Skyrim is worse than Oblivion in every way

No matter how bad Oblivion seemed at the start I had to give it a bunch of hours to try and get better just out of respect for Morrowind.

 

:milkfinger:

No matter how bad Oblivion seemed at the start it became even worse later on.

 

I mean let's be honest, most of us play these shitty games for quite a while no matter how shite they are. We know more about the quests and lore of Fallout 3 and Oblivion than the casuals who call them the best games ever.

 

Fallout 3 had lore? i thought it was just a bunch of incoherent babble some 2 year old put together.
I cared about as much for the world of oblivion as it cared about me, so no, i dont know its lore.

I have played them a decent amount of time, but most if not all of it has been thanks to stuff that wasnt originally in the game, vanilla must be comparable to sucking a turd.

 

Initially Oblivions biggest problem for me was the ridiculous level scaling. Bandits in full Mithril and Glass armor and such.
At least that could be resolved with mods.

Graphically the game wasn't so bad when it was released. Textures could have been better, yes, and the doughy faces were quite terrible to look at (but then again Morrowinds faces weren't exactly great either), but the game could look quite nice, esp. when rendering nature scenes.
I also still think that combat and magic system had mostly improved from Morrowind - as far as aRPG combat goes, it worked better.

The more persistent problem was ultimately that the world&quest design and story were rather bland to outright stupid - e.g. world design managed to destroy any illusion of the game taking place in the large central province of an empire. It felt like what it was: a couple of villages in a small valley.

 

This is an issue with all games of this type though, especially when they try to portray a large city. I find it hard to think of a big city that exists completely in 3D worldspace which isn't unbelievably small.

 

It had, but only considering pre-war world and immediate aftermath. The texts you could find on terminals were quite decent as well as some non-MQ locations.

 

Actually if you guys go read my initial comment you'd see that I said I played Oblivion for more than 15 min since I eventually gave it another try and ended up playing for a couple hours but again everything was boring and ugly and I couldn't get into it. I didn't need more than that to see that the world seemed dead, empty, uninspired and the quests were too. So my reply to the OP was, I can't tell which one is worse because I didn't complete either but whatever amount of time I dedicated to the games was enough to make me not want to continue.
It didn't cross my mind that people would interpret my post as me saying that playing a game for a few hours is enough to claim the "game is bad"since I didn't make it to the end, but the first few hours of content were bad enough as to make me give up. What's with you guys getting your panties in a bunch because someone couldn't stand playing some boring and uninspired game?
Anyway, letting this silly back and forth go. You boys had way too much coffee today and yes I am indeed a girl.

 

Playing Oblivion for a few hours is enough to find it's shit. 15 minutes not. All hassle was about your 15 minutes statement.

 

I clearly wrote in my initial post that I played for 15 min then eventually went back to the game and played for a bit longer. Not my fault some people can't read.

 

It varies in magnitude depending on world design, though.
For example in both Morrowind and Skyrim tricks are employed to create illusion of large worldspace - traversable paths wind between and around impassable landscape, terrain is partitioned into distinct areas isolated from each other, there are many identifiable terrain features, in Skyrim there are also cities designed to appear much larger.

Oblivion, OTOH had just a featureless bowl of homogeneous forest.

Compare:

(Oblivion one shows most minor locations while Vvardenfell's does not, but neither shows all locations relevant to its legend, so focus on the roads - both maps show pretty much all roads and footpaths in-game and those indicate the amount of structure and detail present in the landscape itself).

Google maps API based maps of all three provinces - compare level of detail (Skyrim's is somewhat borked and illegible, but should be good enough):

http://www.uesp.net/maps/mwmap/mwmap.shtml
http://www.uesp.net/maps/obmap/obmap.shtml
http://www.uesp.net/maps/srmap/srmap.shtml

Oblivion's Cyrodiil seriously feels no bigger than Morrowind's Ascadian Isles, area alone doesn't mean shit.

 

I found oblivion pretty big, but it felt mostly copypasted terrain with holes with loot in them.

 

I just keep discovering things about Morrowind. I only recently discovered that the Propylons move you to the first Dunmer Stronghold clockwise or counter-clockwise adjecent to it.

And now I discovered that there is a big ol' depression with only one way in/out south-east of the Ghostgate. You learn something new every time you play that game.

