Bethesda: Skyrim finds medium between Morrowind, Oblivion

User Comments: 31

1. June 27, 2011 5:15 PM
   Scott8090 said:

   I honestly loved morrowind to death. I played it many more hours than oblivion because it was much more alluring. I hated the quick travel in oblivion. Morrowinds biggest fault was its combat system which was improved drastically in oblivion. The fact that you could swing over and over and over again at the same enemy, with your blade passing through the enemy with no contact drove me nuts. Some people disliked the inventory sorting in oblivion I didn't hate it but one thing I will mention is that with any rpg on pc please please please map the pages of the inventory to keys (I for inventory, J for journal etc none of this f keys or tab crap, we have 126+ keys, make use of them) I just worry about the inventory system turning purely into a console only system where you see one item at a time and pan across over and over like in some games. If its anything like fable 3 I'm not buying it I still haven't beaten oblivion even though I modded it heavily and did most of the side missions because overall it was WAY too repetitive from the procedurally created caves to the procedurally created oblivion gates. Over the entire series the environmental designs have been fabulous but when it came to character animations and especially the character skinning/ armor was horrible. We are getting ready to move into a next generation of graphics soon and I don't want to see bethesda fall behind. Skyrim looks like its headed in the right direction and hopefully more of the things we loved in morrowind come back to with a new viking inspired environment

   Thanks for suffering through my opinionated rant.

   James Adler

   No junk right, The day a company bothers to make a game that caters to PC Gamers again then I might say Companies finally pulled their heads out of their butts and made a good pc game lol.

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2. June 27, 2011 5:19 PM
   Scott8090 said:

   I've loved ES games from the get go, and my only hope for this game is that Bethesda don't sell out and only listen to "Morrowind" band jumpers, that think they know how to make a good CRPG but don't know sh-t, going all the time "WAH Morrowind wasn't like this!"

   Morrowind band jumpers? dude...the vast amount of "complaining" fan boys are the Oblivion Crowd. Morrowind is old school. It wasn't vastly popular on the xbox or even as well known on the PC. Yea people played both but coincidentally the "360" crowd are more likely and obviously are..more rude and disrespect over all. Hell, read the comments the People who "liked" aspects of morrowind and played the game are not ditching crap..gezz complaining kids...

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3. June 27, 2011 5:21 PM
   Scott8090 said:

   i loved both games.

   cant pick between the two,

   i don't know why people are so against oblivions fast travel system, before you could fast travel somewhere, you had to walk there on foot anyway. and you didn't have to fast travel if you didn't want to.

   You know In some ways I hated traveling too lol but for some reason how the made fast travel in "oblivion" made it just less exploration friendly. Hell, I liked the fast travel but I found that exploring was just plain worthless really..It didn't yield anything that made me say mmm maybe I should go in that ruin I just passed. Morrowind I was always like YEA!! cave heck yea!. Oblivion I just ran though and did quests..caves ruins all were kind of blah to me. Good exploration options+fast travel+good city options= YEA!!!

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4. June 27, 2011 5:27 PM
   Scott8090 said:

   Not sure if anyone felt the same way but I thought archery was rather weak. The ability to hit your target was fixed with the new combat system but The default damage of Archery made it rather pointless for my self. Didn't take long at all Till using a sword in closer to median corners was a "requirement".

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5. October 22, 2011 10:15 PM
   Guest said:

