100% disagreed.

Don't get me wrong. I loved all of the Elder Scrolls games, but Skyrim is the best one yet IMHO. Quests, variety of terrain, all of the dungeons, caves, crypts, etc., are all unique and don't give me the feeling that I've explored them all before.

Skyrim is the best Elder Scrolls yet.

unless he spent $3000 on a good gaming laptop chances are it wont be able to handle mods and play high res without lagging like crazy and crashing...i want mods but im content with xbox too because for $300 i can just put the game in and play without much problem or having to use the steam scam

he has a semi-good quality laptop and he put in skyrim and it worked perfectly

Umm... the same could be said for Morrowind and Skyrim. (Except morrowind didn't have physical grass given it was made in 2002) All the landscapes included grass and trees to some extent. In Skyrim, the closes you can get to a treeless landscape is around Whiterun, but there are still trees here and there.

You do realize your picture ofr oblivion is of guard armor, right?

Here is Imperial armor.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5251217254_e03d7df9b1.jpg

Much more roman looking, wouldn't you say? Not entirely roman looking like Skyrim, but it still has the signature skirt, and the finned helm.

I thought RP meant "Role Play", as in, using your imagination to pretend you are something/someone. RPing is purely imagination that you bring to reality. It is all pretend, not real.

Do you really need a number to tell you how strong your character is for role playing reasons? Or one to tell you how smart they are? Attributes are pure meta gaming information, since pen and paper games cant show action, you need values to base your chance of success on with a given task. That is irrelevant with an action based game.

Roleplaying and the gaming genre of Role Playing Game(RPG) are not the same thing, yes you RP in an RPG, but a Role Playing GAME needs stats to tell me why I can carry 5000 restore health potions, 30 swords and a spare set of plate armor. it is part of the GENRE, you can't take it out and replace it with NOTHING, skyrim did not replace the attributes right, they only partly did.

It isn't irrelevant, so many action based games have had stats that effect it, Vampire TM: Bloodlines, System shock, Deus Ex, and I could go on, stats are INTERGRAL to RPGs, just like magic is to high fanatsy, you can't just rip it out.

Even D&D, which started everything RPG, gave you numbers and a carry limit measured in ... numbers. Like it or not, it's all part of the RPG experience.

Yeah you do. Cause otherwise it's an adventure game where you're playing as yourself and not as another character.

Exactly. Look at the grandfather of every RPG, D&D. You take stats out those games, even the PC versions, and it destroys the game. It's no longer an RPG at that point.

A cRPG needs stats to represent your character. Honestly, if you like to "imagine" game mechanics that are no longer there you might as well just be LARPing. In a role-playing video game, stats and other role-playing elements are completely necessary. Without them, you might as well be playing make believe with sock puppets.

Ha ha I knew this thread would eventually go OT. That topic heading is too misleading.

did you seriously just ignore all my other points in favor of the Nu-Cyrod complaints (which have been proven to be valid)?

Oblivion is retcon-central, and where Elder Scrolls lore goes to die. get over it.

What lore dies? The OB gates are the best damn thing i have ever witnessed in a TES game and i miss them greatly

I'm not sure if serious or joking.

If joking: lmao, good one.

If serious: are you high? Mehrunes Dagon's plane of Oblivion was one of the biggest letdowns of the generation. it was so generic I literally almost stopped playing out of depression. and then there's the matter of Nu-Cyrod, where Bethesda I guess just said "to hell with being original, let's just copy LOTR" and went their own way in attempt to make a quick buck. unfortunately they failed by introducing one of the worst level-scaling systems to ever be in a video game.

They just need to focus more on story and content instead of tech and cool systems for TES 6. They do that and I'm a happy camper.

I keep reading this, but I went through every single Oblivion dungeon (I got a bit OCD about it) and they were all unique. Yes, there were 4 main texture sets - mine, cave, fort and elven ruin - but every single one was individually designed and dressed. Some were linear, some were labyrinthine, some were multiple levels, some had trapdoors, some were flooded, some had internal Goblin structures... and so on. Oblivion's dungeons get way too much flak. Now, the Oblivion gates were repetitive. I think there were only seven that repeated randomly.

Go back and read what Cyrodil is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a rain forest. But, Bethesda turned it into a generic landscape. They just grabbed the lore and threw it out the window because they wanted to game to be more Lord of the Rings than Elder Scrolls.

They certainly were not cut and past in Oblivion, that is a myth.

Some graphical items were reused but no more so than Skyrim or Morrowind.

