By the way, MORROWIND FTW! That is all.

@Crossaber

You've invoked a torturous and irrelevant anology about guns to avoid the fact that the criteria you've used to justify Skyrim as an RPG could just as easily work to justify Call of Duty: Black Ops. Thus poking a large hole in your argument, and jeopardizing your stance on whether or not Skyrim is an RPG, let alone a good one because you've refused to answer my point.

Not really, it's just that I played Oblivion for 2 years and probably spent 500-1000 hours on it, I got sick of Skyrim after 2 months and less than 200 hours.

Indeed.

For me the biggest deciding factor of if it's an RPG or not os the Character > player aspect. Once the player starts to have direct control over character skill success it turns into and action adventure game over a RPG.

absolutely. i'm just about to the point where anyone that doesn't accept the character vs player -based mechanical differences isn't even worth the debate time.

but, only almost, lol.

Gimme some of that stuff yer smokin', damn, it's gotta be good....

The Elder Scrolls have never implemented combat-mechanics like Bioware, where combat relies purely on character-skills rather than player reflexes. This was so in Daggerfall with its click-fest combat, in Morrowind and so forth. True, perhaps lockpicking could be adjusted by a mod if you don't like that sort of thing, but overall posts like these are misguided, and this isn't opinable. Elder Scrolls mechanics have always worked in favour of player reflexes, it is not just this game.

Try this, if you have the time perhaps; duel with a mage in Neverwinter Nights and duel with a mage in Morrowind and observe the differences.

Eh? All I'm getting at is that to me TES was never really a "RPG" to begin with, I'm not trying to force it one way or the other. I would like it to be more then a shallow hiking simulator that we see skyrim as now however. For me what makes truely great RPG's are a combination of deep story, great characters and how they interact with said story with lots of options and C&C on how you move through that story.

If you want to see Mage duel's you have to go back to BG2 NWN and the new rulesets marked the decline of the D&D system I think, plus the newest ruleset for forgotten realms completely destroyed about the lore of said world. I mean they don't even have a goddess of magic anymore! XD

TES magical duel only really amounted to elemental blast or damage blast of choice spam until one side is dead. Skyrim you pretty much limited to only "base line" spell to do this while atleast in OB you could make some more interesting ones. Like for instance I had a 50 damage (lightning) over 30 feet for 5 seconds spell that I used for pretty much general street sweeping. With it I didn't have to be perfect with accuracy but it didn't hit unwanted targets. Not so in skyrim your stuck with locked in amounts. So for me Skyrim is a big step back for magic.

Well, there was a time when you could use a much bigger variety than that in a mage duel, with spells like...
Fire/frost/shock shield
Silence
Noise
Weakness to
Absorb
Damage
Fortify for yourself
Reflect spell
Absorb spell
Etc...

Oh, and my favorite: Calm humanoid. Although this is still in Skyrim. It's the fastest way to stop a battle.

I hate threads like this, because people's narrow definitions of an RPG, and their insessant insistance on "numbers! numbers! numbers!" and abolustely no player skill makes my heart, head, and soul hurt.

At this point, I don't even care if Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are considered RPG's or not. If they aren't considered RPG's (which I consider to be a load of absolute crap - they are the very definition of the term - just because they don't abide by Dungeons & Dragons rules and mechanics doesn't make it any less of an RPG), then quite frankly, they are better than anything and everything to ever come out of the RPG genre. If Elder Scrolls, or even just Skyrim if you want to focus on just the one game, isn't an RPG, then RPG's are inferior to Elder Scrolls.

But Guild Wars is a multiplayer game, social interactivity is a given. However, I realize how my comment excludes 90% of RPGs. Maybe, you can say that we are in the stone age of RPGs, so primitiveness is normal. Or back then stone age, now dark ages.

The player input for Skyrim is trivial. All you have to do is follow the compass and fight when the game sends enemies at you. I only did very few, very few quests that required me to investigate and make decisions(not out-of-blue choices&consequences railroading, actual decisions).

