Morrowind playthrough rant

[Shaewaroz]

Rant posts only work as long as you don't offer a game that supposedly did it right.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

So what you're saying is that Morrowind is so amazing that it appeals both to hopeless autists and casual dudebros?

edit: then again, Drog has a point. Yesterday I was browsing reddit's skyrim page and stumbled upon this conversation.

When I first played Skyrim I accidentally killed Alvor and so I had no idea what to do for the main quest, and so I did the Civil War.

That sounds like a serious oversight on Bethesda's part. You'd think Alvor and Gerdur would be essential (non-killable) until they've pointed you toward Whiterun.

imagine being so SPECIAL that Skyrim's main quest mystifies you

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

You start a thread bashing Morrowind, calling it a "flawed turd", and now 10 posts later you reveal that one of its successors, Fallout: New Vegas, is among your favorite RPGs?

In what way exactly is F:NV a successor to Morrowind? A completely different company, different dev team, different setting, different systems... Just because they use the same company's engine? That's pretty tenuous.

Well trolled, Porky, well trolled. Fallout: New Vegas has its strengths, and it's superior to the other successors of Morrowind (though that isn't saying much), but its exploration, world-building, and aesthetics are all inferior to Morrowind's, as is its combat which is simply FPS w/VATS. Perhaps next you can create a thread hyperbolically attacking Pool of Radiance and eventually reveal that your list of favorite RPGs includes Secret of the Silver Blades or Buck Rogers.

If you had read F:NV threads here, you'd know that I outline a simple way to improve F:NV's combat with several mods and setting changes, and always advise people not to use VATs. With that approach, F:NV's combat actually becomes a decent FPS experience, miles ahead of Morrowind. It's aesthetics are also more interesting than Morrowind's because of the differences between NCR and the Legion, and how all of that is tied to actual gameplay, quests, etc, as opposed to Morrowind, where aesthetics represent an empty shell around a dead husk of a world. Exploration is much better in F:NV because most places you come to have actual content besides a few enemies to kill.

I could once again point out the strong architectural sense of Morrowind, which clearly differentiates between Imperial, Redoran, Hlaalu, Telvanni, and Temple settlements, each with their own distinct style (which are also highly original, except for the Imperials), not to mention the Dwemer and Daedric styles. Or I could once again point to the natural environment, with regions that are distinct from each other yet avoid being caricatures. Or I could once again point out the unique flora and fauna that contribute to the sense of Morrowind being an alien setting. Or I could once again point to the beauty of the moons and nebulae at night, the water, ash storms. But all of it would lost on you, as apparently you prefer the monotonous aesthetics of a post-apocalyptic desert. This is similar to someone on an art forum starting a thread blasting J.M.W Turner only to eventually reveal they're a fan of Monet.

These are just different settings, and arguing about which one is better is silly. You can do great things with pretty much any setting aesthetically.

Interesting to you means that a location has a quest attached and is just waiting to be looted by the PC. Otherwise, New Vegas offers nonsensical maze-like interiors for buildings, a handful of caves that look alike, and a handful of vaults that look alike. And its overworld is extremely constricted. Morrowind, by contrast, offers an overworld that is well designed so as to feel as large as the area it represents, divided between nine distinct geographical regions, with numerous settlements ranging from large cities to ramshackle fishing villages. And it offers a larger number of dungeon-type locations to match, with more variety in their overall type, and with better interior design.

Morrowind is larger yes, but that's about it. The fact that F:NV has less of each type of location is a plus, leading to less repetition. But each location in F:NV is much better than in Morrowind. Although not as varied and unique as in Gothic games, F:NV has locations that actually feel different because they come with interesting back stories and things of that nature. For example, there is one side vault in NV which is completely optional, where you can find computer records, notes, etc of a vast morbid experiment that you unravel by exploring the vault. NV is full of stuff like that, whereas Morrowind is just dull and empty, and any optional dungeon you come across will have nothing besides some stuff to fight and worthless loot to find.

In an RPG, a poor combat system based on character skill trumps a poor action-based combat system, like the one used in the Gothic series. Moreover, I wasn't aware that the VATS system of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas involved any great understanding of the game system --- or any understanding whatsoever. However, Morrowind's combat system, though lacking in tactical depth, isn't without points of interest, as others have attempted to explain to you, though you seem impervious to all reason.

You keep throwing up these strawmen arguments: the understanding of the game system had to do with BG and ToEE games as I carefully explained before. With a combat system like NV, an FPS system, the player skill involved is obviously physical (aiming, running around, etc).

Fallout: New Vegas, Gothic, and Gothic 2 can be said to fall into the same subgenre of RPGs as Morrowind, and all three are objectively inferior in world-building, exploration, aesthetics, and even combat.

Thank you for your personal opinion.

 

[CrawlingDead]

Morrowind has always been overrated , it's mediocre game , not top 10 . I can agree with OP , Morrowind's points that people claim to be strong aren't actually that good .

Here's what I especially like

Every Morrowind lover I talked to said that . It's like you have to be the chosen one to like Morrowind , more like you have to have autism to enjoy Morrowind .

Offtopic rant

Spoiler

You know , I joined codex because I saw people bashing Morrowind here , and I thought there are people who have taste on Codex , but I learned that Morrowind faggotry is strong here . Are you satisfied with the current Bethesda ? You know why this happened ? Because people were so happy to fill their mouths with shit to buy Morrowind , which brought Bethesda on top and have set their general direction in video game industry , which they follow still .

I'd have to disagree. It was pretty impressive upon release. A realized, open-ended world in the first-person with real-time combat, yet with enough RPG elements to keep the hard-core satisfied. It certainly didn't match the RPG deepness of Baldur's Gate, but it did well in it's own right.

They could have done so much with the franchise after that: fixing, adding, and further improving the gameplay and writing of the series, perhaps adding many of the elements missing from Daggerfall that could have been further realized with much more powerful technology. But the assholes at Bethesda saw the money and exploited the hell out of the xbox, reducing the franchise to a mere action hiking simulator game.

 

[Sjukob]

I'd have to disagree. It was pretty impressive upon release. A realized, open-ended world in the first-person with real-time combat, yet with enough RPG elements to keep the hard-core satisfied. It certainly didn't match the RPG deepness of Baldur's Gate, but it did well in it's own right.

My problem is that Morrowind doesn't have strong points I can play it for . It's like jack of all trade , but I don't like the mix it offers . If audience was interested in the open world RPG with real time combat , the first Gothic that came out earlier was a better game overal .

 

[laclongquan]

The first thing they could have done with Morrowind is to fire the entire writing department. Kick them all out and replace anew.

Everything else take far second places, like coding, graphic, etc...

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

In what way exactly is F:NV a successor to Morrowind? A completely different company, different dev team, different setting, different systems... Just because they use the same company's engine? That's pretty tenuous.