The landscapes were also more diverse in Oblivion than in Skyrim. That said, I don't consider Skyrim to be a step back. It has fantastic graphics for dungeons and landscapes, though naturally a bit more drab and less diverse than Oblivion.

A role playing game is meant to help a person roleplay. Attributes and stats are useful in such a game. If all you are going to do is use your imagination to pretend, you might as well lay down, close your eyes, and roleplay. No game of any sort needed.

I think everyone is on concencus about this. Oblivion has truly very little to offer compared to either Morrowind or Skyrim. The question is whether Skyrim has surpassed Morrowind. and it's not just nostalgia, I still have morrowind installed, it has its unique beauty that is incomparable.

Oblivion didn't even have spears or werewolvves. I think literally the only think we lost was attributes. Though that is a big one. (no one else seems to care however)

Besides some derps like firstperson on horseback, Skyrim didn't remove anything too essential from Oblivion. You can't complain about removing skills when the skills and RPG elements of TES IV were already such a joke.

Role playing is the act of taking on the role of another and stepping into their story. But it's also an active thing, rather than passive. It's not the same thing as putting yourself in the shoes of a the main character of a book you're reading. Now, you've already demonstrated a penchant for throwing out and ignoring anything that happens in the game that doesn't fit what you want, then making up something else to replace it with. Just like you example of how you don't actually have to join the College over in the storytelling thread. You just pretended it didn't actually happen. With an approach or attitude like that, you might as well be reading or writing a story, rather than actually role playing.

Or better yet, you might as well be role playing a chat room. Which I have done before. You'd love it. No rules. No structure. You get to be who you want to be and do what you want to do. The place I frequented back in the day had humans, elves, dwarves, vampires, werewolves, dragons, immortals, super saiyins, and so much more. I was in there one night when two Lauranas (from Dragonlance) walked in, then proceeded to have an IC argument over which one was the real one. Then there was the person that claimed his character could lift 100+ tons, which, of course, meant that he could rip my character apart into tiny pieces with his bare hands. It was loads of fun. Then the site closed down and I had to go looking for someplace else.

I eventually found that new place. This one was different. It combined the chat room based role playing style with a system of skills and attributes. All characters had to be approved to ensure they met certain guidelines and fit within the lore. Members of the site also volunteered as story hosts or game masters to make rulings on activities involving the attributes and skills. Despite the rules and structure, this site made for a far richer role play experience. Why? Because those rules and structures acted as a framework upon which we could build our characters. I couldn't very claim that my character was a master swordswoman when her skill was just 20. Nor could I claim she could lift 100+ tons when her strength was only 10. So the character had to start out as a poor young woman with little more than a rust sword to her name that she was still learning to use, out to make her fortune. By the time I left that site, through social interactions and increases in attributes and skills, she was a wealth woman, leader of a mercenary company and among the most skill and powerful fighters of the site. Her evolution had been facilitated by the increase in her stats and attributes. She was more skill, stronger and faster than when she first showed up. In fact, her sword skill was the highest on the site. However, she was not the strongest or the most agile, so others could still have the edge over her in a fight.

Skyrim is very similar, though without the social interaction. Yes, the game is all about telling your own story, but not within a vacuum. The story is intended to be told within the context of the game world, using the game's mechanics to facilitate the building and evolving of that character. Like my character on that second site, a new character in Skyrim cannot be a master swordswoman when her skill is only 15. As her skill increases, and the story progresses, she evolves as a character. The framework Skyrim uses for building up your character has some gaping holes in it. Yes, you can use your imagination to gloss over them and pretend they don't exist, but that doesn't mean the holes go away. You can deride numbers and dice rolls all you want, but when you get right down to it, that's all Skyrim is. Just because it has a fancy graphical interface and it responds to pressing buttons doesn't change that.

Christ not this again. Look attributes may not have been as important as in Fallout but you still can't imagine everything away. Keep imagining you can run fast when all the high elfs overtake you with their 1.1 scale.

It breaks the system. Say you're level 100 in one handed weapons and level 1 in two handed- you hit like George Foreman with One hand, then when you use both hands you're a baby? (for that matter weapons type isn't really over how many hands you hold it with GRRRR).

Something like intelligence is harder to show in combat, but you simply cannot argue that attributes were unneccessary, it's almost objective. The only arguement I will accept is it's better because it's simpler.

If you think Oblivion's environments are better than Skyrim's, you're just plain crazy.

I often soil myself while playing the piano.