You are dead on with your Morrowind/Oblivion comparison. I'm one of those weird people who played Oblivion first, and then went back to play Morrowind. THANK GOD I DID. I don't think I could have enjoyed Oblivion as much as I did in 2006 if I knew how inferior/nerfed the game is when compared to Morrowind.Olivia75 said:Awesome review, right on the money, Yahtzee. Again.
I loved Morrowind, but Oblivion was such a lame follow-up. ("Follow-down" might be more accurate.)
That's exactly our biggest complaint - the scenery. Might sound picky to someone after a dungeon-crawl hack-slash, but to me and mine, we like immersion. Morrowind had it. Someone in the art department spent an aeon on morrowind, figuring out what plants grew in what regions, what fungus resembled what other fungus, the types of plants and vegetation that would grow in each separate region, and that is a level of detail I really appreciate. That, Oblivion was totally without.
Ditto to the characters. We LIKED that Morrowind had people ambling about saying "outlander, you are wounded," or "we welcome you freely" or whatever, as you walked past. But in Oblivion they just talk without being asked - "i saw a mud crab recently." My god, call the feds. Who, on any planet, talks like that?
Also, if they rendered the cities from the outside we could have still had levitate spells. And WTF was up with the telekinesis in Ob?? I loved it in Morrowind. It nearly killed me in Oblivion.
Horses were cool, but who cares - if you can't fight from the back of a horse, you don't want a horse. (Plus it kept getting gored by minotaurs and periodically running away anyway.)
enchantment was retarded in oblivion, but excellent in morrowind.
I read somewhere about the development of Oblivion, with the AI causing problems such as guards on duty would get hungry and abandon their posts and go hunting... and so other guards would arrest them for deserting and so on. Or they would steal apples and get arrested... THAT sounds like a game i want to play. Why did they take that out? It sounds awesome.
I bought Oblivion the minute it was available. I mean, i was down there at midnight when the store had them on the day the xbox arrived and all, because i thought it would surpass Morrowind. But i got a bit over it a bit quick. Mod up Morrowind a bit and it's still light years ahead. Man, i'm STILL playing morrowind. I've been throught the main story a hundred times over, but it's still fun to waltz about in that world. There are still things in there that surprise me.
Anyway, to cut a fat story thing, i dug the review, and i wholeheartedly agree with the whole thing.
cheers.
Anybody who has played both games and prefers Oblivion is clearly judging the games on style, not substance.