Overweight Manatee said:
Combat: I phrased that poorly. Skyrim combat definitely exceeds Morrowind's unmodded. Though not for lack of trying with HP-bloated enemies and as-ever poor AI.
I haven't noticed much of an HP bloat and I'm playing on master. Lvl 10 currently. After putting a few perks in destruction I can one-shot regular bandits with a dual firebolt. Mages - which have fire resistance, or so it seems - I stun with a shout and then rush to them with a sword, killing them with four-five hits. That doesn't change the fact that I get easily killed too when I'm careless - especially by the mages.
Exploration: In Morrowind every quest gives you detailed (or not) directions like an ordinary person would and lets you find your way there. Fast travel options are limited to the ferry system. Dozens of the important dungeons (with the top class unique items) would never be reached by a following a big quest marker, you had to read the books for hints or just flat out be lucky finding them (granted I haven't done enough of Skyrim to know whether this is true or not). All of this contributes towards making it feel like you are actually exploring Morrowind vs. following the quest marker into oblivion. And continent hopping was awesome. Morrowind really wasn't that tedious to get around if you knew how to get to your location.
Roll a warrior type in Morrowind and try not to steal everything you can so that you have infinite cash so that you can enchant a portable fast travel system. Have fun watching you run the small distance from Balmora to the fighter's guild-related eggmine for 10 minutes.
The minimum character speed in Morrowind was just too low. You should start with a respectable one you'd have even at maximum encumbrance and lowest possible speed and athletics - and then make athletics and speed provide you with a boost so that you gain an edge in melee combat, not so that you can travel on foot without spending hours watching the landscape slowly pass by.
Notice the bolded part too. Yeah, when you know how the game works and all the useful tidbits then you can bypass the tedium. That's the word with everything about MW core gameplay. Skyrim is playable out of the box to a complete novice.
Sure that the mods improved on this (as well as other stuff) but it's a bit unfair to compare fully modded MW to vanilla Skyrim.
Dialog: The wiki is just a way of interaction, it says nothing about the dialog itself. Morrowind had paragraphs, Skyrim/Oblivion have single sentences. Need I really say more?
Yes. I don't agree with that POV for several reasons, one of them being that when you talk to someone in real life you usually don't talk paragraphs. The other one is that the fact that pretty much all NPCs had the same response when asked about a given subject killed *all* the sense of personality they might've given. Caius Cosades averted this to some extent, some other NPCs like Divayth Fyr did too because you couldn't ask them about bullshit.
In Skyrim some characters also give you lectures resembling the MW ones. Take the Talos priest in Whiterun for instance. That's four or five sentences which you could make into a nice and tidy paragraph if you wish so.
Quests: They all tie in to the much better exploration factor. As for the rewards: yeah, its almost realistic? Why, were you expecting the Uber Pwning sword of Pwningness in exchange for gathering flowers?
Actually the flower quest in MG did provide you with some rewards. But no, each and every quest should yield some sort of reward that the player can appreciate, and if you need a tie-in of some sort for storytelling or coherence reasons than make it as easy and quick as possible. Clicking on 'advancement' isn't a reward that I could appreciate, especially since money was plentiful and getting access to new trainers didn't mean jack shit because the same skills or spells were available elsewhere.
In other words, the player needs motivation to do something. A couple of "fetch this oh thank you advancement!" killed any sort of motivation as it was much more rewarding for me just to bash some skulls on the road or steal shit.
Skyrim quests so far: fedex quests are short and usually tie into something (and pretty much always reward you). Can't compare the MQ to Morrowind's one as I'm still early in the game (omw to High Hrothgar) but it sure as hell beats the crap out of Oblivion in terms of, well, everything.
Alchemy/Spell stuff: Yeah, broken if you cheese it. I never played a full spell caster, those are equally boring in all TES games until you grind out a shit ton of levels. Oblivion/Skyrim's failings was the need to do fireball x100 to every unnamed bandit's face, that's hardly much better. As for finding ingrediants: Derp Detected. Mage's guild books on alchemy ingredient effects told you 3/4ths of what you needed to know, and you could buy them right from the vendors. Can't comment on enchanting as I have done none of it in Skrim, but Oblivion's was dogshit with its limitations so if Skrim is the same then its equally bad.
In Skyrim all ingredients have four effects and you can use them straight from the bat. Alchemy skill regulates how potent your potions are and using some perks makes finding out ingredient effects easier than experimenting.
The first effect you can get to know by eating the ingredient. You can take perks that allow you to find the second and third effect by eating too. You can also just try to mix ingredients blindly and the game helpfully makes bad combinations (that you found to be bad by testing them first) no longer available so you can just mix away different ingredients and see what happens.
There was a handful of books/letters/notes on alchemy which told you about effects in MW - most of hidden in dungeons, not in bookshops - and you had a shitload of ingredients. So no, reading books wasn't a way to learn what works. Anyway, it's not the recipes I'm bitching about, I'm bitching about having 40+ ingredients in your inventory and no simple way to manage them, and about the poorly made interface which made mixing a chore. In terms of the alchemical interface both Oblivion and Skyrim easily surpass Morrowind.
