Simply put, there are more scripted set pieces and dungeon crawling has been stripped down to corridor traversing. It's not there yet, but it's getting more and more like COD with every installment.

Check out my last post, I edited a link into it for you.

excellent thanks

now i dont even need skyrim anymore
now i dont even need skyrim anymore

Most of the time, so long as you pay attention then there's no issues with finding the locations of your quests. The only things against this would say comes down to any town or village without fast travel method (Boat, stilt rider, teleportation by mage) because once you get out of those, small towns and villages without any road markers are difficult to find. Main quest I can understand, many of the tribes of ashlanders are just out in the wilderness. More difficult, the Mage Guild mission to collect dues. I got lost for an hour trying to figure out what road I was supposed to use for one of the locations, pondering the in-game map and journal (because there's a few different directions to arrive, and a few more to leave. Crossroads of about 5 different paths) and I finally gave in and looked online for it.

Didn't read through previous posts so...

YOU MUST PLAY ALL ELDER SCROLL GAMES AND START WITH MORROWIND

Also, apologies if already mentioned but YOU MUST DOWNLOAD AND USE MGSO 3.0 MOD for morrowind

their are numerous other great mods that you can find at nexus morrowind

lol... also.. DO NOT BUY ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE!!!. it sux imo

That's the point though. In morrowind, people gave you directions. You had to follow signs and landmarks. In Oblivion and Skyrim, you follow the glowing arrow. You actually hit on EXACTLY what I meant. You could remove quest markers from the new game, but those organic ways of finding targets doesn't exist because it was built with the crutch of quest marker arrows in mind.

I'm not saying that I'm against that method, when it works well. 95% of the time it does. 5% of the time, it leaves you frustrated. I would argue that the game giving you directions, landmarks, signs and so forth was a good thing. But in some cases, like the very difficult to find caves, or quests for the Oracle, or something otherwise kept very cryptic, at least some semblance of a drawn map or a marker makes it an easier option.It gets hard to stay with a quest when you're stuck for an hour debating which of the 3 roads and the one non-road, none with signs or makers, will take you to a destination that won't show up on the map anyway.

Alright back to the videos now that i watched them... Hope i got all these right... I'll comment on these as i watched them; Although fresh 2 hours of video to go over is still a lot...

Why The Elder Scrolls Isn't Dumbing Down:
Good video sets regarding the system. The two largest points are brought forward regarding invincible NPC's, and using the quest markers. It's explained quite well that in Morrowind and elsewhere, following badly written directions is quite hard to do. It's well known Morrowind IS littered with bad directions all over the place. However having them say 'It's located here' and then letting you have the option to turn on/off the marker for the general location would be better. Although what annoyed me most was a locked wooden plank door that i couldn't lockpick because it was part of some quest i hadn't gotten yet...

The second video is a little enlightening as he gets into hating people who parrot views from other sources, and i realize i do this after watching a video from TB, although i don't claim it's my own view it is good enough to determine if i'd get a title (assuming it's on GoG).

Why you should still play morrowind:
Gets quite into detail of something the later games lack, which is the Depth. The ability to do things your own way, to make your own quests and items. He goes into detail a little on the SkyWind project, and as good and awesome as that sounds like it might be, i've only wanted the major bugs in the main game fixed and not requiring them to add a weird physics engine. Honestly...

Perhaps more is how the game and writing manages to suck you in and keep you occupied and happy and grow while in comparison to the other games...

Main Quest Comparison: Skyrim & Morrowind
There's quite a bit of how fast of a pace Bethesda keeps trying to keep you going in the game, and he says it was bland writing that killed the game for him. Not sure if i can agree as i didn't get that far... I played maybe 30 hours; But it's the same things that annoyed me in Tomb Raider with the cutscenes that were so jarring that made me quit the game.

Back to the video. The buildup doesn't have the same payoff, but more importantly the little things and badly placed dialog just ruins it. At the very end of the game (as his example) where he's almost monologing to you how you could be a hero or a curse to everyone, yet that should be at the beginning rather than the end. The second example being how everyone praises you as the dragon born, but executed so poorly.

Other problems is when you don't know what an NPC is saying because he's being drowned out by sound effects or music... Which is particularly annoying.

---

Overall, all good videos that aren't 'this is the best game ever or else you suck' type of videos, they present arguments and facts in a very forward way that isn't intended to sell you a product, but compare against technologies and teams who wrote/made them. More often than not he/they say Bethesda makes very flawed games that once modded create something that's very enjoyable, while Vanilla is very bland or in some ways broken, while still somehow managing to sell tons of copies of the game.

Actually i'd like to see how SkyWind comes about when it's done, but i'd certainly hope the magic system is opened up similar to Morrowind since that's what really killed it for me in Oblivion...

Nice little summary of the videos.

And if the buggyness is your problem, maybe you will be interested in this project: https://openmw.org/en/

"What is OpenMW/OpenCS?

