Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind: A Series in Retrospective

[Arkhon]

One of the best reviews I've read:

Hey all. I know this isn’t my usual subject of discussion (read: not Legend of Korra), but recently I have spent time playing the various entries into the Elder Scrolls series, and I have formulated a number of thoughts that I think I can make coherent enough to sort into a meaningful discussion. And maybe it’ll get me a few more followers.

(Astute readers (i.e. people with eyes) will note that the title does not include Daggerfall or Arena, the first two installments in the Elder Scrolls series, and that’s because I haven’t played them, so please keep that in mind while reading this. Also, I’ll warn you ahead of time for profanity, and minor Skyrim spoilers.)

I first purchased Morrowind several years after its original release - perhaps in 2005 or so - and immediately fell in love. The story, the environments, the detail, the opportunities, the options, the dangers, the world itself - everything was mesmerizing. It is a game that I come back to again and again. I fire it up at least once a year and roll a different character and have the time of my life. I’ll go as far as saying I think it’s my favorite video game of all time, and easily the best installment of the Elder Scrolls series, in my humble opinion.

I bought Skyrim on release day. I loved it. I tore through the main quest and explored hundreds of Skyrim’s nooks and crannies before finally settling down and moving on to other ventures about a month later. Some time in early 2012 I picked it up again and continued my first character, and I finished the Imperial side of the civil war. Then I stopped again, and I haven’t come back until this past weekend. What I found interesting, though, is that every time I play Skyrim, I think to myself, “Man, this is a really good game, but it just makes me want to play Morrowind.” And every time I say, “Nah, it must be just nostalgia. I’ve been bitten by the nostalgia bug before, and I know how this works.”

But every time I return to Morrowind, I realize it’s not nostalgia. Morrowind is a genuinely better game. Sure there are parts that are a real pain to deal with, like the awkward combat and the godawful running speed, but in nearly every other aspect I find Morrowind to be far better than either of its successors. The world is only 10 square miles, and both Oblivion and Skyrim are 16, but Morrowind always feels larger. There are reason for this, of course. Morrowind lacks the map-click, anywhere-anytime fast travel, so you must use city services to get anywhere, and you can only travel to other population centers. Is there a quest objective in the middle of [&@%!], Vvardenfell? Better start walking from a backwater like Ald’Ruhn. And by the way, you can’t walk straight there over rolling plains - you’ve gotta take a detour through virtual stretches of volcanic passes and around impassable cliffs. And you may not even have a quest marker! You might have been sent off with directions and you may need to keep an eye out for landmarks. Did I mention the godawful running speed?

Now, you might be thinking, “Self-Moving-Soul, you’re not making a great case for why Morrowind is good.“ Rereading my words, I might agree. But trust me when I say its a genuine adventure. Those long stretches of passes and paths you must follow are chock-full of dungeons, caves, fortresses, huts, bandit passes, plants, animals, dangers, friends, foes, what have you, so the world is never, ever sparse. Using directions and landmarks and your own wits to find your way is infinitely more engaging and interesting than following a floating arrow like a lemming. Just finding a place you’ve been looking for is a reward in and of itself - and then you’ve got to do the quest, or plunder the dungeon or whatnot! The world is alive, and you are a part of it. (I cannot, however, defend the running speed. But there are mods that help).

The thing is, this is just one of many reasons why I feel Morrowind is the superior game, and next I will discuss the one thing that ruined Oblivion for me: level scaling.

Level scaling, to those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, is the practice of designing an RPG game in which the enemies in the world level up alongside the player. So if you level up to 10, everything (enemies, animals, NPCs, guards, everything) in the world levels to 10. When you reach level 11, everything else reaches 11. This design flaw choice was implemented wholesale in Oblivion. Everything in Oblivion - all of the NPCs and items and enemies and friends - leveled with you. The idea was that you, as the player, could go out into the world and plunder any dungeon at any time at any level, and the challenge would always be appropriate.