Well, let's see... Bethesda created Morrowind, and then four years later released Oblivion using the same game engine but dumbed down in far too many ways to mention in this thread. This was followed two-and-a-half years later by their adaptation of the Oblivion version of the engine to Fallout 3. Two years after that, Obsidian released Fallout New Vegas using the same game engine with virtually no changes (yes, the substance within the engine was better in New Vegas than Fallout 3 but the engine was not, unless you think changing the way armor applies to damage was crucial to the game). I could understand how someone's preferences might lead them to claim that Fallout New Vegas was equal to, or even somewhat better than, Morrowind, but it's illogical and preposterous to claim Fallout New Vegas is one of your favorite RPGs while simultaneously vomiting over Morrowind.

Coming next for Porky...
Starts a thread bashing Deus Ex for its level design, writing, and combat. Then reveals one of his favorite games is Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Starts a thread bashing Dungeon Master for its exploration, puzzles, and graphics. Then reveals one of his favorite games is Eye of the Beholder 3.
Starts a thread bashing Thief: The Dark Project for its level design, cut scenes, and characters. Then reveals one of his favorite games is Thief: Deadly Shadows.
Starts a thread bashing Demon's Souls for its atmosphere, combat, and backstory. Then reveals one of his favorite games is Dark Souls 2.
Starts a thread bashing Pool of Radiance for its linearity, encounters, and interface. Then reveals one of his favorite games is Secret of the Silver Blades.
Starts a thread bashing Fallout for its world-building, exploration, and character customization. Then reveals one of his favorite games is Fallout 2. Or Fallout 3.

It's aesthetics are also more interesting than Morrowind's because of the differences between NCR and the Legion, and how all of that is tied to actual gameplay, quests, etc, as opposed to Morrowind, where aesthetics represent an empty shell around a dead husk of a world.
These are just different settings, and arguing about which one is better is silly. You can do great things with pretty much any setting aesthetically.

If arguing about the aesthetics of a setting is silly, then you've been silly this entire time. Yes, it's possible to have good or bad aesthetics in any given setting, but video game developers (for the most part) make their own settings, and Morrowind's Vvardenfell is a far more interesting setting than New Vegas' Mojave Desert, with aesthetics to match. It's been pointed out to you time and time again how Morrowind's aesthetics contribute to its world-building, in innumerable ways. And yet the one example you provide of New Vegas' aesthetic superiority is that the NCR troops dress like 20th century Americans, while Caesar's Legion LARPs as Romans --- as though Morrowind doesn't also have aesthetic distinctions between factions, including the Imperial Legion dressing in pseudo-Roman fashion!

Exploration is much better in F:NV because most places you come to have actual content besides a few enemies to kill.
Morrowind is larger yes, but that's about it. The fact that F:NV has less of each type of location is a plus, leading to less repetition. But each location in F:NV is much better than in Morrowind. Although not as varied and unique as in Gothic games, F:NV has locations that actually feel different because they come with interesting back stories and things of that nature. For example, there is one side vault in NV which is completely optional, where you can find computer records, notes, etc of a vast morbid experiment that you unravel by exploring the vault. NV is full of stuff like that, whereas Morrowind is just dull and empty, and any optional dungeon you come across will have nothing besides some stuff to fight and worthless loot to find.

That's Bethesda's post-Morrowind style of world-building: Every location has to be quirky with a unique story to go along with it, so that the player can always be having a fun cinematic experience. Your criticism of Morrowind's exploration and world-building always comes back to the fact it presents an actual world, rather than a theme park. By the way, your description of a "side vault in NV which is completely optional, where you can find computer records, notes, etc of a vast morbid experiment that you unravel by exploring the vault" applies to all 4 vaults, which differ only in the enemies you kill. And you always ignore the vast amount of world-building contributed by books and dialogue. And how exploration applies not only to interior locations but also the natural environment of the overworld, something where Morrowind excels and where a larger gameworld is necessary.

If you had read F:NV threads here, you'd know that I outline a simple way to improve F:NV's combat with several mods and setting changes, and always advise people not to use VATs. With that approach, F:NV's combat actually becomes a decent FPS experience, miles ahead of Morrowind.
You keep throwing up these strawmen arguments: the understanding of the game system had to do with BG and ToEE games as I carefully explained before. With a combat system like NV, an FPS system, the player skill involved is obviously physical (aiming, running around, etc).

If aiming and running around qualify as physical player skills that make a combat system interesting to you, then Morrowind certainly qualifies, as you must have realized if you actually completed a playthrough as a magic-focused character. It could be intelligently argued that a deep, innovative action-based combat system (Dragon's Dogma, Demon's/Dark Souls) is better in an RPG than a mediocre character-skill-based system, but such systems are hard to come by. You, on the other hand, are suggesting that a First-Person Shooter is a better combat system for an RPG than Morrowind's character-skill-based system. Similarly, you had earlier unfavorably compared Morrowind's combat system to Gothic's, as though adopting a poorly-designed action system would have made Morrowind's combat better. Finally, as an example of a non-action-based tactically-deep system you're suggesting Bioware's Real Time with Pause, which was easily the worst element of the otherwise excellent Planescape: Torment.

Thank you for your personal opinion.

You're welcome.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

... Repeating how F:NV has pretty much nothing to do with Morrowind other than sharing an engine made by the same company, many years apart...

I could understand how someone's preferences might lead them to claim that Fallout New Vegas was equal to, or even somewhat better than, Morrowind, but it's illogical and preposterous to claim Fallout New Vegas is one of your favorite RPGs while simultaneously vomiting over Morrowind.

Since you've failed to show how F:NV is related to Morrowind other than in a most tenuous far-removed fashion, I don't see why this would be preposterous at all. If I say A is better than B, and you say it's preposterous to say that because they are closely related, you have to actually show that A is very similar to B, you know as in beyond just sharing the same company as the creator of the engine they are based on.

That's Bethesda's post-Morrowind style of world-building: Every location has to be quirky with a unique story to go along with it, so that the player can always be having a fun cinematic experience.

I am not sure you understand what cinematic means in the context of games. It usually refers in a negative manner to experiences that are passive, out of player's control, where they are presented with a pre-made "cinematic". This has nothing to do with the presence of actual content, especially if that content, as in F:NV, actually happens to be very interactive and the complete opposite of a "cinematic".

Your criticism of Morrowind's exploration and world-building always comes back to the fact it presents an actual world, rather than a theme park.

There is no actual world outside of Bethesda's games where you have 50 copy and paste locations of 10 different types that contain absolutely nothing of interest. The real world might be relatively boring compared to a video game, but even locations of little interest such as farms, caves, etc, still contain something unique. Every farmer has his own story, his own problems, every cave has its own animals, etc. If you want to look for an example of how a huge open world game like that should be done, look to Dwarf Fortress, not Morrowind or Daggerfall. In DF (when it's finished anyway), there is depth to things, in Morrowind there is just copy-paste.

