Who actually finds themselves enjoying the Gamebryo TES games more than Skyrim?

[Kevin]

I've been watching the Freelance Astronauts' LP of Oblivion which has conjured up some pretty fond memories of those Oblivion and Morrowind in me. Perhaps it is because Morrowind had left such a big impact on me when I first played it and I've played Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas in the interim that I've petered out on Skyrim in a lot shorter period than I have with those other four games. I also get the feeling that the amount of mods hasn't quite lived up to that heritage as the Gamebryo games had; for instance, very soon after Oblivion was released, we had great ones like Obscuro's Overhaul, Deadly Reflex, and the Midas Magic mod come out, whereas with Skyrim I had sort of given up hope after finding that the armour and clothing mod categories at the Skyrim Nexus were inundated with palette-swaps of a certain piece of stripperific clothing nominally only available to a certain NPC in the game.

Or maybe it's because of the slightly more "generic fantasy" environments in Oblivion and Morrowind that I felt that it gave me more of a Tabula Rasa to work with for my character, and I find myself sorely missing the spell-crafting, enchanting, and alchemy mechanics in those two. Sure they were utterly broken, but the way I see it, the Elder Scrolls games are more toys than games to me.

[TixyLixx]

Morrowind just had the worst combat and UI ever, I just couldn't enjoy it. Back then though RPGs were seen as being quite dated in terms of the actual real time gameplay and why I didn't really like them. Oblivion was just a broken mess that crashes all the time, Fallout 3 suffered from the same engine problems too and the combat was of the worst things ever in Fallout 3... was such a mess.

Skyrim has been the first I could play and get into but once I realized it was just grabbing quests and running to dungeons which all felt the same, I got bored after about 20 hours and haven't gone back since.


I like the idea of what Bethesda are trying to create, sadly engine woes really let them down and the combat is never good. Give me Mount and Blade combat any time, hate all this stat based bullshit... I hit you in the head ffs, you should not be able to take 20 blows of a sword to your head.

[Sketch]

The Skyrim engine really is the Gamebryo engine. Regarding mods, while there are so many naked lady mods, there are also plenty of great mods too, I'm surprised you've not found them, just look in the gameplay mod sections. I think it's partly because there are so many modders now, that perhaps the greater range of mods causes there to not be one that stands out so much. OOO was THE rebalance mod, whereas there are multiple good ones for Skyrim. Browse some more, you will find them.

[Spider Jerusalem]

it's a good thing oblivion had all those mods so close to launch, because it sorely needed them.

[soldant]

I love the Morrowind world, but the game has two significant issues:

1: Long-winded monologues for every single topic.
"Hello NPC, which way to Balmora?"
"There's a river that winds such a long distance. It was once a great fishing spot... until they came. Squibs are lovely little creatures. You like pillows, don't you, Soldant? Blah blah blah..." for another twenty lines. Yes, TL;DR is often the refuge of people who just want to burn the world, but in Morrowind it's totally implausible. It's quite obvious that it's just a one-sided monologue delivered by a character vomiting their life story for no appreciable reason. The fact that you can have characters say more because there's no voice acting doesn't mean they should say more. It's one of the things that annoys me about people claiming that Morrowind's "dialogue" is the best. It isn't, it's just absurdly long, and it's barely even dialogue in its structure.

2: Terrible combat and magic. They're too stats-based for an FPS game. It makes absolutely no sense that it looks like I'm hitting a target and I'm standing right up against them yet I consistently miss them. The game is too visually-oriented for abstract dice rolls to be a good gameplay mechanic. Using magic and weapons was clunky and slow, it just wasn't very fun at all. Combat was an absolute chore. Boring!

That said the game world itself was fantastic, stepping off the boat for the first time felt like entering an alien world which still had familiar beauty (even if it was just a load of giant mushrooms). It also had more things to do, even if it was inconsequential. I remember you could join a lot of additional factions including some vampire families, even if they only had very limited options for quests etc. With the demand for voice acting and higher quality assets of course all of this stuff fell by the wayside.

Oblivion had major issues. That incarnation of Gamebryo was horrible, absolutely atrocious. Also the game world felt too familiar, it was far too close to standard fantasy settings that it just didn't seem engaging for me. But the combat was a lot better and made a lot more sense, so in general gameplay it probably played a bit better. Skyrim is a nice balance between the two, along with fixing the absurd class system. It was ridiculous that I could level up my Restoration skill to 100 and gain zero levels just because I had a Warrior class.

[SirKicksalot]

The thing I liked most in Oblivion was going north. The other borders did nothing for me. It was the Skyrim border that always attracted me. Always wondered what lays beyond the Jerall Mountains.
I was satisfied when I finally got there. Mammoths! Tundra! Giants! Vikings! Fjords! Auroras! Wonderful, wonderful region.

I'm waiting for a Deadly Reflex for Skyrim. Or maybe it's already out? The Oblivion version was awesome. I'm not sure what other mods I used at the same time, there's a famous jpg guide out there and I picked some from it... A bunch of combat, gore and nudity mods active at the same time can lead to some very nasty things.