But for me it backfired, because this concept destroys all sense of character progression. If you find an enemy you are unable to beat, you can’t leave and train and level up and come back to take it on with shiny new spells or weapons, because that enemy will have leveled up as well. When I played Oblivion, I had no sense that my character was becoming stronger. In fact, if you play on higher difficulties, you must mini-max your skillups and attributes in ways that completely break the intent of the system (i.e. you are obliged to deliberately manage your minor skill progress so that every level you gain the maximum attribute bonus). For someone who wants to play an RPG and not an action game, this shatters immersion. You never get stronger relative to the world. You never feel the triumph of utterly smashing/disintegrating/disemboweling your enemies. Hell, you feel useless next to the guards, because they’re the same level as you and they’re really, really powerful. And there’s no threshold you must reach to beat the main quest or the factions, because the level scaling works the other way too. I have been Sigismund, level 10 paladin, Savior of Kvatch, Champion of Cyrodil, Arena Master, and Head of the Fighter’s Guild. And I did it all in piddly steel armor and with a silver claymore.

That, in a nutshell, was why (vanilla, unmodded) Oblivion is easily the worst entry in the series. There are mods that help. Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul removes much of the scaling and makes many things static, but it really ramps up the difficulty. The design of the game also made it exceedingly difficult to play a hybrid character. I’ve tried so many different Paladin and Battlemage builds, but not once have I felt half as competent as an archtypical wizard or warrior.

Morrowind has a partial scaling system. New, tougher enemies appear in the world when you level, but the old ones remain, and certain areas have specific lists of enemies that make them challenging (don’t go beyond the Ghostfence before level 10, is all I’m saying). There are also many, many items that are static and fixed, so if you get lucky you can run across some bonkers stuff early on. That may be good or bad depending on what kind of experience you want, but it really feels rewarding when you find a chest or some gauntlets hidden behind a coffer that aren’t obvious at first glance, and you look at the stats and your eyes pop out of your skull. Skyrim also has a partial system that I think works well. Each area of Skyrim pulls from a list of enemies that it can spawn, so there are places you don’t want to go right off the bat. Other enemies will scale with you until a certain point, so beyond level 15 or so bandits stop keeping up. It’s a workable system that encourages reckless exploring while retaining the sense of character progression (I can’t really speak for items in Skyrim - I don’t know if any are static or not).

I will now move to the last thing that makes Morrowind better: the vibrant world.

First, take a look at this article from the UESP (Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages) wiki:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Demographics

Decipher the chart at the top. Specifically, the number of NPCs.

To summarize:

Number of NPCs in Oblivion (no expansions): 855

Skyrim: 1016

Morrowind (no expansions): 2675

Wow. That’s a huge difference. And those 2.5k NPCs are packed into a smaller game world than either Skyrim’s or Oblivion’s. So the world feels more vibrant, more alive. There are more people doing more actions and saying more things. Well, kind of, because Morrowind’s NPCs do not have schedules, unlike Skyrim’s and Oblivion’s. And we have to consider that the lack of schedules (and, thus, complicated AI pathing and programming) is the very reason why Morrowind can support more NPCs. If you tried to stuff that many people into Skyrim, your PC might not be able to handle it.

But even considering this, it’s hard to not feel as though Skyrim isn’t as alive as Morrowind. And even if we acknowledge the technical limits, and accept the lower number of NPCs (because, let’s face it, Skyrim’s voice acting is halfway decent, unlike Oblivion’s), Morrowind is still more alive. Why? For the simple reason that there’s more to do.

In vanilla (unexpanded) Oblivion, there were six major storylines/factions: the Main Quest, the three Guilds, the Dark Brotherhood, and the Arena. In Skyrim (unexpanded), we have seven: the Main Quest, the three Guilds, the Dark Brotherhood, and the two sides to the Civil War.

In unexpanded Morrowind, we have fourteen: the Main Quest, the three Guilds, the Morag Tong, the Imperial Legion, the Imperial Cult, the Tribunal Temple, the three Great Houses, and the three Vampire Clans. And each of them has an interesting storyline, unlike, say Skyrim’s Imperial Legion quests, half of which are literally copy-pasted (same dialogue, same objective, same style, same architecture) “capture this fort” [&@%!] tasks that reek of laziness, content that Bethesda should be ashamed of including in their flagship series.