If aiming and running around qualify as physical player skills that make a combat system interesting to you, then Morrowind certainly qualifies, as you must have realized if you actually completed a playthrough as a magic-focused character.

Do I really need to explain the difference between aiming a very fast tiny projectile over potentially long distances against multiple well armed opponents vs the combat system in Morrowind?

Similarly, you had earlier unfavorably compared Morrowind's combat system to Gothic's, as though adopting a poorly-designed action system would have made Morrowind's combat better.

Actually, the melee combat system in Gothic 1/2 is one of the best ever done, but someone who enjoys Morrowind's combat probably wouldn't see it that way.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Since you've failed to show how F:NV is related to Morrowind other than in a most tenuous far-removed fashion, I don't see why this would be preposterous at all. If I say A is better than B, and you say it's preposterous to say that because they are closely related, you have to actually show that A is very similar to B, you know as in beyond just sharing the same company as the creator of the engine they are based on.

To put it more succinctly for you: Fallout 3 was created using the same underlying game engine as Morrowind (with only 1 game in-between) by the same company, and Obsidian then created Fallout New Vegas using virtually the exact same engine as Fallout 3. Moreover, Bethesda has by choice been milking the same basic formula (in greatly dumbed-down fashion) ever since the success of Morrowind, and Obsidian was constrained to follow the same formula by the game engine that Bethesda delivered to them. Yet in Porkyland this is a "most tenuous far-removed" connection.

As you have no response to my arguments about aesthetics, I assume you concede defeat.

There is no actual world outside of Bethesda's games where you have 50 copy and paste locations of 10 different types that contain absolutely nothing of interest. The real world might be relatively boring compared to a video game, but even locations of little interest such as farms, caves, etc, still contain something unique. Every farmer has his own story, his own problems, every cave has its own animals, etc. If you want to look for an example of how a huge open world game like that should be done, look to Dwarf Fortress, not Morrowind or Daggerfall. In DF (when it's finished anyway), there is depth to things, in Morrowind there is just copy-paste.

It's been explained to you several times how Morrowind has numerous factions, environments, settlements, dungeons, and so on combined with an enormous amount of lore to create a living world. And it's been explained to you how dungeons differ from each other in substantial ways. This not only adds to immersion but also contributes to replayability, since it's possible to play three complete games of Morrowind joining different factions, following (aside from the main quest) almost entirely different quests, spending far more time in certain settlements and areas than others. As always, your essential problem with Morrowind's world is that you think every single last location in the game --- including every grotto, cave, mine, and farmstead --- must have a unique hook to immediately interest the player, and if the location doesn't have such a hook then it should be wiped off the map. The reality is that, even in a scaled-down gameworld, to create an illusion of realism it is necessary to have a sufficient number of mundane locations, such as farms, that stand in for the much larger number that would exist if the gameworld were on a 1-1 scale. And no, not every farmer has some kind of story that's relevant to the player-character or the hook for a quest. Your method results in an Oblivion-style theme park.

Do I really need to explain the difference between aiming a very fast tiny projectile over potentially long distances against multiple well armed opponents vs the combat system in Morrowind?
Actually, the melee combat system in Gothic 1/2 is one of the best ever done, but someone who enjoys Morrowind's combat probably wouldn't see it that way.

Perhaps you could explain how "aiming and running around" are so very different in Fallout New Vegas versus an earlier game with the same game engine. You could also explain how "aiming and running around" in the fashion of an FPS constitute an interesting action-based combat system for an RPG. Again, Morrowind's combat is a relative weakness, but your proposed alternatives are either shallow action-based systems or the utter pointlessness of Bioware's particular RTwP system.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

To put it more succinctly for you: Fallout 3 was created using the same underlying game engine as Morrowind (with only 1 game in-between) by the same company, and Obsidian then created Fallout New Vegas using virtually the exact same engine as Fallout 3. Moreover, Bethesda has by choice been milking the same basic formula (in greatly dumbed-down fashion) ever since the success of Morrowind, and Obsidian was constrained to follow the same formula by the game engine that Bethesda delivered to them. Yet in Porkyland this is a "most tenuous far-removed" connection.

You do realize the same game engines are used for completely different games, right? Unreal Engine for example, or even Gamebryo which is the underlying engine for all Bethesda games. These engines can be used for an RPG by one company, an FPS by another, and an RTS by a third. So how Morrowind and F:NV sharing (in a far removed way) the same engine makes them the same thing is beyond me. Likewise, if this same formula you are talking about is just being an open world RPG, then you argument is similarly silly. Just because two games are both open world RPGs, we can't criticize one and praise the other? What?

As you have no response to my arguments about aesthetics, I assume you concede defeat.

Didn't I already say that the aesthetics in F:NV are actually better than in Morrowind because they are tied in to actual gameplay and have some meaning? Take for example your beloved architecture example from Morrowind. So every great house has its own architecture, but this goes nowhere. You can't actually engage in Morrowind's politics, by helping one house dominate over the other, or anything like that. It's just an empty shell, where you join one of the three, and do roughly similar fetch quests to rise up in it, and this changes absolutely nothing. In F:NV, as I already explained, you can also join different factions with their own aesthetics which are just as good as in Morrowind, but there is actually meaning behind it. You can help the NCR or the Legion or Mr. House, help them rise to the top, and remake the world. See what I mean?

And it's been explained to you how dungeons differ from each other in substantial ways.

Except they don't. There are a few different templates, and then tons of specific instances, all so similar to each other as to make exploring them a boring chore that a player gives up on after a while, well short of exploring the majority of them.

This not only adds to immersion but also contributes to replayability, since it's possible to play three complete games of Morrowind joining different factions, following (aside from the main quest) almost entirely different quests, spending far more time in certain settlements and areas than others.

Actually this is a terrible example. Morrowind is the number 1 example of a game you wouldn't want to replay, because you can (and will) do most important stuff on a single play-through. For example, I joined the House Telvanni, but I spent most of my time in Balmorra, since it's the first city you are led to by the story, and it's the most convenient for selling stuff. Likewise, I spent a lot of time in Aldruhn because there are a lot of quests there. Morrowind does not enforce any kind of exclusivity on you, regardless of which house you join, you can still do most of the quests in their capital/cities. Likewise, you can join most organizations, being in the Mage's Guild at the same time as in Thieve's guild, or in mage's guild and telvanni house, even though lore-wise they are enemies.

As always, your essential problem with Morrowind's world is that you think every single last location in the game --- including every grotto, cave, mine, and farmstead --- must have a unique hook to immediately interest the player, and if the location doesn't have such a hook then it should be wiped off the map. The reality is that, even in a scaled-down gameworld, to create an illusion of realism it is necessary to have a sufficient number of mundane locations, such as farms, that stand in for the much larger number that would exist if the gameworld were on a 1-1 scale. And no, not every farmer has some kind of story that's relevant to the player-character or the hook for a quest. Your method results in an Oblivion-style theme park.

