Morrowind was massive decline and should be considered as such

[KateMicucci]

I'm not sure what standard of quality is being applied here because Oblivion is certainly more polished than many celebrated RPGs.

True but oof.

 

[Butter]

I guess polish is what matters most in RPGs. That's why Square Enix and Bioware are the best developers.

 

[perfectslumbers]

I'm not sure what standard of quality is being applied here because Oblivion is certainly more polished than many celebrated RPGs.

Oblivion is a polished mound of shit. Morrowind is an unpolished nice medieval castle. Skyrim is a polished bungalow.

 

[Robotigan]

I guess polish is what matters most in RPGs. That's why Square Enix and Bioware are the best developers.

What matters is whether a game is interesting to play which is both a measure of polish and creativity. But frequently I find that many lower budget RPGs are measured by the idea of playing the game rather than how it actually plays. Some of these devs have poor project management and unrealistic ambitions that are tacitly excused by enthusiasts. Fans will lament that producers cracked the whip and wouldn't let devs complete their vision, but we've seen that many of these devs fail to release a game at all once they're free from that burden (Chris Roberts, Ken Levine). Realistic scoping and setting achievable timelines are critical skills for managing large projects.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Read this entire thread. It's a lot of spilled ink just for people to affirm Todd's claim that everyone's favorite TES is the first one they played.

I played Daggerfall shortly after its release and highly regard it, but I've considered Morrowind the superior game since my first playthrough, while acknowledging that it represents a substantial shift in game design away from procedural-generation and dungeon-crawling towards hand-crafted content and Open World exploration. Oblivion, by contrast, constituted intense decline in numerous aspects:

• Comprehensive creature-leveling such that all monsters and NPCs are set at the same level as the PC, with weaker types of monsters disappearing after the character gains enough levels, and stronger types of monsters not appearing when the character is low-level
• Comprehensive item-leveling whereby a high-level PC will not only encounter similarly high-level bandits but said bandits will have random pieces of extremely expensive armor and weapons, while a low-level PC will never find weapons/armor of such powerful material; or a weapon on display in a glass case in a castle will be a worthless replica if the PC is low-level but the real thing after the PC gains enough levels
  
• A clunky interface, which was clearly designed for consoles, in sharp contrast to Morrowind's sleek menus.
  
• Reduction in the number of joinable guilds/factions offering many quests from 10 in Morrowind to 4 in Oblivion, keeping the more generic ones (Fighters/Mages/Thieves guilds)
• Factions now centered around quest lines, with 2 of the 4 (Fighters Guild and Mages Guild) being poorly written and boring
  
• Both in-game and out-of-game world maps that offer far less information than their Morrowind equivalents
• Automatic fast-travel to any location that's already been visited
• A quest compass that points to your next destination, the use of which is made necessary by the combination of uninformative journal entries and an inability to ask directions
• Full voice-acting for dialogue, which necessitated a drastic reduction in the amount of dialogue per NPC, most of whom have one comment about themselves or their city to offer and nothing else
• Poor writing in general, with dialogue and books less interesting than in Morrowind
  
• Minigames for speechcraft and lockpicking (and poorly-done minigames, at that)
  
• Elimination of certain kinds of items, such as thrown weapons, crossbows, and spears
• Reduction in the number of skills to the point where axes are considered blunt weapons
• Regenerating magicka, which effectively means that all health can be easily regained after each combat, thus removing much of the logistics that existed previously
• Elimination of different physiques (and animations) for Argonians and Khajiits
• 3D face modelling was a technical improvement but horribly implemented so that the end result was substantially worse
• HDR lighting was a technical improvement but in practice was overpowering and made the graphics worse (though at least HDR was optional)
• A physics model was a technical advancement but its implementation was so wonky that bumping into a table would send objects flying around a room
  
