Rose tinted glasses with a healthy dose of nostalger along with a good portion of lower expectations at the time.

Yahtzee!

I think each series has pros and cons over each other. Morrowind has the best customization. Whether it be clothes/weapons/spells etc. Oblivion has the best (overall) guild quest lines, not as generic as Morrowind's and longer than Skyrims. Skyrim has the best combat and interactive world. There is more freedom with combat and no class restriction.

Most Morrowind quests were pretty mundane, I think the first two Mages Guild ones in Balmora were to go fetch 10 heather blossoms, and go kill rogue mage in some cave. The majority of the quests were like this.
I don't think many offered you a range of choices. Even the main quest was pretty linear and if you killed a quest essential npc you'd get a pop-up on the screen warning you to load a previous save game because you'd just stuffed it all up.

Why do so many people think Oblivion and Morrowind is better?

possibly because they play heavily modded versions

This is my question. Why do people think these games are better than the others in the same serie?. IMO each one is great on different merits. Sure Skyrim has less depth than Morrowind but Morrowind also was mostly text based in terms of dialogue(which was great imo). Morrowind was my favorite game but I can easily see how people like the other games based on different merits.

Morrowind had more depth, lore and story. IMO
Oblivion had better factions, pacing and balance(still not that balanced) IMO
Skyrim has better combat, environment and presentation. IMO

I have said this many times and I will say it again.

Morrowind is a better GAME to play.
Oblivion is a better Game to PLAY.
Skyrim is a better game to PLAY.

?

I wish Oblivion and Skyrim had this feature. it's about freedom, responsibility, choice and consequence. If my desire to kill someone is so strong that I am willing to sacrifice the main quest in the current playthrough, give me this freedom and inform me.

Infer.

I just loled when You mentioned the console. Maybe the world wasn't huge but it FELT huge. That's the only thing that mattered.



This works only if You abuse the games mechanics, which means skipping the whole questline ( and it was longer than Skyrim's ). I wonder how fast I could get things done using levitation in Skyrim... oh snap! I forgot they removed it from TES games! I wonder why .



More quests for the Guilds/Factions ( you needed to get your hands dirty and work hard to rise through the ranks )
More unique Artifacts ( getting them was rewarding and FUN, not to mention those items were powerful and mostly best in game )
More progression or in other words from ZERO to HERO.



I mostly agree. I have nothing against level scaling though I might have liked it more the way is was in MW. W/o level scaling the world felt bigger even if only because I couldn't get somewhere until my Hero was strong enough to venture there.



110% agree


Skyrim's faction quests were a joke. Not because they were boring but because of their length. You can become a leader of each of them in few hours w/o rushing. Well maybe not the Thieves Guild but only because it requires stealth gameplay.


Sorry but I just can't agree that Skyrim is better.

Exactly! I agree totally with this... It's a lot of nostalgia for the Morrowind-players I think. I played Arena and Daggerfall, but strangely enough I never got into Morrowind... It didn't "rock my world" but I loved Oblivion. And Skyrim is far better than Oblivion in all ways. But that might be because I am from Scandinavia and really like the norse mythology with all it's gods, creatures, myths and stories.

The Viking-era does rule and if you haven't read "R?de Orm" (The Long Ships in english) by Frans G. Bengtsson do it. A terrific read for you who like the viking-era

You include here the guilds, the guild quests and the variety of quests too? Given the 5 year advance I honestly expected many 'Whodunit'ish quests in Skyrim...

Nostalgia isn't that important, at least for me. Compare them right now and Morrowind fails on many levels, graphics animations and what not, but it's still better in a great many as well.

The way the quests start, the fact that you are not always the mystical hero to come and save the day, the amount of guilds you could join.

