Why do some consider Morrowind a better game than Oblivion?

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Vuljatar

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Morrowind has depth, flexibility, and immersion. It has atmosphere, man. When you get off the boat at Seyda Neen and set out to explore this beautiful, gigantic, living world, you are in awe. When you go into a sixth house base for the first time, you are afraid. When you confront Dagoth Ur, you are angry. The main story is both interesting and compelling (the fact that it's actually about you helps), as are all the myriad other stories woven into the faction quests and miscellaneous encounters. It draws you in because it is so deep and flexible. There are more than two ways to do anything--even the entirety of the main quest. The game is what you make of it.

Oblivion has retard-friendly interface and gameplay, shiny graphics, an utterly forgettable and uncompelling story, and 3 voice actors (one of which has maybe 7 lines in the entire game). It's got cop-out teleport-anywhere fast travel, which succeeds only in making the game world (which is actually about the same size as Morrowind's) feel tiny. Not to mention the fact that scaling enemies render leveling-up pointless (or worse than pointless, since most enemies get stronger faster than you do).

Morrowind is the plain-looking girl with glasses and acne, who grows up to be a very attractive millionaire doctor with an IQ of 180. Oblivion is the stunningly beautiful, vapid blonde ditz who gets her tits at age 14, spends half her adult life in rehab, and looks like your grandmother by the time she's 32.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is the player's character--not their in-game avatar, I mean their personal strength of character. What do you want, player? If you want a one-night stand, a cheap, easy fuck because you can't handle commitment, then go with Oblivion (or, lets get real, go with something like God of War because you aren't a RPG gamer at all). But if you want an experience, a game that you will come to love like no other, Morrowind is the game to play.

This is why Morrowind is a better game than Oblivion. That is my opinion, and it is a fact. My saying this may sound arrogant, but it's completely fucking true and every RPG gamer knows it.
 

Private Custard

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I'll merely post exactly what I posted a couple of years back during a debate on the future of the Elder Scrolls. I think this should cover my feelings!

Private Custard said:
Actually, sod it, I'm wound up now so I have to expand!! I'll copy and paste from 2 posts I made on the official forums.

I want:

1) More items, especially candles and lamps to decorate my house.

2) Some way to place items where I want them without worrying that the Havok physics engine is going to fling them all over the place if I look at them funny.

3) Skills. Longblade, shortblade, axe, spear etc etc etc... I hate the dumbing down of Oblivion, it spread to every aspect of the game and should have been sub-titled 'My First RPG'

4) All houses should be available to live in, without worrying about re-spawning crates etc... It's one of the things that made Morrowind brilliant, the ability to choose your own house.

5) New artifacts and special weapons, not just rip-offs from Morrowind. Oblivion stole, amongst other things, Azuras Star, Necromancers Amulet, Umbra......and on and on and on...

6) More spells. Again Oblivion failed on a massive scale. We want the fun spells, Jump, slowfall, levitate, mark, recall etc etc

7) The ability to wear clothes under armour and robes over the top, or just mix and match. Another of Oblivions fail points.

8) More unique dungeons and caves. So many of Oblivions caves were copy and paste jobs, crates were always found on the raised bits in the corners surrounded by stalagtites and stalagmites.

9) No more scaled levelling. To make it so you can take over the world as a level 1 character renders the entire levelling system null and void, meaning the game isn't full RPG. Remember in Morrowind when you accidentally made it to red mountain as a level 5 character and suddenly got worried for your safety?!

10) More easter eggs, things like Indiana Jones's note, the mudcrab merchant, the message in a bottle.............fishy sticks!! Things that make you want to go out and explore. Oblivion never offered much in the way of special items, and when it awarded them to you, it quite often wanted you to give them away to complete quests (garridans tears, artifacts etc..)

11) Armour - By the time you reach level 20+ in Oblivion, pretty much every bandit is wearing full elven, glass, and laughably, Daedric armour. What makes certain armours special is their exclusivity, I don't want 50 sets of Daedric in my storage chests!!

12) Draw distance - Yes Oblivion had good draw distance, but it didn't half make the world look small. If you're going to give a good draw distance, at least make places look far away.

13) Voice acting - Four words "Thank you kind sir" !! The voice acting was an epic fail. Martin was about as exciting as a coma in a nunnery and the rest of the population comprised of probably less than 15 different voices. The one ray of light was Sheogorath...............although I'm pretty certain the Sheogorath that speaks to you on the shrine quest is not the fake Scottish accented Sheogorath in SI!