• Lack of aesthetics, especially compared to Morrowind's brilliant art direction
• A generic, medieval fantasy grab-bag setting, without even the coherence offered by Daggerfall's Iliac Bay region much less the spectacular sui generis setting of Morrowind
• A dull, poorly-plotted main quest, with the only plane of Oblivion featured in the base game (except at the very end) being a generic hellscape with little variation
• A half-baked action-oriented combat system so that success in combat depends greatly on the player's physical skill, yet is boring and tedious

Oblivion and Skyrim are built on the same game engine as Morrowind and are fundamentally the same type of CRPG, but this shouldn't obscure the fact that even within a specific CRPG subgenre (or even sub-subgenre) it's possible for the quality of games to vary immensely due to deterioration in game mechanics and other aspects.

 

[KateMicucci]

Oblivion, by contrast, constituted intense decline in numerous aspects:

A clunky interface, which was clearly designed for consoles, in sharp contrast to Morrowind's sleek menus.

The interface is functionally poor, but aesthetically it's the best in the series.

Reduction in the number of joinable guilds/factions offering many quests from 10 in Morrowind to 4 in Oblivion, keeping the more generic ones (Fighters/Mages/Thieves guilds)
Factions now centered around quest lines, with 2 of the 4 (Fighters Guild and Mages Guild) being poorly written and boring

There are fewer guilds in Oblivion but the quest chains are fairly long and the quests are better than Morrowind. Morrowind quests didn't have poor writing, they had hardly any at all. And the Oblivion fighter and mages guild questlines weren't bad. Definitely better than the Morrowind fighter and mages guild questlines, which were so bland I don't even remember them at all.

Both in-game and out-of-game world maps that offer far less information than their Morrowind equivalents

Morrowind's pixel map was close to unreadable.

Automatic fast-travel to any location that's already been visited

Good. No other RPG get shit for having fast travel except Oblivion and Skyrim.

A quest compass that points to your next destination, the use of which is made necessary by the combination of uninformative journal entries and an inability to ask directions

How many RPGs have getting lost as a game mechanic?

Full voice-acting for dialogue, which necessitated a drastic reduction in the amount of dialogue per NPC, most of whom have one comment about themselves or their city to offer and nothing else

Most Morrowind NPCs had nothing to say either.

Poor writing in general, with dialogue and books less interesting than in Morrowind

The books for both are mostly carryovers from Daggerfall. Morrowind doesn't have good writing.

Regenerating magicka, which effectively means that all health can be easily regained after each combat, thus removing much of the logistics that existed previously

Non-regenerating magicka was shit and I modded magicka regen into Morrowind.

Elimination of different physiques (and animations) for Argonians and Khajiits

Who gives a shit about argonians and khajiits

A physics model was a technical advancement but its implementation was so wonky that bumping into a table would send objects flying around a room

When Oblivion came out physics were still the coolest thing ever and nobody cared that it was wonky.

Lack of aesthetics, especially compared to Morrowind's brilliant art direction

Morrowind had good concept art but the game doesn't look like that. It was mostly brown and fog. Oblivion wasn't aesthetically strong in every area, but the menus, cities, some of the weapons were beautiful.

A generic, medieval fantasy grab-bag setting, without even the coherence offered by Daggerfall's Iliac Bay region much less the spectacular sui generis setting of Morrowind

Again, non-TES rpgs get a pass on this.

A dull, poorly-plotted main quest, with the only plane of Oblivion featured in the base game (except at the very end) being a generic hellscape with little variation

As opposed to Morrowind's poorly paced, tedious main quest and Ash Wastes with little variation.

 

[Robotigan]

Oblivion was a welcome experiment even if not every change worked out. It feels a bit too much like a tech demo, but it's cool that those mechanics made their way into Creation Engine for future titles. Really, I commend that they even tried to innovate. Whenever a franchise starts rehashing itself every release, I check out. Fortunately, most dev studios fold before than can happen. But that's another reason Oblivion gets unfairly maligned. The series survived long enough for us to watch its technical jank get smoothed over in the next game. VTMB is from the same era and even jankier but the franchise died so it's forgiven, I guess.