*deep breath*

Yes. So. That’s where this discussion has come together. At the beginning of this article, I told you how I quit Skyrim after I finished the Imperial Legion storyline. The bolded, profane sentence above is why. I did those stupid fort-capturing quests, and I took Windhelm (in a mission that really didn’t differ much from the last six quests and had some terribly written dialogue to boot), and I got a crappy sword and the “satisfaction” of having run the same damn thing seven times. I was so disappointed. So I quit.

I’m not saying Skyrim is bad. Compared to many of the games out there today, it’s really, really good. I just played it over the weekend, actually, and had a lot of fun. It IS the world’s best hiking simulator, but this hiking simulator lets you kill [&@%!] up and down the mountains, smashing your warhammer/magic spell/dagger into someone’s face and shouting people to death the whole time. And the dungeons are fantastic- easily on par with Morrowind’s and in many cases much better. The leveling system is actually really nicely designed, too, since it doesn’t pigeonhole you into archetypes (like Oblivion) or hybrid classes (like Morrowind) in order to be effective, and it keeps that notion of being whoever you want with the well-designed perk system. Skyrim is fun.

But whenever I fire it up, I play for a few days and think, “Man, I really want to play Morrowind.”

-FIN

EDIT: Oblivion is still crap.

Source: http://self-moving-soul.tumblr.com/post ... rospective

[philfredobob]

just another reviewer beating down on oblivion, nothing new here.

i disagree about basicly everything, Oblivion was the best. the only thing i dont like about it is the repetative dungeons, and this guy didnt even mention those.

[Crimson-Claw]

Well, while I personally like Morrowind the best, I dislike it when people claim one game is the best.

For example, many of Morrowind's features, such as its combat system, are unappealing to others. I liked the fact that there was no fast travel, but others don't.

And while I kind of do agree that Oblivion felt like the weakest entry to me (although I liked KotN and SI), I believe it introduced very interesting and useful concepts such as the NPC schedules. I'd pay for a Morrowind update that adds NPC schedules simply because they add a lot of life to the game.

[DikaSmausha]

I agree and disagree. Some of your opinions are facts, and a lot are biased. So I can't really see past this as an personal opinion. Though I agree with most of what you are saying, besides the bashing on Oblivion. All three of the games are equal, really, as they each have ups and downs. My opinion will always be Morrowind, but it is biased.

[Yaije]

Eh, I wouldn't say any of them are above and beyond better than the rest overall. Sure in certain areas they shine or suck, but overall none seem to stand out.

[The SheoDovah]

Oblivion introduced me to TES and helped me to get into RPGs but it is the weakest out of the 3(Morrowind, Skyrim and Oblivion). The level system would punish you if you made a single mistake. The lack of dialogue options. and so forth but it had an excellent atmosphere. The world is going to hell but you may as well look at the beautiful scenery. Morrowind has some flaws as well. The combat system is said to troll gamers at random, the lack of fast travel(which may be a good thing depending how you look at it) and so forth.

Skyrim managed to bring some of what i've heard of Morrowind back but it also dumbed down a lot. For example, the regenerating health was not neccessary and doesn't belong in a TES game. As well as the disappointing guild quests. Only a few stood out. The bard's college is considered to be a joke by many fans.

Each game has it's flaw. Hopefully, Bethesda will combine all of the strengths of the 3 games and implent them in TES6.

[Avron the S'wit]

We have a name for these people: Morrowhiners.

Honestly I'm going to agree with everyone who said that each game has its ups and downs. Myself, I think that Morrowind has the best main quest storyline; Oblivion was the most fun to play; and Skyrim has the most new features. A really good retrospective is able to pull on the strengths and weaknesses of each game, because they all have it (including the games before Morrowind), but I myself find them all enjoyable for their own reasons.

I myself actually like Skyrim the least amount. The world is so large and the quests so many, I feel like I'm always getting thrown from one side of the map to the other for no good reason.

[Speed of Darkness]

I have a few friends who don't enjoy playing RPGs but they enjoy watching them because they are "like a movie." Now I don't agree with that statement, and all but one of them plays virtually 0 games, unless you count the apps on a phone.

