Why did Oblivion turn out so much worse than Morrowind?
The leadership team was the same. Almost all of the designers and writers were the same. Most of the artists and world builders were the same. Even back then, our dear friend Todd was in charge of Morrowind too.
What happened?
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poor design priorities
inefficient and downright negligent development cycle
business needs put in front of game needs
Can you be more specific?
Leveling in oblivion could be fixed by doing it "wrong", I agree with everything else though
>inefficient and downright negligent development cycle
-too much effort wasted trying to set up "Radiant AI". There was no such thing in-game in the end.
-game designed around the oblivion gate mechanic to compartimentalize the main quest away from the rest of the game but no work towards compelling incorporation
-no playtesting or thorough study of game progression leading to broken leveling, broken loot and items, and dreadfully tedious combat and enemies.
>poor design priorities
-game designed to ape popular fantasy of the time(Lord of the Rings) while shedding a substantial amount of TES's own identity for very generic medieval fantasy
-hiring of expensive Voice Actors like Patrick Steward for publicity's sake on an audience that hardly gave a fuck
>business needs put in front of game needs
-points stated above
-three shitty DLCs one of them being Horse Armor and only one good one
Do you have any theories on why a team that made a game like Morrowind would make those seemingly rookie mistakes?
Was it the publishers forcing them?
I just can't see the person who wrote Morrowind telling his programmers "Throw it out! We need to make it more like Lord of the Rings!"
>I just can't see the person who wrote Morrowind telling his programmers "Throw it out! We need to make it more like Lord of the Rings!"
This happens fairly often in video games in order to appeal to a larger demographic.
See : Fallout 4
An alright game in its own right, but watered down to such a point it couldn't be considered a fallout game anymore.
Oblviion was a good game you fucking insufferable autists. Muh muh morrowing WUUUUHHHHHH ;-;
None of you have ever fucking played murruhwind it so stop larping.
Even skyrim is fucking better.
The nostalgia defense is gone now. Oblivion is genuinely the worst.
The music in Oblivion was fucking fantastic though.
People who were kids when Oblivion was new are 18 and 19 now.
Yeah but you can't say anyone prefers Skyrim and Morrowind both for nostalgia reasons.
When are getting a TES6 anyway? It's been close to 6 years since Skyrim.
Oblivion side quests and faction quests were actually better than MW sidequests, you dumb cunt.
It didn't. You just either have nostalgia goggles for Morrowind or you are just bandwagoning on the Oblivion hate. Every Elder Scrolls has had their fair share of flaws
Please look forward to Skyrim 2
Good fucking Christ, In 10 years we will have people here on Sup Forums making Skyrim nostalgia threads.
If this truly happens I will make sure to find out where you live and personaly FUCKING FUMIGATE YOU CUNT!
Actually, those are the Skyrim fanboys, aka you. Back to réddit with your RPG that has literally no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Fucking underage faggots.
>It's been close to 6 years since Skyrim.
Just in time for the HD Remaster Platinum Game of the Decade Edition
>Do you have any theories on why a team that made a game like Morrowind would make those seemingly rookie mistakes?
i wasn't paying attention back then and i'm only going off testimonies of other fans but the creative staff at Bethesda was very much rearranged around the time, the development of Fallout 3 had much to do with it. Todd Howard had the lead for the first time.
also Morrowind was developed when the company was in poor economic state, there was more work put with less budget and without a solid deadline to the process, which lead to the game being more limited in scope but far more polished and consistent in it's content and presentation.
i'm a relatively new fan. I played morrowind and Oblivion back to back before Skyrim was released, back in 2010.
Oblivion was just a massive step down from Morrowind, i greatly enjoyed and got immersed in the later but could not bear the former. Needless to say Skyrim was a big let down too, but i feel it keeps something from Morrowind that Oblivion didn't have, a variety and unique aesthetic to it's own, i enjoyed Dreugh tombs, dungeons and dwemer ruins much more than generic Ayleid ruins and sewers that all looked the same.
Clearly you only hate yourself if people being born later is offensive to you.
you just don't wanna be reminded that you didn't achieve anything in your life and you are still here in 10 years.
I didn't even say skyrim is the best what the fuck
Lets leave all other games out of this discussion
Just oblivion alone
In a vacuum.
Its complete shit.
Uhm annon, read the post again.
LOTR
>morrowind combat is better than oblivion
Is this the power of autism?
>Sidequests in Morrowind
>Not shit
It's a plebian simulator in the truest sense of the world. You're a bitch until you're head honcho of basically all guilds as long as you level up blunt weapons.
Of course you're a new fucking fan. Sup Forums quality would improve drastically if we'd just ban everyone under 25 and you mouthbreathing faggots would be restricted to reddit.
There have been lots more oblivion threads recently. What for?