[GameCat]

I don't like TES series too much. I mean, these are decent games that looks awesome at the begining, but if you will play them for couple of hours you will see more and more flaws.

Skyrim and Morrowind - terrible interface. Yeah, there are mods to make this more appealing, but imagine Photoshop interface that sucks until you mod the shit out of it. That's not how good game/software is made.

Combat system - it's really simply hack'n'slash, especialy when you're playing as a warrior or knight. Click, miss, click, miss, click, hit, click, miss, click, hit (Morrowind). It's slightly better in Skyrim (but still crappy) - click, hit, click, hit, click, stronger hit.
I didn't play as a mage, so I don't know if it's good. The best combat in Skyrim was probably when you're using a bow, because it needs some skill from player to be good at it.

Even worse - who cares about rather bland plot (I don't even remember what I was supposed to do in Morrowind, lol) - "HURR DURR you're a DRAGONBORN, go kill dragons" - when you have shiny new (but the same as previous) dungeon with same crappy loot (and puzzle that involves setting up some stones to match drawings on the wall (or key) in the same room) that your compulsive need to explore everything is forcing you to visit it. And after that you see TWO more dungeons nearby and your brain is screamin "YOU MUST EXPLORE IT, because you may miss a loot".
There was no real reward from exploration, except of some pretty views, but this was only on surface.
BTW why making such beautiful landscapes with snowy mountains, streams with swiming fishes, forests etc. and then forcing player to spend at least half of the time in crappy, uninteresing, boring dungeons?

No, just no.

Give me open world game without all that crap. There's nice topic about it -> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/foru...led-Experiment

[apricotsoup]

Morrowind has been my favourite of the TES series almost entirely for its setting, I also thoroughly enjoyed exploring skyrim and sometime I plan on going back in with a load of mods.

But I just couldn't wait to be done with oblivion, I kept telling myself it was going to get better but I just hated the generic feel of the entire thing so much I found it somewhat of a chore that I gave myself.

[DaftPunk]

I think this happened to all of us,once you stopped playing Skyrim you couldn't go back. I put roughly about 34 hours in to the game,not touching main quests,but only side ones.

[Alphabet]

Loved Morrowind - top three game of all time for me.

As for Skyrim, I just couldn't get immersed. The requirement to choose sides to advance the main quest seemed horribly underdetermined to me. Violent nationalists versus violent imperialists? No to both, thanks. And yet that didn't seem to be an option past a certain point - indeed right there in the 'tutorial'. Also, unskippable tutorials are a right pain.

[Sketch]

Choose side to advance main quest?

[NathanH]

I love the Morrowind world, but the game has two significant issues:

1: Long-winded monologues for every single topic.
"Hello NPC, which way to Balmora?"
"There's a river that winds such a long distance. It was once a great fishing spot... until they came. Squibs are lovely little creatures. You like pillows, don't you, Soldant? Blah blah blah..." for another twenty lines. Yes, TL;DR is often the refuge of people who just want to burn the world, but in Morrowind it's totally implausible. It's quite obvious that it's just a one-sided monologue delivered by a character vomiting their life story for no appreciable reason. The fact that you can have characters say more because there's no voice acting doesn't mean they should say more. It's one of the things that annoys me about people claiming that Morrowind's "dialogue" is the best. It isn't, it's just absurdly long, and it's barely even dialogue in its structure.

2: Terrible combat and magic. They're too stats-based for an FPS game. It makes absolutely no sense that it looks like I'm hitting a target and I'm standing right up against them yet I consistently miss them. The game is too visually-oriented for abstract dice rolls to be a good gameplay mechanic. Using magic and weapons was clunky and slow, it just wasn't very fun at all. Combat was an absolute chore. Boring!

1. Morrowind comes from a happy time before everyone was slave to the idea that the point of conversation with NPCs is to have dialogue. The point of NPCs in Morrowind is to provide the required information and quests to the player in an efficient manner. It succeeds at this reasonably well. You're not meant to be having a conversation with the NPCs, you're meant to be getting things from them. They are a resource.

2. Morrowind is not an FPS. First-person perspective for an RNG-based combat system used to be quite normal. Sadly it seems to have died out, probably forever. Something of a shame really; it provides experiences rather different from typical modern action-RPG combat.

[trjp]

Having played all 3 of the recent TES games but only having enjoyed Skyrim I'd have to disagree - but...

None of them are perfect and Skyrim is the least 'PC' of all of them. I had to fight to understand the menus and other stuff - even on a controller it's crude and lazy (like it was designed on a whiteboard and not an actual computer).

Skyrim has a level of polish and playability the earlier game lacked tho - it also has a sense of direction which I think these games need (even if you choose to ignore it) - Oblivion was FAR too "oh you've left the sewers - get on with it, you'll probably die".

