Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

So what's your new favorite TES game?

Which is the best Elder Scrolls game?

  • Skyrim (didn't play the previous games)

    Votes: 1 3.0%
  • Skyrim

    Votes: 4 12.1%
  • Oblivion

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Morrowind

    Votes: 16 48.5%
  • Daggerfall

    Votes: 5 15.2%
  • Arena

    Votes: 2 6.1%
  • One of the spin-offs of course.

    Votes: 3 9.1%
  • I hate TES

    Votes: 2 6.1%

  • Total voters
    33

Callaxes

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 17, 2007
Messages
1,676
I haven't played Skyrim yet, but the youtube videos look promising and the thumbsup the game gets here is down right adorable.

Did Skyrim change your view on the TES hierarchy? Is it good what what it is or does it give the Iliac Bay cricket club or the Vvardenfell guar owner association a serios run for its money?
 

Grunker

RPG Codex Ghost
Patron
Joined
Oct 19, 2009
Messages
27,385
Location
Copenhagen
I only played Oblivion, so I don't really know that much about TES. I dislike the whole genre (hike-sims), Skyrim included, but in comparison to Oblivion it's a fucking masterpiece so far.

Oblivion was downright offensive, Skyrim is mostly just a gigantic waste of potential.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Skyrim is certainly way better than oblivious, but it's painfully and needlessly simplified in most aspects.

I'm only beginning to play it, though, so my overall opinion about it may shift quite a bit. Still, it'll probably end up being third best TES regardless of my future experience with it, because Morrowind and DF are hard to beat, Arena is quite a bit of a derpy prototype and you can't get shittier than oblivious.
 

Conkrete Knight

Educated
Joined
May 17, 2010
Messages
240
Location
Denmark
Morrowind, although I played Daggerfall at a later date and can clearly see why people loving Daggerfall were furious.

All games of course have the fault that at some point you break the game and become a demi-god, quite early if you are unlucky.

Daggerfall simply stopped being interesting when "getting lost" was the only danger the dungeons held, and a big one at that.
Morrowind kept me going, so thats a plus.


Also looking at the artbook from Morrowind is looking at failed opportunities.
 

Callaxes

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 17, 2007
Messages
1,676
Ed123 said:
Morrowind was mah favourite "all time", but I have little interest in playing it today.

Ditto.

I think Morrowind is the best game for a kid to play. We tend to generally think of kids as having short attention spans, but I could tolerate games back then which I can't play for more than 30 minutes today. Everything feels rushed to me and something as small as an AI glitch or a bad dialog line is enough to break the fourth wall.

Kids on the other hand can forgive these things and become immersed in their own finely crafted alternate world which they will explore even though they might not understand most of it.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2007
Messages
3,181
Morrowind. For the setting, the lore, the books and the first-time exploration. Some locations were successful at setting the proper mood and tie in with lore aspect, as well, but not much else. The rest ranged from meh (stats and combat) to shit (level scaling; sterile gameworld filled with nothing but wooden automatons).

As for the reason for this thread: although Skyrim is an obvious un-decline from Oblivion and FO3, looks pretty and plays better than Morrowind, it still got nothing on the latter in areas that count the most.
Despite that, there's no novelty in Morrowind for me, anymore, and no reason to replay it. So, in a few years and a few hundred mods, I may well put Skyrim among the hiking sims I've enjoyed, to an extent.
 

Peter

Arcane
Joined
Jun 11, 2009
Messages
1,570
I've actually only played the TES games in recent years and my favourite would probably have to be Daggerfall. I can't really tell you why, to be honest. I should enjoy Morrowind more, but something about it just never clicked with me. Daggerfall, on the other hand, plays great, imo.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Conkrete Knight said:
Morrowind, although I played Daggerfall at a later date and can clearly see why people loving Daggerfall were furious.

All games of course have the fault that at some point you break the game and become a demi-god, quite early if you are unlucky.

Daggerfall simply stopped being interesting when "getting lost" was the only danger the dungeons held, and a big one at that.
Morrowind kept me going, so thats a plus.
That's more or less my stance (though I don't mind playing DF once in a while - will have to finish it one day), there is simply nothing interesting in DFs random dungeons, nothing at all in overland, and mostly flavour stuff in the cities.

Also, I'd welcome having redundant passages that do nothing but twist in place a dozen or so times mostly cut out of DF's dungeons. They make no sense and DF's dungeons are large enough to be confusing even with sensible layout.

Still, I'm reserving judgement 'till I get far enough in Skyrim.