For me, the player/character skill separation arguments are a big case of hypocrisy, one that favors tactical skills over hand-eye coordination. And I have no problem with attributes being gone. It is not a FPS thing, it is just another RPG ruleset. A simple ruleset attracts me more, as it lowers metagaming and powergaming and grants a faster pace. That said, I respect player-character skill separation. I just think sports games do an infinitely better job at it.

I played Skyrim for 250 hours. An excellent fighting game for warrior, thief and mage builds, it is open world with infinite content. I will play another 250 hours easily, maybe more. But as someone who played Morrowind, I expected more. It is hard to deny Skyrim, it is an excellent game but it doesn't share the ambitions or philosophies that made Morrowind. I felt like slipping away sometimes, letting the beauty blind me but I woke up to the truth now.

We lost the patient, time of death 11.11.11.

But there is hope. I am actually impressed with the community for pointing Skyrim's shortcomings. Oblivion shared these too. I mean Oblivion had so much problems, these things went unnoticed. Skyrim being a much better game, turned the spotlights on the actual problems. Will Bethesda listen?

PS. I want to clear something, I am not a narrativist. I am a ludologist. I want emergent behavior, not more railroading. If next game is filled with choices&consequences [censored], I will be really pissed. I want non-linear, not multi-linear. I hope they get it right, if they ever try. Ah, I am so romantically hopeful.

Well by "player control over character skill success" I assumed you meant that this particular game (or series as you say) is reflex oriented rather than purely player-skill oriented. I don't think particular editions or rulesets matter here really; say you are a warrior in NWN, what you do is just click on an enemy to initiate combat and your character will do the rest (the player is still involved of course). If you don't have the necessary skill requirements (i.e. enough strength or dexterity) you will never win that fight. Dragon Age still works this way.

In Morrowind (or Daggerfall) you can win any fight, since all you need to do is maneuvre away and blast with pin-point accuracy. I found this annoying, coming from the previous system, but gradually came to understand that it's just a different type of RPG. I would still say TES comfortably belongs in that category, since all the traditional elements which you list (story, interaction, drama) still exist.

Well, it's not like Skyrim takes player skill. Whether or not "hacking away" is successful or not still depends on numbers. And managing the numbers has now become so easy that it's boring.

Edit: It doesn't take skill because...
AI is so bad that you don't need to have any specific "strategy" for fights.
You're locked into your combat animations, so you can't "manuver" manually in the middle of them.
There's no locational damage.
There's auto-aim for both melee weapons and bows.
There's no "reflex" actions required, like pressing the block button at a specific time to be successful, or pressing a dodge button to avoid an attack.
Different attacks don't have a special time to be used - If you have the stamina, use a power attack. If not, use regular attacks until you can use a power attack, repeat.

I would say something like... Mount and Blade is player-skill-oriented. Skyrim is not like that at all.

Skyrim's main storyline is not as interesting as Oblivion's and Morrowind's. Story-wise, Morrowind is by far my favorite, like most of the games it's a story of a prophesy coming true and all that, but it was so much more complex than Skyrim's or Oblivion's. Skyrim's setting, to me, ties with Oblivion. The setting is boring, familiar, and not at all alien like Vvardenfell. I also was not excited about the dragons' return; I was hoping the lore could remain where the dragons would not return. Playing through Skyrim I hoped that a daedra lord or some god would reveal itself to be a main antagonist or a even a protector of the Dragonborn, but alas the role of the daedra in the game were not as prominent as in past games.

This is probably the best argument I've seen from people who would argue that there's nothing particularly special about Morrowind to put it in its own category above Skyrim and perhaps Oblivion.

Still, I think that the fact Morrowind does entail a little bit of player skill (as opposed to its basically total absence from games like Final Fantasy 7) is simply an incidental result of deciding to convert an RPG from a turn based system to a real time combat model. This is more of a necessity when you consider that virtually all of the other RPGs we've talked about - Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origin, etc. are all party-based games where your character is just one member of a group that you're controlling. Morrowind, by contrast, ensures that the Nerevarine is a lonely, in some ways tragic hero. It could easily be said that a turn based system is virtually required for a game where six or more characters are sitting there trading blows, otherwise it would be too chaotic and uncontrollable. When the combat boils down to the player's character vs 1 or maybe 2 enemies at any given time you could quickly see how turn-based would be an unnecessary thing.

