The Elder Scrolls series
 

I have to say, the Elder Scrolls series has steadily gone down hill in my opinion. Better graphics replaced better gameplay. Maps got so small, they are mere postage stamps compared to Arena or Daggerfall. Arena was huge!!!! You could walk for hours and not get anywhere. Daggerfall had all of Arenas size, though it was actually smaller, but it was a perfect trade off for the dungeons and map veriety it had - it was auto generated by a computer. Morrowind started the hand drawn maps in the series, and is actually the smallest of them all. Even though Morrowind is technically smaller than Oblivion, It did feel bigger - partially because fast travel didn't exist outside of stilt riders. Even the environment in Morrowind felt more errie.

My vote goes to Daggerfall as the best in series. You could buy anything, or own anything you wanted in this series, from boats to houses to shops. Yes, you can own a house in a town in Oblivion, but you don't have a shopping selection as you did in Daggerfall. You could do anything or be anything in Daggerfall. Even the designing of spells and weapons had more veriety in this rev than any other rev.

If I had any input to give to the designers of this series, for #5, bring back some of the size using computer generated maps and intermix it with the hand drawn sections. Bring back the variety that Daggerfall had. Bring back the changing weather like snow on the ground (Ever notice this was missing in Oblivion and Morrowind?). The weather has no impact on the ground in the latter two in the series.

THe point is, I don't need better graphics in the Elder Scroll series. I need better gameplay. And ditch the $2 add ons! THat is annoying.

Just my two cents.

-S

Morrowind was the best in my opinion.

While it lacked the Good Combat system of oblivion, and the vastness of Daggerfall it was the most perfect RPG ive ever played...every person felt like they really had a role in the world and exploreing was very fun to do.


Oblivion is built far too much for casual gamers and lets you instantly teleport from anywhere to anywhere and had less skills and items and caves/dungeons not to mention all items are set to only appear when your a certain overall Level.

Morrowind just had that great feeling when you found some extremly high quality armor after battleing through a bunch of tough foes in a cave you just discovered.

The entire series did this. You never got higher level equipment at lower levels, nor would you run into higher level monsters at low level.

-S

I never played the earlier Elder Scrolls games. I have only played Morrowind and Oblivion. While I like both, I much prefer Morrowind. The only thing I really didn't like in Morrowind was the hit or miss combat system. Other than that, it felt like the perfect RPG. It actually felt like I accomplished something. I hate the way Oblivion guides you with that stupid map marker. I like the idea of horses but no horse combat just makes them dumb. When I level up I can actually run faster than the slower horses. The levelling system in Oblivion is deplorable. Everything about it just sucks. I'm glad I have the PC version so I can enter the console and "upgrade" my low level junk into something useful. When I "upgrade" I first remove the old item then add the new. I also hate the way you have to recharge enchanted weapons in Oblivion. It is SO annoying and really turns it into a chore. The merchant system is a joke, the guilds awkward (you can lead the Mages Guild with no magical skills whatsoever etc.), and no real incentive to explore because of the levelling system. The storyline in Morrowind was excellent (including Bloodmoon and Tribunal). The storyline in Olbivion is ok, but not as good as Morrowinds and predictable. Oblivion is ok but ultimately in the end it is kind of a let down.

Morrowind with the female companion mod for those lonely treks - after a while she got on my nerves, so i killed her.....:rotfl:

Started with Oblivion, and really liked it. Bought Morrowind in the bargain bin, and while it is a larger and seemingly more complex game, it seems to be a bit of a chore, dodgy fonts and their sizes, which makes the truckload of reading near impossible and very little audio make it hard for me to get into.

I still give it a go now and then, but never get far into it.