Horses for courses - I'm sort-of saying that it's the least 'open' of the TES games and that's probably what I like

Gamebryo was far from an optimised experience in itself either - ran like crap on most hardware, when it wasn't crashing!!

[internetonsetadd]

Skyrim saw tons of good and essential mods pretty soon after it left the gate. Check the top x lists.

I sunk over 200 hours into it, and I can't really remember why. The storytelling generally wasn't good, the quests--with some notable exceptions--were mostly ass, the ease with which I could lead any and all guilds was dumb, the overarching moral dilemma between the factions was awkward and uninteresting, and the dragon fights were ungodly boring after the first five. I tend to think that the core gameplay is basically window dressing for what I really come to TES for: to explore a world and pick flowers and junk.

Oblivion's vanilla setting made it the most disappointing title in the series by far. I will always play TES until I die or they stop making them, and I will forever be most disappointed when they decide to visit the more generic lands in Tamriel. I'm used to generic, half-broken, average everything else. Cram butt loads of stuff in there, make the scale epic, and I will overlook flaws while I gawk at pretty, preferably imaginative things and somehow manage to have tons of fun that I probably won't remember.

I do prefer Morrowind to Skyrim, but mostly because of setting. One of my favorite experiences in Morrowind? Looking at clouds.

[soldant]

1. Morrowind comes from a happy time before everyone was slave to the idea that the point of conversation with NPCs is to have dialogue. The point of NPCs in Morrowind is to provide the required information and quests to the player in an efficient manner. It succeeds at this reasonably well. You're not meant to be having a conversation with the NPCs, you're meant to be getting things from them. They are a resource.

Except that the implication is that it is a conversation, and it's filled with absolutely unnecessary information which isn't even related to the inquiry. They're NPCs, not books. They even lapse into dialogue-style text at times. And I don't know what magic time that was when NPCs had (shock!) dialogue-style text, because it sure wasn't Morrowind's era.

2. Morrowind is not an FPS. First-person perspective for an RNG-based combat system used to be quite normal.

That's my point, with those mechanics it shouldn't have been an FPS. The stats-based gameplay looks ridiculous and clunky with a first person perspective. The animation system was far too limited.

[NathanH]

Except that the implication is that it is a conversation, and it's filled with absolutely unnecessary information which isn't even related to the inquiry. They're NPCs, not books. They even lapse into dialogue-style text at times. And I don't know what magic time that was when NPCs had (shock!) dialogue-style text, because it sure wasn't Morrowind's era.

As I said, the point typically isn't to simulate dialogue, it's to provide resources to the player via the NPCs. They are more like books than people to have proper conversations with. It's not the game's fault that you've got the wrong end of the stick.

That's my point, with those mechanics it shouldn't have been an FPS. The stats-based gameplay looks ridiculous and clunky with a first person perspective. The animation system was far too limited.

As I said, Morrowind is not an FPS. It's not the game's fault that you've got the wrong end of the stick.

You're quite welcome to dislike the sort of game that it is and express a desire for games that are more like the sorts of games you want, but don't be so presumptious to believe these are flaws in the game rather than matters of taste.

[soldant]

As I said, the point typically isn't to simulate dialogue, it's to provide resources to the player via the NPCs. They are more like books than people to have proper conversations with. It's not the game's fault that you've got the wrong end of the stick.

They shouldn't be books. They're NPCs. It is the game's fault that I've "got the wrong end of the stick" because the game presents them as NPCs with conversation topics. The delivery was wrong.

As I said, Morrowind is not an FPS. It's not the game's fault that you've got the wrong end of the stick.

I should have said "in first person" rather than FPS, since it's clearly not a shooter either.

You're quite welcome to dislike the sort of game that it is and express a desire for games that are more like the sorts of games you want, but don't be so presumptious to believe these are flaws in the game rather than matters of taste.

It looks ridiculous. The visual feedback for the player has very little to do with what's actually happening. At the same time it did incorporate player-affected elements like with crossbows or archery (specifically aiming) and moving around to avoid hits, so some elements weren't entirely stats-based either. It comes off as confused. Of course it's my opinion, but with games there's very little that's objective when we're discussing these things. Your opinion is that they were valid mechanics, my opinion is that they're flawed in this environment.

[Track]

It should be pointed out that, even if you consider characters to more books more than NPC's, that's no excuse for being dull and long winded. Too often I find in RPGs that characters, and in-universe books, for that matter, go on for ages about absolutely nothing, and the writing is usually atrocious to boot. The difference between the NPC's and the books, however, is that I can (and do) completely ignore the books, whereas I have to interact with the NPC's to do anything. Which I'd be fine with if they had anything interesting to say, but usually they don't.

[Kevin]

It was rather strange how the "Speechcraft" minigame functioned much like how you would expect a computer hacking minigame in any other game does, which raises some rather interesting existential and epistemological questions.

[Nalano]

a happy time before everyone was slave to the idea that the point of conversation with NPCs is to have dialogue

What is conversation without dialogue?