purpleblob said:
1. what morrowind mods can you guys recommend to me to make the game more interesting?
2. which one is better? morrowind or oblivion and why?
1) That can only be answered if you specify which parts of the game that bore you. I played with only some cosmetic and bugfix mods besides the official ones.
2) I personally found Morrowind vastly more enjoyable (spent hundreds of hours on it compared to less than twenty for Oblivion). It simply has a lot more to do, and the guild questlines that play a big part for me are much longer (and there are enough guilds in the game to justify a replay). The combat system stinks though, and Oblivion does some things better. IMHO some of the strong and weak points of the games
MW:
+ Lots of quests (this weighs VERY heavily for me)
+ Quests that show a web of interlinked politics
+ Varied world
+ The low population density is believable since one is on a frontier island
+ Replayability through quantity
+ More character customisation options through more skills and equipment (another biggie for me)
+ Smaller dungeons (this is a matter of taste, I like it as I am a surface dweller by nature) with occasional unique loot.
- Unbalanced (like all ES games it is easy to become a jack of all trades, but IMHO this problem isnt that big if you roleplay and specialize your characters). Partially moddable.
- Awful combat (hold down a mouse button and hit your enemy based on luck and your combat stat). Moddable?
- Mostly linear quests with little branching and a world that doesnt recognize most of your achievements. Not moddable.
- Grinding to improve your skills. Moddable.
- Too much walking. Not moddable.
- Static NPCs that just stand there all day long reduces immersion. Moddable?
- Crashes a lot (at least for me...). Not moddable.
Oblivion
+ Looks good and doesnt require all that much hardware
+ Some good quests
+ NPC schedules add to immersion
+ Fast travel to visited locations saves a lot of boring walking time. I wish more games had this.
+ Technical polish. Crashes very rarely. Short loading times.
- Tonnes of interface issues on the PC in particular. Partially moddable.
- A quest compass that railroads the quests and unfortunately is necessary since there arent enough other hints in the game. Integral to the quest design and not really moddable.
- Fewer quests. Moddable but fan made quests cant substitute the quality of professional content.
- too many escort quests that are hopeless due to AI and enemies scaling up much more than the allies... Partially moddable?
- Mostly linear quests with little branching and a world that doesnt recognize most of your achievements. Not moddable.
- Awful combat, but this time action based arcadish such (some like it though). Moddable?
- Unbalanced, level scaling makes the game harder as you level up and some builds (such as thief types) are simply not viable at high levels when the enemies have thousands of hitpoints. While MW is unbalanced in that jacks of all trades are godly, Oblivion makes outright punishes specialists. Partially moddable
- Physics and AI bugs due to a potentially interesting being misused and badly tuned. Walk past a shelf and watch all the items fall to the floor. See guards catching each other in friendly fire and kill each other. Have the characters you escort run in between your sword and the enemy. Not moddable.
- Awful dungeons that are random recombinations of dungeon blocks (the same as ancient Daggerfall) and have random enemies and content. Not moddable.
- Voice acting consisting of five or so actors. Sean Bean does a good job, but the sheer repetition of retarded suburbian voices (I truly hate cats that sound like Whoopi Goldberg) hurts immersion. Patrick Stewarts part is pointless as he only is in the intro. Not moddable?
They share some flaws and strong points. Both follow the TES tradition of a free roaming world with weak NPC interaction and storyline, e g sandboxing. Neither is all that immersive. If your problem is with that genre then neither game is likely to appeal to you.
And is moddable a word?
Morrowind is vast, fairly empty and populated by a huge population of more or less lifeless drones and a few quest giving NPCs. It is the perfect setting for creating your own kind of experience but you have to be creative because the game is more or less one huge sandbox with rather limited incentive to continue the main story (or any side story for that matter).
Oblivion, on the other hand, is packed with a staggering amount of vastly different quests, from tiny fed-ex type quests to huge undertakings, taking you all around the landmass. Some quests are of the fairly straight forward, well known type while others are truly surprising, both in terms of twists but also in their execution. In fact, there is so much to do in Oblivion, that I strapped myself in and went for a ride and I wasn't finished until more than 300+ hours later, and there was still plenty or ruins/caves left to explore.
I also disagree with your analysis. I'm actually pretty sure that Morrowind has a significantly larger number of quests. It certainly has many more guild quests (and guilds). In contrast to you I quit Oblivion because I found that there was too little to do (unless joining every guild I ran out of quests after 15-20 hours, and I was bored due to some interface issues such as the compass breaking the immersion of many quests). I'd grant that some (but far from all) of the Oblivion quests are more interesting than the MW ones though.
Exploration of dungeons is pointless as the dungeons are random recombinations of dungeon blocks. The only variety is in the dungeon type, e g if it is a vampire cave, a monster cave, or a bandit cave.