Favorite Bethesda Game

[Emphyrio]

Please understans, Rusty only played Oblivion for 10 hours and his opinion of the game is based mostly on stuff he read about but didn't actually experience in the game.

[Vaako]

Easiely Morrowind, Levitation, better fast travel system, better legendary and unique items. You had to have certain stat requirements to advance the ranks of factions. And cant just like in skyrim go to the college of winterhold and become leader after doing a few quests without any knowledge in spells.

[Element]

• - Aside from one track, the music was forgettable.

There was also the main theme. Oblivion beats Skyrim in that department, anyhow.

Skyrim:

• + Biome diversity.

Never understood this point. Are people playing this with mods when they talk about the biome diversity? Because when I played the game near release it struck me as being quite dull and grey throughout, even when traversing different biomes.

[Tweed]

Waiting for Rusty to alter the votes.

[rusty_shackleford]

Waiting for Rusty to alter the votes.

There's no way to do that through the web UI and I'm too lazy to go alter the database manually.

[junior]

[Element]

Meme stopped making sense when it put DS2 up there

[wndrbr]

Meme stopped making sense when it put DS2 up there

and Frontier at the bottom.

[czarwave]

I'm going to say Skyrim.



There were several things I liked about the Morrowind.

• + It was weird, surreal. It has bizarre aesthetics. Elven kingdom in a volcanic land and an ashen sky, with feuding Elven clans. Clans living inside the shell of a giant dead crab. Huge mushrooms and floating jellyfish monsters and stuff. The setting and aesthetics are exotic and unique.

• +Morrowind's NPC interaction is really good. In Skyrim, EVERYTHING is voiced, and voice acting is expensive. So there is far, far less dialogue in Skyrim. In Morrowind, they went nuts with the amount of text, so you just get so much more lore and character. Speechcraft is such a great skill in Morrowind because it reveals so much more meaningful information about the characters and the world. I also liked that you could click on a phrase/term and the NPC would give you information about that.

• + Subfactions. I joined House Telvanni, and then had to pick one of five master wizards to become an apprentice to, and each one as an extensive questline. I got really immersed in working for this one wizard who lived in this ruined castle overgrown by vines. You really feel like you're in the world.

• +Being able to craft spells so I could leap over mountains was fun.

• - Aside from one track, the music was forgettable.

• - But then you get to the bad. Morrowind isn't very friendly to newcomers. It doesn't give you a tutorial. You step off the boat, get attacked by 20 cliff racers out of nowhere, and die having had no way to defend yourself. Learning the hard way is extremely frustrating (or you read a guide or a wiki, which is boring). Morrowind as tactile as Skyrim. In Skyrim, you swing your sword and hit the bad guy. In Morrowind, you can spend a minute swinging your sword and never hit, which makes it very aggravating to level up skills and combat not very fun if you don't set up your character a certain way right from the beginning (which requires foreknowledge). There are a thousand different things like this that add up and create an unsatisfying experience.

• - Another issue is that most of the map looks like the same, brown wasteland. Morrowind becomes boring to look at after 20 hours.

Skyrim:

• + Biome diversity. You get a lot of variety in environments. You have lush forests, snowy plains, snowy mountains, rocky mountains, valleys of golden fields, autumnal mountain forests, marshes, chilly beaches, and icefloes. I could play Skyrim for 200-300 hours before the world started feeling samey. Also, Skyrim is overall prettier to look at than Morrowind, which was a lot of mud huts in barren wastelands.

• + Fixes a lot of the irritating issues with Morrowind. You click an enemy to swing your sword and it actually hits him. There is a proper tutorial so you know what's going on. You can't screw your character at creation because you were knew and didn't have prior knowledge of unintuitive mechanics. Etc. You can pick a direction and go on adventures and not need to be constantly alt+tabbing out to consult a walkthrough or a wiki. More fun to actually play.

• + About half a dozen memorable tracks. Still not many but more than Morrowind.

• +/- Generic Viking/Germanic fantasy. Not a very memorable fantasy world to visit like Morrowind but not bad either.

• +/- Civil war was a cool idea but so much content was dummied out, you really need mods to expand the experience.