You can finish Morrowind game in 12min, seen a video of it, the guy starts of as a mage type character lvl 1 then goes grab some spells which up his stats to become some uber mage then heads straight to the end boss and kills him. All in 12min, game over.:D

Bit like another game i clocked a few hrs into it, Elemental Evil a turnbase rpg, headed out to this castle and i could see through this wall (glitch, bug?) which i shouldn't be seeing, went in their and killed this boss which took me 3 reloads of the game but, when i would die and respawn he wouldn't reheal. I killed him and got the games end credits??? finished it!

Morrowind rocked. It was a game that felt like it had a truly epic feel to it. Standing on top of a mountain checking out yourself decked in armour at sunset, and then finding some scary necromancer's temple guarded closely by dark elves ripe for the slaughter. Some of the architecture, the characters, and the vistas I will always remember. Oblivion seemed to lack a lot of the unique areas and fun sights that Morrowind had - after playing for a few hours, I felt that if I had seen one city/forest/dungeon, I had seen them all. Plus the stupid levelling system removed any sense of danger or adventure because I knew that no matter where I went, the worst thing I would encounter would be a skeleton or a wolf.

Skeleton or wolf? I suppose you haven't hit a goblin cave, accidentally triggering a fight with three Goblin Warlords or closed Oblivion gates with less than ideal weapons and armor on- you'll fight for your dear life. No offense meant. I would like to like Morrowind but as said before, the small text and graphics are such a big immersion killer for me as well that I simply can't. Too bad, it's a great game on it's own. Oblivion with mods is a good piece of work but not great because of it's rather horrible software and plethora of bugs that Bethesda doesn't feel like fixing. Losers.

I played Morrowind maybe a couple of hours, total. I still have it, I just haven't gotten around to trying to get the thing to run again. It ran when I first got it, the learning curve was really steep and I felt like I was just bumbing around, so I set it aside for awhile. Last time I tried loading it, it was crashing all the time from the drivers, so I just haven't loaded it again.

Oblivion is fairly cool. It is a console game, but I thought it was a fairly decent port from console. The controls work for me, the graphics are just astounding, the world is very detailed, the music and atmosphere very rich, very good scripting for the "random" conversations that people have, probably 20,000+ lines of dialogue. It's multithreaded, and will take full advantage of SLI graphic card setups and twin displays. There has to be at least 500 "side quests", and then another 200 which are recurringly generated. I just picked up Shivering Isles as part of my going out (of PC gaming) splurge, and I haven't gotten around to actually getting into the damn thing. I just completed the Dark Brotherhood quests, and the Thieves' Guild stuff. There's just too much to do on the game. My windows machine will crash before I can complete half the side-quests.



I think it's a great game. It was made as well as Half-Life 2.

Don't get married! :D

What was more fun was to steal a goblins tribe staff. You then drop it in another goblins cave, and that goblins tribe will find it - creating a war between the two tribes - carnage everywhere! Ever seen 50+ goblins fighting it out? I made myself invisible - essentially a fly on the wall! That was the best part about Oblivion! :D :D :D

VENGANCE!


First time I heard that in DF I nearly fell out of my chair!

some-what ironicaly it was the much praised AI that killed both morrowind and oblivion for me...
i just got utterly bored stupid with the enem AI behaviuor...
they only did one of two things no matter what type of enemy they were..

1/stand about like a man at a bus stop whilst i killed it with arrows from long range..
2/run at me like a maniac...

utterly repetive..apart from that both games were great...but enemy AI ..and that goes for any game any genre and time any where,,,the AI is the game

Morrowind, properly modded, gave me the deepest gaming experience I ever encountered in a first-person RPG. Each NPC had its personal story, its faction had its own purposes, sometimes conflicting with the other factions, the island to explore was huge - especially with the add-ons - and the graphics were great for the time the game appeared. Compared to it, NPCs in Oblivion seemed so lifeless and soooo few. A capital populated with some 80-100 inhabitants, all giving roughly the same answers... Immersion killer, in my eyes. All in all Morrowind gave a much better feeling in terms of gameplay, even though it couldn't compete with Oblivion's fantastic graphic engine.