14) AI - Just one example of laziness is the infinite arrows trick. Stand out the back of the Chorrol fighters guild when the Orc is doing his archery practice. Just keep taking his arrows off the target.............he'll never ask for them back!

15) Oblivion - If you can be bothered, try doing all the Oblivion gates, you'll soon realise that there are probably less than 10 individual 'Oblivions'. They repeated so often that I could guide a friend around them over voice chat!! This complaint could probably be lumped in with the repeating caves complaint I have.

16) Too much forest - the landscape had no variety, it was either mountains (with snow sometimes) or forests. Morrowind had Azuras Coast, The Ashlands, Mournhold, Solstheim (North and south), The Bitter Coast etc etc....
 

Necrofudge

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Eponet said:
Necrofudge said:
Oblivion is too easy. It has a leveled monster system. Any level 5 character could beat the game. I preferred Morrowind because of the challenge of it (and because I preferred it to Oblivion's plot)

I still play both games but I've enjoyed Morrowind far more.
Actually, Morrowind's main plot was beatable by a level 1 character if you knew what to do.
Yes, you could put it that way. In fact, you could pretty much beat any game where the main boss fight involves a puzzle or target if "you know what to do".

Still I doubt Morrowind is beatable that way if played by an average person, considering the fact that at level one, a character would barely be able to outrun a rat, let alone the monsters that guard the miscellaneous trinkets needed to win.

The average player wouldn't be able to do that, but they could easy beat oblivion since it gives them such a fancy gold decorated crutch.
 

Snor

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for all of the many reasons morrowind is beter stated (surely) before my post i would like to add that its from 2002. only that simple fact that a game from 2002 is still one of the greatest rpg's of all time (if not games of all time) means that despite technological strains the underlying mechanic is very strong.

what i felt with morrowind (in addition to anger because of missing with my blade while I clearly hit that stupid rat) was an immersion because the world felt real. the cities all had their own stories and you could feel the political intrigue between the houses, hatred for outlanders etc.

add to that the immense amount of side quests and diversity in classes (because in Oblivion it all comes down to point and kill, with little strategic differences) and you have something that is still relevant this day.

the only problem is that the game is to hard for a beginner. a tutorial + a working journal like oblivions would be very nice (how many times have i not forgotten what to do with that quests that I picked up half a year ago)
 

JustShyofGenius

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Morrowind' main plot was awesome and well told. Oblivion was pretty standard Fantasy fare. Even beyond the main story, Morrowind's internal lore was much deeper and more fun to explore. However, all of this pales in comparison to the real reason I loved Morrowind:

Exploration. In Oblivion, exploration just kinda fills out your map and helps you grind out your abilities. Everywhere you go, you find leveled, random loot and leveled enemies. Every dungeon looks the same. There's just no sense of accomplishment from searching every nook and cranny of a dungeon. It doesn't really matter where you go to kill stuff, because you find the same loot everywhere and the monsters are all relatively the same difficulty, so why explore? They did get this right in a few spots, like the Ayelid (sp?) quest and the Daedra quests.

Morrowind, though. Man. You walk into the wrong area and you are toast if you aren't well on your way to becoming a god. You can't just go anywhere you please. And when you are finally bad ass enough to go there, you might be rewarded with some seriously sweet loot. Or you might have to levitate up to some random perch that you don't even see from the ground to find a one of a kind item. It's worth your while to go to the very corner of the map because you might actually find something new that you can't find anywhere else.

Also, in Morrowind, the sense of immersion was awesome. It felt like the world existed outside of you. The dude you run into has his stats because those are his stats. That item you found in the chest has been there forever. In Oblivion, that dude you just ran into has stats based on yours and that chest you opened didn't even have loot in it until you opened it.

Sure, Oblivion was bigger, but it didn't seem to be crafted with the same love and attention to detail that Morrowind was. It was bigger for the sake of being bigger, and they sacrificed a lot to accomplish this. Too me, it feels like lazy design. They made things random and scripted because after putting the map together; it was just too daunting for them to handcraft everything.
 

Eclectic Dreck

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Private Custard said:
Actually, sod it, I'm wound up now so I have to expand!! I'll copy and paste from 2 posts I made on the official forums.

