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[Torak]

Oh, and fear the spiders.  Fear those gawddamn spiders.  Better yet, turn on the infinite mana cheat and torch the lot of them with a burnin' inferno.

I had issues with the spiders too, until I got the earthfire sword. One charged attack kills them, or two quick attacks.

[LordBucket]

I just resintalled morrowind and started a new character. I had played through about 90% of the official quest line on a previous computer, but never finished. Right now I'm grinding out endurance for levels. Six more levels until get 100 endurance so I can start doing more interesting things.

Last time I went Telvanni. I liked them, but the stronghold was amazingly inconvenient. Seems more practical to live in the mages guild. I may try some new guilds this time around...morag tong, thieves guild, but I'll probably go Telvanni again.

Daggerfall was great
Morrowind was good
Oblivion sucked.

I played daggerfall extensively. It's a free download from Bethesda now, so anyone can try it. In some ways it was definitely a stronger game than Morrowind...but it was also seriously lacking in some other ways. Whatever else you say about it, Morrowind is playable. Daggerfall kind of wasn't. Even with all the patches, it was horribly bug ridden to the point of it being difficult to get through the game without having to abandon and restore from previous saves to work around irrecoverable bugs. And the dungeons...ick. I used to have nightmares about Castle Necromoghan.

For those of you who haven't played Daggerfall, the dungeons were abso-fucking-lutely huge. And extremely three dimensional. The only other game I've ever seen with a similarly complicated dungeon design was the original Descent. A single objective in a single dungeon could routinely take 2-6 hours to figure out. And the designs were such that "always stay to right" simply didn't work. To get to different subzones you might need to go through teleporters, or climb down chutes in the middle of a room.

A good game, yes. But not always a fun game. Like Morrowind, the world itself was far more interesting and fun to play in than the official quest line.

Daggerfall was flawed, but it was awesome in it's scope and potential.  Morrowind, could have
been even better, but instead they chose to lower the potential and scope of the project.

...yes. Morrowind is tiny compared to Daggerfall. And it seems to have a lot less subtlety. There are lots of things going on in daggerfall that were amazing. For example, I remember very clearly playing daggerfall one night, running along after dusk with the rain beating down around me when all of the sudden a heard an arrow fly past and strike the wood of a nearby building. It was an assassin related to a quest I was doing. But when he saw that he missed, rather than simply running in and attacking, he left. I never even saw him. That was really cool. Daggerfall had a lot of subtlety of that sort. Listening to Lysandus' ghost wailing after nightfall in the capitol, scouring through books to find summoning dates for Daedra...all sorts of things that you could potentially play the entire way through the game without ever knowing about. And clothes? Daggerfall had so many types of clothing and armor that it was a veritable barbie-doll dressup game. They went into so much detail that you could even tuck and untuck your shirts, to have different looks on your character portrait, even wearing the same clothing. Bank loans, character housing, boats, wagons, horses...so much that didn't make it into Morrowind.

But, Daggerfall lacked detail in other ways. Sure, different provinces had different architecture, just like Balmora had differetn architecture than Ald'ruhn in Morrowind, but in Daggerfall a single province was typically hundreds of cities, and they all kind of looked the same. The quest generator was fairly simplistic. Once you had played through the half-dozen or so basic variations of a quest for any particular faction, it was all pretty much the same after that.  "Kill an ogre in Joe Shmoe's ancestral crypt" wasn't much different from "kill a renegade wizard's familiar in the tower of Bob." But then, to be fair, Morrowidn didnt' even have a random quest generator.

Both good games. Excellent, even. But each game was better than the other in some regards, and not as good in others.

[Vester]

You could actually look at Oblivion and Morrowind in the same light as DnD 4th and 3rd ed. It went mainstream, and lost some of the juicy bits that made the older game awesome and fun to play, becoming weirdly combat oriented. It became shinier, adding a lot of superficial updates (like the aforementioned bloom). It raped the lore for some reason.

Honestly, both 4th ed and Oblivion have their good points*, but they do seem to induce RAEG.

* I have no idea what these good points are, but they're there.

[Frogeyes]

Oblivion WAS a good game, really. Like the rest of the series, it was open-ended and had a rich setting. Unlike the rest of the series, it had pretty graphics, combat, magic, and stealth were all dramatically improved, and productive values were just generally high.

 The only reason it gets so much hate is because it abandoned most of what made the other games unique. It didn't have the ambitious procedural generation and expansive ways of interacting with the world of Daggerfall, or Morrowind's complex, alien setting. It inherited a ton or rich lore, but didn't add much to it. Finally, level scaling (something I've always disliked in TES) was godawful.

