The Elder Scrolls - Ranking Arena to Skyrim

I played Arena when it first came out and I thought it was a pretty neat game. Minus points were the extra NPCs that showed little or no value and the area was LARGE.
I loved Daggerfall, even though it was probably the buggiest game I ever played. It was constantly locking up on me. I would have to restart my computer and I would go right back into Daggerfall, probably locked up on me 4 times a game session; but I kept going back to it. If I could play it on Windows 7, I probably would; bugs an all.
I own Obvilion and Skyrim; but I can't quit playing Morrowing to start them. With all of the mods available for Morrowing, how can you ever play through it? You all know there are some really huge game changing mods for Morrowind. After all these years though, I can't stop playing Morrowind.
 
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I've never heard of this site, so I didn't see a reason to read Joe Blow's article. I'm not going to bump his "hits", which I believe is the goal of such posts. As far as I'm concerned, I'd go Skyrim, Oblivion, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Arena.
 
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Yes, it's especially amusing to have Morrowind rank that high - considering it has the worst combat system of any TES game.

Exact opposite opinion here. Oblivion is the worst. Morrowind the best.

That said, I'm only comparing Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. I can't remember Daggerfall's combat at all. Skyrim kicks butt with spells, but the melee combat still sucks.

And yes, I enjoy punching mud crabs. It calms me down ;)

Even with Skyrim being a kickass game I would have to put both Skyrim and Morrowind as the best. They're both great in their own ways.
 
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Morrowind is literally one-click from start to finish. Arena was, IIRC, more or less like Ultima Underworld. Daggerfall had combat moves based on mouse movement, and Oblivion is somewhere between Morrowind and Skyrim for combat.
 
Even with Skyrim being a kickass game I would have to put both Skyrim and Morrowind as the best. They're both great in their own ways.

I feel the same way, which is suprising. I didn't really expect that much out of Skyrim, especially with some of the changes they made and the ridiculous UI, but it holds together really well.

DArtagnan said:
Daggerfall had combat moves based on mouse movement

Morrowind had a movement based combat scheme. Everyone seems to forget that, since we all turned it off. :p
 
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Morrowind had a movement based combat scheme. Everyone seems to forget that, since we all turned it off. :p

I don't forget that, but it was a redundant choice - as it was always the same move with the same weapon that did the most damage.

Frankly, it boggles the mind that even Bethesda could come up with such a horrible combat system.
 
I don't forget that, but it was a redundant choice - as it was always the same move with the same weapon that did the most damage.

Exactly why everyone turned it off. Even so, I found Oblivion's melee combat far more annoying, to the point that I never played a fightery type for any length of time. Different strokes for different folks, etc.
 
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Morrowind is literally one-click from start to finish.

So is Diablo 1 & 2 and yet I hear some people enjoyed that game. Not too many people, but a few. ;)

I know, it's not really a fair comparison since Diablo had different skills that could be used for different kinds of opponents, but since my characters in Morrowind are always mix of mage and melee it felt similar. No "one-clicking" from start to finish for me. It was click….hmmm what combination of spells to use on this guy and then click click click, spell, clickity click click, spell again :)

Also I could miss. The thing I hate about Oblivion and Skyrim is that I always hit. I prefer a dice to represent my skill in this kind of game.

Exactly why everyone turned it off. Even so, I found Oblivion's melee combat far more annoying, to the point that I never played a fightery type for any length of time. Different strokes for different folks, etc.

It might be the fact that you always hit. That's the problem I had with it.
 
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Exactly why everyone turned it off. Even so, I found Oblivion's melee combat far more annoying, to the point that I never played a fightery type for any length of time. Different strokes for different folks, etc.

Indeed.

Archery in Oblivion is about infinitely better than it is in Morrowind, and I tend to play archers - so.... ;)
 
So is Diablo 1 & 2 and yet I hear some people enjoyed that game. Not too many people, but a few. ;)

I know, it's not really a fair comparison since Diablo had different skills that could be used for different kinds of opponents, but since my characters in Morrowind are always mix of mage and melee it felt similar. No "one-clicking" from start to finish for me. It was click….hmmm what combination of spells to use on this guy and then click click click, spell, clickity click click, spell again :)

The thing I hate about Oblivion and Skyrim is that I always hit. I prefer a dice to represent my skill in this kind of game.

I appreciate that, but you're using your character preference as a pro-Morrowind combat argument - which isn't logically sound.

