Morrowind is a fine RPG, whether or not it lives up to Daggerfall's ambition. Daggerfall on release was a buggy mess, and it's ideas could not be conveyed adequately until 20+ years later when Daggerfall Unity was created. Despite the rough development cycle, Bethesda made a quality game that many people look back on fondly. And with OpenMW, it's more playable than ever and can be improved with mods like the newer titles. It may not be a massive, procedurally generated world but what we got was handcrafted and fine tuned. Would Morrowind be a better game if Vvardenfell was 10x it's size?, I doubt it. It just means that the quests would be more spread out, and you'd have to fast travel a lot more.Lutte wrote: ↑ March 11th, 2023, 13:22That would be Oblivion, not morrowind.wndrbr wrote: ↑ February 8th, 2023, 06:17Starfield looks like Bethesda's first serious attempt at putting some effort since Morrowind.
Morrowind had the coolest setting of TES but as a game it's the second lowest effort shit Bethesda ever made, right after Skyrim.
Daggerfall gave you mounts, Morrowind removed them. Daggerfall's world had schedules, Morrowind had no NPC schedules and they always stayed in the same spot forever. Daggerfall had a convenient travel system, Morrowind had the most retarded shit in existence whose main purpose is not to add to the gameplay but to hide how small the game world really is. Morrowind had the smallest dungeons of all TES.
Oblivion was a failure in many ways, the worst offender being the excessive level scaling, But if we're talking about effort, Bethesda really tried. Radiant AI didn't pan out as Beth hoped but even what ended up making it to the final build of the game was miles better than the completely dead world of Morrowind. While faces were the ugliest thing in existence, the engine was quite uniquely immersive in its ability to project distance, I do not recall many games gave such a high quality illusion of seeing up to the horizon before Oblivion apart from Far Cry.
People only see the streamlining (such as the removal of skill requirements to rank up in guilds or the quest compass) that causes them to hate Oblivion and don't realize how different it was from both morrowind and other mainstream RPGs. While there were a ton of fail and it ended up being a bad game, Bethesda poured a lot of effort into making it. Oblivion wasn't a streamlined morrowind: it was a streamlined Daggerfall, as it was built with the same sort of ambitions : a game with a sense of scale and simulationism, while Morrowind had no ambition whatsoever, just a game they made with the hope of pleasing the RPG crowd to save them from the bankruptcy that was coming after the market failures of their previous action games.
Yes, I really despise morrowind.
Oblivion suffered from a large chunk of it's content having to be cut before release, it's likely that only half of what was initially planned made it to store shelves and it's a damn shame. They wanted Cyrodill to be a living world, but had to neuter the A.I due to the problems it apparently caused. It being developed with the Xbox 360 in mind may have also contributed to cutbacks and downscaling, as that was around the time developers started shifting away from PC exclusives. Often to the detriment of the RPG genre as a whole.
All ES games are fine games in their own right, even Skyrim presents an epic scale and an unforgettable soundtrack. You really can't go wrong playing any of them.