You are exaggerating of course, as usual, but I do want game locations to have content, and so do most people. If you weren't such a fanboy of the game, and looked at it objectively, you would see how natural and obvious this is.

And the point is not that every farmer has a story relevant to the player-character, but that they have SOME story, any story at all. In Morrowind, on the other hand, all these NPCs/monsters/etc just walk around back and forth and live in a bubble of pointlessness and emptiness.

Perhaps you could explain how "aiming and running around" are so very different in Fallout New Vegas versus an earlier game with the same game engine.

Ok, if I must. When you shoot bullets out of guns, the bullets fly very fast, and are very small, and you are shooting them at enemies that are shooting back with powerful weapons at you from a distance. This creates for a level of challenge, where you must quickly aim (and F:NV actually rewards the player for targetting specific body parts, 2x damage for head shots e.g.), use cover, face multiple enemies. Morrowind, on the other hand, most enemies attack in melee range, running straight for you, and you "shoot" slow moving, wide radius projectives at them (before you realize touch spells are better anyway), making the whole process completely devoid of challenge or interest. The few enemies who use ranged weaponry use very weak attacks (early level spells, arrows, etc) so you can just run up to them and kill them at leisure. Ok?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

You do realize the same game engines are used for completely different games, right? Unreal Engine for example, or even Gamebryo which is the underlying engine for all Bethesda games. These engines can be used for an RPG by one company, an FPS by another, and an RTS by a third. So how Morrowind and F:NV sharing (in a far removed way) the same engine makes them the same thing is beyond me. Likewise, if this same formula you are talking about is just being an open world RPG, then you argument is similarly silly. Just because two games are both open world RPGs, we can't criticize one and praise the other? What?

And now you're equating the specific game engine used in Morrowind/Oblivion/Fallout3/FalloutNewVegas/Skyrim with the more general ones created for the purpose of being licensed out to game developers, who then make extensive changes to it in order to reforim it to suit the needs of their particular genre and subgenre. To spell it out for you: Bethesda licensed the Gamebryo engine and used it to create the specific game engine for Morrowind. This was followed by Bethesda taking the engine they had created for Morrowind and using it for Oblivion, and then again for Fallout 3. Obsidian used the same engine that had been used for Fallout 3 for Fallout New Vegas, without meaningful change. I won't blame someone for not having played Oblivion or Fallout 3, but, even without understanding the exact evolution of the game engine, the similarities between Morrowind's engine and Fallout New Vegas' engine should be obvious to even the most obtuse player. If you were familiar with the evolution of the game engine, you would realize that the game engine had declined enough by Fallout 3 so as to greatly hamstring Obsidian relative to what Bethesda had accomplished in Morrowind.

Didn't I already say that the aesthetics in F:NV are actually better than in Morrowind because they are tied in to actual gameplay and have some meaning? Take for example your beloved architecture example from Morrowind. So every great house has its own architecture, but this goes nowhere. You can't actually engage in Morrowind's politics, by helping one house dominate over the other, or anything like that. It's just an empty shell, where you join one of the three, and do roughly similar fetch quests to rise up in it, and this changes absolutely nothing. In F:NV, as I already explained, you can also join different factions with their own aesthetics which are just as good as in Morrowind, but there is actually meaning behind it. You can help the NCR or the Legion or Mr. House, help them rise to the top, and remake the world. See what I mean?

Your response to an argument about aesthetics does not concern aesthetics but is rather a diversion to unrelated gameplay issues, and even then your criticism falls flat. You claim that New Vegas has meaning because it allows the player to choose sides and thus "remake the world" but the game ends irrevocably with the Battle of Hoover Dam. The player never experiences the post-Battle Mojave Desert and thus never experiences the consequences of their fundamental choice in the main quest. Moreover, despite having four separate choices of which faction to side with in the main quest, the resulting quests for one path are largely identical to the other paths, with the only distinction being which faction you persuade various groups to side with (or at whose behest you destroy those groups). New Vegas' gameworld is just as much an "empty shell" as you claim Morrowind's to be. Morrowind, for its part, contains strife between (and within) various factions, up to and including the killing of faction leaders, and though it may not represent the consequences particularly well it isn't worse in this regard than New Vegas. And none of this is related to aesthetics --- on the specific example of Morrowind's architecture, it both contributes to world-building and is aesthetically pleasing in itself.

Except they don't. There are a few different templates, and then tons of specific instances, all so similar to each other as to make exploring them a boring chore that a player gives up on after a while, well short of exploring the majority of them.
Actually this is a terrible example. Morrowind is the number 1 example of a game you wouldn't want to replay, because you can (and will) do most important stuff on a single play-through. For example, I joined the House Telvanni, but I spent most of my time in Balmorra, since it's the first city you are led to by the story, and it's the most convenient for selling stuff. Likewise, I spent a lot of time in Aldruhn because there are a lot of quests there. Morrowind does not enforce any kind of exclusivity on you, regardless of which house you join, you can still do most of the quests in their capital/cities. Likewise, you can join most organizations, being in the Mage's Guild at the same time as in Thieve's guild, or in mage's guild and telvanni house, even though lore-wise they are enemies.

There are 91 ancestral tombs in Morrowind; if someone decided to load a game and explore all 91 tombs without any intervening activity they would no doubt become bored with always being in the same type of environment, but the fault would not lie with the game but with the person who decided to play it in a bizarre way that was bound to lead to their frustration. Likewise, if you think it makes sense to explore a majority of Morrowind's vast number of dungeon locations in a single playthrough then you weren't playing it the right way and yet strangely persisted in a manner guaranteed to frustrate you. There are a sufficient number of factions in Morrowind (10 offering a large number of quests) that you can experience three different playthroughs rising to leadership in different factions by carrying out different quests in different locations. For that matter, there are sufficient miscellaneous quests so as to have only limited overlap in different playthroughs. The main quest is the same in every playthrough (though New Vegas offers only limited improvement here), but there's more to the "important stuff" than the main quest. As for the specific issue of exclusivity, there are a few restrictions on combinations of factions. Morrowind will only rarely prevent the player from exploring a particular location, but you seem to have taken this as an invitation to explore places for no particular reason, which you dislike, and then you came here to complain about the inevitable.

You are exaggerating of course, as usual, but I do want game locations to have content, and so do most people. If you weren't such a fanboy of the game, and looked at it objectively, you would see how natural and obvious this is.
And the point is not that every farmer has a story relevant to the player-character, but that they have SOME story, any story at all. In Morrowind, on the other hand, all these NPCs/monsters/etc just walk around back and forth and live in a bubble of pointlessness and emptiness.