Telvanni, Hlaalu, Redoran, Morag Tong, Fighters Guild, Thieves Guild, Mages Guild, Imperial Legion, Imperial Cult, Tribunal Temple, Twin Lamps (sort of) the amount of work you have to put into these guilds to actually lead them, the slowness of the main quest where you actually need to be someone important before you can save the world, it all makes so much more sense. Something that I just don't see in Skyrim or saw in Oblivion. Don't get me wrong I love Skyrim, but Morrowind did a lot of things better. Not everything, but a lot, and most of what Skyrim does better comes from it being build at a later date (graphics/animations)

As someone who started playing with Daggerfall, I enjoy Skyrim the most. I'm old, I used to play games like Wizardry and the like for PC, yet I enjoy Skyrim's streamlined gamepaly more than the other games. And it doesn't necessarily make me younger, and I don't think of Skyrim as any less an RPG.Skyrim may have features and stats missing, but I'm still roleplaying. Which game is closer to being a traditional pen-and-paper "roleplaying game" doesn't mean much as far as entertainment goes.

As far as my own complaints with Skyrim? If the game just let me break questlines by killing off ANY NPC I choose. I don't need the game to stop me from making those mistakes. If they want, make essential NPC's invulnerable to death from others: dragons, monsters, during civil war. But if I'm trying to kill Ulfric Stormcloak while pretending to join, I'd like to be able to kill him.

I liked enchanting and the ability to put any enchantment on anything and as many of them as I wanted. I made an amulet that restored 6 different attributes (health, magica, strength, ect) a very small amount each. I liked the ability to customize my spells in stead of just taking the preset and limited options provided. I could choose to make it a touch, targeted or on attack. I could choose area of effect and duration and amount of damage within the limits of the soulgem. I also like being able to make fun spells like a dagger that healed with each attack or armor that caused fire damage to the wearer. I liked being able to name potions and spells.

I liked clothing that was not gender specific. If I played a female if I bought pants they would not magically turn into a dress if I put it on. I could choose my own clothing.

I liked the strange creatures and fantastical landscapes.

I liked having to make choices like you could choose to join a house but only one of the three. And having some guilds hostile to others.

I liked that by doing something like dropping or selling the package you were given at the start instead of delivering it like you were told you could make it impossible to complete quests.

I liked having verbal instructions that you needed to follow to complete quests and that they were inexact enough that you really needed to search carefully to find what you were looking for.

I liked the minimap in the corner and that the large map showed which areas you had explored. I liked slowly making the whole map visible. I also liked being able to put markers on the map with little notes. The map was more colorful and the roads were more easily seen also.

I liked in the open inventory you could see your character and what he had equipted. I also liked the drag and drop grid inventory. You could even use drag and drop with your mouse to move things from the world to your inventory with the inventory open. I liked the drag and drop selling screen.

I liked levitation and having a 3-D world. Some places you couldn't get to without levitation. And it was fun to fly.

I liked underwater combat and exlploring underwater ships and grottos.

I liked how dangerous and common slaughter fish were. They were a real danger any time you went in the water. I even liked cliffracers. You really needed to watch the skies carefully. I got killed by them often.

I liked that health and magica didn't regenerate without sleep. And you couldn't sleep if any opponent was nearby. It made exploring much more dangerous.

I liked having many more clothing slots. 2 rings, an amulet, belt, clothing AND armor. Right and left pauldions, ect.

By current standards the graphics are limited and the combat mechanics aren't as good.

I keep seeing this word nostagia pop up, yet that would mean a yawning for the past, the good old days. I am still playing Morrowind to this day, it has nothing to do with nostagia and more to do with personal preference. Skyrim has some nice shiny graphics and a much improved combat system i'll give you that, but a poor main quest and terribly short guild quests. Becoming the Arch-Mage after just 8 quests without any rank up is just poor in my opinion. Same goes for the companions. I really enjoyed being a nobody in Morrowind, having to collect random flowers because i'm the noob of the guild, slowly but surely ranking my self up and earning more respect. This gave me a sense of progress and made me feel like i had achieved something.

I guess the fact that i have no interest in the Viking age and yet love the alien world of Morrowind also helps sway me towards that game. That said, Skyrim is a GREAT game no doubt about it, but in no way the best. Just my personal opinion.

No one likes (vanilla) oblivion better.. well not many people...

Because every TES game is so different it comes down to a matter of opinion.

I think that Oblivion was a worse game than Morrowind, not because it wasn't as deep or RPG-ish but because it lost what made Morrowind such an unique game; The settings. Vvardenfell was exotic, it broke all traditional fantasy rules. Oblivion's settings were too generic.

