5 ms·

I've never played any of these games apart from Skyrim. How would you compare the two? I've heard that this game is legendary. For me Skyrim's atmosphere was aw

by edem 6y ago

I've never played any of these games apart from Skyrim. How would you compare the two? I've heard that this game is legendary. For me Skyrim's atmosphere was awesome, but the storyline was a bit meh. Edit: thanks for all the responses they are quite insightful!

neilshevlin 6y ago
Morrowind: Dense, lot's of lore and immersion. More open, and less guided. I think at this time the cult of linear narrative was in it's infancy. And so you could kind of do more of what you wanted in Morrowind. Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs. IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience. I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.
- kbenson 6y ago
  Arena took place in all of Tamriel. Cities were procedurally generated from a seed if I recall correctly, so they could have buildings in same locations across games, but cities were huge and filled with random people (like over a hundred buildibgs, some probably had specific structures). You could walk for hours between cities, because the land was also procedurally generated, but mostly flat. This was doable because the game looks like minecraft with a bigger block size. It feels like a cross between a few features of a modern TES game and a rogue-like.
hutzlibu 6y ago
I played Morrowind when it came out, but not for long, because the fighting was a bit boring. Something that worked very well in Skyrim. So I am curious, how it works in this version.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  OpenMW is very true to the original, the intention is not to change things like the combat system. There are some modifications that go for this, but the more awesome ones need the big engine hacks that are incompatible with OpenMW. Combat btw becomes a lot less tedious if one knows that chance to hit / block / evade depends on fatigue and fighting while exhausted is a bad idea. Modern games have sophisticated cues to make such effects known, like audible heavy breathing noises and visible screen bobbing and blur effects, etc. MW has no such cues.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    Thx. But ... actually I remember the fighting to be way too boring and not challenging, not too hard.
Athas 6y ago
The storyline in Morrowind is great, but it is told in an unusual way. At the surface it's a fairly traditional Chosen One story about killing the Big Bad, but if you dig a little deeper, listen to the various NPCs, and read the various in-game books of historical poetry, it's very morally ambiguous, and not even the facts are completely clear. And some aspects of the story implies that the Morrowind universe does not even have the notion of objective truth (look up CHIM for a rabbit hole, and the maybe-serious theory that one of the demigods in the universe literally got his hands on the Morrowind plugin editor). Also, the game play is very old-fashioned by modern standards.
onli 6y ago
Skyrim had that thing where every cave you go into there is a generic story told inside by a letter on a dead body. The world was full, but it was filled with generic stuff like that, utterly uninteresting after you realize what's going on. The main story was not strong and the balance with the only storywise mighty dragons that were ingame quite weak was completely off. Auto-leveling of quest items made quest rewards worthless. Oblivion was unplayable because of the extreme auto-leveling, if you weren't extremely lucky with how you played it or fixed it with a mod. Morrowind had none of those flaws. There was auto-leveling (mainly leveled lists with a small range, iirc), but the effect was small and felt organic. And the world is less filled with generic bs, no shoved in story told in every cave. The lore presented and the atmosphere was awesome, with the local gods and their path to power, the nerevarine part of it and the diverging perspectives (though a modern game might have used that for a non-linear story, which MW completely failed to do). I also got the impression that the stories written in the ingame books were a lot more interesting in Morrowind. In the later games that got too boring fast, in Morrowind I actually read most of them. Might have been me becoming less patient over time, but I read somewhere the authors changed, so not impossible my impression is valid. Graphics are obviously worse, Quests can be a bit off - especially the guild quests. Not only are they strange in what they ask from you, breaking immersion; Like in Oblivion and Skyrim following those quest lines and becoming a guild leader does not amount to much. Only do one, then it's okay. Some game mechanic can be broken rather easily, but if you don't search for ways on Youtube I doubt that's an issue when just playing - but Oblivion and Skyrim are a bit more stable there. I liked Morrowind best, but it was also the first I played and the one I wrote simple mods for.
- simion314 6y ago
  I do not understand what is wrong with environment story telling? It is more then just letter and journals, sometime there are only different objects and skeletons placed around you fill the rest if you care to look at the details, most of those stories I never noticed. I also like it how it used in the Fallout games so I am curious what aspect of it you dislike.
  - caslon 6y ago

by edem 6y ago

neilshevlin 6y ago

Morrowind: Dense, lot's of lore and immersion. More open, and less guided. I think at this time the cult of linear narrative was in it's infancy. And so you could kind of do more of what you wanted in Morrowind. Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs. IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience. I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.

