Morrowind was massive decline and should be considered as such

This is basically it to me. On the other end of the "modders will fix it" mentality is the "roleplaying will fix it" mentality. Both are banal excuses for the base product being bland or just outright bad. If I'm forced to make your game interesting by making my own headcanons, I feel like I'd rather just play in a better created setting.

 

I think that the ideal game is somewhere between Daggerfall & Morrowind but with better combat all round tbh.

To me this is all fine-tuning stuff anyway. Arguing over Morrowind & Daggerfall is like argueing who you'd sooner fuck between a Grease 2 Michelle Pfeiffer & a prime Baywatch Yasmine Bleeth. There comes a point where you're just bitching over preferences between blondes & brunettes, and the smart cookies are just happy to be playing with either.

 

Hey guys let's make a sequel that deletes (or streamlines)everything the prequel was trying to make:
-RPG codex : Fantastic Idea it's one of the best rpg ever made.
-Banal consumer #18708: Morrowind is one of the best game ever made. So many deep rpg elements that no other game tried to do.
Imagine if jagged alliance 2 deleted everything( instead of improving everything like it did in reality) jagged alliance 1 was trying to make, everyone here will be dissapointed by the sequel. Imagine if fallout 2 deleted (or streamlined by removing skills for example and removing things there and there) everything fallout 1 was trying to make. Imagine if Gothic 2 deleted everything (or steamlined)Gothic 1 was trying to make. Imagine if Kotor 2 deleted everything ( or streamlined ) Kotor 1 was trying to make.
But when it comes to Morrowind everyone here forgets (or completely blinded by nostalgia) what Morrowind could have been if it had taken Daggerfall into consideration. But no shup up be happy with your streamlined Morrowind.
I have really no hope for the future, Todd howard was right, streamlining is what people wants.Keep it simple, stupid.

 

Thought experiment: It's early 1997 and you're working on Fallout. There are dozens of terrible FedEx side quests and the testers have all complained about them. You want to remove them all before the game ships. Should you do that, or would removing bad content constitute decline?

To put it another way, would Fallout have been better with a bunch of half-baked ideas tacked onto it, or is it better for being a tight and focused experience?

 

Daggerfall was an ambitious project, well ahead of its time. Unfortunately the devs bit more than they could chew and the vision could not be fully implemented given budget and hardware limitations - hence lots of repetitive, auto generated content and plethora of bugs. After commercial failures of Redguard and Battlespire Morrowind was a last chance project - do or die, hence the devs had to scale down their ambitions. Julian LeFey was gone by that time and the rest of the team preferred to play it safer this time, to set more realistic goals and not to deliver another Buggerrwind.

 

As if Morrowind wasn't a buggy mess too,keep in mind that the mod the most downloaded on nexus for morrowind is a bug-fixing and mechanics-fixing mod.

I never said they should have kept the FedEx quests from Daggerfall but instead improve them make them interesting for the player. Morrowind has tons of FedEx quests too but everyone here forgets it.

 

Unnecessary/never-used skills were a bane of early RPGs. Horse-riding in games where you never encountered a horse, language skills for races you never once interacted with, social skills that gave you some flavour text once or twice at best (while costing as much as actually useful combat and magic skills).

 

I agree with your point that improving bad content beats removing it. But unless you're a neanderthal, you can't just work on a game for as long as you want. Removing bad content and getting the game out the door beats leaving it in.

 

Battlespire proved that you can make all of the language skills usefull instead of removing all of them. Battlespire despite many flaws is the proof that you can make language skills usefull, an ever more deep character system that works and make many skills interesting.

 

But what is the bad content that MW removed for the better exactly?
Bland procedurally generated NPCs? Not really, they just got replaced with equally bland walking wikipedias.
Bland procedurally generated fetch quests? Not really, they just got replaced with bland hand-crafted fetch quests.
Bland procedurally generated dungeons? Not really, 90% of MW's dungeons are even more featureless and boring that DF's random dugeons, and even at its best MW doesn't hold a candle to DF's main quest dungeons.
Some of the things removed didn't see much use in DF (conversation system, language skills, most of the landmass), true, but didn't take away from the experience either.
But then what was so bad about horse riding, courts, public events, day/night cycle, climbing, reputations, or branching plots, for example, that all of those things needed removing?

