That was my point. You can't fault Morrowind with horribly handling enemies when they are handled the exact same way as in Skyrim, the only difference being that you're at a lower level in MW when you can defeat them (but have still invested just as much time into getting there as you would have in Skyrim.)

To clearify the person I responded to specificly said except expansions so maybe you should actually check your facts before falling to petty insults. And the fact that Skyrim let you level up faster does not change my argument.

As for the leveling taking longer time in Morrowind I only partially agree. Some players, like me, will naturally focus more on developing the characters abilities by playstyle. This results in me having a level 40-ish character at the roughly same time as I have a level 30-ish character in Skyrim since I find the leveling in Morrowind to be a bit faster since a whooping 10 skills you chose will give you 1/10 of a leveling, but they also recieve an exp-boost. Had they also added some unique features to each skill if they were chosen as a Major or Minor as well as the attributes I would argu that the MW system would be deeper than Skyrims, but sadly it isn't.

I've put +1000 hours into Vanilla Oblivion and I can say that Skyrim is definitely better then Oblivion in pretty much every catagory and fixes the problems that Oblivion had such as overuse of Level Scaling.

Played Morrowind and Oblivion... ALLOT OF PEOPLE are just being nostalgic for the past games. In reality Skyrim is the best.

We always see past things as being better...

I disliked morrowind, Love skyrim though.

morrowind is one of the best because so many of the game mechanics are superior to skyrim's. it's not nostalgia because many of us never actually stopped playing morrowind due to its superior rpg elements.

skyrim, imo, is the best roleplaying sim ever created. morrowind is one of the best rpg's ever created. (xbox)

Maybe because some things are?

New and shiny isn't always better. Sometimes you shouldn't mess with success and that is what Bethesda has done and by doing so has ruined a great series.

As a Morrowind and Oblivion player with hundreds upon hundreds of hours invested in both, I'm extremely happy with Skyrim. My biggest beef with Oblivion wasn't the cartoon saturation or the sort of cliche'd D&D fantasy world but the lack of reward for exploration. After I went through one or two caves I realized all the bad guys had the same stuff, nothing in the caves worth taking etc. Skyrim, makes it interesting. Small caves have journals of past explorers/adventurers, some have unique items, weapons/armour. You can find these things without having to have a quest spawn them. Sure content is levelled but you don't end up with complete swap outs of gear from bad guys. In Oblivion it drove me nuts that when I hit lvl 20... all the guys in the cave mysteriously had glass armour and weapons... Morrowind wasn't like that they may have bone armour, glass weapons, orcish it was completely up to chance who you encountered and what they were armed with.

Skyrim manages to keep the levelling of gear but also make caves less boring. Also, they've brought back the "alien" feel to the world. You have to battle against the terrain in so many cases, to find quest objectives where as in Oblivion it was just one grassy hill away almost all of the time.

All in all, its a lot like Oblivion meets Fallout 3 with all the things from Morrowind I still value today. Sure, there are things missing but all of the "big" things are still there thus making it a pretty awesome game in my books.

This is me exactly. Loved OB but really just thought MW was extremely boring. I wanted to like it, but there was no difficulty slider so I could get used to the combat.

My little gripe about SK is the same as yours as well as the lack of spell variety and number of spells.

Other than those two little things I just really, really enjoy this game.

I don't find the dungeon delving superior to Oblivions, I mean really aside from a few quest related exceptions an dragur ruin is pretty much just like any other dragur ruin and so forth. Thanks to crafting it's tons easier to just craft up any weapon you can find much sooner then you could find them.

Playing both morrowind and oblivion, I like skyrim, some stuff is different, but it still feels like elder scrolls. Actually the difficulty level is like morrowind, but the other things like Oblivion.

Visually: the best TES game ever.
Storywise: Some of it is REALLY good (DB), some of it is really bad (the Dragons/Blades retcon, the College of Winterhold (made even worse with the potential it had)
Questwise: Far worse as a whole (not even the greatness that were the DB and Thieves Guild lines could save it)

So...take from that what you will.