[Jackrabbit]

Basically, change the names around and release it as a stand alone product with no ties to The Elder Scrolls and it wouldn't have induced nearly as much hate.

It's a bit like Silent Hill 5 in that respect, I think. Yes, I'm just blindly going along with Yahtzee here.

[LordBucket]

combat
dramatically improved

I've never really understood the objection so many people have to Morrowind combat. You swing your sword, and have a chance to hit/miss depending on skill, armor of target, etc. Pretty standard stuff. It's not a first-person-shooter. Having hit/miss determined by the graphics would make combat skills irrelevant.

graphics

Oblivions graphics actually turned me off a bit. After the dark atmosphere in Morrowind, Oblivion sometimes seemed a bit too bright and Disney-esque to take seriously.

[Maric]

I enjoyed Morrowind and Oblivion equally. They were both really fun in my eyes and wasn't that many bad points to it.

[Akigagak]

I've never really understood the objection so many people have to Morrowind combat. You swing your sword, and have a chance to hit/miss depending on skill, armor of target, etc. Pretty standard stuff. It's not a first-person-shooter. Having hit/miss determined by the graphics would make combat skills irrelevant.

'miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, hit.'

woo, I killed a crab.

[Jackrabbit]

The miss sound haunts me to this day. I was swinging at the fucking crab! Don't tell me I wasn't my weapon went through him! At least make a block sound! AAAAAAAAARGH.

[Puck]

Oblivion:
First of all Gamebryo Engine. TEH HORROR. I haz enough technical thingamaballs in mah pc to PWN the living daylights out of oblivion. Still, in cities, when there are a lot of vertical lines (no, nothing to do with vsync) you strafe around, the character seems to jitter around. The framerate stays up, but it all gets jittery. Supposedly a lot of folks dont even notice that, when you show it to them, the other half is not so lucky. Oh, btw, it has nothing to do with graphical quality anyway, you can crank it down all the way to "look like triangle ass" and it still does it.

So basically, I get prettier graphics that have the infallible ability to break immersion. The plot doesnt help a lot with this immersion thing either. Dont get me started on their voice actor. Im convinced they hired only one.

A friend of mine bought the game for me, as a present. And what stays is the feeling of a chore. I HAVE to finish this game someday.

Morrowind:
The same friend who bought oblivion spent every free minute here when we were playing Morrowind. We were friggin takin shifts, you hear me? I was playing for 6 to 8 hours, and when I fell unconscious, I wouldnt even go to bed, just shut down on the couch behind the PC. I woke my friend up (because he was using the couch, duh) and told him it's his turn.

I think there was a week without the PC ever being turned off. it was kind of extreme.

Even without any "better head mod" or fog removed I still think Morrowind is VERY nice to look at. Really, I LOVE the style. And it doesnt break immersion for me, because its FLUID. There's a lot to explore, finding stuff using landmarks is just great.

The only real gripes I have: Could use more survival style like carrying supplies. But that's a matter of taste. The last part of the game, however, was a real ripoff. Halfgod guy tells you about the siege that will last months, and all that ever happens is ... you go there and smash up the place 

[Jackrabbit]

Hey, where is that mod that removes the fog anyway? The screenies looked amazing.

[LordBucket]

miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss,

That was only really an issue while cross training weapons you never used to get the stats you needed at level gain. I don't think it was the combat system at fault so much as the compulsory nature of levling. If instead of that silly 3x5 point system, they had simply awarded fractional stats every time a relevant skill increased, it would have made the whole experience a lot more pleasant.

Standing around the Vivec arena storage room for 5-10 minutes letting rats hit my armor to get endurance gains every level comes to mind.

The last part of the game, however, was a real ripoff.

All the elder scrolls games I've played have all been weak when it comes to official storyline. Faction and random quests, inconsequential dungeons and side-treks have always been fantastically better made than the critical game quests.

The last part of the game, however, was a real ripoff.

It's been a while since I've done the morrowind blades quest, but I remember feeling like it was one long string of "go here, now go here, ok, now go over there, now go there...KILL HIM!!! ...now go over there..."


I also always thought it was strange how weak some of the major NPC's are. It feels wrong to be able to get naked and punch to death a 1000-year old Telvanni mage-lord, and I don't remember it taking much longer than punching to death diseased rats.

[Jackrabbit]

One thing I hated about Morrowind was that it was so static. Everything felt almost unchangeable, though many things could change if you did the quests. On the surface, you just couldn't do anything. But, really, I think that's not the point. The focus of Morrowind was the visuals, the exploration and the rich backstory of the setting.

[Vester]

Are you sure?

For me the focus was beating people up and then stealing their clothes.

[Jackrabbit]

Fine, that too.