So in conclusion I would argue that yes, Morrowind incidentally does allow player's skill to influence the combat at least a little bit, which is an inevitable when you grant your player the ability to move wherever he wants, whenever he wants (including dodging arrows or spells). However, this is tempered by a ruthless adherence to dice rolls and statistics which determine everything else, including whether or not your sword does damage when you bring it down on the enemies' head, no matter how quickly you mash your attack button. In some ways, I think the fact that in Morrowind fatigue drains as you move around, and it's so important to effectively dealing damage or casting spells, is an effort by the developers to (very softly) try and discourage the player trying to over-do it with maneuvering around the NPC's to gain an unfair advantage in combat.

This is one of the best posts I've seen on the subject in a while. Hell, even in the numbers and rules heavy beast that is D&D, it's perfectly feasable to play the game with as few numbers and rules as possible. Does that make it any less of an RPG when a group likes focusing on character interaction and immersion over constant check rolling?

The fallacy of this is that Skyrim has the worst character interaction of probably any RPG I've seen, and it's arguably inferior then any other modern TES game. I would also argue Skyrim has more ways of breaking your immersion than Morrowind or Oblivion, but that's a bit more subjective I suppose.

Saying Skyrim isn't an RPG is like saying water isn't liquid. Anyone whos says that is making a factually incorrect statement, Syrim is an RPG , and is a much better game than MW.

... http://i.imgur.com/dfO73h.jpg = !


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http://i.imgur.com/WPrPFh.jpg ...

Sticks and stones may break my bones but... a poor anology, unsubstantiated opinions that don't answer my arguments, and a post that finishes with a 100% subjective statement may never hurt me?

The OP is subjective ,however Skyrim is an RPG that is a fact, as far as my opinion that Skyrim is a better game than MW well i call them like i see them. Skyrim > MW.

Skyrim is my first true open world rpg. It supports the actual "role-playing" aspect of pen'n paper rpg systems. True, it's lacking the obvious stats-and dice rolling side of most rpg. Don't get me wrong: "fighting" against and with numbers can be very satisfieing provided the rule-system behind is alright and deep. But there are enough of those stats and numbers rpgs out there that are based on very strict rules. Skyrim on the other side tries hard to hide it's rule-based system.

Being such a potent true role-play game Skyrim has a serious downside though: lacking a deeper party setup. Role-playing was and is always about interacting with a group of adventurers and working together. Skyrim's a single-player game, true, but there could still be a small group setup with better AI. Ko-Op play would be dream come true.

lolwut?
skyrim is one of the best TES games, maybe second only to Morrowind.
as for the RPG... I'd say Action-RPG.

How is it a fact? By what criteria are you making that determination? Quantify your statement.


Of course, this thread isn't really about whether or not Skyrim is a great video game or not, or even if it's a better video game than Morrowind - it is about whether or not Skyrim is a great RPG, or even an RPG at all.

But okay fine, let's have some fun. Whether or not Morrowind is a better game than Skyrim or not is totally up to a person's interpretation. There is no right answer, and your opinion is as valid as mine. However, as is you've added nothing to the conversation. Tell me why Skyrim > Morrowind. What about Skyrim do you like so much that Morrowind didn't have? What did Morrowind have that you hated? And, to show that you have an informed opinion rather than a popular but thoughtless one, tell us one or two things about Morrowind that you liked, or think that Skyrim could've learned from.

In the end, it really DOESN'T MATTER. If you think that Skyrim is a great game, like I do, then congratulations, have fun playing. If you prefer the old mechanics then congratulations, go play Oblivion or Morrowind.

Bickering about a point that has always and will always come down to opinion is a waste of time. Time that could be used to play TES games instead.