Sceptic
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2010
- Messages
- 10,874
With respect to topics, Daggerfall was much worse. I see where you're coming from, but I also like being able to ask everyone about everything. As for responses, some of them do vary depending on whether you're asking a lowly commoner or someone in a Great House. They don't always vary though, and it would've been nice if they did. In fact it took me quite a while before even notcing the variations because of this.The idea that you can also go around and interrogate people endlessly for huge amounts of text on everything, even lowly commoners, is also just weird. The game needed better differentiation in conversation topics and responses between different characters, especially for things like their social class etc.
The three I listed are IMO the best, especially in terms of a good narrative for how and why you ascend to the top. Temple was... I don't remember much of it actually, so probably not that memorable or original. Though I do remember not being able to become the head in my first run because of low skills (I consciously avoided cheesing it out with the trainers and I wasn't looking at spoilers).I did not play the other guilds you mentioned this time around so maybe I've just forgotten.
For lack of a better term, the "experience" of wandering around and exploring the world is simply more interesting in Skyrim and (to a much lesser degree) Oblivion.
The first statement is by itself reason enough to negate your argument. Oblivion and Skyrim have WAAAAAAAAY too much combat, and it doesn't matter whether it remains fun after "several" hours. Is it still fun after 30? 40? Because that's most of what you'll be doing in both games, whacking things on the head until they die. And the minimal improvements to the combat system itself (never mind that they're also balanced by the dumbing down of the character system) can't keep up with dozens of hours where you repeat the same moves over and over and over again. Morrowind suffers from this too, but at least there you don't have to repeat those moves as many times due to lesser emphasis on combat.There is less combat in Morrowind, at least until the endgame, so it's not as big a problem as it could have been, but there's all sorts of little convenience tweaks that the newer games have (sprinting, faster harvesting of ingredients, better animations and camera) and more unique stuff to find while exploring that the hiking simulator element is much better.
Some of the tweaks I agree with (faster harvesting), others are up for debate (combat animations ARE more indicative in Ob than in MW - but generally Ob graphics and animations are a piece of shit), and camera was never an issue for me in any TES because, you know, first person.
That last statement however? More unique stuff to find in Skyrim and in fucking OBLIVION? Were you smoking something? The last TES game to have a plethora (and I mean a PLETHORA) of hand placed and hand crafted stuff was Morrowind. Neither Skyrim nor Oblivion can hold a candle to it with their linear copypasta dungeons and levelled lists. So... no. Just no.
Music in Oblivion is pure decline compared to Morrowind, it's Jeremy Soule veering away from his better, slower and mood-capturing stuff from IWD, NWN (thanks to Excommunicator I went back and listened to the music there; some of it really is quite good, outside of the shitty combat tunes) and of course Morrowind and going full John Williams bombastic. Just compare the main menu themes from both games. Graphics in Ob are utter shit; setting aside the eye-searing bloom, you have a complete lack of anything resembling an art direction; not surprising considering the anything-goes design also applies to the graphical style having no unity or cohesiveness whatsoever. Everything looks like shiny plastic (see VD's "welcome to Disneyland" in his review; the image he chose is an eye-opener but it's also very typical). Turn off the bloom one of these days btw; I did once, because I couldn't stand the eye-searing shiny, and then realised why Bethesda used it so much; the underlying graphics are completely stale. And let's not even get into the character models.I'm referring mostly to the presentation aspects (graphics, music) and feel of the combat, and in that respect Oblivion is more enjoyable simply by virtue of being a newer, more technically proficient game. Morrowind is still pretty damn clunky no matter how many mods you install.
On the technical side, MW and Ob crashed about equally for me. I heard Skyrim was more stable, and indeed what I've seen definitely indicates that Bethesda finally managed to make a stable Gamebryo game.... 10 years later.
Combat is much more fluid and less clunky in Oblivion. That's about the only concession you'll get out of me, and it doesn't in any way make Oblivion a more enjoyable game. Especially not minute to minute, when you have to put up with all the others points in addition to having to put up with so much more useless combat in the first place.
Fair enough.Skyrim's combat is simple, but fun, and remains fun even after several hours. Morrowind's... isn't.
And why is this an improvement over Morrowind, whose world is just as pretty, and that has a fuckton of cool locations instead of "a few", and an even more varied world design? The only down to Morrowind is the prettyness of the world on a low level technical scale - ie polygon count and texture resolution. If that's the predominant criterium then expect accusations of graphic whore to fly. The one technical aspect that was indeed an annoyance was the view distance, to an extent, but that has been fixed by mods (and DraQ has some settings that increase view without negating the atmosphere that relies on the fog).Skyrim is also quite pretty even without mods, there are some cool locations to find, the world design is pretty varied, and so on and so forth.
No. NO. NO NO NO NO.So yeah, ultimately my reasons for liking the new games more to actually play mostly comes down to technical and presentation reasons, but in a game where the bulk of "gameplay" is spent hiking around and hitting stuff with a sword, those elements are important.
The most important element of an exploration-focused CRPG (fuck that stupid "hiking simulator" crap) is that the world be worth exploring. Quality and quantity of unique things to find, be they items or quests or NPCs or bits of lore or whatever. Being told an interesting narrative through the things you find. Using the things you found as a stepping stone to finding more things. And always having more unique things to find.
In this respect pretty much nothing holds a candle to Morrowind. Not even my beloved Might and Magic, much as I hate to admit it. And certainly not later TES.