So I keep hearing opinions along the line of:
Daggerfall was great
Morrowind was good
Oblivion sucked.
Is it me or is it the growing trend for games to get worse as time goes by?
Media of all kinds tends to generate something of a "If it's older, it's better" Syndrome. If a game is "X" good, they expect the sequel to be X^X, or it's just crap. It doesn't help that everything changed loses you points with some people, and everything kept the same loses you points with other people.
*Grumbles*
Last I checked, all the Elder Scrolls games take place in the same world, so if you're really interested into lore, the books in Morrowind technicially carry over to Oblivion.
The graphics in either may not be top-of-the-line, but Oblivion's was a substantial improvement over Morrowind. Hearing what the people were saying when I talked to them helped too. I'm probobly not in any position to judge graphics, as I seem to be the only person in the universe who can't tell the difference between "high" and "very high" settings on most games.
I still haven't forgiven Morrowind for that damned Egg Poacher mission for the fighter's guild. Wasn't hard, just never seemed to register them as killed.
Not saying which one I think is better, just defending Oblivion.
Where exactly are you getting this idea that people not liking a new game must obviously be unreasonable? Would you like Dwarf Fortress 2 if it was a ww2 first person shooter with no blood or Dwarves? It's not about age, it's about whether or not the sequel is as good as or better than the original. How many people do you see saying Diablo or Warcraft 1 is better than Diablo or Warcraft 2? What about HL1 compared to HL2? What about Arena compared to Daggerfall? All your theory does is allow you to feel superior to people who hold a different opinion than you by automatically marking them as unreasonable.
I actually do prefer HL1 to HL2... But that is beside the point.
I recently popped my morrowind disk in to find that it is scratched beyond all repair. This made me very sad, as while I own both Daggerfall and Oblivion, Morrowind really is the best one. The best way I've seen it described is that in each version, they made the playable area smaller, but made it more detailed.
In Arena, you have the whole of [whatever that continent is called] to explore, but you have to "fast travel" between towns, because there is infinite wilderness between them. Virtually all the towns look the same, there are no guilds in the normal sense of the word as it relates to roleplaying games, and the graphics are downright simplistic.
In Daggerfall, the graphics did not improve much. This time, you have a small section of the world map to explore, but it is absolutely massive, and can be walked from one end to the other in real-time, though this is as incredibly boring as it would be in real life. The combat is relatively the same, but the dialogue is pretty good, allowing you to ask about different things, in different ways. Fast traveling is still in, though this time it allows you to choose whether you want to stay at inns and such, or not, and if you choose to stay at inns, it requires money. I'm not sure exactly what that option does. There is a rather nice feature that you can select when fast traveling which ensures that you arrive during the day. You can ride a horse, a cart, even buy a ship. Sadly, while this game is incredibly complicated, most of the features are not fully implemented, resulting in half of the skills list being useless.
Morrowind changed a lot of things. It created the ability to have a pacifist character, and made combat suck. You swing, graphically it looks like you hit the monster, but you know that because of the "whoosh" sound and the lack of a blood cloud, you in fact did not. This is even worse with bows, as perfectly aimed arrows can go right through an enemy and hit a friendly standing behind him. Fast travel was removed and replaced with Silt Striders, forcing you to explore the wilderness a bit. Whether this was a good or a bad thing is debatable. Morrowind took Daggerfall's speech system and added to it, allowing you to jump between topics in a wiki-style manner, and adding the ability to ask in detail about an NPC's history. The world map was infinitely smaller than Daggerfall's, but much more detailed. The graphics were a massive improvement, and most towns looked relatively unique, thought there were still a lot of them, so there was quite a bit of copy-pasting.
Oblivion took everything that Morrowind had changed about the TES series and reversed it. Gone was that notion that one had to actually walk from place to place. Gone was the notion that some enemies are just too difficult for you. Gone was the notion that every NPC might have an interesting backstory that one could ask about. Gone was the notion that some might like to avoid killing anything, and instead engage in simple fetch quests, as certain guilds in Morrowind offered. The combat was infinitely improved, removing the roll to hit when you clearly hit him graphically, but it stilled felt a bit a stiff, as there is very little movement when you take a hit on your shield. Still, the staggering helps with this a bit. Oblivion has exactly
7 6 towns, each of which has their own graphical style. It has 4 guilds: Fighter's, Mage's, Thieve's, and Dark Brotherhood. These are not the guilds of morrowind, which you join and feel like you are actually part of the guild. Nay, you shall join the guild, then embark on a short journey of 10 or so incredibly linear quests until something happens to the head dude and you take his place, and then have absolutely no worthwhile reward for being the fucking head of the fucking guild. And you can do this to every guild with the same character. You'd think that being the head of all 4 of the only guilds in the whole fucking country would count for something.
Also, you get a cheap suit of armor for saving the world.