Exactly. To me Daggerfall is a horrible game and the role playing aspects really started with Morrowind but for many Daggerfall is the ultimate. All subjective. Skyrim is my favorite now because its new ansd fresh but I have loved both Oblivion and Morrowind equally in there times. If my wifr had not gotten me Redguard for one christmas however, I would have never picked up another TES game after Daggerfall which to me is completely different creature than the other three.

The landscape is one of the strenghts of the game ,the world is designed beautifully and have a certain variety; of course it is heavily scaled down, so we have swamps and after some seconds the "icy wasteland" above.

In real life i prefer the "green" of Oblivion too...the problem is that it was too overstocked in that game,like all the rest of the color palette. In Skyrim all is more credible and balanced in this regard,even if too "cold" for someone's tastes.

We are in a nord land,so of course we have mountains,trees,snow and the annoying bears...but we have even tundra,autumnal forests and all the rest -and all well implemented i dare to say.

My only huge regret -apart from the lack of choices/depth - is the missed opportunity to have a real big land to explore in 2011/2012 - due to the well-knows "technical limits" of our hardware (the consoles forces the game developers to work with the "handbrake" on)

In brief -and with all due respect- i sincerely think that the Op statement is totally wrong.

The "step backwards" of the game are others,not surely in the game world/design. And i'm not sure that they're either too many if compared to Oblivion.More to Morrowind - with the due proportions.

With so much to legimately moan about regarding Skyrim, it totally baffles me why anyone would think Oblivion had a better world design than skyrim. Skyrim looks like a real place, not a bunch of copy'n'paste cliched fantasy fare. World design is where Skyrim excels.

I love how you claim that skyrim doesent stay true to the elder scrolls when your only mentioning of a previous TES game is oblivion.

I agree with everything you said EXCEPT for a deeper and more meaningful storyline (if you're speaking specifically of the main quest). Like all TES entries that I've played (starting with Morrowind), the story lines have been bleh. All of the entries have cool books and an awesome underlying foundation, but their main quests have always been a bit corny and unbelievable to me and I always end up just grinding through them to see that spot that I haven't seen before or just complete the game. However, I thought the voice acting of the main characters was much better in Skyrim (God forgive me, though Sean Bean was always one of my favorite actors I was terribly disappointed with his melodramatic shaky voice acting in Oblivion... and I got annoyed with Martin Septim the perpetual puss). It also helped that the character movements were more fluid and organic in Skyrim... it at least felt epic at times. Oblivion's main quest failed to convince me from the get go... I thought Morrowind's was more convincing.

That said, I'm no Oblivion hater. I certainly got my couple hundred hours out of that game before the Oblivion gate tedium began to end my love affair. Overall, I think that Skyrim holds it's replayabilty better than Oblivion. At least for me, I've already doubled the amount of time I've played it... so, at least in that way (and many others), it's as addicting to me as Morrowind was.

Oblivion is my favorite game and it has been for 6 years but I will admit compared to Morrowind its more...casual if you will less complex, I wouldn't call Skyrim a step backwards (I wish the puzzles were harder however) but compared to Morrowind Skyrim and its successors could strive to be a bit more like it

Skyrim contains approximately 11 sq. miles of terrain in the overworld.

Cyrodiil contains about 16 sq. miles of terrain.

16/11 = 1.45 | 145%. Cyrodiil has 45% more explorable surface area than Skyrim.

Small? I'm pretty sure it takes the same amount of time to run from one end of skyrim to the other as it did in cyrodiil. I think the gameworld is easily big enough so as not to be called 'small'. That word is reserved for fable

EDIT: and what I have written here is an objective lesson in reading the WHOLE thread before you post lmao. Regardless, I still wouldn't label skyrim as small, the scale dwarfs almost everything else out there. I think this time they've plumped for quality over quantity. Dangerous move when quantity has become the expectation. At least they have the balls to gamble...

Hahahahahaha, Baldur's gate is not an RTS RPG combo, it's a straight up CRPG where you just happen to control your whole party fully and not just sort of like Mass Effect, and Yes I know Skyrim in an action RPG, so is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which had a great ballance of player skill and stats, if you play good enough you CAN overcome bad stats but it's really hard, that's how I see an action RPG.


Attributes may have STARTED out being just an abstract way of showing how strong or smart you were, but as I said before, they became an integral part of the genre, when someone(me at least) thinks RPG, they think questing and loot but also stat building, you can't just take out a part of the genre and not replace it, and no the perks did not replace it, they replaced SOME of it, but being good at hammers doesn't mean I'm strong, being good at Potion making doesn't make me smart, in the older TES games you could see a number that showed how smart you were, how srong or tough or lucky, now you have Skills but no Attributes, so everyone is exactly the same besides what they know, Attributes made you better or worse at things, in skyrim you start at the same level for everything with only up to go.
And the perks are sadly abstract as well, as if a spend all day swinging a sword only to suddenly know how to throw better fireballs, that doesn't make sense but can happen.