 

OLD THING GOOD
NEW THING BAD

 

Nope Jagged Alliance 2 was new and it's a better game in every way possible than Jagged alliance 1. (without removing mechanics from the previous entry but instead adding mechanics and overhauling what Jagged alliance 1 did).

 

Exactly, i don't even understand what game they are talking about. They are totally blinded by nostalgia, it's a totally different Morrowind they are talking about.

 

So what's the functional difference in Daggerfall's dozen different stores and taverns in each city?

You act as if Daggerfall's cities had dozens of unique buildings, when they're just as copypasted as Morrowind's (if not even more so). Daggerfall's cities give you the illusion of size by being realistically scaled, but there's no real difference between the 5 taverns in the same town. Stores only differ in their stock but usually have similar or even same layouts. The only gameplay effect is that if you want to find a specific cute dress, you have to visit 4 different clothiers and hope one of them has it in stock. The layout of their stores is exactly the same though, what they have in stock is the only real difference.

Taverns are even less unique. All of them serve the same function.

Don't complain about Morrowind having the same copypasted building everywhere and then pretend Daggerfall was any different. If anything, Daggerfall had even more copypasta.

 

Ultima IV was massive decline and should be considered as such.

Colossal Cave Adventure was massive decline and should be considered as such.

 

Daggerfall has a better excuse for copypaste though.

 

Dunno if it's been brought up yet but it's interesting to see how the Codex reacted to Morrowind years ago - mostly negatively. Here's a thread from 2005:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...d-sucked-the-douglas-goodall-interview.10408/

Morrowind is a really big step down from Daggerfall, but a step down isn't always a bad thing. Daggerfall is probably my favourite TES game, especially after I replayed it in the Unity remake recently, but moving to a much more limited but much more focused type of game was the right decision. The focus on worldbuilding and lore was a good move too. Morrowind turned out great for what it is it in the end, it's easily the second best TES game.

To stick up for Morrowind:

Both games really only have a handful of memorable characters - Caius, Vivec, Crassius and Dratha and so on from Morrowind, and Elysana, Helseth, Akorithi, Nulfaga etc from Daggerfall. Most NPCs in both games are basically placeholders. I know this is basically what you were saying.

Agree, Morrowind's entry-level guild quests are a complete pain in the ass. They only really work on your first playthrough when they really make you feel like a shithead grunt doing work that nobody else wants to do.

I think most Morrowind dungeons are boring but at least you know for sure you'll be able to reach the end goal in them. Daggerfall's dungeons are great until you start bumping into too many where the end goal is literally unreachable, whether due to a procedural generation fuckup or because it's behind a secret door that you could never be reasonably expected to find. I do agree that Daggerfall's main quest dungeons are better - Direnni Tower fucking rocks, same for Lysandus' Tomb.

People don't give Morrowind a hard enough time for removing climbing. It's insane how much use you get out of it in Daggerfall, especially as a thief who can leap from balcony to balcony, rooftop to rooftop while looking for targets to steal from. It really should have stuck around in Morrowind, imagine being able to piss off the Telvanni by just climbing up their shitty levitation towers.

 

To everyone who rated OP as "participation award" or "retarded", you look EXACTLY like him when you're crying over the "dumbing down" from MW to Oblivion.

 

Nothing good ever came from fucking Bethesda.
It was always cancer and will always be.
Let's hope it goes bankrupt soon.

Morrowind in Top 10 is a fucking disgrace for this place.

 

Daggerfall's stores:

Quality: low


Quality: High. We can see that the store is bigger
Sentinel's stores are different but i have no screenshots of them
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:General_Stores



Daggerfall's tavern



AT LEAST Daggerfall tried.

Morrowind's tavern:




Morrowind's Taverns are even more lifeless than daggerfall's taverns. I know what you will say it's artificial. Yes it is but at least why don't they improve NPCs and improve taverns in morrowind instead of streamlining?
Morrowind said Fuck it.