 

Yeah, on my last playtrough i learned that you can become uber without ever leaving balmora, too bad i had to stop playing it because i got a new comp and my game/saves/mods/etc were on the old one and i couldnt be assed to move, reinstall and make sure everything worked.
Morrowinds depth was insane, if only they kept that oblivion would have been playable vanilla.

 

Did you guys know, BTW, that all those sealed messages that look like gibberish are actual ciphertext that can be broken and read by cryptographically inclined player?
You can also attempt to recreate the seal using your security skill, IIRC.

Popamole it ain't.

 

I recall there is one message in code that you cannot decypher without the proper code word. Which in that particular case was

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

Skooma

 

DraQ there's also the choice of setting. Morrowind isn't just more detailed, its about Vvardenfell. Not the entirety of Morrowind.

 

Arena, Daggerfall. Also, Assassin's Creed and a lot of GTA-oids.

 

Oblivion is absolutely and, like Fallout 3, irremediably a piece of shit. I tried them, ubermodded, for 5 times at least and couldn't get into any of them as much as I did try. I played vanilla Skyrim for at least 30 hours before being bored. But then I tried it again two months ago with graphic and gameplay mods and it got me hooked: it's clearly a superior game. Anybody who says otherwise is full of shit. I even prefer it to Morrowind but I understand that some can prefer Morrowind or Daggerfall. Nevertheless I think it will rise to the status of a minor classic, even by Codex standards (even if for me it is more than a minor classic: IT IS A CLASSIC (and I wouldn't have bet two pennies on it seeing how I loathed Oblivion and Fallout 3)). Now raise your pitchforks gentlemen, I don't care: you aren't real old farts (except for a few exceptions like Mondblut or Octavius amongst others) and haven't, like me, bought and played Ultima III & IV & V, Wasteland or Dragon Wars at the time they came out in shops or thought, while playing Fallout: well it's decline from Wasteland. Maybe I'm becoming senile but I doubt it: Skyrim is a great game, even if some considerable parts of its original design decisions are pure derp.

EDIT: By the way, Daggerfall never did it for me, I did buy it when it was first issued and didn't care about the bugs. It's just that its random nature never appealed to me. For my Rogue cravings, I was much more happier with the "original" Epyx Rogue on C64 or the Apshai Trilogy, or nowadays by Stone Soup. I think that for a lot of people, Daggerfall was great for it was their first Rogue-like and it had great scenery (for the time) and some kind of questlines. For me, it was a mess (again, not talking about bugs).

 

Kay, combat is shit, there is no spell making, most classic spells that gave charm and depth to spellcasting are gone, nothing you do in this world matter, no one gives two shits. all dungeons are linear, bland and boring design that any beginner DM would scrap as a first try.
There are no stats, so everyone in the world is just as strong, agile and smart as everyone else.
The story writing is shit, the dialogue is shit, the UI is shit, the player-world interaction is shit, The non-player characters are shit,
The way challenge is treated is shit.

Everything else is average at most, graphics are decent and world design is actually pretty interesting, the lore is somewhat interesting but the way its presented to the player is shit.

Skyrim is impresive, till you look under the hood, now go play it some more with those things in mind.

The only way to play skyrim is to treat everything beth did like shit, and overwrite it with what fans made, amongst that sea of shit theres bound to be something good.

.......... SHIT.

 

At one point in time, aworism somehow became hip enough that new members began to emulate it. A most interesting phenomenom that I couldn't trace to any particular threads for all my years of lurking.

 

Which pretty much means that to reach similar or even greater level of detail (less compression) Oblivion should be entirely set on Imperial City isle(s) while having similar total gameplay area.

 

The plot would need to undergo heavy changes, since Dagon probably isn't able to perform a surgical strike opening portals only inside the main city (instead of all over the province). It would be better to just not have the city in the game, since you can't portray it adequately. Or have it in the game, but the entrances are blocked to strangers due to a hardcore quarantine (after the emperor and his sons are assasinated by a dangerous cult, chancellor Ocato is extremely paranoid about security)

 

Oblivion didn't really cover the entirety of the Crisis so its altered version wouldn't have to either.

 

Why not an entire game set in the Imperial City with a low-key and derp free plot?