• - Factions aren't as fleshed out as as in Morrowind. The Companions were probably the coolest but there is so little flesh to them. No subfactions either.

I have Oblivion but haven't played it yet. I've heard thieving is really fun in it. I am a little put off because you really want to play Bethseda games with mods to fix the game, make them look better, and sometimes make them play better, but modding is very frustrating. You have to spend many, many hours looking up recommended mods, then reading through their pages, then downloading them, then trying to install them in the correct order, creating batch patches, and then you load up the game and 5 hours your game crashes. I wish there was just an all-in-one stable modpack I could download and play. I know there was one for Skyrim but I haven't found one for Oblivion.

Now that I think about it, didn't KCD try something similar? I seem to remember a lot of talk about that game riding CPUs hard due to "complex" NPC behaviours in towns.

From my 80 hours playing KCD, I didn't notice anything like that.

Skyrim sucked, the first time I played it I got to the dragon attack and quit I hated it from the start. When I did my one and only playthrough I almost quit half way through when I had to talk to the perverts on top of the mountain, that quest was one of the worst in any Bethesda game. Horrible gameplay mechanics, ugly environment, ****** outcomes, and really gay story. I would have to be lobotomized to do another playthrough of the other **** outcomes and **** side quest. The only quest I enjoyed was the Dark Brotherhood storyline.

[WaterMage]

Morrowind > Rest.

Morrowind has the most interesting setting, amazing story, amazing factions and everything is so amazing.

[Boontaker]

I'd like to play morrowind again now that my lobes are fully formed, that said man is it an ugly game. Oblivion is juuust enough of an improvement that I could stomach a full replay as an adult, which is why it got my vote. I'll agree that morrowind has some crazy ambitious RPG mechanics but playing it feels like running through swamp water.

[Maggot]

Morrowind has a more consistent visual fidelity than Oblivion which has giant stretched low resolution textures with weird looking normal maps in the oblivion areas.

[Boontaker]

Morrowind has a more consistent visual fidelity than Oblivion which has giant stretched low resolution textures with weird looking normal maps in the oblivion areas.

If only the beautiful swamp scenery wasn't interrupted by the horrific npc and monster models constantly.

[BENEFACTOR]

Morrowind > Rest.

Morrowind has the most interesting setting, amazing story, amazing factions and everything is so amazing.

Oblivion actually had AI and felt like a living world.

[junior]

Morrowind > Rest.

Morrowind has the most interesting setting, amazing story, amazing factions and everything is so amazing.

Oblivion actually had AI and felt like a living world.

stop huffing paint

[WaterMage]

Oblivion actually had AI and felt like a living world.

Till you get to high level and everything soaks hundreds of hits with everything maximized...

[Decline]

I'd like to play morrowind again now that my lobes are fully formed, that said man is it an ugly game. Oblivion is juuust enough of an improvement that I could stomach a full replay as an adult, which is why it got my vote. I'll agree that morrowind has some crazy ambitious RPG mechanics but playing it feels like running through swamp water.

[maidenhaver]

0.48 openMW has a dungeon music mod now. Its more important to have good sound than pretty graphics.

[Decline]

0.48 openMW has a dungeon music mod now. Its more important to have good sound than pretty graphics.

I don't know if you're being ironic here but it's true. Lightning and ambient is more important than poly count.

[Sweeper]

Daggerfall (best one) > Morrowind (2nd best mechanically) > Oblivion (SOVL and nostalgia)

[BENEFACTOR]

Oblivion actually had AI and felt like a living world.

Till you get to high level and everything soaks hundreds of hits with everything maximized...

That's true and that's a legitimate flaw of the game. Morrowind on the other hand was completely static and lifeless.

[Rand]

Another point for Oblivion, it has the best music of any Bethesda game.

Best music system, too. Just mp3s in three or four folders.

They pioneered that in Morrowind.
Oblivion just did it because why fix what ain't broken?

[Rand]

Morrowind has a more consistent visual fidelity than Oblivion which has giant stretched low resolution textures with weird looking normal maps in the oblivion areas.