OpenMW is a new and modern engine based on the one that runs the 2002 open-world RPG Morrowind. The engine (OpenMW) will come with its own editor (OpenCS) which will allow the user to edit or create their own games. Both OpenCS and OpenMW are written from scratch and aren’t made to support any third party programs the original Morrowind engine uses to improve its functionality.
To give you a better idea of what this project is about, here are some of the aims for the future of the OpenMW engine:

Be a full-featured reimplementation of the Morrowind engine.
Run natively on Windows, Linux and MacOS X.
Support all existing content, including Tribunal, Bloodmoon and all user created mods (in case they don’t use external programs).
Allow much greater modability: change game rules, create new spell effects, etc. through scripting.
Fix system design bugs, like save-game “doubling” problem.
Improve the interface and journal system.
Improved graphics by taking advantage of more modern hardware.
Support to improve game mechanics, physics, combat and AI.
(Possibly) Support to implement multiplayer
(Possibly) Support to run on mobile devices.

NOTE: Playing Morrowind with this engine still requires one to own the Morrowind data files."


Tey also have a very nice video jurnal on youtube, with a pretty good narrator (sometimes very funny):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD71523B07EA46A9E

I'm aware of the project and have for a while. Last i heard it wasn't quite complete, although they were getting quite along with it last i heard a year or so ago. But my gaming seems to be slowing as i can't seem to fully get into games easily at the moment.



Although one thing that would really help the game is switching the 3d locations on the world map to doubles instead of floats; Convert the data during loading would work fine; And it would only really affect the saves plugins that make use of them.

OpenMW is shaping up very well. Version 0.34 was released just a few days ago, I'm not very picky with graphics as even Daggerfall looks good to me but if they can somehow increase the draw distance, that would be stellar.

Can't wait till it hits 1.0, I'm going to burn hours on the game once more.

Ditto other fidget... ditto...

The end game is that all the mods should work with it, and that features like MWSE and MGE will be built in, if I read correctly, but that they would at least be made to work with it.

Alright... time for me to wade into this debate. Been reading enough posts on various sites long before this one even was entered, and figure it is time to jump into the fray! :-D

Morrowind:
1.) Was my first TES. I LOVED the lack of direction. I once spent 2 hours real-life looking for a location in the Ashlands because of a combination of an ash storm and minimizing the view-distance setting so my machine at the time could run it. Good luck having an experience like that with Skyrim or Oblivion.

2.) More factions than ever appeared in Oblivion. Skyrim seems to compensate somewhat. But it was not just the quantity of factions - it was the quest-lines weaving between them so that it was possible for joining one faction to lock out others, and for warring factions to come to a head with various ways of concluding that war.

3.) Loved the interface. As others have said it is so console-ized for Oblivion and Skyrim.

4.) Disliked Cliffracers (really, who actually LOVED them)? It was so annoying to go exploring from cell to cell and having to always periodically check the skies. Not like Skyrim where a dragon *could* show up, but more that it was guaranteed that if you went so long without checking you probably had a line of them behind you chasing you.


Oblivion:
1.) As much as people complain about this being "generic high fantasy" and "too bright and colorful", that is one of my favorite aspects to this game! Morrowind was very original and less generic yes, but there were many many times towards the end that I ACHED to have a "normal" fantasy setting, with the closest being Solstheim or the Ascadian Isles region of Vvardenfall (though the giant mushrooms ruined the immersion for me in that regard).

2.) Loved the combat. While Morrowind's was skill-based and I totally get what they were going for, it really does not work well in a 3-D "action"-like setting. Also, if designing FPP-action-based combat using mouse/keyboard combination will always be superior to a controller because m/k allows for more precise aiming.

If I had to make a suggestion for the next TES game, it would be to maybe make a VATS equivalent as I feel that would allow the best of both worlds - the "actiony" segements of Oblivion/Skyrim while still accounting for stat-based hit-detection.

3.) Really DISLIKED the loss of Levitation, though I understand why that happened. Same with the Mark/Recall Spells. Just something cool about flying through the air, and being able to set your own teleport destination.

4.) Really disliked that it was not possible to finish one quest in any of the main quest lines and NOT get the next quest in the sequence. Very immersion-breaking. Skyrim is also guilty of this.


Skyrim:
1.) Loved the dual-wielding ability, the Civil War, the perk system, and the radiant AI quests.
2.) Dragon spawning rate was a bit too much. But I guess that leads me to the next beef:
3) Many times it felt like unnecessary grinding to max out some of the skill trees/get that top perk. Often-times for a given skill tree the ONLY perk I cared about was the one that required 100. I get that it may have been chosen for the 100-point slot for motivational reasons but I really feel some of them could have been better arranged. Probably just a matter of personal taste/preference. (FYI - for the grinding I am talking about the Smithing tree while for the placement the Speech tree).


There are probably others but for now I will leave what I stated above.

Edited for clarification...

After searching a bit last night, I found this thread. The thread is pretty old but I see why it isn't going to be part of 1.0, a hell lot of work :)