I hesitate to suggest either.

Morrowind has a more flexible magic system (that is easy to cheat), 2 expansions, you can easily get a hundred or three hundred hours playing it.

Also includes failure rates of casting, failure to hit even though you sliced through it, no voice acting (Some idles are voice acted) and really bad directions where you probably need a walkthrough, so much they sold a book with the answers to every quest.

As for Oblivion, Armor/world looks nice, you can cast all spells without failure (skill level determines the mana cost), full voice acting, you can't accidentally lose key items anymore. Also you can fast travel AND always have a pointer towards your next goal in your quest.

Downside, the magic system is gimped, the faces look terrible, some things are illogical (came across a weak wooden door but couldn't pick it because it was a quest area). Also difficulty spikes in Leveled lists is worse than in Morrowind.

*sigh* It's hard to say. There's enough annoyances in both games.

But don't worry. It just works.

With no cue to indicate whether the player missed because of a failed collision check or because of a failed die roll.

There's a Fighting Fantasy game on the Nintendo DS that handled this better; if your attack roll would indicate a miss, the attack will appear to collide, but the enemy will show a block animation.

Except that you're not likely to notice the difference except at high levels of skill.

The difference in mana cost between 5 skill and 25 skill is not that noticeable, whereas the difference between 99 and 100 is.

(This applies to both Daggerfall and Oblivion.)

Until you talk to somebody offering a service, but then get refused because you're not a member of the guild.

Then you become a member of the guild, talk to the person again, and are refused service because your rank isn't high enough. (And you're not told this until *after* you click on the service that's claimed to be offered.)

At least Morrowind doesn't require you to wait around for NPCs to be in the correct position before you can go shopping, unlike Oblivion, which does. (Or Daggerfall, where stores are only open at certain times; good luck getting your banking done if you take severe damage in sunlight.)

Oblivion's physics aren't the best, and can sometimes cause enemy item drops to end up in a spot that's hard or impossible to reach. (The ground in TES games (except Arena) isn't always as solid as it should be; I've definitely fallen through the ground in all 3 games, and I hear that it can still happen in Skyrim and modern Fallout.)

The badly done enemy scaling and the bare action game combat system makes a potential amazing Open world RPG game something inferior to Morrowind. Some of the features to make the console and PC versions basically the same made the PC version suffer a lot.

Also It was one of the fformer AAA games experimenting with the new hardware Glow and Filters/shaders and they were a bit overworked. The performance wasn't the best originally. And some of the original dlc`s were a joke/meme themselves.

And It is a shame because the game was potentially amazing and immersive.

A lot of the faults were fixed in the superior Skyrim.

Except that Skyrim removed spellmaking, which is the one feature that got me interested in the series in the first place.

1. Get Oblivion.
2. Ignore main game.
3. Install Nehrim.
4. Have fun!

Do what I did. Buy either one, and never actually play it; instead opting to give Daggerfall Unity a try. That way you get to play in a world vastly larger than any of those, that has been carefully crafted by fans as to fix most of the issues with the original, instead of having to deal with Todd Howard's lies.

If you do insist on either Morrowind or Oblivion, remember the source ports. Don't run the originals.

As much as a I despise Oblivion's leveling system / level scaling, and l as much as I love Morrowind's world, after Oblivion I just can't get past Morrowind's frozen-in-place NPCs. Oblivion's world feels far more alive for me by contrast, I think because of this.

Shame Skyrim brought in a raft of its own issues though, from awful UI to dragons which could be taken down real easy. It’s all much the same across the series, they all have a few good things and some bad things.

Oh, special addon:
Try arktwend for Morrowind, nehrim for oblivion, and enderal for Skyrim. Arguably an improvement on each one.
https://sureai.net/games/

Morrowind characters would wander randomly around, sometimes you are expected to find NPC at a specific place, only to find them walking in the swamp nearby.

Oblivion and likely Skyrim, characters seem to be given an daily routine they would follow. Blacksmith/storefronts being the easiest from 'getting up, eat, go to work, go home, eat, go to bed'. In Oblivion you got a quest from someone who was insistent he was being followed, following said culprits you saw them farming all day and doing normal tasks, so you more or less got to see it wasn't static.

