to take someone seriously when they're defending the offending bits with the vehemence of a hungry tiger. It's actually quite the disturbing trend to be completely honest.

Any thread that starts with "Will" needs an "I don't know" option.

I hope it's not Morrowind 2.0, just the same as I hope it's not Oblivion 2.0. I'd see it as a huge disappointment if it was either of the two - I want a new game! Sure, take the best from both games (and other developments), but develop it and progress, don't just copy and paste. I know some people may be over the moon if they can come on here after release and say "it's just like Morrowind! ", but I've already got that game.