Exaggeration, in a thread that began with the statement that Morrowind is a "flawed turd"? Perish the thought!
The deeper problem lies in your interpretation of content to be meaningless fluff rather than RPG substance. I don't need a game to provide me with the life stories of monsters in a dungeon, nor with the life story of every farmer or other unimportant NPC. Speaking of which, Fallout New Vegas, like Fallout 3 before it, uses large numbers of replicated generic unnamed NPCs to pad out the population of settlements, something avoided in Morrowind where each NPC at least has a unique name.

Ok, if I must. When you shoot bullets out of guns, the bullets fly very fast, and are very small, and you are shooting them at enemies that are shooting back with powerful weapons at you from a distance. This creates for a level of challenge, where you must quickly aim (and F:NV actually rewards the player for targetting specific body parts, 2x damage for head shots e.g.), use cover, face multiple enemies. Morrowind, on the other hand, most enemies attack in melee range, running straight for you, and you "shoot" slow moving, wide radius projectives at them (before you realize touch spells are better anyway), making the whole process completely devoid of challenge or interest. The few enemies who use ranged weaponry use very weak attacks (early level spells, arrows, etc) so you can just run up to them and kill them at leisure. Ok?

It seems that your chief complaint with Morrowind's magic system is that it doesn't allow for combat similar enough to an FPS to meet your tastes. And no, that isn't "OK" when criticising an RPG. For that matter, at one point you had complained that Morrowind might as well have auto-resolution for combat but have since proposed as superior Bioware's Real Time with Pause system that as I recall is rather similar to auto-combat.

 

[Lord Azlan]

So I've been trash talking Morrowind for years now, but that was based on several failed attempts to play it, beginning with when it first came out in 2002 and years later. Each time I would play it for a few hours, get bored/tired of it, and uninstall. But rejoice, for I have now completed the game, and have a much better body of evidence to base my trash talking on. Just finished the main quest, and boy, do I hate it more than ever.


The Bad:

- Combat: Obvious one, but needs to be re-emphasized. Clearly the melee combat is shit, as standing there and clicking the attack button over and over is boring as all hell. That's why I went the magic route, but that is just as bad. The enchanting and alchemy paths are completely broken, and besides that, totally uncool. So I tried to be a real spellcaster. Instantly the game begin to fuck me over. Even though I chose a race and sign conducive to extra magicka, I still ended up with a pretty small magicka pool, especially when trying to cast custom spells. You run out after a few casts, and then you have to rest, and of course every place is swarming with monsters, especially those annoying as fuck cliff racers, so resting becomes a real chore.

On top of that, to fuck the pure spell caster over even more, these geniuses introduced the spell reflect mechanic, where many enemies will automatically reflect your spells back onto you. Who thought this would be an enjoyable mechanic? There is spell reflect in D&D games like BG, but there it's a legit mechanic, which you can counter with a breach spell or what not, here it's just an inherent fuck you from the developers. Even if you have resistance to that type of damage and don't hurt yourself too much, you are still wasting valuable magicka, if it's a powerful spell.

- Exploration: a lot of people site this as a strongpoint of Morrowind, but I just don't see it that way, for a couple of reasons. I get it, the world is huge, and there is a ton of dungeons, caves, tombs, etc to explore. But to me, enjoyable exploration has to have two things, an incentive to explore, and variety. Morrowind has neither.

It's a flawed turd.

Seems you found combat hard. Maybe you should have lowered the difficulty? I am not sure if you aware, but, combat only has to be competent in certain types of RPG, and sometimes barely that. Traditionally if you play as a mage only in RPG, withouts buffs and summons, you are going to get your ass kicked. You may also want to compare combat as it was to other games of the era. Unless you general point is that "I played a 2002 released game more than TEN YEARS LATER - and gues what - the combat is crap."

I quite like the reflect spell mechanic, it stopped you from spamming spells or melee. At one point you are going to figure out whacking this guy is causing me some damage - what to do? In a game where there combat was naff - it at least added a very small strategic element. I would say some of the best fights in MW and its followers were against opponents that had reflect damage on them. Potato or potato right?

- Exploration: a lot of people site this as a strongpoint of Morrowind, but I just don't see it that way, for a couple of reasons. I get it, the world is huge, and there is a ton of dungeons, caves, tombs, etc to explore. But to me, enjoyable exploration has to have two things, an incentive to explore, and variety. Morrowind has neither.

On variety, Volcano, mushroom homes, Vivec, Aldruhn Giant Crab town, plains, mountains, silt striders, Daedic ruins, Ashlands, Dwemer Ruins, Corprusarium.

HANG ON -

You played Morrowind for over 50 hours and across nearly 15 years and you think it is crap?

I spent over 10 minutes on this thread over one afternoon - its a turd of a thread.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

And now you're equating the specific game engine used in Morrowind/Oblivion/Fallout3/FalloutNewVegas/Skyrim with the more general ones created for the purpose of being licensed out to game developers, who then make extensive changes to it in order to reforim it to suit the needs of their particular genre and subgenre. To spell it out for you: Bethesda licensed the Gamebryo engine and used it to create the specific game engine for Morrowind. This was followed by Bethesda taking the engine they had created for Morrowind and using it for Oblivion, and then again for Fallout 3. Obsidian used the same engine that had been used for Fallout 3 for Fallout New Vegas, without meaningful change. I won't blame someone for not having played Oblivion or Fallout 3, but, even without understanding the exact evolution of the game engine, the similarities between Morrowind's engine and Fallout New Vegas' engine should be obvious to even the most obtuse player. If you were familiar with the evolution of the game engine, you would realize that the game engine had declined enough by Fallout 3 so as to greatly hamstring Obsidian relative to what Bethesda had accomplished in Morrowind.

For the purposes of this discussion, there is no conceptual difference between companies customizing a third party engine for their goals and Obsidian customizing a Bethesda engine, which Bethesda themselves changed several times between Morrowind and Fallout 3. In fact, there is no Morrowind engine, it's always Gamebryo, which was adopted to Morrowind, then adopted to Oblivion, then to F3 and so on. Some of the Morrowind engine code got reused in subsequent games, but much of it was changed with every iteration. So I am really not sure where you are going with this.

Whatever similarities exist between Morrowind's engine and F:NV engine pale in comparison to the massive differences between the 2 games. If you think about what different aspects make up an RPG, they are for the most part vastly different between those two games. The combat is obviously different, the exploration feels different, as you yourself admitted, the aesthetics and graphics look different, the character development is different, the setting is different, the writing is completely different, NPC dialogues and behavior are completely different, and so on. So how on earth those tenuous engine connections would make F:NV a successor of Morrowind that one cannot like if one dislikes MW, as you originally claimed, is really beyond me.