I want:

1) More items, especially candles and lamps to decorate my house.
You know, I suppose there are obviously people who desperately want houses and bases in these games. Hell, one of the coolest mods for Fallout 3 was simply a really, really awesome home for my character. But, to be honest, I don't find myself fussing over them much. In the previously mentioned mod, sure I put my weapons and ammunition in the armory as it auto sorted them and placed them on display shelves and whatnot, but in Oblivion I just dumped all my potions in one chest, my unused armor in another, and my weapons in a third. I so rarely went back to these to get a particular item that I eventually stopped worrying altogether. In morrowind, I just dumped everything in a big pile and hoped for the best.

Private Custard said:
2) Some way to place items where I want them without worrying that the Havok physics engine is going to fling them all over the place if I look at them funny.
I will say that one of the more annoying and persistent bugs in these games is the propensity of items to fall through a table after I so much as look at them. More than once some terribly important mcguffin was lost forever because it fell in such a way that I couldn't pick it up.

Private Custard said:
3) Skills. Longblade, shortblade, axe, spear etc etc etc... I hate the dumbing down of Oblivion, it spread to every aspect of the game and should have been sub-titled 'My First RPG'
I don't know if this is entirely fair. Without spending a terrific amount of time, a player is only going to be really good with one kind of weapon. And, aside from some variation in damage done when sneaking and fatigue drain with each attack, most melee weapons act more or less the same as the others. Sure, I liked using a Spear in Morrowind. It was my chosen weapon. But it was functionally identical to a sword in the long run. I suppose I'd like to have had the choice to use a spear but I don't think that not having such a choice dumbed the game down even slightly as the combat inherent in their usage was identical. I didn't get a range advantage for using a spear for example, so why would I use it when some two handed sword did twice the damage?

Private Custard said:
4) All houses should be available to live in, without worrying about re-spawning crates etc... It's one of the things that made Morrowind brilliant, the ability to choose your own house.
Morrowind had the same problem with re spawning containers if memory serves. If the container was empty, it was generally safe to put stuff in. If you found stuff in there it was not safe to put stuff in.

Private Custard said:
5) New artifacts and special weapons, not just rip-offs from Morrowind. Oblivion stole, amongst other things, Azuras Star, Necromancers Amulet, Umbra......and on and on and on...
Given that so little in the game changed mechanically, any change in these items would be entirely cosmetic. Perhaps the better complaint is that so much was identical and you simply resent the things that called attention to that fact. A fireball is a fireball. A glass dagger is a glass dagger.

Private Custard said:
6) More spells. Again Oblivion failed on a massive scale. We want the fun spells, Jump, slowfall, levitate, mark, recall etc etc
Levitate was not included precisely because it would have broken many parts of the game (specifically any part that took place in oblivion). The AI also doesn't really react well when you levitate. Mark and recall had little purpose when fast travel exists (a point you will later decry oddly enough when these spells represent the same exact thing). Slowfall was likely cut for the same reason as levitate.

Really, aside from those, you really aren't missing any spells that I can recall. And while an argument could be made that they could have redesigned segments to get around the various problems, Oblivion already had plenty of problems when it came to people encountering stuff before they are supposed to without them. Including these features would almost certainly cause more problems for an already troubled game.

Private Custard said:
7) The ability to wear clothes under armour and robes over the top, or just mix and match. Another of Oblivions fail points.
Except, the fact that you could enchant clothing as well simply meant a player could become even more unstoppably powerful. I distinctly remember the mystical set of fancy clothing that I wore under my enchanted ebony armor in Morrowind. I also recall being an unstoppable killing machine by level 10 as a result of exploiting this and other loopholes.

Sure there were other solutions to the problem, which I suspect is your real gripe much of the time. That Bethesda solved problems in ways you do not agree with, or rather solved problems that you enjoyed exploiting.

Private Custard said:
8) More unique dungeons and caves. So many of Oblivions caves were copy and paste jobs, crates were always found on the raised bits in the corners surrounded by stalagtites and stalagmites.
Really? Because I recall LOTS of copy pasted interiors in Morrowind. Lots and lots of them. In fact, I seem to recall that the game had perhaps four kinds of things. You had the caves, you had the dwarven ruins, you had those other ruins, and then you had the local buildings. Sure there were lots of really cool set pieces you ran into along the way but morrowind was just as full of stupid copy paste dungeons as Oblivion.