How many scripts are there? Are there 1 for each day? Is it random number they choose from? Is it every 7th day they all go to church to go pray to the local deity? I'm not sure, but i'm not going to install the editor(s) just to figure that out. But i do agree, it is far more lively than Morrowind.

But under the hood, the same engine is in use from Morrowind to Skyrim, though it has been modified over the years, seeing as a lot of the file structure has carried over to Fallout 3, Oblivion and skyrim. However the changes are ultimately incompatible so just importing everything to do Morrow-skyrim isn't a simple process.

Though i wonder if that project is going to be done soon, it would be interesting to see if the fan work would be worth playing and if they incorporated more liveliness. Imagine adventurers going to train, and then going in a local area known to spawn undead daily? Then going to the bar to eat drink and hang out before going back to the adventurer's guild to rest? If you clear it out beforehand maybe they will complain that their wages were low for some reason because the undead number was unnaturally low that day...

Anyways, I'm sure we'll see something. Though they've been working on a morrowind-updated game since Oblivion's engine came out, though i don't recall seeing a release.

What's this about a source port of Oblivion?

The drawback of source ports is that they're not always faithful to the originals, particularly for things the source port developers consider to be bugs. For example, comparing Morrowind to OpenMW:
* In Morrowind, blindness increases your accuracy, but in OpenMW it decreases it instead. (This is likely a bug, but sometimes I feel these sorts of bugs can give the game an interesting character; see SaGa 1 for a game filled with these sorts of bugs.)
* In Morrowind, if your Acrobatics is high enough (but still within reasonable range), you can climb mountains by repeatedly jumping; OpenMW doesn't let you do this. (This is one OpenMW change that I strongly disagree with; I also disliked how Oblivion wouldn't let you climb mountains without a horse.)

(Note: Reasonable range does not include values over 1,000 that are accessible via a certain consumable, at which point you'd just jump over the mountain entirely.)

I think this behavior is actually the result of a bug. I'm pretty sure this bug can also result in NPCs going inside walls or even falling out of bounds.

(If you want to know what out of bounds is like, watch speedruns of these games (not Arena) or play Daggerfall.)

Morrowind hasn't aged well at all. Everything feels stiff and lifeless, the combat sucks and it's pretty horrible to look at. Definitely go for Oblivion. It's not perfect but it's a lot more enjoyable in many ways.

Fanboys will cry for Morrowind but they're blinded by nostalgia.

Maybe. But even characters that shouldn't be moving sometimes move, once i had the teleporter who had moved to another portion of the room far away from the spot. Naturally using the console to reset their positions did fix this...

Heh, reminds me, i got my agility like at 400-800 (Via soultrap/statboost bug), then i jumped... and hovered... and if i went left/right i could phase through walls too. That was weird. I then found out some stats you don't want too high.

MMmmmm maybe. If you aren't actually looking at the characters not moving and instead moving yourself to get to do quests, you will notice and realize the sheer quantity of things to do, places to explore, monsters to fight, and other things that the stiffness isn't really noticed or remembered.

But replaying the game a 3rd or 4th time like myself, trying to do 8 quests in the same area at the same time, and trying to optimize stats (2 +5 and +1 luck) it quickly became a chore of so 'how much do i improve this skill before i can rest' problems, along with the quests didn't have an easy way to check on status or next what to do next. (Expansions did end up separating and compiling them together, but when you have 100 days of logs you really can't go through them)

I then when grinding quickly found issues with low level fighting, standing and punching a rat for 45+ minutes to level up hand-to-hand, not being able to hit a ghost with 'non magical item' so i enchant it with anything 'restore health on me, or shoot light, or adds 1 burden for 1 second, etc' and suddenly it works. Which was really stupid, to which point you just start casting spells or enchanting things to shoot spells and rotate a myriad of items you stock before retiring low level stuff.