Also looking at the artbook from Morrowind is looking at failed opportunities.
Then you run a mod that tries to open up Vivec on *modern* machine and understand the reasons for them being *failed* opportunities.

Ed123 said:
Better than Battlespire?
Main series only. Still haven't played the spinoffs.
 

Admiral jimbob

gay as all hell
Joined
Sep 29, 2009
Messages
9,225
Location
truck stops and toilet stalls
Wasteland 2
Morrowind, then Daggerfall, then Skyrim.

Morrowind will always be my first love. Daggerfall is a great flawed gem. Skyrim is a fun theme park that has potential to be extensively renovated into something pretty great.
 

Satan

Educated
Joined
Dec 9, 2010
Messages
635
1. Morrowind
2. Daggerfall
3.

(i haven't played spin offs though)
 

Wyrmlord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
I don't know, they are all the same. They really are.

Daggerfall is considered a sophisticated game, and rightly so, but when you get down to what you do in the game, you find that it involves the conduct of the same mundane things.

Join the Fighter's Guild and kill some animals in the cellar.

Go to a city, search for the man you need, and get whatever you need out of him.

Retrieve a rare book from a large dungeon.

Do other such mundane work until you are of the right level to be allowed into certain quests.

And so on. Admittedly, all of that happens in much larger dungeons, much larger cities, and a much larger world than latter Elder Scrolls game. And it involves a non-linear main quest with three plotlines which can be pursued in any order and to any extent. And the fights are harder, with liches against whom you need spell absorption and werewolves against whom you need silver weapons.

But Daggerfall really wasn't a game to keep me engaged beyond a week or two. Just like Oblivion, but for different reasons. I just start thinking, "What else is there?" And I know the answer - very different ways of doing the same thing all over again.

Skyrim is a much more dumbed down game than Daggerfall, no doubt. But there's a larger variety of things to do in Skyrim, even though each of them has less depth than Daggerfall.

Did Daggerfall involve you climbing steep mountains to their highest peak, mine their rare ebony ores, and bring them down to a smelter in a nearby city so you can build a rare ebony suit from it? No, it did not. Did Daggerfall have restricted orc camps and orc stations into which you can sneak in order to freeload and steal all their precious stuff? No, it did not. Simple things like that made Skyrim a lot of fun for me.
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
Developer
Joined
May 3, 2011
Messages
5,698
Morrowind, but I've only played a bit of Arena and Daggerfall so my opinion is hardly the most authoritative. Skyrim was a great attempt at building a game out of strong lore and actually expanding on it, instead of just spitting on it like Oblivion did, and it has a fantastic game world, but ultimately I think Morrowind has better mechanics, game balance and more options open, plus quest lines that are more interesting and involved.

It's kind of funny to think that Morrowind is actually much smaller than the other games. Walking speed is just slower, giving a sense of scale to the world, but the world itself is probably about 1/3 the size of Oblivion or Skyrim. Maybe Bethesda should go back to that model, so that we can get more quests charged with politics, intrigue, and choice and consequence, instead of yet more dungeons to crawl through. I don't give a shit about random ruins and smugglers' caves if there's nothing important to do in them, so I'd rather see the ones they give us actually count for something.
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
Patron
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
37,241
Location
Seattle, WA USA
MCA
I never played any of the earlier ES games because I hated pop-a-mole real time RPG's when they first came out.

I tried to play Morrowind but it was then that I realized I was really bored with bland generic fantasy rpg settings and quit playing.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
sea said:
It's kind of funny to think that Morrowind is actually much smaller than the other games. Walking speed is just slower, giving a sense of scale to the world, but the world itself is probably about 1/3 the size of Oblivion or Skyrim.
I don't know about Skyrim, but there was a comparison revealing that Oblivion is only marginally larger than Morrowind in terms of raw landmass area. Now consider the z-axis, water exploration and the fact that average path between two locations is many times longer, while the only tool to measure the size of the world from within the game is path length between locations.

Jaesun said:
I tried to play Morrowind but it was then that I realized I was really bored with bland generic fantasy rpg settings and quit playing.
:x

You're the biggest faggot ever, Jaesun.
:rpgcodex:
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
Patron
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
37,241
Location
Seattle, WA USA
MCA
Enlighten me on what exactly I am missing by not finishing Morrowind DraQ.