This happens in D&D too you know, some level of metagaming is always going to happen, how does my character know what perk to gain if he has no concept of the leveling system? and I'd say it's pretty logical what guild in Morrowind you can't join at the same time, the 3 great houses outright tell you "you can only join one", the thieves guild and the fighters guild are fighting, and you can't be a preast of two religions at one time.
Planning Very well as I put it does not mean looking at a guide to figur eout what to do, it means not making bad choices, if you want to be a thief made fighter in Morrowind you have to spend your levels carefully, in skyrim I nevel felt that was the case.


"Alright let's bust into this locked chest with this unlock spel-" Yeah there isn't one, so no matter how much I don't want to play that freaking minigame I have NO CHOICE, and don't say "well just don't pick locks!", And miss out on loot that could be really helpful? I started shooting things with a bow because my mages was always out of Mana when fighting dragons so I needed another way to shoot them down, I NEEDED smithing to survive because bandits don't play by the rules it seems, one hitting my weak level 40(this is sarcasm) when he has full health. These are things I really feel are something that isn't my fault, but issues in the game itself.


Now let me end this by saying all of this is MY opinion, nothing more, this is how I feel about RPGs, and I do love skyrim to death, but it's less of an rpg.

Do you have ANY idea of how many versions of these and other numbers I have seen. over the years?

From now on all calculations of area are to come along with peer-reviewed scholarly articles, or qualify as BS.

Did you skip the part where I said that skills are what your character knows? 1handed/2handed are skill. They don't describe your character physically.

As for the second part of your response, that is so predictably you. And I'll have to give my same answer. Pretending that the holes don't exist doesn't make it so. That you feel the need to pretend in the first place is indicative that there is, in fact, a problem. The use of your imagination does not, and cannot, excuse poor design.

What? It's a known fact that Cyrodiil as it appeared in Oblivion was 16 approximately sq. miles in size. You can count them yourself if you'd like.

Similarly, Skyrim has been found to be only about 11 sq. miles in size. Again, you can count that yourself if you'd like.

The fact is that Cyrodiil is about 50% bigger than Skyrim. I shouldn't even have to do any math to prove that to you. Look at any map of Tamriel and you'll see that Cyrodiil is the largest, most prominent province on the continent by a ratio of 3:2.

So then it makes perfect sense for skyrim to be the size it is in comparison to cyrodiil...

What UI?

Oh, you means the compass...

That's a HUD, not A User Interface, the menus are the UI, and they are awful.

I'm not a fan of so many impossible mountains that we either have to spam jump or waste time circling around to get to our destination but i think skyrim is beautiful and a step forward in many aspects...yea we lost alot that we loved but we've gained so much more. We lost many spells which svcks but the destruction effects look so much better then those small colored balls or thin shock strings.

At least from a visual standpoint, skyrim is a huge improvement...just beards alone made me happy with the new visuals

Glad I'm not alone on not liking the awful user interface at least, should maybe have stated in my original post that I'm playing on PS3 and therefore have no access to mods.

I'm really shocked that this thread made it to five pages...

OBs MQ was better than Skyrim. Fight Dragpn, learn shout, fight dragon learn shout, talk to greybeards, learn shout, talk to blades learn shout....boring. In OB you close gates to OBLIVION, which are much more powerful than a dragon. You recover a Great Sigil Stone, Great Welklynd Stone, Go to Camoran's Paradise, and Fight a Horde or Daedra IN THE IMPERIAL CITY. Skyrim has NOTHING compared to OB's Main Quest

If we're talking about quests, Oblivion's are so much better than Skyrim's, that its really isn't close.

I still prefer the design & landscape of Oblivion over Skyrim, I agree with the OP on that point but i don't think anyone can reasonably call it a step back, I also prefered the Ayleid ruins of Oblivion over the Dwemer ruins of Skyrim but that's just personal preference.
As far as the often touted & band waggoned phrase " copy & pasted" i see almost as much of it in Skyrim as i do Oblivion, Although on a lesser scale & the exceptions are the obviously hand crafted dungeons/ruins that are unique but also numerous.

Skyrim is a barren landscape & a quality one at that, I just don't like barren landscapes & prefer my scenery a bit more oblivion style, Once again it's personal preference & a design preference over anything else.

Can't we just like both games & live in peace?

The differences of opinion on these games is interesting. I enjoyed Morrowwind (and Daggerfall), but Oblivion took the genre to a new level for me. I'd put Skyrim on par with Oblivion, as it's not really better overall but does introduce some great ideas while leaving behind great ideas from the previous games. Oh, well. I'm having fun.

Nah, Skyrim is just a step backwards in the areas that matter to you and others and still a major step forward for the series as a whole. Even though the things it stepped backwards on were more important to me than the rest of the features.

This whole thread is based on individual reflections on the game. Opinions.

There is no right or wrong (at least none that we'll ever agree on...), so I don't see why we keep trying to convert the masses.