Long story short:

*Been playin since daggerfall.
*Skyrim is really pretty. World design is unmatched. Movement is vastly improved. Animation is a nice improvement too, but still weaksauce.
*I don't really like the mini cutscenes in combat, I would prefer cooler combat moves in 3rd person and mouse/anolog directional swing control for 1st person (think Jedi Knight or Dead Island for inspriation).
*Lack of spellmaking is kick in nuts to mages.
*Lack of spell variety is lame.
*I expected more weapon variety. They keep giving us fewer choices. I wanted everything from Morrowind back + some new stuff. Disappointed.
*The one handers and two handers share the same animations and fighting styles which is really lame. I expect each freaking weapon type to have it's own style of combat. Fighting with a mace should be different than a sword and not just in terms of stats, attacks/animations, everything should be different.
*Dragons need to vary their tactics, too much reliance on breath weapons becausde the animators are weaksauce.
*Voice acting is really great but I wish the NPC's would just say "Hi" when you run by and save the rest of the stuff for when you actually engage them in conversation. They randomly blabber way too much and it spoils the solid voice over work and makes them seem 'special'.
*RPG system/mechanics need some tweaking. it is a problem when a single enchantment is more powerful/as powerful as 2 perks. Skills have been handicapped in favor of making perks define character. This was a change made by people who wanted to create a simpler system and while it is stil fun it could be better.
*(CONT. RPG mechanics) - It is good that you cannot get all perks which provides some variation in playthroughs. However this could have been achived keeping stats, adding perks, and creating a system where it was impossible to max out all skills or all attributes.
*The inventory, menus etc. are all very sterile and future ipod little kid robot people garbage. I would muich rather it looked all old timey and elder scrollsy.
*Characters are cool they just need to be developed more.
*Voice acting is stellar (for the most part).
*World design is unmatched.
*Free form gameplay is unmatched.
*BGS really likes evil and evil stuff and demons.
*I hate the daedra and want a questline that mirrors every daedra quest and allows for the destruction of their shrines and their followers.

My biggest complaint with Skyrim and why I wouldn't rate it as highly is your lack of options. You have to be an immoral character 80% of the time in order to see most of the content. I don't want a good/bad system as they are always poorly designed and shallow, but I'd like to be able to have more emotional investment in scenarios like whether you join the Dark Brotherhood or not. When I may that choice not to it was amazing and the quest after was awesome. I like that I could choose between the imperials, or the stormcloacks when fleeing from Helgen, but that option to pick different alternatives needed to be in every guild, and every quest.

For heavens sakes at least allow me to spare bandits when they yield. Not allowing me too just detaches me emotionally from my character.

I totally agree. I always play one or maybe 2 evil guys (I play a lot of characters) just to see the content but the vast majority of my characters are 'good guys'. It just feels better to me. In this game if you truly try to walk an honorable path you have to ignore a lot of the game .. which would be fine but there isn't many alternatives for people who want to bring the light. My mages are helpful, wise, white wizard types (part monk, part nurse, part sage, part entertainer, with the ability to unleash elemental fury if needed for defense).

I'm actually really looking forward to a game where I can be an actual force for good and I don't feel like the game was made by a bunch of demon worshippers. There needs to be more Yin to all the Yang in this game.

I haven't been able to fire up my heavily modified Oblivion games since I began playing Skyrim.
The graphics are a vast improvement over Oblivion, most of the complaints I do have against this game have already been stated before.
I do wish the game had a little more of a fantasy element, especially in the wildlife diversity. No Werebears, few Werewolves, no Minotaurs in the home province of Morihaus?
I think the "fighters guild" and "mages guild" could have used more fleshing out. The Companion questline could use some more background for people who rush through quests without taking the time to listen to other NPC's and reading the in game books and logs, letters, etc... The College of Winterhold made some sense to me because I had prior knowledge of some aspects of Lore, but it still felt rushed, and better explanations of events in the questline would have been useful to have.

Well of course it's worse, it's a new game with pretty graphics, it is law that it has to be bad and stupid because today nothing can be good

Seriously though, I found many things I could only find in modded Oblivion. It still needs a couple of mods and DLCs to make things more interesting but it's worth a buy, definitely.

For background, I started playing TES games when Oblivion came out, moved on to Morrowind, and have tried out Arena and Daggerfall.

My opinion is that Skyrim is probably my favorite of the series.

Oblivion had good gameplay, but a really bland world and dull lore, whereas Morrowind had the opposite issue(crummy gameplay, but an AMAZING story and atmosphere). Skyrim isn't quite up to Morrowind in terms of story or atmosphere, but between how immersive the game can be and the gameplay(which I enjoy), I can forgive it for that. My main disappointment with the game so far are the Companion and Winterhold questlines, both of which feel were ridiculously short.

Skyrim blows Oblivion out of the water, imo. As much as I loved Oblivion, it was an extremely bland environment with very little in the way of distinctiveness.

