Zomg
Arbiter
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2005
- Messages
- 6,984
Around the time Oblivion came out it was still the hrdkr Codex opinion to regard Morrowind as outright trash (or seemed to be, anyway). This no longer seems to be the communal wisdom.
My critical thumbnail sketch of Morrowind is (in no significant order):
Terrible combat (the core gameplay) - completely uninteresting after about thirty minutes into the game.
Terrible character development - completely misdesigned, it facilitates only irritation.
Poor quests - Virtually all of them are unambitious and their main function is to set you hiking through the striking landscapes.
Terrible roleplaying (in the sense of expressing a character for the PC(s) in the context of a gameworld) - The world is almost perfectly static and untouched by your actions, the questlines are mostly linear and compartmentalized (up to and including becoming the boss of mutually opposed groups without any of the obvious feedback) and in general there is never a sense of character to the PC.
Good "lore", with excellent presentation as a mass of slowly integrating information that you pick up in random scraps.
Good visual design.
The "Offline MMORPG" description is apt.
I haven't played Oblivion. My impression is that the combat is improved, the character development is nearly identical, the quests are elementally better yet they suffer from velvet glove features like the quest compass, the roleplaying and static world problems are unchanged, and the lore and visual design are shifted towards generic fantasy.
Is that accurate? Is there a sunnier interpretation of Morrowind to compare it to?
My critical thumbnail sketch of Morrowind is (in no significant order):
Terrible combat (the core gameplay) - completely uninteresting after about thirty minutes into the game.
Terrible character development - completely misdesigned, it facilitates only irritation.
Poor quests - Virtually all of them are unambitious and their main function is to set you hiking through the striking landscapes.
Terrible roleplaying (in the sense of expressing a character for the PC(s) in the context of a gameworld) - The world is almost perfectly static and untouched by your actions, the questlines are mostly linear and compartmentalized (up to and including becoming the boss of mutually opposed groups without any of the obvious feedback) and in general there is never a sense of character to the PC.
Good "lore", with excellent presentation as a mass of slowly integrating information that you pick up in random scraps.
Good visual design.
The "Offline MMORPG" description is apt.
I haven't played Oblivion. My impression is that the combat is improved, the character development is nearly identical, the quests are elementally better yet they suffer from velvet glove features like the quest compass, the roleplaying and static world problems are unchanged, and the lore and visual design are shifted towards generic fantasy.
Is that accurate? Is there a sunnier interpretation of Morrowind to compare it to?