Anyways, occasionally they ask if I'll play a game so they can lounge around, study, and watch. 90% of the time they choose Morrowind because though they would never play it they don't think it is automatic like the latest 2 and things actually have to be figured out/ analyzed to complete quests and enjoy that even over the "kill moves" of Skyrim.

That is probably the most unbiased opinion I could ever find.

[Unionhack]

Eh, this dude makes some alright points, but I remain firm in my stance; Skyrim was a good game, Oblivion was a good game, and Morrowind was a good game. None of the three were God's gift to gaming, but none of them were the scourge of the RPG genre as we know it, either.

I personally think Oblivion was the best. Doesn't stop me from putting plenty of hours into Skyrim. I've actually done the least in Morrowind compared to the other two games. Doesn't mean I like it any less; I just didn't get into it as much as Skyrim and Oblivion.

[Aralvar]

You're really not seeing the improvements that were made over Morrowind. The combat is not the only thing. NPCs don't stand around while you steal their stuff for one thing, and they actually have a daily routine. Oblivion is probably the most underrated game I've ever played. I didn't find the leveling system to be that punishing. I hate to be "this guy", are you sure you aren't just really bad at the game? As I leveled up and got better weapons and armor, I would be able to tackle harder enemies. Including those bandits that had Ebony armor for whatever reason. Avron put it the best, each game has their own strengths and weaknesses. I can't respect the opinion of anyone who thinks Oblivion is the weakest game in the series when it improved over Morrowind in so many ways. There is no weakest game, only players who have biased opinions.

[Yaije]

You also have to keep in mind the areas that it stepped backwards in respect to morrowind. Like how when you'd level up and be able to take on stronger foes you could go into deadlier places where those stronger foes would be found. Oblivion just makes the world scale with your level in EVERYTHING.... even sneak, pickpocket, etc...

Also it's very underwhelming seeing a scamp army overtake Kvatch and threaten all of existence.

[Stendarr]

Pretty much agreed on everything, though I think he forgot important elements.

First off, about Oblivion. It's a shame, because the world is truly well done and fun to explore and all, but yeah, the level scaling KILLS the game. It really depends which type of character you are using, but basically anything else than the big 3 archetypes get destroyed as you progress. Heck, even the thief class from what I remember. My last character was an assassin or something along those lines, so I was training both blades and marksman, as well as sneak, alchemy and light armor. Versus being, say a barbarian, where practically the only skills you level up are axes and heavy armor. Enemies level up regarding your LEVEL, not your ability to deal damage to the enemies, and that's why the overkill level scaling kills the game. I wanted to be able to sneak by enemies cut their throat with my poisoned blade (which I made myself, the poison that is), or shoot them at a distance with a paralyzing arrow, while being able to not die at once when struck by an enemy. But that means every time you level up, you don't level blades or marksmanship as much as you could, as much as the barbarian leveling up his axe skills. And it doesn't help when you level up your acrobatics and athletics while walking normally or jumping... So the gap between you having the upper hand and the enemy closes incredibly faster when you're an assassin, and in the end, the enemies get much stronger than you each time you level up.

I mean, I got through several factions before doing the main quest, and I HAD to tone down a lot the difficulty because I couldn't progress. I'd need to shoot 20-30-40 arrows before killing an enemy! Same thing when trying to slash them! And my poisons or sneak abilities couldn't help much at all. EVEN when I toned down the difficulty it was a nightmare, things would just get worse as I progressed. So I abandoned my game. I don't know how Bethesda missed this! And even as a barbarian it was still frustrating. For one like the guy says, you never have a sense of progression. And I always needed to best weapons and armor in order to not be [&@%!] off while fighting , particularly farther on when you maxed certain skills. If I maxed the axe and heavy armor skills, I can't deal more damage or resist to more damage even if I leveled other skills. Which means that at a certain point, I can't get stronger but the enemies could, and then the only thing that can help you is better armor and weapons which gets scaled to your level... I was a barbarian with the best equipment I could find, had several skills maxed up but I still struggled to kill a brown bear, loosing more than half my health to kill one.