Private Custard said:
9) No more scaled levelling. To make it so you can take over the world as a level 1 character renders the entire levelling system null and void, meaning the game isn't full RPG. Remember in Morrowind when you accidentally made it to red mountain as a level 5 character and suddenly got worried for your safety?!
I can agree with this. I mean, the game was easier to beat at level 1 than level 25. And there were points where the sudden spike in difficulty was absurd. Those god damn mountain lions at level 10 for example. You couldn't outrun them, they easily attacked through your block and you couldn't do much more than scratch the things. Without a good supply of health and stamina potions, you were pretty much screwed if you ran into one on foot at level 10.

Private Custard said:
10) More easter eggs, things like Indiana Jones's note, the mudcrab merchant, the message in a bottle.............fishy sticks!! Things that make you want to go out and explore. Oblivion never offered much in the way of special items, and when it awarded them to you, it quite often wanted you to give them away to complete quests (garridans tears, artifacts etc..)
I can agree with this. When I found some of those easter eggs in Morrowind, it actually seemed like I might have been the first person to do so. It seemed like my own private joke that the developer decided to tell me.

Private Custard said:
11) Armour - By the time you reach level 20+ in Oblivion, pretty much every bandit is wearing full elven, glass, and laughably, Daedric armour. What makes certain armours special is their exclusivity, I don't want 50 sets of Daedric in my storage chests!!
This was true in Morrowind as well. But, your point stands regardless. Honestly, when I decided I wanted to build a set of Ebony armor in Oblivion because it looked far better than that terrible Daedric garbage, I had to go through hell and back because anyone wearing heavy armor was probably wearing Daedric thanks to the leveled list.

Private Custard said:
12) Draw distance - Yes Oblivion had good draw distance, but it didn't half make the world look small. If you're going to give a good draw distance, at least make places look far away.
That's hard to do when the world is only a few miles on a side.

Private Custard said:
13) Voice acting - Four words "Thank you kind sir" !! The voice acting was an epic fail. Martin was about as exciting as a coma in a nunnery and the rest of the population comprised of probably less than 15 different voices. The one ray of light was Sheogorath...............although I'm pretty certain the Sheogorath that speaks to you on the shrine quest is not the fake Scottish accented Sheogorath in SI!
I can agree with this as well. If you're going to have voice acting at least try to ensure it adds something that the text boxes didn't.

Private Custard said:
14) AI - Just one example of laziness is the infinite arrows trick. Stand out the back of the Chorrol fighters guild when the Orc is doing his archery practice. Just keep taking his arrows off the target.............he'll never ask for them back!
The AI was just as stupid in Morrowind. And, to be fair, AI is also one of the most difficult kinds of algorithm to write. It also tends to be very computationally expensive and people are more impressed by shiny baubles than smart enemies. So people are content to marvel at careful scripting and whatnot that helps hide blisteringly stupid AI if it means they can get closer to photo realism. And, to be honest, for all the technical marvel inherent in the AI in oblivion, it was what lead directly to some of the biggest technical problems in the game!

Private Custard said:
15) Oblivion - If you can be bothered, try doing all the Oblivion gates, you'll soon realise that there are probably less than 10 individual 'Oblivions'. They repeated so often that I could guide a friend around them over voice chat!! This complaint could probably be lumped in with the repeating caves complaint I have.
This is entirely true but then you do realize that it takes a team of artists some amount of time to produce a minor variation in the world correct? That time is a limited resource and thus spending it in environments would detract from it's being used resolving some of your other complaints (Like the fact that entire categories of weapons were missing for example).

Private Custard said:
16) Too much forest - the landscape had no variety, it was either mountains (with snow sometimes) or forests. Morrowind had Azuras Coast, The Ashlands, Mournhold, Solstheim (North and south), The Bitter Coast etc etc....
I can generally agree with this.
 

joshuaayt

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Better lore, more quests, world actually felt massive, larger spell library with less enchant limitations (That really pissed me off in Oblivion)

I feel that Oblivion only really wins on combat. Yes, it is a major victory, and so one must really weigh up their tolerance for tedious combat against Morrowind's strengths.

Morrowind was pretty fun as a pure mage, though- combat is fairly smooth as a spell caster.
 

captainwolfos

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Personally I think they hold up quite well on their own merits. I hadn't started to play Morrowind until I completed Oblivion a few dozen times, and at first attempt I couldn't get into it (then again, I only played it for about five minutes to check to see if it actually worked. Second hand ftw).

I'm an Oblivion fanboy through and through. But Morrowind is also a great game.