Also, playing a destruction-reliant mage in Skyrim is totally viable, for the first time in TES I guess. Destruction-based damaging magic is easily an alternative to bashing people's heads with swords and axes. You just need to purchase more powerful spells than the flames/sparks you start with (which you can do in Whiterun - the second town in the game if you don't stray off the path right from the start - and put some perks in Destruction that lower mana cost and increase damage. You're good to go then.
Raapys said:
Look beyond the visuals for a moment. Combat? As you say with Morrowind, tedious and unrewarding. Rinse and repeat. MW with mods actually had far better combat than this. Exploration? Interesting for the first hour or so, until you realize that there isn't really much interesting stuff to find, just more enemies and a quest here and there. About the level of MW then. Dialog? Hah, don't get me started. Reading Morrowind's wikipedia is far more interesting than this stuff. Quests? I've done a fair bit of them, only a handful didn't have me 'go to dungeon x, bring back item y, kill person z'. Then you've gone from MW's 'look around that area, the cave should be somewhere near there' to 'just follow the magic pointer on your hud!!' gameplay. No improvement there.
Hum. You know, most of the time you don't provide arguments I could counter whatsoever. Boils down to preference, I guess. I like Skyrim's combat despite putting ~12 hours in the game and find it not tedious and rewarding. Some of the places you find are just as interesting as Morrowind for the same reasons. Say, a bandit camp I've stumbled upon due to one of the Radiant Story (trademark) quests - it's a mining camp apparently taken over by bandits. Inside you find mammoth tusks and a dead mammoth. WTF, you think. Then you go forward and find that the bandits made a huge hole with sharpened spikes, with multiple animal carcasses down there and an unlucky dead high elf. This sort of level design is miles better than whatever I've seen in Oblivion and comparable to many places from MW.
I don't really care about the quest compass or the 'directions'. I cared about it in Oblivion since it was intensely stupid at times, leading you to a character whom you should find on your own only so that the NPC would go "ooh, how crafty of you to find me!". Noticed no such derpness in Skyrim so far.
Then you've the skills of course. Let's just whisker away attributes and the effects they had and could have and replace them with the fabulous mana, stamina and health!!!! Let's make every skill matter just as much when you level up!!! Let's remove as many skills as we can!!! Let's add derpy perks so WoW players will feel at home!!! There's just so much wrong with that part it's almost enough to ruin the game by itself. What could have been an excellent system had they taken the time to improve it, was instead replaced by herpderp.
I disagree. MW system was just clunky in my opinion. If I'm to pick a more complex but poorly designed character system or a simpler but one that is working well I'd always choose the latter. I don't miss attributes at all and the perks allow for substantial customisation.
Spells, spellmaking. Yeah, not really. It looks better in combat, in every other way it fails greatly. It's a decline from Oblivion, but it's not even comparable to MW. After the initial 'WOW COOL SKELETON BONES EVERYWHERE' impression from my mage, it grew exceedingly dull to play once I realized just how shallow they'd made it.
No. Most of the spells I bought so far in TESV are useful and I have around 17 of them at the moment. My character is shaping up to using magic as the first choice and melee weapons as a backup option and I love how it works. Compare to Morrowind where the spells you could buy were completely useless and you bought them only to learn spell effects - and simple damaging spells plainly sucked. In before Draq: sure, you could make really potent offensive spells but making insanely powerful fireballs was not an option. And I like insanely powerful fireballs.
I could go on, but I'm sure you get my drift. Beyond the visual illusion, there really isn't much going on in the game. It's just another next-gen dumbed down "rpg" that has captivated people with atmosphere and the illusion of an interesting world. Improvements are few, decline is there even from Oblivion and the rest has already been done by the Nehrim mod for OB.
What I see is an illusion that you provide fair points while all you do is to provide your unsubstantiated opinion on the game. I respect that but you seem to believe you're arguing and not just making a statement.[
Oh, as far imbalances in Morrowind and also Daggerfall, I actually think that's *much* preferable to carefully balanced and sterile games such as Skyrim and, to a larger degree, OB. Daggerfall probably has the most broken spell system ever made in terms of balance, at least when combined with the also broken enchantment system. Yet it's nonetheless far more entertaining than the similar systems in both MW, OB and Skyrim.
That's personal preference. I found it annoying that I constantly have to restrict myself in MW if I want to get any degree of challenge. Stealing stuff - overpowered character who could reach a very high level without doing a single quest or leaving a city/town by stealing, selling and training - did it once, got lvl 23 or so. Exploring alchemy, spellmaking, enchantment - extremely overpowered character. The only way to enjoy the game for me was to restrain myself all the time.
The things blatantly OP in Skyrim I found so far are followers (which BTW don't attack you when you hit them by accident like someone stated) and stealth. The rest works fine so far.