And did I talk about how dangerous the roads would get? I'd find dead bodies of NPCs who traveled between cities because the roads were filled with minotaurs. Isn't it normal that there are more dangerous areas in certain regions? The farther from civilization you go, the more dangerous it is (as a general rule). Shouldn't the roads be safe particularly when there are guards patrolling them?

Also, I thought the voice acting in Oblivion was pretty bad and you couldn't really take some characters seriously, particularly the Dark Brotherhood. They felt like the Cyrodiil Theatre Troupe or something...


I'll get a bit more brief for the other games. As for Skyrim I thought they fixed a lot of things, particularly the level scaling and the exploration, the voice acting was better too. Honestly, the world game is gorgeous, the dungeons are in general very nice and varied, probably the best in the series. Although the best dungeons of Morrowing were pretty sweet. But what disappointed me most in Skyrim I think, is the lack of artefacts and I mean real artefacts, not the daedric items you get from daedric quests, well... I mean, in Morrowind you could get in a random dungeon and find a unique and powerful ring, or a very sweet axe, etc. And if you didn't need them or didn't want to collect them, well you could use the money. Now, besides the fun of raiding dungeons and walking around, there's no real incentive to explore as much as possible of them, and there's certainly no surprise except for quests and the dungeons themselves. You always know what kind of treasure you'll get and honestly it's a big part of the fun of exploration. Say what you want about some design choices, but I feel a good open-ended RPG ought to give you a good sense of progression (which Oblivion didn't have) and incentives to explore dungeons, items to collect (which only Morrowind had). Plus, who doesn't have fun trying to collect as much of old artefacts as they can? And it's always fun seeing them pop up in a subsequent game, hundreds of years later in a different province. As much as Skyrim's exploration is very well done, there's a little something missing.

I also preferred the diary of Morrowind although it could've been improved, and how you'd get directions to get from one place to another. Sure the directions weren't perfect (but I had no problem with them myself) but that doesn't mean they couldn't make them better. I thought it was that much more immersive rather than having arrows. Because honestly, even if you don't follow the arrows, the voice acting doesn't allow them to give you proper directions. Unless you follow an NPC, something which was a good idea. And speaking of voice acting, I'd rather have much less voice acting if I can get more, and better content. Voice acting presents big limitations on several things. First, there's a lot of characters which you barely can ask anything, and the others don't have much more to say than their set of lines. In Morrowind, you could get a looot more information from the NPCs you needed to talk to in the main quest. You could also ask random people about the last rumors, their background or the gossip, and those of certain characters could lead you to quests or artefacts. Not a quest in itself, just a little line of dialogue here, your curiosity and you got a new fancy ring. But obviously that wouldn't be possible now. It's incredible how much resources voice acting needs, and the positive out of that is only a question of immersion and technology. And even then, reading a text can be more immersive than hearing poorly acted lines with the same voices, or noticing how it is limited. And the NPCs don't need to be silent, they surely weren't completely silent in Morrowind, and the important NPCs were much more chatty in Bloodmoon. I just think the real conversations shouldn't be acted.

It is also felt in the lesser choices of factions. I think it's a bit boring that you pretty much only have the ''fighter's'', ''thieves'' and ''mages'' guild, like there is no variety. No matter what kind of warrior-like character you make, you only have one choice. Even if you have a different set of skills and a different way to play, it's a shame that you pretty much have no choice than to do what you already did. And then it was fun seeing in Morrowind how the Telvanni hated the Mages guild, despite both being mages. Or having the choice between mercenary work or work for the Empire in the Legion. Sure you could do both, but having the choice was much better for roleplay. Not every skull-crusher barbarian would like to work in the Legion, or a Paladin-like character wouldn't necessarily like to be a mercenary. And it just helped make the world feel more alive. Always having something to do, loads of NPCs, loads of cities, loads of different factions, loads of artefacts and such helps make the world feel more alive. In Oblivion and Skyrim, there's loooads of empty spaces with almost nothing but dungeons.

Anyway, pretty much what I wanted to say and I ended up writing a bit too much.