However, your skill argument has merit. I understand that some people prefer character skill to be the deciding factor.

Personally, I prefer the immersion of my own skill mattering more than the number on my sheet. Ideally, both should matter a hell of a lot - but I find it hard to immerse myself in a world, if it's my character doing the stuff and not myself.

It's different for other games, though.

For third person games, it's less vital.

Skyrim found an excellent balance, because your personal skill is essential for a melee/archer - and the perks add a lot of much needed flavor to keep you interested in character progression.
 
Indeed.

Archery in Oblivion is about infinitely better than it is in Morrowind, and I tend to play archers - so…. ;)

Indeed indeed! Unless I was going pure blasty mage I almost always ended up relying heavily on archery in Oblivion. I just started an Argonian archer in Skyrim, so I'll be interested to see if it's as fun.
 
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Indeed indeed! Unless I was going pure blasty mage I almost always ended up relying heavily on archery in Oblivion. I just started an Argonian archer in Skyrim, so I'll be interested to see if it's as fun.

Well, I consider Skyrim the game with the best archery combat as of yet :)
 
Well, I consider Skyrim the game with the best archery combat as of yet :)

Agreed. You can play a full-fledged archer in this game and not feel gimped and some of the perks (like slow-time etc.) keep it fun and interesting. I love one-shotting a bandit at the extreme range for my weapon by having to actually lead my target by a fair amount--perfect mix of skill and skill points at work.
 
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I love mixing archery and alchemy. It's great fun to mess with the enemy. Most of the time, I just use weakness to "element of choice" type poisons, but stamina draining potions can be fun for the melee types that love power attacks. I'm a destruction mage/archer with a good dose of alchemy. I'm a glass cannon with only 150 hp and 140 stamina. All the rest is in good ol' magicka.
 
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I'm of a different opinion than most when it comes to melee combat. I find Skyrim to be the least appealing compared to Morrowind and Oblivion, but magic is much more fun this time around, at least compared to Oblivion.
 
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No. Morrowind had 3 attack types, chop(attack button), thrust(forward+attack button) and slash(left or right+ attack button) . Each weapon did a different amount of damage depending on the attack type(spears obviously did a lot more damage with a thrust than with a chop) and there wasn't much of a point to using an attack type other than the highest damaging one for the weapon you were using, so there was an option in the menu that just disabled the less-damaging attack types for any given weapon(ie all attacks with spears would automatically be thrusts, daedric swords would always slash etc).

Basically it was unfinished, the only difference between attack types was how much damage they did which rendered the least damaging attack types pointless, there should have been an advantage /disadvantage system in place, by for instance giving thrusts less of a chance to stagger an opponent but more of a chance of ignoring armor etc so you'd end up using all attack types depending on the situation.
 
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Unfortunately skyrim's combat is also much worse than dark messiah of m&m. Combat is by far the worst part of skyrim imo. Too bad to because the rest is excellent.

Indeed. And more generally the whole body awareness* concept is still quasi ignored by Bethesda in their games.

* by body awareness I mean : player character with no legs and not casting shadows while in first person mode + no camera movement when walking or running (head bobbing). Yep, the sprinting in Skyrim is an exception and a welcome addition in this direction.
 
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That makes no sense. All glitches affect the game, more importantly the player's experience while playing the game.

The only glitches I experienced after playing about 250 hours are:

1. extra louis letrush clones - didn't really bother my enjoyment of the game at all, in fact it was kind of funny

2. sometimes when running and knocking random objects into water, the physics looks a little bit silly - didn't really bother my enjoyment

3. some keybinding hiccups - this was annoying but I figured out a workaround by remapping the F, R, T keys to my Numpad buttons and the E, A, D keys to my mouse buttons. my understanding is that this was fixed with Patch 1.2 but i'm already using the remapped keys anyways

4. one dragon did not give up his soul. this was slightly annoying, but my understanding is this was fixed with Patch 1.2. in any case that was the only dragon who did not give up his soul

5. some dragon corpses will move around in a strange way if you fast travel to the location where you previously killed a dragon. this doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the game, either

6. sometimes my follower fails to switch into combat mode when getting attacked by enemies. this one is quite annoying.

7. sometimes the game crashes when I try to take a screenshot using F12. this is also annoying, but it has only happened about 5 or 6 times in a span of 250 hours.
 
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