Your response to an argument about aesthetics does not concern aesthetics but is rather a diversion to unrelated gameplay issues, and even then your criticism falls flat. You claim that New Vegas has meaning because it allows the player to choose sides and thus "remake the world" but the game ends irrevocably with the Battle of Hoover Dam. The player never experiences the post-Battle Mojave Desert and thus never experiences the consequences of their fundamental choice in the main quest. Moreover, despite having four separate choices of which faction to side with in the main quest, the resulting quests for one path are largely identical to the other paths, with the only distinction being which faction you persuade various groups to side with (or at whose behest you destroy those groups). New Vegas' gameworld is just as much an "empty shell" as you claim Morrowind's to be. Morrowind, for its part, contains strife between (and within) various factions, up to and including the killing of faction leaders, and though it may not represent the consequences particularly well it isn't worse in this regard than New Vegas. And none of this is related to aesthetics --- on the specific example of Morrowind's architecture, it both contributes to world-building and is aesthetically pleasing in itself.

Actually you do experience the consequences, in the end-of-game cinematics. While this might not be optimal, it sure as hell is way better than what happens in Morrowind, that being nothing. On top of that, there are less profound consequences within the game itself, as you choose to align with one faction, the other will start attacking you on a regular basis, shoot on sight in their settlements, etc. In Morrowind, after killing off a raiding party from one House, I can easily stroll through its settlements and halls as if nothing happened. So nice try, but no.

There are 91 ancestral tombs in Morrowind; if someone decided to load a game and explore all 91 tombs without any intervening activity they would no doubt become bored with always being in the same type of environment, but the fault would not lie with the game but with the person who decided to play it in a bizarre way that was bound to lead to their frustration. Likewise, if you think it makes sense to explore a majority of Morrowind's vast number of dungeon locations in a single playthrough then you weren't playing it the right way and yet strangely persisted in a manner guaranteed to frustrate you. There are a sufficient number of factions in Morrowind (10 offering a large number of quests) that you can experience three different playthroughs rising to leadership in different factions by carrying out different quests in different locations. For that matter, there are sufficient miscellaneous quests so as to have only limited overlap in different playthroughs. The main quest is the same in every playthrough (though New Vegas offers only limited improvement here), but there's more to the "important stuff" than the main quest. As for the specific issue of exclusivity, there are a few restrictions on combinations of factions. Morrowind will only rarely prevent the player from exploring a particular location, but you seem to have taken this as an invitation to explore places for no particular reason, which you dislike, and then you came here to complain about the inevitable.

You are kind of missing the point. You don't have to explore all 91 tombs at once, once you've seen 5 tombs, and 5 daedra ruins, and 5 caverns or whatever, even if you alternate them, you've still seen everything already, so there is no sensible reason for the other 86 to exist other than to serve as filler.

It seems that your chief complaint with Morrowind's magic system is that it doesn't allow for combat similar enough to an FPS to meet your tastes. And no, that isn't "OK" when criticising an RPG. For that matter, at one point you had complained that Morrowind might as well have auto-resolution for combat but have since proposed as superior Bioware's Real Time with Pause system that as I recall is rather similar to auto-combat.

See, this is another patented strawman argument from you. I keep telling you that in order for a combat system to be interesting, it has to include some measure of player skill, which could be physical, mental, whatever. You keep trying to turn that into me somehow saying Morrowind needs to be an FPS. But no matter how many times you try, that's still not what I said. And if you think Baldur's Gate combat is auto-combat, then ...

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

For the purposes of this discussion, there is no conceptual difference between companies customizing a third party engine for their goals and Obsidian customizing a Bethesda engine, which Bethesda themselves changed several times between Morrowind and Fallout 3. In fact, there is no Morrowind engine, it's always Gamebryo, which was adopted to Morrowind, then adopted to Oblivion, then to F3 and so on. Some of the Morrowind engine code got reused in subsequent games, but much of it was changed with every iteration. So I am really not sure where you are going with this.

You appear under the impression that changing the way armor affects damage and adding in a handful of special perk effects is equivalent to taking the raw Gamebryo engine and creating a workable game engine from it. Bethesda did that once, for Morrowind, and since then have milking their engine for as long as they can, patching in various additions to create the slightly different versions of the original Morrowind engine used in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim. Fallout New Vegas' game engine is Fallout 3's game engine, not much different from the original Morrowind version. As such, Morrowind and Fallout New Vegas are far more closely related than simply being "in the Open World genre". Of course, it's possible to create games of radically differing quality with more or less the same game engine, as Bethesda itself proved between Morrowind and Oblivion.

Whatever similarities exist between Morrowind's engine and F:NV engine pale in comparison to the massive differences between the 2 games. If you think about what different aspects make up an RPG, they are for the most part vastly different between those two games. The combat is obviously different, the exploration feels different, as you yourself admitted, the aesthetics and graphics look different, the character development is different, the setting is different, the writing is completely different, NPC dialogues and behavior are completely different, and so on. So how on earth those tenuous engine connections would make F:NV a successor of Morrowind that one cannot like if one dislikes MW, as you originally claimed, is really beyond me.

You're confusing quality differences with category differences; I've explained how Fallout New Vegas is inferior in quality to Morrowind in various ways, while the game mechanics are similar. Exploration in Fallout New Vegas fundamentally works the same way as in Morrowind, but it's worse for the reasons I stated previously. The graphics are created using the same processes as in Morrowind and in a technical sense are better than unmodded Morrowind (and equivalent in a technical sense to Fallout 3), but the aesthetics are much worse (and Morrowind with mods is technically superior). NPC interaction in Fallout New Vegas is the same as in Fallout 3, where large numbers of NPCs are generic and cannot even be spoken with, and the small number of unique NPCs use voice-acting to sharply limit the amount of dialogue feasible; Obsidian wrote much better dialogue, and conceptualized better NPCs, than Bethesda did in Fallout 3 or Oblivion, but they had to do the best they could within the limitations of that version of the game engine. Fallout New Vegas' systems for character customization and progression are nearly identical to those found in Fallout 3, though Obsidian did far better work at creating perks that were useful or interesting, and also added optional traits. The settings of these games are different, but world-building occurs in much the same ways in each game, and Morrowind easily triumphs here for reasons that have been described in detail, though Fallout New Vegas in turn is far superior to Fallout 3 (which is truly execrable in this regard). Fallout New Vegas has an interface identical to Fallout 3's, which is about as clunky as Oblivion's and similarly designed for a console, while Morrowind has a sleek PC interface.

Actually you do experience the consequences, in the end-of-game cinematics. While this might not be optimal, it sure as hell is way better than what happens in Morrowind, that being nothing. On top of that, there are less profound consequences within the game itself, as you choose to align with one faction, the other will start attacking you on a regular basis, shoot on sight in their settlements, etc. In Morrowind, after killing off a raiding party from one House, I can easily stroll through its settlements and halls as if nothing happened. So nice try, but no.