Why are you obsessed with Skyrim you reddit tier faggot? Fuck off and take your trash with you ape.
>you just have nostalgia glasses for morrowind
>actually you are just underage and that is why you can't appreciate Oblivion
The absolute fucking state of you guys. This is hilarious. Oblivion has to be a terrible game if defending it drives you mad like this.
Morrowind was a last ditch effort to make their best game before going out of business, Oblivion was a sequel to popular series belonging to successful company with plenty of corporate meddlers.
Morrowind combat starts out shit and gets good when you stop missing
Oblivion combat starts ok then gets fucking horrid when you stop doing any damage.
i wasn't into RPGs at all before, eat a dick. My main genre was arena shooters before.
Music in Oblivion is better.
>the creative staff at Bethesda was very much rearranged around the time
Nah, go look at the credits. Most of the names are the same.
Todd Howard, and Ken Rolston were the lead designers and idea guys on both, Guy Carver, Craig Walton were lead programmers, Matthew Carofano was the lead artist on both, Christiane Meister was the lead character designer on both, Hope Adams and Noah Berry were the world building team leaders on both, etc.
>Combat went from absolute shit to what
>The landscape went from absolute shit to mediocre
>Enjoyment from dungeon crawling went from pretty shitty to at least less shitty
>Sidequests, the majority of the content, went from shit to decent.
Play Morrowind and then play Oblivion directly after. There's so much shit that makes sense.
A-user, we're talking about the elder scroll games, leave your issues at the door.
>Why did Oblivion turn out so much worse than Morrowind?
it didn't, it was better
>What happened?
good things
where was kirkbride though? his influence in morrowind was huge
easiest way to fix oblivion combat without modding is to simply never level up via sleep. some enemies are naturally stronger than others and you will get stronger over time as skills increase, then there is a difficulty slider you can adjust as you see fit in the menu should the game start getting too easy over time. (alot better than damage sponge enemies)
Inside the credits lies the answer.
Morrowind:
>Game Design
>The Morrowind‑Team
Oblivion:
>Game Design
>Bethesda Game Studios
>inefficient and downright negligent development cycle
That's Bethesda for you. They waste half of their budget on stupid shit. Celebrity VAs, radiant AI, voiced protagonist.
>music
both were about the same
>lore
morrowind was better but oblivion was still good
>world design
morrowind was better but oblivion was still good
>main quest
yeah ok oblivion failed a bit here, but parts of it were good
>side quests
i'd give the edge to oblivion
>combat
oblivion fucking blows morrowind out of the park. morrowind's combat is so utterly awful as to be almost unplayable. i honestly don't know how anyone can remotely stomach it. oblivion has issues but they're all fixable by mods; morrowind's combat issues are NOT fixable by mods and this is why it's so fucking awful.
I've never played morrowind. I hear so much about it. What do I need to play and where can I get a copy?
Steam? Ebay? Amazon?
Suck a dick.
I remember back just before Skyrim was released, people on Sup Forums were saying that there would be a time when people would love Oblivion. At the time I didn't believe it, but now we have people on this board who unironically say Oblivion was the best Elder Scrolls. So now I'm following in the footsteps of those wise oldfags and say that after the release of the next Elder Scrolls, there will be people who believe Skyrim was absolutely perfect and the best in the series. I hope at that time, there will still be people on this board who haven't forgotten how bad Skyrim actually was
gog.com
i am though and personally i think you need a lot of fucking patience to get through it. the combat is not fun at all and mods can't really fix it, it's just bad at its core. you could try morroblivion but that requires you to have both morrrowind and oblivion. plus it's a pain to set up.
Get it on GoG. Don't mod it on your first run, except using either OpenMW or the code patch.
but if you don't level you never encounter a lot of the game's high level enemies thus you miss content
the problem isn't just a particularly bad level system, it's the greater structure of the game progression that sucks, from the spawns, to the placement of quest objectives, to the way you receive xp, to the speed and length of the quests.
honestly all you really need to fix it imo is fransesco's
Don't listen to this man. Get all the unofficial patches.
Morrowind has more CTD errors and literally unsolvable quests than any other elder scrolls game.
>the combat is not fun at all and mods can't really fix it
Gratuituous Violence literally fixes it right out.
Opinions /= facts
The series was starting to get popular so they decided to casualize it to cash in on normalfag shekels. You can clearly see this on the province itself since they retconned the entire thing in favor of a LOTR setting since the movies were popular at the time (they even brought back Mithril which was taken out of Morrowind since the devs wanted TES to feel more like its own setting).
I'd recommend (very much heavily)
KOTOR and Baldurs Gate. really good franchises. play em.
Console priority and kowtowing to people who bitched about little nuances that added to the experience.
Finally an intelligent nigga on the subject of Oblivion.