Also keep in mind I have been playing cRPG's since Might and Magic II came out for the Amiga 500.
 

crufty

Arcane
Joined
Jun 29, 2004
Messages
6,383
Location
Glassworks
baronjohn said:
How is Morrowind generic?
No trees
Brown
Cliff racer menace

Skyrim is my favorite, I can't go back to the graphics of Daggerfall, though I do think there is opportunity to improve the skyrim gameplay system with a few more elements nabbed from Daggerfall.

Every time I'm ready to get bored something ridiculous pops up. I am hooked in closing out the thieves guild quest.

One issue is...it's a bit like playing in a pnp game where there aren't many players in the area. The DM is ready to be hard core, two others of the group are ready, but power gamer pete, if he doesn't get his phat loot will simply leave and your game will be even worse.

I get the feeling skyrim goes in a direction, then folks know the reaction will be "but a thousand console tards will complain bitterly that they aren't the head of the guild" and so then a different direction is taken.


For example, take the daedra quest haunted house. That was nice, unexpected. The ending was a bit cheese though I'm not sure what would have happened had I had a calm spell. But the very end in the lawful good option was arrrggh...daedra does a and b but then is all oh well I guess since you are who you are and all...felt like it "had" to be done that way

Daggerfall had more limited quests so it's really no comparison. At the same time there was no "Make it easy". No cure poison potion in front of the spider lairs.
 

Mister Arkham

Scholar
Joined
Apr 24, 2008
Messages
763
Location
Not buried deep enough
Probably still Morrowind. It was the first game of its type that I played, so it's always going to hold some special place for me...but it also has the atmosphere and the lore and the really unusual setting. It's very much a game that succeeds in making you feel the stranger in a strange land. Past that; I've never played Arena, could never make myself stand Oblivion, and have never gotten to play enough of Daggerfall to form a real opinion about it. I've tried several times over the years, and can get enough to see why some of you hold it in the regard that they do, but I've never gotten it running long enough to get into the meat of the damn thing.

I have to say though, that I am continually impressed with Skyrim as I spend more time on it. It has its issues and it's more repetitive than I'd like, but the setting has a great deal of variation for an open-world game and it nearly catches Morrowind in terms of sheer atmosphere. Plus it does some stuff to the character/leveling system that I really like, because--screw it--I've always hated the character system in TES and at this point it's just nice that they've changed it.
 

Admiral jimbob

gay as all hell
Joined
Sep 29, 2009
Messages
9,225
Location
truck stops and toilet stalls
Wasteland 2
Jaesun said:
I tried to play Morrowind but it was then that I realized I was really bored with bland generic fantasy rpg settings and quit playing.
Doesn't that mean it's not an RPG? Why do you associate the word RPG with it? Why is Morrowind your favourite game, Jaesun?
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
Developer
Joined
May 3, 2011
Messages
5,698
DraQ said:
I don't know about Skyrim, but there was a comparison revealing that Oblivion is only marginally larger than Morrowind in terms of raw landmass area. Now consider the z-axis, water exploration and the fact that average path between two locations is many times longer, while the only tool to measure the size of the world from within the game is path length between locations.
Pretty sure Skyrim is physically a bit bigger than Oblivion, but it's hard to say - it certainly has a comparable number of map markers at least (fewer dungeons but more towns and overland locations). Morrowind might be a bit bigger than I say it is there, but the number of actual locations on the map is much smaller. There are fewer random dungeons, there's less distance between locations (play with the fog disabled and distant land, and you'll realize this), but it still doesn't really feel small or compact because you still spend a good deal of time exploring.

Part of it is also the quest compass. In Skyrim and Oblivion, you rarely spend time looking around because you always know exactly where to go. In Morrowind, meanwhile, with vague directions you have to figure out how to get to a place yourself, which can take quite a bit of time, but it's always much more rewarding to see the rooftops of a settlement over a ridge as you approach. That exploring that's a fundamental part of gameplay, rather than just an optional one, really helps to sell the size of the world and makes much better use of it, even if ultimately it's not as big as it seems. This is ultimately why I hate quest markers, arrows and so on - the level design and world design should be able to help the player find his or her way, not a bunch of pop-ups; without them there's no reason to make those big, sprawling environments in the first place.
 

Wyrmlord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
Jaesun said:
I never played any of the earlier ES games because I hated pop-a-mole real time RPG's when they first came out.

I tried to play Morrowind but it was then that I realized I was really bored with bland generic fantasy rpg settings and quit playing.
They are not "pop-a-mole".

They are just a variation on Ultima Underworld. The first two TES games, I mean.
 

Nael

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2005
Messages
11,384
Location
Indy
Morrowind modded to fuck then Daggerfall.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom