I'm not sure how others feel, but I can't help but feel that The Elder Scrolls franchise has sold out with the release of Skyrim. I use the term 'sold out' to mean that rather than doing their utmost to cater to loyal fans who've been following this franchise for years, Bethesda has dumbed down the gameplay and content to make the game accessible to mindless sheeple who just want to follow the latest fad.

Maybe I just feel more strongly than others since I know multiple people who have played Skyrim as their first TES game and all of a sudden think they own the franchise and speak condescendingly. The very same people would have looked upon any TES game, the genre it represents and RPG gaming as a whole with contempt in the past. All of a sudden 'nerdy' fantasy RPG games with extensive lore reminiscent of LOTR is cool.

I am far from a lifelong TES fan, and I haven't played the first two games in the series. I stumbled upon Oblivion in mid 2008 and I scoured interstate for Morrowind, both of which I loved dearly. I would check the internet and Bethesda forums regularly for news of a fifth Elder Scrolls game, and once Skyrim was announced I went straight to preorder the game. I waited three years for Skyrim, and nine months with it preordered anxiously awaiting the 11/11/11. It gets on my nerves that TES V: Skyrim seems to have lost its roots to cater for these new 'fans'. The leveling system has been skimmed down, the variety of weaponry, skills, and the depth of magick customization have all been streamlined. I admit it's simplified and streamlining can be good, but at what expense?

Please note that I'm very glad that TES franchise is finally garnering the attention it deserves and is meeting success. A part of me still can't shake the negative feeling I am harboring towards these recently emerging Skyrim fans. I'd also like to state that I believe art forms and all types of media such as games, books, movies, etc. should be embraced by all. This feeling may just be irrational but I'm just curious as to who else feels that way.

The game is definately simplified. It also almost completely lacks any of the metaphysical grandure of games like Morrowind.

That said, do i think they sold out? No. They made a more mainstream title which offers just enough to keep the loyal followers in line (Somewhat begrudgingly) and draw in new players.

The DLC, and the next title, will determine if they sell out or not. If they keep going down the current road, they are rife for a sellout. There is a happy medium between what keeps the follwers happy (Those who have held the franchise up for years) and what keeps the fickle masses interested. Skyrim pushes the line, but its success SHOULD mean that there is more to work with in giving us, the old dogs, more to sink our teeth into in future titles.

We shall see.

I think that's a very balanced view on things. I definitely agree that DLC and the next title will decide whether it has sold out or not. I can't help but hope that the users on Reddit are onto something genuine with their Thalmor induced in-game apocalypse theories (which made it into GameInformer news in case you haven't heard of the aforementioned theory), as it would provide an incredible amount of depth and would greatly draw on the depth of TES lore.

I think it may just be a case of me being overprotective of the franchise I love so much haha.

If you guys think that Morrowind and Oblivion weren't 'mainstream' games you have no idea what you are talking about.

Seriously, if ya wanna feel cool and different play indie games, there are almost NO GAMES made by big developers that don't have a wide demographic in the past ten years or so. I can reccomend Mount and Blade as one of the best true indie games with RPG elements in years.

Skyrim is simplified, but part of that to me is quite good, i always thought the character and stat management in Oblivion and Morrowind was horrible, and i've been gaming for 25+ years...There are a couple things I wish they wouldn't have ditched, athletics, acrobatics, spellmaking..but I considered alot of what they removed uneeded fat, I don't think Bethesda has ever been good at complex levelling schemes or any of that, the less they make you itneract with screens and menus in TES games, IMO the better, because it's usually a chore. Despite it's shortcomings, I prefer the perk system...I wouldn't have minded stats staying though.

Bottom line, if you thought you were cool or unique for liking Morrowind or Oblivion,l guess what, you weren't. Oblivion had a huge budget too, it was a very mainstream game. Morrowind was from a different time, but still a mainstream game..and people forget it was also on the original Xbox. not exactly some underground sleeper RPG hit.

no, they just sell skyrim

Levelling actually seems more complex than 'get 10 levels and you level up'.

Weaponry is isn't drastically different from Oblivion, since you sort of have to specialize in perks to reap the full benefits of particular weapons. And daggers aren't the same as swords anymore.

Skills, I agree. I want my acrobatics, unarmored, and H2H back.

Magic, I agree, but as for spellmaking, we're already complaining about how unbalanced the game is. This would make it far worse.

Edit: Attributes were a pretty big loss though.

I started the series with Oblivion. I can't help but feel the cries of "Morrowind, Morrowind" is just nostalgia. The spouse played it and all he comments on about it is that he didn't like how you could spam skills to level up without actually doing anything.

I suppose 'mainstream' is probably the wrong term. Morrowind, and to a lesser extend Oblivion, focused on a very particular part of the gaming crowd. That was RPG gamers. As such, Morrowind contained alot, and i mean ALOT of character and background. Oblivion started to build on the action-adventure aspect of the franchise, broadening the horizons and encompassing more gamers.

Skyrim does that again, taking in even more of the Action genre while even treading on FPS toes. By 'Mainstream' i mean that it is intended to appeal to more than a single genre of gamer.

Bethesda might as well sell out to valve or merge, actaully they might to just that in the near future.

I just downloaded Morrowind applied the MGEUI mod to update graphics. Wow what a crap [censored] game, am sure it was good in prehistoric times tho on your commodore 64. Talk about a waste of a hour downloading morrowind, installing mods .... only to fire it up and be utterly disappointed.

They said Bethesda "sold out" when Morrowind was released. They said Bethesda "sold out" when Oblivion was released. They said Bethesda "sold out" when Skyrim was released. And they will say Bethesda "sold out" when they release TES VI. As far as I'm concerned "sold out" is in the eye of the beholder.

You know what?

No they didn't ..I know it's amazing for you to believe, but both games were really big and had fans outside of traditional RPG gaming..that's what made them so big.
I remember specifically having friends whose first RPG was Morrowind, it is quite an easy game to play, in fact it was my wifes first RPG..who literally had played NOTHING on PC since probably having an Apple 2e prior to that as a kid lol. Not exactly a sophisticated game. Find it hilarious that Morrowind is being used as some kind of elite standard for RPG's..seriously kids these days. Even Daggerfall was a fairly big game for it's time, everyone I knew who PC gamed played it. Granted a smaller group of people in general were PC gaming..nonetheless TES games have IMO always been aiming for mass appeal.

I'm replaying Morrowind right now for the millionth time, all it has is better art, story, visual atmoshpere..it lacked things that it's RPG contemporaries had had for years, like schedule npcs that do stuff and random events...and it had some of the most atrocious combat around, even for it's time.

It takes a lot of patience to spam skills for a long time, so if you're willing to do it you shouldn't complain about how easy it is to level. Skyrim was generally harder to level (again, spellmaking taken out - you can't spam 'bound dagger 1 sec' over and over to quickly grind your conjuration.

Exactly what do you mean by crap? The gameplay, the graphics, the overal mechanics?

If so, then yes, i agree completely. It is very, very dated.

Where Morrowind shon was in the story, the characters and the uniqueness of the world. If remade with modern graphics and gameplay dynamics, but with all the story and conversational personality, it would still be superior to either Oblivion of Skyrim.

I 'll agree that the story was better, but that does not make the story of Skyrim bad.

In addition, so many things about Morrowind were awful, that the story better be good to make up for it. It isn't just it being dated either, I play old games religiously, most of them you don't have to mod to death to make them playable. Ton of crazy bad design issues with the vanilla game.

I think your missing the point. I hate racing games, but even i can enjoy a game of Road Rash. I absolutely svck at FPS, but i still like to play the occational title if its got a solid story. Just because fringe elements of other genre's play a game does not mean the game was designed to target them.

Skyrim is clearly designed to target more people outside of the traditional RPG genre than either Morrowind or Oblivion. Of course, there are several varriants within the RPG genre its self, but the same can be said of any genre. There is a radical differance between Halo and CoD for instance, but that doesn't change the fact both are FPS games. Just because Morrowind had certian nuances or did not does not change the fact that, predominantly, it was an RPG.

I'm not missing the point, I just think you are wrong. I think both Morrowind and Oblivion were definitely also made to bring in people who did not normally play RPGs, Oblivion in particular was a huge game with professionally paid voice actors, a couple of whom were actual famous actors, just like Skyrim.

Just because you don't like the direction they've taken the game in, this does not mean they are somehow just now trying to appeal to a new demographic, they have had a broad demographic for years, in fact this is likely the very reason they have removed stuff they did.The series has never been about 'spreadsheet RPG', or appealing to a specific niche market IMO. Gaming in generalis much bigger now and it has changed, some for the better, some for the worse.

What irks me though is all you guys talking like you are part of elite underground group of gamers when you are talking about playing these really big games, if you wanna feel that way go support indie developers or free/mod projects..there are a ton of them out there that ARE generally made for loyal groups of niche fans, which TES games are not, and IMO never have been.


You could say the same about any game, any genre, because there are simply more gamers now.

In my lifetime, it has gone from people perceiving advlts who play games as being weird or losers, to being a completely standard way to pass time. My wife is an attorney who plays Skyrim. Welcome to the new world, if you want niche games, support people who actually make them, instead of asking people who never did to make them for you.

If that's what you thought i was trying to say, then you definately didn't understand my point. Or i articulated it poorly. Either way, i will try again.

Morrowind maintained a great deal of the unique qualities of the TES universe in full, complete with the metaphysical nonsense which many old dogs associate with the universe. Yes, it implemented new things to draw in new players, but it did not do so at the expense of the old. At least not to my memory, i will admit i was only just comming into my own as far as story based gaming went when i played Morrowind, though i do remember playing both Arena and Dagerfall before that.

Anyway, Oblivion, to draw in an even larger player base, gave up a huge amount of the background and character of TES games. IMO, this was largely due to adopting voice acting, but thats an arguement for another time and place.

The point is, the push, with all things gaming of course, is to constantly expand your customer base. I see nothing wrong with this. What i have a problem with is doing so at the expence of those who have followed the franchise for years. So far, Bethesda has NOT done this, though the amount of intrest they have shown in the old dogs has been decreasing notably since Morrowind. It remains to be seen how far they are willing to take that path, and i feel that the DLC for Skyrim and the next TES title will indicate that.

So far, they have not crossed that line, and have expanded their player base and thus the resources available to them for future work. What they do with those resources will determine whether or not "I" judge them as sellouts. It is also something that must be done on a one-on-one basis, title by title. A mistake in one title (Like those damned aweful putty-heads in Oblivion) can be corrected in the next.

Nostalgia is why people still write mods for Morrowind.

Ever wondered why gamers say the older games in the series are better? Why the first series of a TV show is always the best? How a bands early music is a lot better than the current stuff they do?

If you follow a franchise, a band, a series etc, whatever part of it that made you fall in love with it is what you consider the best. Any new stuff feels like it wanders from the original things you loved.

Did not read.

Simple answer: No.

/thread

The only things Morrowind had other than story is the fact that you had no limits on how powerful you could become..much of which was stupid, I mean you can fly acorss the sky at top speed quite quickly if you want to. You could break the game much easier, in many more ways..beyond that I really don't think Morrowind had much of anything that is particularly grand.


I've followed the franchise for years and I love Skyrim. I'll bet i've been playing RPG's since you were a kid or close to it. There are plenty of "real RPG fans" who love Skyrim, sorry you don't, but you don't represent plenty of fans of the other games. All the huffing and puffing on this forum means diddly, all of my friends (most in mid 30s) have basically played daggerfall onwards and we all love Skyrim, though of course we all have our individual gripes with it. I'm guessing that's not unusual.

Also, MW and OB are both action RPG, it's just in the case of MW especially, they aren't nearly as good at the action part as Skyrim.

Precisely, it's like your first girlfriend / boyfriend...

I can't believe I wasted a whole 2 hours downloading Morrowind, updating patches, adding graphics overhaul mods etc only to fire it up and... . I can't believe this is actually the game all the Skyrim haters are comparing it too, haha

Least with Baldur's gate 2 while the graphics are dated the gameplay is still great for todays systems, Morrowind however is sheer garbage, from UI to gameplay, combat, etc.

Im a long time TES fan, been gaming on PC since the early 90's. All I can say is that Skyrim is probably my favorite TES game ever made.

Also, dumbed down is a matter of perspective. I consider Morrowind to be one of the easiest games of the TES series, mostly because it was easy to circumvent the bad AI and even easier to go rob everyone and buy all of your skills to 100 without much effort. Once you reached level 40 in Morrowind there was virtually nothing in the game that could lay a finger on you, it was like god mode. In fact, you could kill Vivec himself without even having to drink potions. Morrowind was super easy to complete. Was Morrowind dumbed down? Well, it certainly was for me.

Skyrim is much harder to break unless you try your hardest. Even then, If you play dead is dead like I do on master difficulty and you use "mortal" like character builds, the game is always going to challenge you and the combat/AI is much more sophisticated.

Sometimes the rose colored glasses and general nastalgia get in the way though, so I can easily understand why someone would consider earlier TES games to be "challenging", even though they weren't.

Where in oblivion did you ever get the idea that i didn't like Skyrim? 200 hours of gameplay would dissagree with that statement. It is, in my mind, considerably better than Oblivion, even in its unmodded, glitchy and often face-palming state.

My point is that the general lay of the games is drifting further and further from a defined base, and into an identity crisis zone. Its not there yet, and i think if they refine what they have with Skyrim, and include the superb story telling they had in Morrowind and Daggerfall, they would have a timeless winner. I'm choosing to reserve judgement of whether or not they sell out until AFTER i see how far they are willing to push the changes they have wrought. Too much in either direction is bad. Skyrim has great (if unpolished) mechanics, and Morrowind had an enthralling story and world. Oblivion was... Well... oblivion.

My greatest fear is that they decide to go off and decide to start from the ground up again, which is the last thing they need.