DragoFireheart ,
Clockwork Knight - *sigh* on it. Expect a few posts.
Hi!
Putting nostalgia glasses aside, what do you think is the objectively better RPG?
Morrowind.
Do you enjoy the dice-rolling button-smashing combat of morrowind, or the fluent slice-n-dice skyrim combat?
Neither and neither is fluent.
Morrowind's combat is built around saner assumptions (in the end skill in combat is hitting without being hit yourself) but it's clunky and fails to represent misses visually.
Skyrim's combat is built around insane assumptions (combatants keep hitting each other until one keels over, skill deciding how hard they hit) and fails to represent most hits visually (it's like you're hitting an invisible box, not a living being).
Additionally Skyrim's combat precludes attacking underwater or when airborne and has reduced variety of available weapons, but OTOH Skyrim has very nice and logical wielding system.
Morrowind offers more control over attacks and more responsive controls, but Skyrim allows for controlled blocking and more diversity as far as attacks go.
Now, modded Skyrim with smarted up AI, added hit feedback and high enough damage to preclude just trading blows can have pretty decent combat as it switches it back to hit while not getting hit, except it's more of player's responsibility this time.
Which world had a greater immersive quality to it? (aesthetics, emergent elements as well)
Morrowind has better world in general, aesthetics included. It also gives player stuff like spellmaker to fiddle with and has much less scripting in its quest meaning more freedom regarding solving them.
That said Skyrim's art direction isn't half bad and it does stuff involving random events and AI reactions much better for obvious reasons, even if it sometimes results in hilarious bloopers.
OTOH while Skyrim features some nice diversity in its locations, the rewards for exploration are questionable and most dungeons are awfully linear.
To its credit, though, there are quite a few almost contained corridors that seem to do a good job corraling retards but are just leaky enough to allow a resourceful player break the sequence and reap the rewards.
The fact that some things, like loot, are unreachable the normal way indicate that it was intentional.
Some dungeons, particularly those featuring contained exterior/fake exterior areas can be refreshingly non-linear, external hostile areas, like bandit and forsworn camps can also allow considerable freedom of approach, which alleviates the impact of unbranching corridors underneath.
Overall I'd say Morrowind wins again, but Skyrim does have some noticeable improvements.
How about the classless character progression in skyrim? Or would you rather have your character clasically "rolled" into classes?
That's actually two questions.
Classless is better, but you should have starting builds.
Skyrim lacks those and Morrowind was effectively classless, with classes having little actual impact beyond initial builds and custom classess allowing you to build any combination of skills and stats.
OTOH the progression itself is much better in Skyrim. Advancement based on all skill gains eliminates stupid and tedious metagaming and the builds diverge with time rather than converging.
Limited (pre-Legendary) perk points are great too.
Questlines! Which game had those written better?
Morrowind, hands down.
Individual quests may not be anything to write home about, but there is precious little scripting involved allowing player to complete quests any way they choose or even preempt most of them or complete them out of order, there are no things like unpickable locks, and the quest tie nicely into each other and world
creating a network-like structure.
Admittedly, Skyrim doesn't do a bad job tying the quests to the world and it does try to create similar network of interconnected quests (presumably after the fiasco of free-floating ones in OB), but the problem is that addition of tight scripting and unpickable locks turns it from nice and organic quest structure into "suddenly I have to join College of Winterhold to complete an unrelated sidequest" artificial derpcoaster.
Other than that the pacing is invariably awful, questlines are short and some quests are plagued with baffling lapses of logic (CoW questline in particular can be summarized with "WTF just happened?").
Then there are questlines that more or less work narratively, but hinge on player doing or not doing a particular thing they could, just as well decide otherwise. For example, what would happen if I snitched on Aela to Kodlak right away?
Overall, while some quests are pretty nice Skyrim does a piss poor job with its questlines.
P.S. I would love if some people who played/replayed Morrowind on some overhaul mods contributed! Since it makes it feel a little bit less retro and fresh in comparison to Skyrim.
Actually, Skyrim has more need for mods than Morrowind.
