I just recently started Morrowind again after a long time. I still love it, and I love Oblivion. I've never gotten the earlier games so I don't know what they're like. Skyrim, however, I found rather disappointing. Perhaps someday I'll give it another try.

Well we could discuss it all for hours but i make it quick or ? RPG codex is the perfect site for RPG's and guess what they as well say about oblivion ? For a RPG veteran it is just too simplistic and not motivating gameplay. I know it is short and not a full review...

.... .... RPG codex thread about Skyrim mods.... consisting for a large part about stuff fitting into any South Park episode, but not any other RPG.
If the codex is your beacon for anything RPG, I'd strongly suggest to stay there.

this so much

though Bethesda does seem to going through a "Steam is all" phase at the moment (given that they are re-releasing morrowind steamworked) so I they don't seem to want to do much to come here

I agree entirely with your points, but that's not actually exactly true: enemies do level with you, but have fairly close upper and lower bounds for their levels, so you can often find encounters which are too tough (or easy) for you now, but will be about right later (or would have been earlier). It does still have issues, but less so than Oblivion.

Yeah, it wasn't bad. I mean it was linear, and in terms of predetermined plot and suchlike it suffered from the same issues as the Cyrodiil main quest, but the story wasn't bad, and there were several memorable characters.

It also provides an...interesting way of finishing the final battle of the Cyrodiil main quest, and one which is quite in character for Sheogorath.

I guess that's fair, and certainly an improvement. But I miss the gameplay days when one of the things you would do in finding, say, a Daedric ruin would be to carefully scout it out and test the waters to see if it was a place you could handle at this point in your character; and I miss knowing that once I'd killed everything camping there that I could stagger out of the dungeons later and not find a respawned enemy party matching me at my current level, ready to take me out in my weakened post-dungeon state.

Not that that ever happened to me in Oblivion right when I first played it, or anything.

I know exactly what you mean: sneaking past a golden saint in my first daedric ruin in Morrowind when I was far too weak to beat it, and running off with the loot (some glass armour I used for the rest of the game) was one of my best memories of the game, and that's saying something. I did mean to mention, though, that most (all?) of the caves in Skyrim which have respawning enemies can still be "cleared" by doing a certain objective (typically beating the boss at the end). While they will still respawn (more enemies find the area), it will then be rarer and the enemies will tend to be weaker.

Hah, well that cracked me up. I just can't even begin to explain all that's wrong with that sentence, mr. RPG veteran :D
Skyrim is actually extremely good. I still didn't enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed Morrowind, but Steam says I have plunged over 130 hours into the damn thing so it has to do something right (While I have modded it to make it more hardcore, the basis of the gameplay remains the same.)

While Oblivion definitely has the best questlines of the three modern TES games (the Ten Little Niggers-esque one for assassins was awesome, as was the one with painting. And the one where you got sent to snatch the ring from under water. Oblivion really had great quest design, I was hoping for more of that in Skyrim. Oh well.), Skyrim wins in exploration hands-down. Seriously, all the absolutely amazing, stunning and wonderful stuff you can find in that game is absolutely extraordinary, especially with all the DLC (expansions, whatever you want to call them). Dwemer fortresses make a comback, sadly not looking quite as alien as in Morrowind, making up for that in other aspects tho. Dragonborn expansion lets you take a look around Soltsheim, with the classical Morrowind architecture surrounding you. You... Oh I won't spoil, the world design is quite simply amazing - I'm just sad cities are not quite as well-executed as those in Oblivion

Did you finish it?

I've got over 300 hours into that (according to Steam) and that's likely underrated by quite a bit because when I first started I was playing offline doing an experiment to see if Steam would me reconnect to the internet every so often. Over 300 hours and not even CLOSE to being through, with what looks to me like much of the gameworld completely unexplored. (For example I've never been to Winterhold)

Sadly, after that many hours, I've now grown tired of it and likely won't finish, which leaves a bad taste despite the fact I really did enjoy the game. (Obviously, or no way would I have over 300 hours into it).

The game world was so.... awesome. Talk about immersion, it was just so.... alive.

To be frank: I dare state most of us would rather see Skyrim liberated from Steam.

As to Oblivion: this bland, misbegotten piece helped me personally to be principled, and not to ever lust too strongly about Skyrim.

Morrowind..?

There has never been in my view a better single player open world RPG than this - I still love it today. Yet, if I had to choose between playing Morrowind and going on Steam - I am most convinced that the Lore of this game would point to not playing it.

To an extent I am wondering if the piss-poor job in the writing department of Oblivion became the self-serving argument about Skyrim going into Steam.

Its kinda sad people always talks about the 3 games yet never talks about Daggerfall.

Ok, so what's your definition of a "gaming veteran" ? Would you mind sharing your brilliant ideas and definitions with us, sir? I enjoyed Oblivion despite it's flaws, so i guess i'm not a "gaming veteran", then.
RPGCodex? Hahaha i knew from the elitist tone of your posts that you came from there. Why should anyone care about what RPGCodex says about Oblivion? I prefer playing the thing and having my own opinion, you know. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

My - possibly fair - concern would be about the game-play interface as Daggerfall is fairly old...

Sad maybe not - what say you?

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion was my introduction to The Elder Scrolls series, I enjoyed it for a while but I quickly got bored with it. It has some great quests, and each city feels fairly unique and it's decent in it's overall art style, but most of the quests were too easy for me. By that I mean, I was champion of the arena at around level 7, and I easily defeated a villain who was supposedly powerful enough to make all of Nirn cower before him...when I was around level 9. I think I eventually spent around thirty hours total in Oblivion before I quit playing it.

Oblivion. That certainly brings back memory. Oblivion is basically my entry point of western RPG, and kind of reinforce my love to open world RPG, as my very first RPG was also a open world RPG from China. I don't have problem with level-scaling since I'd also played some very linear RPGs, whose enemies always stay basically similar level as the players. I think the small details in the games that I discover through exploring win my heart. I remember on a mountain I found some body parts in a monster's stomach, and nearby there was a girl's dead body and a letter saying something like her bf/husband left to find something and never returned (or something similar). Another occasion I found a letter a guy wrote saying he would confess his love to a girl near a lake while carrying flower, and a lake nearby had a dead body with flower floating with monster nearby. Yet another occasion there was a dead troll under a bridge carrying a letter by the troll saying he's not a good troll. These little easter eggs do not really affect gameplay that much, but add a lot of fun to exploration. Also you can do a lot of silly thing in the game, such as enchanting a hood with light effect and reverse-pickpocket it to someone's inventory, then he/she will become a funny looking walking lantern.

Mods are great, but I don't think you have to had mod to enjoy the game. I did enjoy decorating my house with the help of mod. I also enjoy having unicorn as my horse with help of mod and console and horse saddle was also very convenient. However, I don't remember using any major content mod or gameplay mod during my longest and most enjoyable game. Later I did try something like FCOM which is great, but I could never got far into it as it made the game quite unstable. The only real annoyance is the character leveling system. The system is set up in a way that unless you do very boring planning and grinding to level up, you will waste a whole lot of skill points. The change of leveling system in Skyrim is very nice.