   It seems that, for the most part, the Oblivion fans are the ones that played it first, and the Morrowind fans are the ones that played it first. This is kind of true for me, and kind of not. I was young when I first played Morrowind. Even though Morrowind has a T rating and Oblivion has an M rating, I always get the feeling that Morrowind is more mature and was aimed at an older audience. My reasoning for this is that at first, Morrowind seemed okay, and then Oblivion seemed vastly better in comparison. Then, as I matured, Morrowind began to grow more and more on me. I eventually liked it better, about as much better as I initially liked Oblivion. This is because Morrowind treated you more like an adult. You had to go out and learn the world. You had to learn the customs of the people, you had to make important decisions for your character, particular blunders could get you killed, espsecially if you just ran around swinging your weapon. In Oblivion, I felt more like it held your hand and walked you through stuff. Although you could try to, there was no need to think. The biggest puzzle in the game, from Tar Meena, was solved for you by waiting a day longer. The biggest puzzle in the Mages Guild was solved fro you by telling a guy what stone tablets said--you didn't even have to translate them yourself. The levelling system in Oblivion I didn't mind as much as some, but it still became dull. There are serious flaws with Morrowind too, though. The major ones I can list are the physics and combat. I liked the magic a ton, almost more than in Oblivion, but the combat I hated in comparison. I hated the hit chance related to skill, especially with ranged weapons. After missing with a bow 50 times because your skill was "too low", you couldn't even pick the arrows back up. Now, I like the games almost equally for different reasons. The most important thing is that I will always love ES more than any FPS, unless it gives a real good reason to like it (because FPS's are BORING).

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6. February 3, 2012 2:06 AM
   Guest said:

   Granting that Oblivion had some very neat things going for it, and that Morrowind's graphics were more primitive (though that can be improved by modding)...

   Of the two, I liked Morrowind better. The feeling of vastness was unbeatable.

   Now Skyrim enters into the competition and of the three...

   Skyrim wins.

   All three are great games, but Skyrim looks the best, was more stable at release (not perfect, but better than either of the other two games), it has better voice acting overall (and more voice actors), it has a vast quantity of things to do, and the worldspace outside of the cities is interesting enough to convince me not to fast travel at all.

   Morrowind gave us a larger land mass, though, and more content than Oblivion or Skyrim. It's still high on my list of all-time favorite games. But Skyrim is a high water mark in game design, in my mind. BethSoft done good. (I say this as a PC player; if I were using a Playstation, I might have a different perspective.)

   Now if I could convince BethSoft to put their heads together with Google and figure out a way to put NPC AI in the cloud, kind of like Apple's Siri, I'd be in heaven. A world as gorgeous and immersive as Skyrim deserves NPCs as bright and flexible as Siri, don't you think? I want to be able to speak to NPCs via a mic or keyboard in natural language, and I want them to have thousands of conversational topics colored by tweaks applied to each NPC to cover motivation and personalization. Make me dig to find out what an NPC knows about stuff - and don't let them all know everything.

   And there ought to be some wooing before you can marry someone. Just sayin'. And some romantic conversations afterward, y'know? Dinner? A walk in a meadow? Go hunting together? Hand over some gold to your spouse to help her/him get her/his business started?

   BethSoft still hasn't figured out what to do with the player after he's taken over a guild. Semi-random quests to be personally executed? Uh... what about directing the guild?

   And there's the fact that in none of the games does anything happen outside of a ten meter bubble around the player. That also could be solved with cloud-based AI. A world needs to be *influenced* by the player, but it shouldn't be static when the player does nothing or ignores a problem.

   And I'd like for the races to mean something besides stats tweaks. I've played several races, and it doesn't matter: the story of the Dragonborn is exactly the same, the characters don't react at all to your race. Thalmor are just as arrogant and unfriendly to a High Elf dragonborn as they are to a Nord dragonborn. Hmm. You'd think simple self-interest would have them recruiting a High Elf dragonborn to their side if they could, and the Nords ought to be put out at a High Elf roaming the countryside as they please.

   And really, how *do* those guards know I'm skilled at sneaking, when they haven't seen me sneak?

   There aren't enough money sinks. Give us more stuff we can spend gold on. Like... build a town and castle, recruit guards, merchants and citizens... mods that do that stuff are insanely popular. Why not put it in the game from the start?

   Eh. Skyrim is a high water mark, but there's plenty of space left above the mark.

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