kbenson 6y ago
Arena took place in all of Tamriel. Cities were procedurally generated from a seed if I recall correctly, so they could have buildings in same locations across games, but cities were huge and filled with random people (like over a hundred buildibgs, some probably had specific structures). You could walk for hours between cities, because the land was also procedurally generated, but mostly flat. This was doable because the game looks like minecraft with a bigger block size. It feels like a cross between a few features of a modern TES game and a rogue-like.

hutzlibu 6y ago

I played Morrowind when it came out, but not for long, because the fighting was a bit boring. Something that worked very well in Skyrim. So I am curious, how it works in this version.

Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
OpenMW is very true to the original, the intention is not to change things like the combat system. There are some modifications that go for this, but the more awesome ones need the big engine hacks that are incompatible with OpenMW. Combat btw becomes a lot less tedious if one knows that chance to hit / block / evade depends on fatigue and fighting while exhausted is a bad idea. Modern games have sophisticated cues to make such effects known, like audible heavy breathing noises and visible screen bobbing and blur effects, etc. MW has no such cues.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Thx. But ... actually I remember the fighting to be way too boring and not challenging, not too hard.

Athas 6y ago

The storyline in Morrowind is great, but it is told in an unusual way. At the surface it's a fairly traditional Chosen One story about killing the Big Bad, but if you dig a little deeper, listen to the various NPCs, and read the various in-game books of historical poetry, it's very morally ambiguous, and not even the facts are completely clear. And some aspects of the story implies that the Morrowind universe does not even have the notion of objective truth (look up CHIM for a rabbit hole, and the maybe-serious theory that one of the demigods in the universe literally got his hands on the Morrowind plugin editor). Also, the game play is very old-fashioned by modern standards.

onli 6y ago

Skyrim had that thing where every cave you go into there is a generic story told inside by a letter on a dead body. The world was full, but it was filled with generic stuff like that, utterly uninteresting after you realize what's going on. The main story was not strong and the balance with the only storywise mighty dragons that were ingame quite weak was completely off. Auto-leveling of quest items made quest rewards worthless. Oblivion was unplayable because of the extreme auto-leveling, if you weren't extremely lucky with how you played it or fixed it with a mod. Morrowind had none of those flaws. There was auto-leveling (mainly leveled lists with a small range, iirc), but the effect was small and felt organic. And the world is less filled with generic bs, no shoved in story told in every cave. The lore presented and the atmosphere was awesome, with the local gods and their path to power, the nerevarine part of it and the diverging perspectives (though a modern game might have used that for a non-linear story, which MW completely failed to do). I also got the impression that the stories written in the ingame books were a lot more interesting in Morrowind. In the later games that got too boring fast, in Morrowind I actually read most of them. Might have been me becoming less patient over time, but I read somewhere the authors changed, so not impossible my impression is valid. Graphics are obviously worse, Quests can be a bit off - especially the guild quests. Not only are they strange in what they ask from you, breaking immersion; Like in Oblivion and Skyrim following those quest lines and becoming a guild leader does not amount to much. Only do one, then it's okay. Some game mechanic can be broken rather easily, but if you don't search for ways on Youtube I doubt that's an issue when just playing - but Oblivion and Skyrim are a bit more stable there. I liked Morrowind best, but it was also the first I played and the one I wrote simple mods for.

simion314 6y ago
I do not understand what is wrong with environment story telling? It is more then just letter and journals, sometime there are only different objects and skeletons placed around you fill the rest if you care to look at the details, most of those stories I never noticed. I also like it how it used in the Fallout games so I am curious what aspect of it you dislike.
- caslon 6y ago