I'll mention a few things explicitly because these are inescapable: Big games have to be designed around controllers in order to justify their budget. They can be comfy for certain games. You should consider plugging one into your PC sometime. Likewise, quest markers are the only way to handle directions at scale. It would be a nightmare to track down and change every reference (possibly requiring recording new voicelines or creating a new art asset) to an object whenever a dev wanted to move it in response to playtesting.

 

[Butter]

Oblivion was a welcome experiment even if not every change worked out. It feels a bit too much like a tech demo, but it's cool that those mechanics made their way into Creation Engine for future titles. Really, I commend that they even tried to innovate. Whenever a franchise starts rehashing itself every release, I check out. Fortunately, most dev studios fold before than can happen. But that's another reason Oblivion gets unfairly maligned. The series survived long enough for us to watch its technical jank get smoothed over in the next game. VTMB is from the same era and even jankier but the franchise died so it's forgiven, I guess.

People forgive Bloodlines because that game was ambitious as hell and is generally well designed. Oblivion was not an ambitious game outside of the radiant AI that ultimately got gutted because they couldn't make it work, and almost none of it was well designed.

I'll mention a few things explicitly because these are inescapable: Big games have to be designed around controllers in order to justify their budget. They can be comfy for certain games. You should consider plugging one into your PC sometime. Likewise, quest markers are the only way to handle directions at scale. It would be a nightmare to track down and change every reference (possibly requiring recording new voicelines or creating a new art asset) to an object whenever a dev wanted to move it in response to playtesting.

Yeah, the gaming industry declined when budgets ballooned and normies got involved. Tell us something we don't know.

 

[Robotigan]

People forgive Bloodlines because that game was ambitious as hell and is generally well designed. Oblivion was not an ambitious game outside of the radiant AI that ultimately got gutted because they couldn't make it work, and almost none of it was well designed.

Shit like this is why I can't take this forum seriously.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

oblivion > morrowind
lol deal with it turbovirgins

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Give Bethestards an inch and they will take a mile. Gatekeep your hobbies, people.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Give Bethestards an inch and they will take a mile. Gatekeep your hobbies, people.

nooo you can't just like traditional fantasy, you have to like my bugman esoteric fantasy

 

[perfectslumbers]

nooo you can't just like traditional fantasy, you have to like my bugman esoteric fantasy

Tolkien is good because his works combined animist and pagan mythology with a Catholic creation story and morality. His works were meaningful and deep, magic was mysterious, power was lurid and inherently corrupting, nature was beautiful and alive and under the threat of industrialisation. And what did most people take from this? Erhmagherd swords and orcs and dark lord :OOO Wizard fight big demon monster !!!!!!!!

Fast forward to the 21st century and Todd Howard watches The Lord of the Rings film and soyfaces at the big black towers of Mordor and the green fields of New Zealand and says "We need TES to look like that!" Most "traditional fantasy," such as Oblivion, is merely a parody of fantasy itself. An aesthetic copy and pasted over and over again with none of the meaning, and none of the depth that made traditional fantasy work in the first place. Perhaps the only meaningful and interesting part of Oblivion is the main villain written by Kirkbride, not because Kirkbride is a good writer. But because Kirkbride at least got his inspiration from something other than traditional fantasy itself, that being various religions.

Morrowind is a deeply flawed game. It's filled with boring fetch quests, Vivec is inconsistent between his writing and dialogue, every npc is "unique," but few of them have unique things to say, the combat feels like crap, the soundtrack is poorly implemented (but very good,) dungeon crawling is perhaps the worst in the series, you walk very slowly, etc etc etc. But Morrowind is still much better than Oblivion because instead of copying LOTR without understanding what makes LOTR good, it creates it's own thing. Something that is meaningful and interesting by virtue of the people working on creating something meaningful to themselves.