Let's also add the dumb ass engine and how they removed so much from Morrowind. Placing items in the world now involves physics so you can't stack your armor or items anywhere you want.
The customization of armor and variety of weapons was left to generic LotR fantasy. Can't break the game with OP spells. Can't kill any main characters.
I def. Agree on the Patrick Stewart thing. Completely unnecessary. Same thing with Liam Neeson in Fallout 3 aka Oblivion with guns.
I thought that was what the code patch was fixing.
Play Daggerfall instead. It does everything Morrowind does better. It has a few...outdated gameplay mechanics, but if you can't get past that you won't be able to stomach MW anyway.
Plus you can get a free download link for Daggerfall from the Bethesda website
If you base the games at their times of development and release then Morrowind beats all.
The flaws for Skyrim and Oblivion have threads upon threads worth of complaints. The only flaw that gets brought up for Morrowind is that one gif of you fighting a mudcrab and dying. Skyrim and Oblivion might have improved combat over Morrowind, but they suck at everything else in comparison
>It does everything Morrowind does better
it has the shittiest quests on the franchise, worse than anything in skyrim
worse loot than oblivion too
There was Patrick Stewart in oblivion?
The three Unofficial patches from the Morrowind Patch Project fix several hundred bugs each, far more than the Code Patch.
>why am I missing at low level
>why does it take so long to get places
>what's with this weird ass mushroomy shit, where's my castles and knights
>why are the characters saying so much, why can't they do it out loud
>I don't know where to go
>man imagine this with graphics
The end result of listening to idiots.
>Morrowind combat starts out shit and gets good when you stop missing
No, it gets boring when you're fighting something 12 levels below you and can never possibly beat you but won't let you recover fatigue until it's dead, forcing you to stand around clicking until it does finally die.
>Oblivion combat starts ok then gets fucking horrid when you stop doing any damage.
Your fault for not getting +5 modifiers on strength. If you don't rush through levels like a retard, you can very easily keep pace with the leveling enemies
so you're saying standing around clicking is unacceptable when you need to keep your stamina but perfectly fine when your enemies are hit sponges?
>rush through levels like a retard
This in the same genre that's supposed to encourage levels because you get more powerful with them.
It's a dungeon crawler, the quests are supposed to be like that. And there's still more substance in going through a dungeon fighting enemies and collecting loot until you find your target than there is in walking 20 minutes to an empty 2-room cave in the middle of nowhere to kill one guy and then going back for a handful of coins
>It's a dungeon crawler, the quests are supposed to be like that
so why would you recommend it to someone in place of Morrowind? how is it Morrowind but better?
They also tried to fix a bunch of stuff that wasn't necessarily broken - a bit overcomplicated maybe - by dumbing it down to spring temperature IQ levels.
Skyrim comic, but the same thing applies.
In Skyrim, you level up and the Draugr get replaced with Draugr Jabronis, etc.
In Oblivion, you level up and the imps get replaced by ogres.
Same shit, different day.
(Actually, Morrowind did the same thing in the dungeons, but not the surface world)
Because some people still insist that "Complicated" automatically means "good"
And everything in Daggerfall is gigantic and complicated because they use random generators to make everything as big as they want. Thus, you get towns with 30 bars and 500 houses or more.
Even if you understand the leveling system and do it 100% right the leveled enemies/loot are still garbage. In Morrowind it was nearly impossible to put together a full set of daedric armor, it barely existed in the game. Which made it fucking cool.
In oblivion it's hurr durr bandits all have daedric after a certain point.
>Why did Oblivion turn out so much worse than Morrowind?
Easy answer: The emergence of consoles. Game developers discovered in pre-dev research that typical console gamers were not nearly as intelligent as typical pc gamers. Devs learned that console gamers were tuning out games that included complex story lines and complex gaming mechanics in favor of linear progression, simple gaming functionality, and gaming-on-rails mechanics.
tl;dr - Oblivion, like so many games released after 2002, was dumbed down for console sales. No, the "dumbed down for consoles" is not a meme. It is indisputable fact.
If anyone wants to tell me how someone could rate Morrowinds side quests over Oblivions, I would be happy to know.
Especially if we factor in the expansions, Oblivion blows it out the water.
No, I'm saying that having to stand around doing nothing but click until the enemy is dead is mind-numbingly dull, and the game forces you to do it because you have to periodically rest to recover your stamina and you can't rest with enemies around.
>It's not my fault for not understanding how the game mechanics work when it's spelled out for me
The music in oblivion is way better than in morrowind
>spelled out for me
Except it's not, at fucking all, going from Morrowind to Oblivion it's like the leveling system goes full fucking retard.