Oblivion:

+ Sheogorath and Haskill.
+ Big, realistic and somewhat relatable game world.
+ I like my knights in shining armour to actually look like they're wearing armour not a cardboard cosplay.
+ HORSES. And other, downloadable mounts.
+ Sheogorath.
+ The hilarity of a really fugly Dunmer woman being hit on in the cell, and being told she was in Uriel's dreams.
+ The soundtrack is good; in some ways better than Morrowind's.
+ Kvatch Rebuilt.
+ The ability to become the Madgod (however, I'd love to see how Bethesda incorporate Sheogorath in later games with this in mind).

- The fast travel system is too easily exploited.
- The inability to effectively put things onto shelves. Or in display cases. Damn things falling through them after they've closed.
- The best quality armour is too demonic for my tastes.
- Lack of options for armour without mods.
- The main quest is really lame.
- My favourite characters always die.
- It would be way better if we could go between provinces, rather than just stay the one.
- The annoying fan.
- Being the top ranking member of any faction is really boring.
- Voice actors are too few.
- Oblivion gates marring the landscape and not being removed later on.
- Things generally not getting rebuilt/repaired.

Morrowind:

+ Big, original game world.
+ No fast travel system.
+ No levelling monsters.
+ Better selection of armours AND weapons.
+ Much better questline.
+ Werewolves.
+ There's actually a questline for vampires.
+ Nerevar Rising (Call of Magic) - the soundtrack in general is godly.

- No mounts, so running around everywhere is incredibly tedious.
- Cliffracers.
- Those goddamned Ordinators.
- There's no way enemies can dodge a well placed backstab in reality.
- Written dialogue, with very little spoken.
- Graphics - it has to be said. As much as I generally don't care about it, going from Oblivion to Morrowind is somewhat weird.
- No compass - not even a buyable one. And I have no sense of direction, so that, if nothing else, would have been very useful.

And d'you know the main thing which links all of these pros and cons? They're all my opinions. So bash me as you will, this is just what I think.
 

Googenstien

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I first had Morrowind on the PC and all the expacs and loved it, it really is like a single player MMO. So much to do so many places to go and there is no order to it all.. if you start out and want to run and try to become a Werewolf or Vampire you could, nothing was stopping you from doing that - and then starting the main quest.

I liked it so much I bought my wife the GoTY box and bought it for the house for the Xbox. The kids used to tape the controllers trigger down and run into walls in the game to train athletics... aha

And unless I am confusing things.. I thought there was fast travel in Morrowind! Mage guild travels and a "recall" spell?? shit, I wanna dig up the game now and load it up again.

Now, Oblivion tried to keep this but to me failed.. failed when they tried to have a glorious graphical game. Also, the auto-level mobbed whole game totally noobed the game up and it seemed like no matter what you did.. the game threw the main quest at you and almost forced you to move in the right directions.

I am in no way bashing Oblivion, but to me it and Fallout3 were a step back for Bethesda compared to Daggerfall and Morrowind.
 

Private Custard

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Eclectic Dreck said:
Private Custard said:
Actually, sod it, I'm wound up now so I have to expand!! I'll copy and paste from 2 posts I made on the official forums.

I want:

1) More items, especially candles and lamps to decorate my house.
You know, I suppose there are obviously people who desperately want houses and bases in these games. Hell, one of the coolest mods for Fallout 3 was simply a really, really awesome home for my character. But, to be honest, I don't find myself fussing over them much. In the previously mentioned mod, sure I put my weapons and ammunition in the armory as it auto sorted them and placed them on display shelves and whatnot, but in Oblivion I just dumped all my potions in one chest, my unused armor in another, and my weapons in a third. I so rarely went back to these to get a particular item that I eventually stopped worrying altogether. In morrowind, I just dumped everything in a big pile and hoped for the best.

A huge part of Morrowind for me, and many many others, was the immersion. The ability to 'sculpt' a property into something personalised, something that really felt like a home to come back to after days of exploring and fighting was important. It just felt like I was squatting in my houses in Oblivion!

Private Custard said:
2) Some way to place items where I want them without worrying that the Havok physics engine is going to fling them all over the place if I look at them funny.
I will say that one of the more annoying and persistent bugs in these games is the propensity of items to fall through a table after I so much as look at them. More than once some terribly important mcguffin was lost forever because it fell in such a way that I couldn't pick it up.

One day in my Chorroll house, I saw a glowing item in the floor. I picked it up and was surrounded by an explosion of hundreds and hundreds of items that had disappeared into the walls one day when I just dumped them there!