Mapping the world, having the key dialog piece to get information, getting beaten down and can't get up in some fights and end up dying because of it, the auto map that only logs the topmost section it can generate and thus multi-level dungeon mapping is useless, etc. Paying to have anything enchanted costs too damn much so you best just use a bunch of petty soulgems to make items until you're at least 50 in it and start making useful stuff for yourself. The overwhelming number of Cliff racers that chase you everywhere and unless you either have good attack or good AOE spells to kill them in a group you're probably dead. Stolen goods are permanently tagged and you can't ever get rid of the tag (So best never to steal from a shopkeeper unless it's an item you never intend to sell to them again).

There was some nice things though. I remember i could summon Golden Saints for a minute, then with a 400+ strength just punch them down and kill them. If you do it right, you can kill them, loot their bodies before they hit the floor, plus you can capture the souls. (If you don't punch them, you can't open their inventory before they hit the floor for some reason).

Perhaps one of the bigger annoyances is there's no real good way to level up lockpicking, except to get the spell 'lock' and then lock a bunch of stuff at 5 or less difficulty and then use cheap lockpicks to go over and over to unlock them. (And like standing there punching a rat for 45 minutes, gets boring as hell...).

I suppose the boring parts of trying to level stuff up really got to me more than anything.

This can be explained by how collision works.

Every so often (once every frame is typical, but some games may do it more often than than, or extrapolate and check some in-between points like Super Mario 64 does), the game checks to see if your position would be inside a solid object. If it would be, the game has to stop your movement to prevent you from going inside the object. This, under typical circumstances, would prevent the player from going out of bounds.

When you're going *really* fast, however, you can end up in a situation where you're on one side of the wall on one frame, and clearly on the other the next frame. Because there's no frame that you were *inside* the wall, the game never realizes that you were trying to go through a solid object and therefore doesn't stop you. As a result, you end up going through the wall and (probably) end up out of bounds.

(Incidentally, Super Mario 64 has been studied eventually, and pannenkoek has made many videos about it, mostly (I believe) on his UncommentedPannen channel (which still typically has text commentary in the video, so the videos still tell you what's goind on).)

Of course, enchanting items, once you find a reaonable way to do so, ends up replacing spellcasting.

Thing is:
* Your spells can fail, but item cast spells always succeed.
* Raising your skills doesn't lower spell costs, but it *does* lower item charge costs.
* Your spell points don't regenerate, but item charges do.

Oblivion fixed these issues, but unfortunately got rid of the ability to make custom "cast on use" items at all. If they hadn't got rid of them, the use of items to cast spells would have felt more natural, with items being a good option when your spell points need to regenerate, but not something that would replace spellcasting entirely (except maybe for Atronach birthsign characters), but alas, they didn't do that. (Just give me the ability to enchant staves, and allow "on self" and "on touch" effects (along with "on target") on staves, and I'd be happy with the handling. And, maybe have staff use improve some skill.)

Or you trap monsters inside soul gems and sell the gems for far more money than they should be worth for the time it takes.

Or, instead of raising Enchanting, raise your Intelligence and/or Luck to high values with potions or spells until the chance of self-enchanting gets high enough. (Raising these stats with potions is easy if you can use some magic to jump-start the process, as the power of potions you make depends on these stats, and as a result you can get these stats to increase exponentially the longer you spend doing this. Note that having extremely high Luck will trivialize most things, including combat.)

Or you can use a trainer.

Of course, some master trainers may be hard to reach, hostile, or non-existent. (But note that you can drain your skill to allow it to be trained for cheap, or you can fortify the NPC's skill to allow them to train you for the normal price, but unfortunately Fortify Skill is only available in expansion areas.)

Some did move around yes, but most npcs in towns were fixed in place for all eternity from what I can remember, if not limited to a very small area. It's weird that it bugs me so much since I don't take any issue with it in a game like Baldur's Gate or Fallout 2.

In Oblivion it varied between the same routine each day, and different routines depending on the day of the week. I remember that where to find certain characters were dependent on not only the time of day but also day of the week.

But yes, if a fan project could make Morrowind more lively in this sense I would be incredibly interested. Though it's sadly a question of where to find the time to play these huge games these days :(