>It's cool having all this awesome gear because I can't get it. Being able to get this awesome, endgame level gear that lets me keep pace with the stronger enemies is dumb
??
rtfm
>If anyone wants to tell me how someone could rate Morrowinds side quests over Oblivions, I would be happy to know.
simple fact that there are more factions and they have constant intermingling.
the Three houses fucking with eachother, the camona tong and the thieves guild fucking with eachother, the fighter and mages guilds being full of corruption and infighting and the "greater picture" of morrowing being a seedy place makes for a nicer game than having one or two guild quests being interesting and cool and giving you full rewards then the rest of the game being dumb peasant/town potato problems.
Oblivion doesn't even have a proper legion faction you can join.
Fixed
Let's look at the Fighter's Guild as an example.
Morrowind has 31 Fighter's Guild quests, Oblivion has 19.
It's not strictly about numbers though, let's delve a little into those quests.
In Morrowind, the first quest is to go to someone's house and kill all the rats. You go upstairs and find every single barrel and cabinet is stuffed to the brim with pillows. It's amusing, but you kill the rats and get your money. Later, completely randomly, you can actually find an unmarked sunken ship full of pillows, with a shipping note saying it is addressed to that one NPC.
In Oblibion, you also get a rat problem quest, for a very similarly named NPC. You go and find out you're actually trying to save the rats, it is an amusing twist, and have to take several steps to find out how and why the rats are being attacked.
Oblivion is amusing, but relies on outside content for the joke to be funny.
As the Oblivion quest line progresses, you just do random quests, eventually with the final person giving you quests regarding the Blackwood Company, who are basically just the Evil Fighter's Guild and you can't join them. Eventually the master of the guild makes you master even though she hates you because... reasons I guess.
In Morrowind, the Fighter's guild quests pit you against the Thieves Guild, a guild you can join. In fact, unless you do thing very specifically, they are mutually exclusive of each other. It's not just random bad guys, each play through can put you on either side of their fight. As the quest line progresses, you find out the guild leaders all have different priorities, and maybe aren't who they seem. In fact, they've been making you do some pretty shady shit. If you trust the right people, you can learn how the guild plans to betray you. Once you reach the leader, you kill the leaders of the Thieves Guild and then he tries to kill you, and you become leader thanks to making allies and killing the old one.
daggerfall to morrowind the budget got reallocated to different places
morrowind to oblivion the budget got reallocated to different places
oblivion to skyrim was just the same
tl;dr:
In Oblivion, you do quests and then you are the boss.
In Morrowind, you have political intrigue, factions fight, the boss of your own views you as a threat, you kill each other's allies, and eventually one of you has to come out on top.
Those aren't really the quests though, thats the setting around the quests right? Which yes, I think Morrowind does better.
But as far as what you actually do in the quests, Oblivion dumpsters it, you go into a painting, you run a dungeon, you go into a house and murder people one by one without anyone finding out its you.
Whats the Thieves guild ending again, you jump off the White Gold tower or some shit? I honestly can't think of anything that even comes close to any of those in Morrowind.
You know in FO4, they fixed the leveling.
So now if you go back to a reloaded concord, you get shit tier enemies with shit shooters that do fuckall damage you can stomp 7 days a week.
>minmaxing in oblivion
>minmaxing in any tes ever
having 100 strength and agility at level 8 sure is fun ...for 5 minutes. Then you realize you just ruined your character and any and all level progression for the rest of your playthrough
Or you could make fatigue potions, or a really cheap restore fatigue enchant, you know, doing things that involve playing the game
Some enemies had fixed level in Skyrim, and even the tiered enemies stopped leveling after a point.
at least i can hit shit in oblivion
wow
a whole generation and they took accuracy out so casual retards can get their instant gratification
you can hit shit just fine after about 30 minutes of breaking in your character
but after about 5 hours of oblivion, enemy health inflates so hard you end up mashing attacks more than you would in the beginning of morrowind
Morrowind:
>Enemy has 100 health
>Each hit does 25 damage
>25% chance to hit
>Takes roughly 16 hits to kill it at low levels, and 4 hits at high levels
Oblivion:
>Enemy has 100 health
>Each hit does 6 damage
>100% chance to hit
>Takes roughly 16 hits to kill it at low levels, and roughly 16 hits to kill at high levels because it gets more HP as you level
Real talk: what are the best mods for Morrowind?
I got oblivion during the last steam sale but my 360 controller is not working with it. Can anyone help me?
what is restoration and using life drain on touch to literally slap it 3-4 times at any lv while gaining health instead of swinging a sword and not hitting anything until you pass out for 300 please, i get you have to lv specific whatever to land hits but its fucking gay i just want to play the game not fucking grind one skill to get to grind the next skill
>not leveling speechcraft, mercantile, and block for maximum difficulty
Daggerfall was better than those two anyway.
all the darknut texture packs
graphic herbalism
better bodies
Morrowind comes alive
all mckombs faces
morrowind graphics extended
You can do the same shit in morrowind, and worse so your point is moot.