Private Custard said:
3) Skills. Longblade, shortblade, axe, spear etc etc etc... I hate the dumbing down of Oblivion, it spread to every aspect of the game and should have been sub-titled 'My First RPG'
I don't know if this is entirely fair. Without spending a terrific amount of time, a player is only going to be really good with one kind of weapon. And, aside from some variation in damage done when sneaking and fatigue drain with each attack, most melee weapons act more or less the same as the others. Sure, I liked using a Spear in Morrowind. It was my chosen weapon. But it was functionally identical to a sword in the long run. I suppose I'd like to have had the choice to use a spear but I don't think that not having such a choice dumbed the game down even slightly as the combat inherent in their usage was identical. I didn't get a range advantage for using a spear for example, so why would I use it when some two handed sword did twice the damage?

Because Bethesda set themselves a benchmark, and then failed to meet it with far superior hardware. Choice is good, more choice is better, less choice when something is supposedly more advanced is undeniably worse

Private Custard said:
4) All houses should be available to live in, without worrying about re-spawning crates etc... It's one of the things that made Morrowind brilliant, the ability to choose your own house.
Morrowind had the same problem with re spawning containers if memory serves. If the container was empty, it was generally safe to put stuff in. If you found stuff in there it was not safe to put stuff in.

Not true. I had crates all over Balmora, Vivec, Sadrith Mora, Tel Vos and Dagon Fel, all filled with my own stuff. I never lost a thing due to a re-spawning crate.

Private Custard said:
5) New artifacts and special weapons, not just rip-offs from Morrowind. Oblivion stole, amongst other things, Azuras Star, Necromancers Amulet, Umbra......and on and on and on...
Given that so little in the game changed mechanically, any change in these items would be entirely cosmetic. Perhaps the better complaint is that so much was identical and you simply resent the things that called attention to that fact. A fireball is a fireball. A glass dagger is a glass dagger.

Azuras Star is Azuras Star......which my character in Morrowind already possesed. The same goes for the other copy/paste artifacts. Also, how did Umbra suddenly become a weak-assed one handed sword when it used to be a monster two handed claymore?

Laziness and lack of ideas. Bethesda knew that most people playing Oblivion would never have played Morrowind and so decided to cheap out


Private Custard said:
6) More spells. Again Oblivion failed on a massive scale. We want the fun spells, Jump, slowfall, levitate, mark, recall etc etc
Levitate was not included precisely because it would have broken many parts of the game (specifically any part that took place in oblivion). The AI also doesn't really react well when you levitate. Mark and recall had little purpose when fast travel exists (a point you will later decry oddly enough when these spells represent the same exact thing). Slowfall was likely cut for the same reason as levitate.

Really, aside from those, you really aren't missing any spells that I can recall. And while an argument could be made that they could have redesigned segments to get around the various problems, Oblivion already had plenty of problems when it came to people encountering stuff before they are supposed to without them. Including these features would almost certainly cause more problems for an already troubled game.

They could have inserted some kind of anti-levitation rule when in Oblivion realms, same as they did when, in Morrowind, you were in Mournold.

Slowfall made exploring without breaking your legs a lot easier. Mark and recall, combined with stilt striders, boats, mages guild transports and propylon chambers, made travelling the world a lot more involved than merely clicking on the map just to avoid the tedium of the world of Oblivion


Private Custard said:
7) The ability to wear clothes under armour and robes over the top, or just mix and match. Another of Oblivions fail points.
Except, the fact that you could enchant clothing as well simply meant a player could become even more unstoppably powerful. I distinctly remember the mystical set of fancy clothing that I wore under my enchanted ebony armor in Morrowind. I also recall being an unstoppable killing machine by level 10 as a result of exploiting this and other loopholes.

Sure there were other solutions to the problem, which I suspect is your real gripe much of the time. That Bethesda solved problems in ways you do not agree with, or rather solved problems that you enjoyed exploiting.

Oblivion wasn't really much of a challenge, so why remove an element of the game that would make that lack of a challenge a little more fun?

Bethesda didn't solve any problems with Oblivion, they merely hacked off a load of the interesting and fun elements for as yet unexplained reasons


Private Custard said:
8) More unique dungeons and caves. So many of Oblivions caves were copy and paste jobs, crates were always found on the raised bits in the corners surrounded by stalagtites and stalagmites.
Really? Because I recall LOTS of copy pasted interiors in Morrowind. Lots and lots of them. In fact, I seem to recall that the game had perhaps four kinds of things. You had the caves, you had the dwarven ruins, you had those other ruins, and then you had the local buildings. Sure there were lots of really cool set pieces you ran into along the way but morrowind was just as full of stupid copy paste dungeons as Oblivion.