That's literally the fault of the ******* Xbox.
It had to work on that piece of **** console.
The original design textures were much better but they had to downsample them because the clowns at Microsoft inexplicably cheaped out on RAM.
Xbox ****** over a lot of games. Thief: Deadly Shadows and Deus Ex: Invisible War, for two other examples of the puny RAM compromising gameplay.

[Rand]

Oblivion actually had AI and felt like a living world.

Till you get to high level and everything soaks hundreds of hits with everything maximized...

That's true and that's a legitimate flaw of the game. Morrowind on the other hand was completely static and lifeless.

They started on the tools to do the radiant AI in Morrowind, and you can see a tiny bit in the stuff they released at the end for the things like Solstheim, but it was unreliable and, again, the Xbox not having sufficient RAM ****** with it so they had to abandon their plans.

[maidenhaver]

Another point for Oblivion, it has the best music of any Bethesda game.

Best music system, too. Just mp3s in three or four folders.

They pioneered that in Morrowind.
Oblivion just did it because why fix what ain't broken?

Yeah, but Oblivion's is best because there's dungeon and town music. It was perfect. The fallouts have that stupid radio code you need to **** with and then skyrim played with day/night and weather music, like Daggerfall had, but adding tracks required conversion to ogg and an extra step. Truly, devs are terrible people.

[Goth-Girl-Supremacy]

**** games for **** people.

[General Reign]

Best music system, too. Just mp3s in three or four folders.

They pioneered that in Morrowind.
Oblivion just did it because why fix what ain't broken?

Yeah, but Oblivion's is best because there's dungeon and town music. It was perfect. The fallouts have that stupid radio code you need to **** with and then skyrim played with day/night and weather music, like Daggerfall had, but adding tracks required conversion to ogg and an extra step. Truly, devs are terrible people.

Yes, but the music for any of them is so easy to mod for it is not worth giving a pro or con point to debate. Conelrad is the only good thing Fallout 3 produced and you can just use it in FNV instead.

[iC3R0]

I would vote fallout 76 it still need more improvement.

[Havitner]

I remember watching the Oblivion intro cinematic as a kid and getting hype as **** as the cool music played while the camera panned above the Imperial City... right until 1:54 when an NPC suddenly appears and he's about twice as tall as I expected him to be. Instantly compacted my mental model of the city from 'grand bastion of civilization' to 'plastic toy castle'.

[Lutte]

Oblivion wins by virtue of being the first thing Bethesda released that feels sort-of like a video game, rather than a VRML world with combat, while not being as awful and monotonous as Skyrim.

Morrowind gameplay is a non existent clunky little thing. There's a slight curve at the beginning where you don't know the mechanics and get shredded by everything, then you get past the curve and become God the minute you start using things like alchemy. It's an either fail/win state that leads to the automatic win part quickly.

You can tell how non existent Morrowind's gameplay is by the fact that people who love morrowind never talk about its gameplay :

> Morrowind had great world building and an interesting main quest. Daggerfall had a lot of women with their tits out. It's pretty close, but I'll go with Morrowind.

>But still, Morrowind had a good and mostly nuanced society, so I enjoyed it the most.

>There were several things I liked about the Morrowind. [...] aesthetics [...] NPC wikis had a ton of text! much better than oblivious voiced dialogue!!!1 [...] subfactions [...] spellcrafting (jerking around with OP spells in a non-game where nothing is a threat is so much fun!!!)

> Easiely Morrowind, Levitation, better fast travel system, better legendary and unique items. You had to have certain stat requirements to advance the ranks of factions. And cant just like in skyrim go to the college of winterhold and become leader after doing a few quests without any knowledge in spells.

Yeah, instead you can become the archmage in morrowind by doing a shitton of extremely riveting fetch quests like collect mushrooms, bring me a bowl, lowly slave, collect money and other really fun things to do /s

>Morrowind has the most interesting setting, amazing story, amazing factions and everything is so amazing.

Of course, Oblivion is still not really a game, it just feels more like one. Less breakable, but still broken nonetheless, as Bethesda is unable to understand "what is gameplay" so you can still do things like keep loads of potions and just act like an immortal for as long as you have some remaining. Is it even possible for Bethesda to release a /video game/? Let's not even ask for a RPG, just a video game will do.