New Vegas' reputation system is so well designed that's is very easy to reach the maximum category of both good and bad reputation with a major faction, at which point the game assigns you "wild child" status with that faction, which you're stuck with for the rest of the game. For that matter, being a "wild child" with the NCR or Legion doesn't prevent you from following their quest line, and after siding with the NCR/Legion and fulfilling their quests it takes an amazingly long time before the option to defect to the other side is blocked off. The player can even side with the NCR or Legion while having a "vilified" reputation, which is then washed clean. And none of this digression has any relation to aesthetics.

You are kind of missing the point. You don't have to explore all 91 tombs at once, once you've seen 5 tombs, and 5 daedra ruins, and 5 caverns or whatever, even if you alternate them, you've still seen everything already, so there is no sensible reason for the other 86 to exist other than to serve as filler.

17 of the tombs are related to quests; some of the others have unusual artifacts. I chose ancestral tombs for my example because I like them less than any other category of dungeon. The obvious solution to my relative dislike is not to spend more time than necessary in tombs; in any given playthrough, I'll be sent to a few different tombs for quests, depending on guild membership and which miscellaneous quests I run across. You on the other hand, as I noted above, intentionally seek out content you don't like and then use it as an excuse to argue that it's better for a gameworld to be stripped to the bare minimum. A true Open World game should be full of content, enough that it feels as large as what it represents even if it is scaled down.

See, this is another patented strawman argument from you. I keep telling you that in order for a combat system to be interesting, it has to include some measure of player skill, which could be physical, mental, whatever. You keep trying to turn that into me somehow saying Morrowind needs to be an FPS. But no matter how many times you try, that's still not what I said. And if you think Baldur's Gate combat is auto-combat, then ...

First, you went into fairly exhaustive detail about how you feel Fallout New Vegas' combat was better than Morrowind's because it was like an FPS, even explicitly stating it's best to avoid VATS mode and play it exactly like an FPS. Now, you claim this is a "strawman argument". If you keep pretending to change your mind in every post, then any quote of your past claims is a "strawman argument", and you're having a strawman argument with yourself. Again, Morrowind's combat is not the game's strongest point, but it is better for an RPG than almost any action-based melee system and is certainly better than a first-person shooter.

Let's see how you think Morrowind could have been better: Small, concentrated gameworld? Bland, post-apocalyptic aesthetics? Every location unique, with a story hook? FPS popamole gameplay? Enjoy Fallout 4, Porky.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Actually, the melee combat system in Gothic 1/2 is one of the best ever done, but someone who enjoys Morrowind's combat probably wouldn't see it that way.

>best melee combat system
>not Mount & Blade or Chivalry
Pick one.

Seriously though you want any of us to believe this is actually functionally different to Morrowind?

Is Morrowind's combat still boring? Absolutely. But it wins out on later instalments in the franchise because character generation and progression (coupled with the level scaling not being as pronounced) actually had a significant effect on your performance, and because it offered you a far wider variety of options. This differs from Oblivion where character generation and progression basically only served as a set of vague guidelines for your future, and where in Skyrim you might as well say they just abolished character progression entirely without thinking to address any of the knock-on effects of a classless system in a game with "level by doing" mechanics

Let's be honest though. Every single Elder Scrolls game has combat mechanics that are completely unengaging and boring to take part in, which at the end of the day all end up being functionally identical; which is to say you have to stand still and click the fucker until he falls over and lets you strip his corpse.

 

[Shadenuat]

Gothic's combat is way more advanced that Morrowind's. For one enemy attack animations actually matter and as you progress in combat skills you get new, more efficient attacks yourself.
Just like in any twitch game AI can be baited and abused however. Even Dark Souls can look almost as primitive as Morrowind when you figure out counter attacks and one-shot any enemy in the game except bosses with a rusted dagger. The video proves nothing. As it is Gothic's combat requires a lot more effort than Morrowind's left-clicking.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

You appear under the impression that changing the way armor affects damage and adding in a handful of special perk effects is equivalent to taking the raw Gamebryo engine and creating a workable game engine from it. Bethesda did that once, for Morrowind, and since then have milking their engine for as long as they can, patching in various additions to create the slightly different versions of the original Morrowind engine used in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim. Fallout New Vegas' game engine is Fallout 3's game engine, not much different from the original Morrowind version. As such, Morrowind and Fallout New Vegas are far more closely related than simply being "in the Open World genre". Of course, it's possible to create games of radically differing quality with more or less the same game engine, as Bethesda itself proved between Morrowind and Oblivion.


You're confusing quality differences with category differences; I've explained how Fallout New Vegas is inferior in quality to Morrowind in various ways, while the game mechanics are similar. Exploration in Fallout New Vegas fundamentally works the same way as in Morrowind, but it's worse for the reasons I stated previously. The graphics are created using the same processes as in Morrowind and in a technical sense are better than unmodded Morrowind (and equivalent in a technical sense to Fallout 3), but the aesthetics are much worse (and Morrowind with mods is technically superior). NPC interaction in Fallout New Vegas is the same as in Fallout 3, where large numbers of NPCs are generic and cannot even be spoken with, and the small number of unique NPCs use voice-acting to sharply limit the amount of dialogue feasible; Obsidian wrote much better dialogue, and conceptualized better NPCs, than Bethesda did in Fallout 3 or Oblivion, but they had to do the best they could within the limitations of that version of the game engine. Fallout New Vegas' systems for character customization and progression are nearly identical to those found in Fallout 3, though Obsidian did far better work at creating perks that were useful or interesting, and also added optional traits. The settings of these games are different, but world-building occurs in much the same ways in each game, and Morrowind easily triumphs here for reasons that have been described in detail, though Fallout New Vegas in turn is far superior to Fallout 3 (which is truly execrable in this regard). Fallout New Vegas has an interface identical to Fallout 3's, which is about as clunky as Oblivion's and similarly designed for a console, while Morrowind has a sleek PC interface.

No matter how much you try to connect the two games based on their engines or being in the same RPG sub-genre, they are still two completely different games, with very little in the way of similarity, other than some very high level stuff that would apply to pretty much any game in the same sub-genre. For example, when you say exploration fundamentally works the same way, that's a silly statement for obvious reasons, because guess what, exploration fundamentally works the same way in any 1st person RPG: you move around the world and explore. The differences are obviously in the actual details of how that's implemented, and those are quite different between F:NV and Morrowind.

New Vegas' reputation system is so well designed that's is very easy to reach the maximum category of both good and bad reputation with a major faction, at which point the game assigns you "wild child" status with that faction, which you're stuck with for the rest of the game. For that matter, being a "wild child" with the NCR or Legion doesn't prevent you from following their quest line, and after siding with the NCR/Legion and fulfilling their quests it takes an amazingly long time before the option to defect to the other side is blocked off. The player can even side with the NCR or Legion while having a "vilified" reputation, which is then washed clean. And none of this digression has any relation to aesthetics.