 

Agreed

YES!!!! but still edgy , Daggerfall was a good concept, this game was the foundation , and morrowind destroyed it.

 

Daggerfall's NPCs were essentially 2d sprites that just floated around the world, so you could have a million of them. With Morrowind, NetImmerse/Gamebryo's NPC number limitations already started coming into place and persist to this day. THIS, I can agree, is possibly the greatest decline of all.

 

At least Daggerfall tried to make believable taverns and shops. Morrowind doesn't even try.


Same fucking statue like in daggerfall, this isn't an improvement. And even worse, Shops never close their doors.
And even more stupid in daggerfall you have to check shelves if you want to buy something whereas in morrowind talking to NPC give you the item.

 

All your examples are very superficial though. What does Daggerfall actually offer in those locations besides the illusion of a realistically scaled world?

Are there any quests (other than the main quest) that aren't procedurally generated copypasta?

Are there any locations (other than main quest dungeons and the castles of the capital cities) that aren't procedurally generated copypasta?

Is there anything to discover at all by wandering across the overworld landscape?

Daggerfall has great systems and great concepts in theory, but there just isn't enough real content to carry the systems.

Morrowind has a lot of bland content too, sure, but it has a larger amount of interesting quests than Daggerfall (Imperial Cult's oracle quests were cool, for example), NPCs who have more to say than just giving you directions, different towns do look and feel different (compare Balmora to Ald Ruhn to Sadrith Mora to Dagon Fel etc), there's a lot more variety than you give it credit for. Meanwhile Daggerfall, while having great systems, barely has any content at all beyond the main quest (other than procedurally generated copypasta).

The one thing I miss from Daggerfall is its awesome character creation. And whenever I replay Daggerfall I spend more time playing around in character creation than actually playing the game.

 

Yes like i said for Morrowind 1 step forward and every other steps backward

Are there any side quests that aren't FedEx in Morrowind?

Are they any locations in Morrowind that aren't straight lines besides main quest's dungeon?

Witch covens and there are mods for that.

Nope they just weren't enough usefull and that's why most of the languages skills are useless. But Battlespire fixed the problems related to mechanics.

Imperial cult's oracle quests are made by Todd Howard. Same design like in skyrim,they are linear.NPCs are wikipedia pages , only NPCs related to quests say different things like in Daggerfall. In daggerfall Sentinel looks different to daggerfall that looks different to wayrest, Etc...

The main quest in Daggerfall is better than every quests in Morrowind because at least it has choices and consequences. and furthermore side quests in Morrowind are all FedEx without meaningful choices whatsoever.

1. Skills:Orcish,Harpy,Deadric,Medecine,swimming,climbing,critical strike,Backstab,Centaurian,streetwise,SprigganThaumaturgy,Nymph,Orcish,Dragonish,dodging, Giantish,etiquette,Impish. A total of 19 skills removed in Morrowind only .3x times more skills removed between Daggerfall and Morrowind than Morrowind and Oblivion.
2. Main quest: Choices and consequences removed in Morrowind
3. NPC: No longer sleep, no longer answer you if they accept you in their houses. You can no longer ask for work.
4. Factions: 18 factions removed from Daggerfall, Temple factions gone, Knightly orders gone. Factions can no longer dismiss you and factions can no longer refuse you if you have a bad reputation.Faction reputation
5. Dungeons: hidden doors, traps, complexity.
6. Wereboar
7. Daggerfall 9 vampire Bloodlines-> 3 vampire bloodlines Morrowind
8. Witch covens
9. Court: debate or lie
10. Political entities
11. Cities can no longer ban you
12. 20 shrines in Daggerfall -> 11 Shrines in morrowind
13. Music that changes considering the mood
14. In daggerfall 2 hours OST -> 50 minutes in Morrowind
15. Banks, ship, letters of credit, carriage,horse,Bracers,and other items.
16. Character creation, edit reputations, deep background, you can no longer edit advantages and disadvantages.