[to_xp]Gekko;10012873 said:
if you're talking about "the game is more casual, fast travel, to stamina loss while running etc." then I agree but it doesn't take much to add some realism enhancing mods. same thing for the hand-holding
Yep - I spent a lot of time "fixing" that sort of thing. It was certainly do-able, but getting all the relevant mods I wanted working together, plus adding some fiddling of my own, took up a lot of time.
the one big unfixable drawback imho is definitely the fact that its's more action and less rpg. mainly due to the fact that all dialogue is voiced and lip-synched, which means waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay less dialogue than morrowind.
Yeah, I didn't like that. Combined with the setting that's the essential, damning (IMO), difference. Though I think it went a little beyond cutting down on the text. Betheda tried to make Oblivion more accessible. Part of this is the mod-correctable hand-holding. But I think it went beyond that and Oblivion's world is a simpler, less interesting world where your decisions as a gamer (but not necessarily as a character) matter even less. The mini-games - and I'll count combat as one here - are examples of that: To a great extent a player's skill - or persistence - could substitute for the character's. Joining/advancing in the world's factions is another example: Oblivion's system may be more quest-based (but see the note on quests later), but Morrowind system of often mutually-exclusive factions was much less forgiving about the character's characteristics and actions.
And speaking of the fully voiced and animated characters: I didn't like the character graphics much - uncanny valley territory, IMO. Not a big deal, though.
It was the exotic, relatively "deep" setting more than anything else that sold me on Morrowind. Oblivion seemed far more sketchy. Take away Morrowind's setting and it was pretty unexceptional outside the challenge of moving around Vvardenfell. Which I enjoyed a great deal. And while mods could make Oblivion *more* of a survival game, I never found/tweaked any that equaled the Morrowind experience. Or even got what I consider very close.
I loathed the mini-games. If there were some real time-pressure they would have been good. But there wasn't. Fixable with mods, happily. I'd rather go with a % chance.
Same for fighting, really. In principle I like the idea of divorcing fighting from "rolls." As it worked out, however, I didn't think much of Oblivion's combat engine. I added some mods that made the player and NPCs take wounds, suffer more from fatigue, and that sort of thing. But... I guess the "uncanny valley" concept works here too: It wasn't abstract enough for me to ignore the deficiencies in realism. But I'm an amateur fencer in real-life and in general a realism buff. As a computer game the combat may have been fine, but it was yet another thing that hurt my role playing gamer's suspension of disbelief more than many a game's more abstract system.
Overall I'd call the new system an improvement, and hope they improve it further in the next game. But combined with other things that hurt immersion in Oblivion the combat system was a negative for me.
Hmm... and lets talk "uncanny valley" with respect to the quests: In Morrowind most quests were basically courier runs with added homicide. However, they had a fascinating backdrop. Oblivion quests were often more involved... but not to the point where I actually found them interesting.
I thought the basic idea for the main quest great: Oblivion is invading and you're *not* the Chosen One. As things worked out I thought the invasion was a fizzle. I was picturing, like, armies clashing over a broad front, expeditions behind enemy lines, desperate missions to save cities Before Its Too Lake, and most of Cyrodiil getting wrecked by default... and I still felt like the Chosen One because I seemed the only thing in the world actually moving. An exaggeration, but that was my impression. Morrowind didn't have a very dynamic world, but I think it gave the illusion of one better than Oblivion.
Gameplay-wise, I found things a lot smaller in the sense that I couldn't run as many characters. In Morrowind I ran something like 4 characters and they all had more than enough to do without much overlap, and the game had enough interesting skill combinations to make them play very differently. I thought some of the magic-skills OP, but I put them on a Atronach character to limit them. (No mana potions allowed!) So I had to do some finagling and modding, but I got several interesting-to-play characters.
In Oblivion I planned 3 characters... then cut it back to 2... then settled on one, maybe two if the game's fun enough... then quit. Maybe modding could have saved things, but the potential combos didn't excite me.
Note this is not so much a function of the number of skills/spells, but how they all actually work in-game. Unfortunately I don't remember enough about the details to discuss it more.
I also didn't like how over-crowded Oblivion's world was with "dungeons". Morrowind suffered from this to some extent, too. But I found it much more excusable on Vvardenfell. With Oblivion, though, it was an immersion-killer for me. Cyrodiil, while it may have fallen on hard times recently, should have been far less full of monsters than a Blighted island, not more.
It really just comes down to what you're looking for in a game, I think. The differences between Oblivion and Morrowind are more shifts of emphasis than anything else. But for me they pretty much all were in a direction I didn't want to go with an RPG. As an action-adventure game, OTOH, most changes were clear improvements. But so far as action-adventures go I'd rather play Stalker. Which is probably still more like Morrowind than Oblivion...
I found Fallout 3 a little disappointing, btw, but mostly too small/short. I enjoyed what there was well-enough.
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