I'm not talking about a set type of area, I'm actually talking about absolutely identical layouts being copied and pasted between different caves etc..

You're in a cave, you reach a point where the cave opens out into a larger chamber, you look to the corner of the chamber and see a raised section of rock with a slope leading up to it. Covering the near-corner of this raised section is a rock pillar, with a couple of unconnected stalagmites and stalagtites. Behind these copy/pasted rock formations is a wooden chest containing a generic enchanted weapon and possibly some gold.

Sound familiar?

I could still talk people around the various Oblivion realms without seeing the screen, all they need to do is describe what they're doing.

It's this kind of laziness that is immersion breaking. All I was thinking when exploriong caves and dungeons was 'de ja vu'.


Private Custard said:
9) No more scaled levelling. To make it so you can take over the world as a level 1 character renders the entire levelling system null and void, meaning the game isn't full RPG. Remember in Morrowind when you accidentally made it to red mountain as a level 5 character and suddenly got worried for your safety?!
I can agree with this. I mean, the game was easier to beat at level 1 than level 25. And there were points where the sudden spike in difficulty was absurd. Those god damn mountain lions at level 10 for example. You couldn't outrun them, they easily attacked through your block and you couldn't do much more than scratch the things. Without a good supply of health and stamina potions, you were pretty much screwed if you ran into one on foot at level 10.

Worryingly, I heard from Bethesda that they actually though scaled levelling was a good thing, and are planning to continue down that path!!

Private Custard said:
10) More easter eggs, things like Indiana Jones's note, the mudcrab merchant, the message in a bottle.............fishy sticks!! Things that make you want to go out and explore. Oblivion never offered much in the way of special items, and when it awarded them to you, it quite often wanted you to give them away to complete quests (garridans tears, artifacts etc..)
I can agree with this. When I found some of those easter eggs in Morrowind, it actually seemed like I might have been the first person to do so. It seemed like my own private joke that the developer decided to tell me.

One of my favourites was the pool of forgetfulness!!

Morrowind felt like it had a personality and sense of humour, which was a nice contrast with the quite threatening surroundings you were usually in


Private Custard said:
11) Armour - By the time you reach level 20+ in Oblivion, pretty much every bandit is wearing full elven, glass, and laughably, Daedric armour. What makes certain armours special is their exclusivity, I don't want 50 sets of Daedric in my storage chests!!
This was true in Morrowind as well. But, your point stands regardless. Honestly, when I decided I wanted to build a set of Ebony armor in Oblivion because it looked far better than that terrible Daedric garbage, I had to go through hell and back because anyone wearing heavy armor was probably wearing Daedric thanks to the leveled list.

Glass and ebony armour I can understand due to the number of mines in the game, it was believable. But in Morrowind, only high-end characters wore these expensive items. Bandits still wore fur, steel, iron and bear/wolf armours.

And there was only about 2 sets of Daedric, one full set worn by Divayth Fyr and the rest scattered around the land in single pieces, some of which were already enchanted and named as artifacts


Private Custard said:
12) Draw distance - Yes Oblivion had good draw distance, but it didn't half make the world look small. If you're going to give a good draw distance, at least make places look far away.
That's hard to do when the world is only a few miles on a side.

being a photography nerd, I can understand the differences between shooting at 9mm and 11mm. There are ways to gain an effect of distance, but I guess it would have been a little work for them.

To be honest, I preferred the fog of Morrowind!


Private Custard said:
13) Voice acting - Four words "Thank you kind sir" !! The voice acting was an epic fail. Martin was about as exciting as a coma in a nunnery and the rest of the population comprised of probably less than 15 different voices. The one ray of light was Sheogorath...............although I'm pretty certain the Sheogorath that speaks to you on the shrine quest is not the fake Scottish accented Sheogorath in SI!
I can agree with this as well. If you're going to have voice acting at least try to ensure it adds something that the text boxes didn't.

Another immersion-killer really

Private Custard said:
14) AI - Just one example of laziness is the infinite arrows trick. Stand out the back of the Chorrol fighters guild when the Orc is doing his archery practice. Just keep taking his arrows off the target.............he'll never ask for them back!
The AI was just as stupid in Morrowind. And, to be fair, AI is also one of the most difficult kinds of algorithm to write. It also tends to be very computationally expensive and people are more impressed by shiny baubles than smart enemies. So people are content to marvel at careful scripting and whatnot that helps hide blisteringly stupid AI if it means they can get closer to photo realism. And, to be honest, for all the technical marvel inherent in the AI in oblivion, it was what lead directly to some of the biggest technical problems in the game!