As far as the streamlining and simplifications which have been made to the series over time, I don't have any problems with it. I've never been one to be too obsessed about numbers and being able to fiddle around with stats, so removing them works for me. The main reason I love TES games is immersion and exploration. I do miss the ability to create new spells, though. That would be nice to have back.

Concerning Arena and Daggerfall....I feel like they're both their own entities. They're very interesting, and are fun in their own right, but they're products of a different time and I don't feel like it's really fair to compare them to later installments in the series.

What definition of "master" are you using here? If you mean the peak level you can possibly reach, then sure 70 to 80 is about where it's at. But once you hit level 20 to 25 in Morrowind, you can ace anything the game throws at you. The fact that you can still get stronger only matters in the context of the expansions where being level 40 to 60 is more important.

So in terms of the challenge presented, not the theoretical limit, I'd say level 10 is fair headway into the progression of your character.
I'm not sure what you mean by "bland". If you mean a thief will always end up in the same place regardless of race, then sure. That's no different in Skyrim, however. If you mean all character's inevitably become ace of all trades, then I'd partially disagree. You could easily become a powerful character in Morrowind without maxing everything, though the game certainly incentivised playing outside your class. That's something I'd hoped they would address. They haven't.

Exactly. And with teleportation via the mages guild, boats, silt striders, and Mark/Recall if you were short on time and your objective was on the other side of the island it didn't take long to get, at least, in the same region. Want to get back from your exploring to do something with that loot? Recall back and sell it, etc...

Graphics are obviously much better than previous titles, and physics and stuff like that are going to be better, so comparing those is pointless. I'm comparing them at the core concept - if I could pick which game was to be published in 2011, which one would it be type thing.

Morrowind I find is the most "hardcoe" of them all. It has the chance for magic to be fail, it has the fatigue/stamina bar having a larger affect on gameplay, causing stuff like weapon misses, magic fails and stuff like that. It makes managing your stamina much more important than in other games - e.g. Skyrim, where you only need to have 1 stamina so you can have your power attack. It also doesn't have fast travel, which I find as a plus, because it means that there is a point of hiring the caravans/gigantic bugs to travel you between cities. Morrowind also does not have any voice acting for NPCs, which means mods work better, and you can have more detailed and in depth dialogue. The lack of map markers pointing out exactly where the objective is means that there are more puzzles, and I prefer that. The lack of level scaling is also a big plus for me.

Oblivion is different again. It has voiced dialogue, which is bad for mods - they seem sub-par when there is no dialogue or no badly voiced dialogue. They have terrible level scaling - you don't want to level up in a fair few cases, as the level scaling makes it harder, not easier. There are benefits, but in general you don't want to get to too high a level. Oblivion also introduced map markers, which took out a large amount of the puzzle and mystery of the game. Oblivion seems to be the least hardcoe of the 3, with it being much more relaxed and less focus on being realistic.

Skyrim's combat system is amazing. It has the best animations I've ever seen - ones which are actually plausible - and has enough room for strategic thinking and tactics to make it more than just the block-stab-block-stab that Oblivion was. It also includes the revolutionary concept that if you swing a sword at something, it'll hit it - something which Morrowind and Daggerfall sorely lacked.

The quests are inventive, and are only as long/short as you make them. If you fast travel everywhere and run in swinging axes and spells, then you won't notice much. If you take your time and aim to get through taking as little damage as possible, they'll last a long time. Voice acting is better, towns are better, NPCs are better, factions are better (radiant quests if you finish), and the main quest was better. All in all I can't see what people are complaining about.

I suspect most of them just like complaining.

Been playing the series since Arena - Some aspects of Skyrim are much improved and some of the things removed can be disappointing. As others have said, a great open-world Action RPG, but a poor RPG game. Boring quests, linear dungeons, lack of choice. As you play, your character turns into a weapon-wielding magic user to hack your way through the game (if the quest bugs don't prevent you from finishing). Wait for CK and the mods (about a year) and the game will be much improved.

There is nothing inevitable about your character turning into a weapon-wielding magic user. I'm playing a Nord Warrior and the only magic I've used has been the basic Restoration spell to heal myself - and that was entirely optional. I could easily have relied on healing potions instead.

Try playing a non-weapon using character (destruction magic does not scale like the swords or axes), becomes difficult late in the game. Could just be my lack of skill or tactics, but I needed to train up my character in sword to finish.