Also Oblivion has the worst system design in any rpg ever.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

nooo you can't just like traditional fantasy, you have to like my bugman esoteric fantasy

Tolkien is good because his works combined animist and pagan mythology with a Catholic creation story and morality. His works were meaningful and deep, magic was mysterious, power was lurid and inherently corrupting, nature was beautiful and alive and under the threat of industrialisation. And what did most people take from this? Erhmagherd swords and orcs and dark lord :OOO Wizard fight big demon monster !!!!!!!!

Fast forward to the 21st century and Todd Howard watches The Lord of the Rings film and soyfaces at the big black towers of Mordor and the green fields of New Zealand and says "We need TES to look like that!" Most "traditional fantasy," such as Oblivion, is merely a parody of fantasy itself. An aesthetic copy and pasted over and over again with none of the meaning, and none of the depth that made traditional fantasy work in the first place. Perhaps the only meaningful and interesting part of Oblivion is the main villain written by Kirkbride, not because Kirkbride is a good writer. But because Kirkbride at least got his inspiration from something other than traditional fantasy itself, that being various religions.

Morrowind is a deeply flawed game. It's filled with boring fetch quests, Vivec is inconsistent between his writing and dialogue, every npc is "unique," but few of them have unique things to say, the combat feels like crap, the soundtrack is poorly implemented (but very good,) dungeon crawling is perhaps the worst in the series, you walk very slowly, etc etc etc. But Morrowind is still much better than Oblivion because instead of copying LOTR without understanding what makes LOTR good, it creates it's own thing. Something that is meaningful and interesting by virtue of the people working on creating something meaningful to themselves.

Also Oblivion has the worst system design in any rpg ever.

another issue with morrovirgins: words words words

 

[perfectslumbers]

another issue with morrovirgins: words words words

Oh that's why you like Oblivion, you can't read :O

 

[rusty_shackleford]

another issue with morrovirgins: words words words

Oh that's why you like Oblivion, you can't read :O

If I wanted to read, I'd buy a book. Also, reading is for faggots.

 

[Sykar]

Read this entire thread. It's a lot of spilled ink just for people to affirm Todd's claim that everyone's favorite TES is the first one they played.

Oversimplified and ultimately hyperbolic nonsense. Recently I posted about my favorite RPGs. Of my top 10 and at least half of them were successors to previous titles that I played before them, like Fallout 2, System Shock 2, Baldurs Gate 2 or Gothic 2 NOTR and I was not the only one. If what Todd said were true there would be a clear general trend among all franchises. It is not. Morrowind is for many the favorite because on a creative level it is ahead of ALL the titles and it is not even close. Daggerfall can compete only because of scope but by and large it is very bog standard fantasy. On the other hand both Oblivishit and Skyderp are creatively bancrupt and in fact retconned a chunk of lore just to accomodate them.
I actually was so excited for Oblivishit that it was a for me. Yet I could barely bear to play it beyond Kvatch and I was so thoroughly disgusted with the game that I uninstalled afterwards and NEVER touched it again. 50! Euro shekels down the drain for complete and utter garbage. Long after Skyrim came out, 2015 iirc, I got it on the flea market for 5 Euro bucks and bought it because I read that with enough mods it can be enjoyable. Surprise, it is not. Even with a couple of dozen mods installed once I finished the mage guild questline I uninstalled in complete and utter disgust and NEVER even touched it again.
Now why is that? Because NO amount of mods can fix the fundamental problems with both games, the horrible streamlined barren RPG systems, the dumbing down, and most importantly, the blitheringly retarded story that for the life of me I cannot understand how ANYONE can enjoy it. Don't even get me started on idiotic design descisions like having 10-15 minute long hand holding intro sequences that CANNOT be skipped whereas Morrowind it takes a grand total of 2-3 minutes and you are released into Seyda Neen with just a vague direction to Caius Cossades which consoletards were STRUGGLING to find which is baffeling to me because when Morrowind came out my English was at best mediocre and I was still playing with a dictionary next to me and I still found freaking Caius Cossades without much trouble.