Although to be honest, the AI stupidity led to a lot of the amusing moments in the game. But taking the piss out of a game like this is something I like to do after I've beaten it, not on first playthrough

Private Custard said:
15) Oblivion - If you can be bothered, try doing all the Oblivion gates, you'll soon realise that there are probably less than 10 individual 'Oblivions'. They repeated so often that I could guide a friend around them over voice chat!! This complaint could probably be lumped in with the repeating caves complaint I have.
This is entirely true but then you do realize that it takes a team of artists some amount of time to produce a minor variation in the world correct? That time is a limited resource and thus spending it in environments would detract from it's being used resolving some of your other complaints (Like the fact that entire categories of weapons were missing for example).

So why create 50 Oblivion gates if you're only going to model 10-15 of them and then repeat over and over? Surely they must have known people would notice and call them on it?

They should have created less realms, with more inside each one. Make them seem more epic rather than a ten minute rampage to the top of the tower!


Private Custard said:
16) Too much forest - the landscape had no variety, it was either mountains (with snow sometimes) or forests. Morrowind had Azuras Coast, The Ashlands, Mournhold, Solstheim (North and south), The Bitter Coast etc etc....
I can generally agree with this.
Cool, we agree on around 10% of my gripes, I'll be happy with that!!
 

MiracleOfSound

Fight like a Krogan
Jan 3, 2009
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I much prefer Oblivion.

It was the combat that ruined Morrowind for me - hit hit miss miss miss miss hit miss miss... ugh.
 

Brotherofwill

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Lineoutt said:
Brotherofwill said:
It's deeper, the athmosphere is better, it doesn't have that too easy to use quicktravel system.

It's just the whole 'being in another world' aspect is much stronger in my opinion. I'm not sure if enemies level with you, but that really pissed me off in Oblivion.
Alright I know this thread it two years old but I can't take it any more! Where is your avatar from? I've seen it! I know I have! AAAHHH o_O

...sorry

Movie from the 60s called The Producers. Don't worry I get that a lot :D.
 

eels05

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Jun 11, 2009
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Becoming the most powerfull being in Morrowwind was an acheivement I was proud of.
 

Dexiro

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Morrowind seems to have a lot more choice and variety.

I haven't played it much, but 5 minutes in i'm riding a giant bug to some weird village that looks like it came from Star Wars, I'm seeing weird bug miners and get a list of 50 zillion guilds that presumably all hand out quests. And the loading screens show me some really creative enemies and varied environments.

Then we load up Oblivion where you get some fields, caves and ruins. The most variety you get is a bit of snow, more hills or denser trees. And the enemies are a pretty standard affair; wolves, skeletons, ogres and bandits.

They're both great games but while Oblivion is a lot more accessible the setting came across as a little generic and boring. The plains of oblivion and shivering isles were a step in the right direction :3
 

WanderingFool

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MiracleOfSound said:
I much prefer Oblivion.

It was the combat that ruined Morrowind for me - hit hit miss miss miss miss hit miss miss... ugh.
The one of the only things I hated about Morrowind. If I swing a sword and it touches a guy, I expect damage to him. When im swinging like a mad man in the early game, and a fucking Nex Hound or rat is just standing there and not even hurt... *rages in corner for a bit*

Also, I never played the games in the Elder Scroll series before Morrowind, but has the leveling system always been that way? Thats the one other thing I hate about Morrowind, and Oblivion.
 

Estocavio

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Everything besides the gameplay is superior - The world, lore, and atmosphere, as well as things to do with it all, are much more extensive than Oblivion. The combat and such are all tacked on though, in an RPG esque style.

I like Morrowind better simply because i enjoy just wandering around, finding interesting books, observing the scenery, and finding new places that are genuinely intriguing to explore (You TRY and tell me you went into a Dwemer fort for the first time, and werent curious as to the architecture and such :p). In Oblivion, you run around doing missions, and not much else.
 

theEntireRobotMafia

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Sep 16, 2010
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The problem is that Oblivion didn't add anything except better graphics, things like factions, werewolves and the ability to go anywhere and kill any of the characters, are now gone it kinda breaks the immersion when you set someone on fire and they are only unconscious