No, it's not very easy. I've played it several times and never got to that. In most playthroughs, you side with one of them, and the rep reflects that.

17 of the tombs are related to quests; some of the others have unusual artifacts. I chose ancestral tombs for my example because I like them less than any other category of dungeon. The obvious solution to my relative dislike is not to spend more time than necessary in tombs; in any given playthrough, I'll be sent to a few different tombs for quests, depending on guild membership and which miscellaneous quests I run across. You on the other hand, as I noted above, intentionally seek out content you don't like and then use it as an excuse to argue that it's better for a gameworld to be stripped to the bare minimum. A true Open World game should be full of content, enough that it feels as large as what it represents even if it is scaled down.

So 17 out of 91 is different from 5 out of 91? Nitpick with the numbers all you want, but anyone who played Morrowind knows most locations in it have nothing of interest after you've visited a few of each type.

First, you went into fairly exhaustive detail about how you feel Fallout New Vegas' combat was better than Morrowind's because it was like an FPS, even explicitly stating it's best to avoid VATS mode and play it exactly like an FPS. Now, you claim this is a "strawman argument". If you keep pretending to change your mind in every post, then any quote of your past claims is a "strawman argument", and you're having a strawman argument with yourself. Again, Morrowind's combat is not the game's strongest point, but it is better for an RPG than almost any action-based melee system and is certainly better than a first-person shooter.

Let's see how you think Morrowind could have been better: Small, concentrated gameworld? Bland, post-apocalyptic aesthetics? Every location unique, with a story hook? FPS popamole gameplay? Enjoy Fallout 4, Porky.

Except I didn't. I said F:NV's combat (when properly modded) has challenge and is interesting unlike Morrowind's. In their particular case, the challenge can come from being an FPS, but it can also come from a deep tactical system or something else. Point is, Morrowind just doesn't have it. I am not sure why this is so difficult for you to understand.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

>best melee combat system
>not Mount & Blade or Chivalry
Pick one.

M&B has a pretty good melee combat system, but Gothic's feels better, less unwieldy, more flow to it.

Seriously though you want any of us to believe this is actually functionally different to Morrowind?

You should actually play Gothic games first, and understand how the system works before attempting to comment on it. After all, I am criticizing Morrowind here AFTER completing it.
The cool part about Gothic's combat is that againt humanoids, you have to time your parries very accurately to block their attacks and then chain that into counter-attacks, which creates a nice flow.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

If you think mount & blade is unwieldy all I can tell you is to git gud.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Gothic's combat is way more advanced that Morrowind's.

Morrowind's combat system is more "advanced" than nearly any other RPG released in recent memory. I'm only going to repeat what others have said, but the only reason anybody would think something isn't advanced which makes dozens of dicerolls every single swing based upon your character status, his skills, and your enemy's status and skills, in order to determine the effects of swinging at them, is because they aren't ready to understand and enjoy Morrowind.
That doesn't mean I found it enjoyable, because standing still and mashing the left mouse button isn't fun, but is it primitive? Not really.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

No matter how much you try to connect the two games based on their engines or being in the same RPG sub-genre, they are still two completely different games, with very little in the way of similarity, other than some very high level stuff that would apply to pretty much any game in the same sub-genre. For example, when you say exploration fundamentally works the same way, that's a silly statement for obvious reasons, because guess what, exploration fundamentally works the same way in any 1st person RPG: you move around the world and explore. The differences are obviously in the actual details of how that's implemented, and those are quite different between F:NV and Morrowind.

You're being deliberately obtuse as to the connection of Fallout New Vegas with Morrowind, and you've become largely nonresponsive on every other subject. It's quite likely that you're simply a Gothic fanboy who has been upset since 2002 that Morrowind overshadowed Gothic, and you thought this would be an opportune time to blast Morrowind in hyperbolic terms hoping to piggyback (no pun intended) on the anger at Bethesda over their latest game. This is made more likely by your claim that Fallout New Vegas is among your favorite games, as it shares the same engine as Morrowind and plays in a similar fashion, but is objectively the worse game (though certainly far better than anything Bethesda has done since Morrowind). You can't credibly pretend to love Fallout New Vegas but hate Morrowind.

However, if we take your complaints about Morrowind at face value then you want:
1. Simpler, unambiguous backstory and world-building, so that you don't get confused and think Morrowind's main quest is about "good versus evil".
2. Poorly-designed action-based melee combat (as in Oblivion) or first-person shooter combat (as in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas) that relies less on character skills.
3. A much smaller, more concentrated gameworld with less variety of environments and less time spent on overland exploration.
4. A bare minimum of dungeons, so that each will be completely different in style from any other, each with a compelling story to keep the player entertained.
5. A bland, generic setting that you will think is "artistically superior" to Morrowind's truly unique setting and strong art design.
You are a handmaiden of decline.

 

[Excommunicator]

I have been trash talking Morrowind for several years based on very little evidence so here is my unsuccessful attempt to save face

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

You're being deliberately obtuse as to the connection of Fallout New Vegas with Morrowind, and you've become largely nonresponsive on every other subject. It's quite likely that you're simply a Gothic fanboy who has been upset since 2002 that Morrowind overshadowed Gothic, and you thought this would be an opportune time to blast Morrowind in hyperbolic terms hoping to piggyback (no pun intended) on the anger at Bethesda over their latest game. This is made more likely by your claim that Fallout New Vegas is among your favorite games, as it shares the same engine as Morrowind and plays in a similar fashion, but is objectively the worse game (though certainly far better than anything Bethesda has done since Morrowind). You can't credibly pretend to love Fallout New Vegas but hate Morrowind.

The bolded part sums up your nonsense quite well. I imagine there are quite a few people here who like me like/love F:NV and hate Morrowind, and the same might be true in the opposite direction. They are very different games, and just because they are both open world RPGs and use the same Gamebryo engine doesn't mean anything.

However, if we take your complaints about Morrowind at face value then you want:
1. Simpler, unambiguous backstory and world-building, so that you don't get confused and think Morrowind's main quest is about "good versus evil".
2. Poorly-designed action-based melee combat (as in Oblivion) or first-person shooter combat (as in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas) that relies less on character skills.
3. A much smaller, more concentrated gameworld with less variety of environments and less time spent on overland exploration.
4. A bare minimum of dungeons, so that each will be completely different in style from any other, each with a compelling story to keep the player entertained.
5. A bland, generic setting that you will think is "artistically superior" to Morrowind's truly unique setting and strong art design.

You are really taking this strawman thing all the way, eh?

You are a handmaiden of decline.

You, on the other hand, have completely declined over the course of this thread. You started with some valid arguments, which although I disagreed with, I could at least respect. But then you've gradually descended into some almost troll-like BS. Come on, man, you can do better.