I could kill whatever I wanted to in oblivion, and had no consequences, i have no idea what you are on about.

This

Too many people compare a modded oblivion to a vanilla skyrim. i played with mods for so long, it was a shock going back to the basic game as it's a completely different game. When i say 'different' I mean that in a bad way.

As for the 'whodunnit' quests in Oblivion, there was only one, so using 1 quest to back up an entire game is just ridiculous.

I can understand why some people prefer Morrowind to Skyrim. I personally hate Morrowind, i found it slow and very boring, with just horrible game play. But its kinda a different animal so i can see that. But I don't see how you can prefer Oblivion to Skyrim. To me Skyrim is Oblivion just improved in just about every single way, with the exception of Guild quest lines. Now while i can see how that can be a legitimate beef with the game, Skyrim is so packed with content and so improved over Oblivion in most that its just seems a better game to me.

I'm talking about Vanilla Oblivion with no mods. Once you start using mods, and customizing the game to your liking, its no wonder you'd prefer it.

You could kill Martin? Uriel Septim? Jauffre? Just look at http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Essential_NPCs list. There are dozens of essential npc's in Oblivion.

You make a good point about the difference in the world itself between the games. I liked how different Morrowind was from any other fantasy world. I mean come on, Floating Squids? Small Dinos? Exo-skeletal Creatures? Walking Lizard Mouths? Ant-eater Looking Shelled Dogs? Large Maggots With Teeth that connected with Armored Alien Dogs and stood up to become a Symbiotic NEW creature combining the two? Walruses With Snouts Full Of Teeth (Even though these return)? Giant Walking Roaches you can domesticate and ride? Eels With Razor Jaws? Desert cities with sandstorms? Giant mushrooms? Slaves? Politics? Volcanos? Ice Castles? Shipwrecks? Everything was just more imaginative and creative. It really felt like another world, and was also deeper in dialog and quest-branching, weapons/armor/skills...

I actually played Oblivion before Morrowind, and I thought it was fun for awhile, then it got too repetitive, especially in the landscape. I also didn't like watching what I leveled so strictly in order to get stronger than all the enemies that were leveling with me. There comes a point when you ask yourself what's the point of leveling at all in Oblivion. I hated how fast you ended up being able to run and how high you ended up being able to jump. I think they realized MW was a little slow, but I preferred the slower movement to the superhero speed everyone starts moving around in in Oblivion after so many levels. I played Oblivion for a few years until I finally tried Morrowind. Boy was I surprised at how amazing it was and the world it took me too was so much more deep, with a unique quality and variety that Oblivion lacked. But mostly it just felt polished and you could tell they put a lot of heart and soul into creating it. I also think they went in the wrong direction with creatures in Oblivion, but that is my opinion. It's like in Oblivion they decided all of a sudden the planet Nirn should be more like medieval Earth. Some might like that, but we have enough Lord of The Rings/King Arthur type fantasy already, and to me it seemed in Oblivion they just jumped on that bandwagon, forgetting their highly imaginative roots.

I can't completely share my opinions on Skyrim yet, as after 3 months the game is still unfinished, and I can't stand the 5 FPS, and the constant hard-locking it keeps doing to my PS3. But the graphics, music, perks system and lack of a athletics and acrobatics skills are all good things in my opinion. If I got started on more of what I DON'T like about Skyrim though, I would go on and on so I won't even get into it anymore. I just can't wait until they release the game, as I still have a beta copy I paid for 3 months ago.

As much as I like Morrowind and I like it a lot more then Oblivion and a good bit more then Skyrim, Bethesda didn't go away from it roots with Skyrim and Oblivion, for a large part Daggerfall had a more medieval feel to it, Morrowind really was the odd one out. The provinces of Skyrim and Cyrodiil have always been designed with a more roman/medieval/viking feel to them.

See I've never played Daggerfall so I appreciate you telling me that. I guess it's all a matter of what you prefer. I love medieval settings as well as fantasy/alien worlds, but I feel they should have stuck with the same type of creatures in Morrowind and brought those into the medieval setting. If only their creature designer could have stayed with them, as I'm sure he either left after Morrowind, or they didn't give him any more creative freedom of expression like he once had.