Summa summarum, you are terribly wrong and should feel bad for being such a dumbfuck shill for Todd "Sweet Little Lies" Howard.

 

[Robotigan]

Also Oblivion has the worst system design in any rpg ever.

I vastly prefer Morrowind's setting and even I think you're being an ass. A bland setting is far from the gravest crime in RPGs.

 

[perfectslumbers]

I vastly prefer Morrowind's setting and even I think you're being an ass. A bland setting is far from the gravest crime in RPGs.

I don't understand. You're quoting me talking about the system design but complaining that the only thing I said Morrowind does better is the setting?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

There is no combat system I utterly despise, abhor, loathe as much as RTwP with arbitrary 6 second rounds.

Because it is incredibly slow, especially in a single character RPG. Neverwinter Nights has the most tedious combat ever because of that, it's just so slow and boring. Morrowind with this kind of shit would have so much worse combat than it already has, holy shit.

It's also an unfitting cargo cult feature that makes absolutely no sense in a real time game, and the only reason it even exists is because someone somewhere thought "A-ha, this is how we can translate D&D rules into real time!"

Do you know how long 6 seconds are? In a single character game that would mean only ONE action every six seconds because you only have one character under your control. Extremely slow, therefore turns combat into a slow and tedious slog. If you are attacked by 4 enemies and each of them takes 5 hits to kill, that means you require 2 minutes to dispatch them at minimum, assuming you don't miss a single attack. So even weak trash enemies that should be quick fodder to dispose of, like a cliffracer, would bring extreme tedium with it because it takes so long to dispatch. That's why NWN is such a shit game, not only does it flood you with boring trash mobs, those mobs also take a lot of time to get rid of.

Pity Baldur's Gate didn't rely on Gygaxian 1-minute rounds, so that it would have failed miserably in the marketplace and never corrupted CRPGs.

Who gives a shit about argonians and khajiits

Feel's bad, warmblood.

 

[Raskens]

How many RPGs have getting lost as a game mechanic?

Who the fuck gets lost in an open world game with or without a quest compass? And with 'lost' I mean you don't know where you are at all. Not being able to solve some quests are understandable, but that's different from being lost.

Also, games where you explore inside buildings can have you getting lost. Getting lost=challenging exploration

 

[rusty_shackleford]

How many RPGs have getting lost as a game mechanic?

Who the fuck gets lost in an open world game with or without a quest compass? And with 'lost' I mean you don't know where you are at all. Not being able to solve some quests are understandable, but that's different from being lost.

Also, games where you explore inside buildings can have you getting lost. Getting lost=challenging exploration

go play kcd in the mode that requires manual navigation, then get drunk until you pass out

 

[Sykar]

KCD = King Comrade Deliverance?

 

[Darth Canoli]

It's funny to watch you fight over some piles of garbage, when i read some messages, i feel like morrowind might be better, when reading other messages, it seems Daggerfal is better and even sometimes that oblivion might have improved upon some features.

And then i remember trying to play morrowind...

It's Ecco the dolphin with legs, the whole concept is garbage.

Sure, Daggerfal seems to have some cool features, it could even have worked with more handcrafted content and a party-based and TB engine with handcrafted encounters.

Truth is, picking one over the others is trying to chose between a pile of pigeon's guano and a big fat fuming pile of cow shit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's funny to watch you fight over some piles of garbage, when i read some messages, i feel like morrowind might be better, when reading other messages, it seems Daggerfal is better and even sometimes that oblivion might have improved upon some features.

And then i remember trying to play morrowind...

It's Ecco the dolphin with legs, the whole concept is garbage.

Sure, Daggerfal seems to have some cool features, it could even have worked with more handcrafted content and a party-based and TB engine with handcrafted encounters.

Truth is, picking one over the others is trying to chose between a pile of pigeon's guano and a big fat fuming pile of cow shit.

I'm putting you down as a Chad Oblivion supporter.