Has there been a decline in quality of TES games since Morrowind or is it nostalgia?

Tihskael said:

I tried my hand at Gothic and its controls scared me away, even though the world seemed tempting. I will surely come back to it one day.

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Just try it for an hour or so, what’s an hour to a lifetime experience , and you’ll be fine.

Corwin said:

How come no-one mentioned Arena. It had two great spells which allowed you to either pass through dungeon walls, or blast a hole in them. Heaps of fun!!

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Because it was boooooring. Endless sameness. Copy pasted cities with 20 identical taverns each. NPCs without the C. It was my first Elder Scrolls game, and I didn't come back until Morrowind.

Tihskael said:

@AppleIntimidation; I am sure you are talking about Skywind. I encountered 1 or 2 game breaking bugs, but for a 300 hour experience that is not bad. But I do encounter plenty of bugs, most of which are fun.
Skywind link:
https://tesrskywind.com/

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No I was talking about morrowind reborn or something like mwe not skywind, because I do not even own skyrim and rely on a 2009 iMac and Macbook Air via Windows 7 bootcamp with radeon hd4670 for my pc gaming thus I doubt I could even play skyrim. and it is like a collection of a crapload of mods and i found most are not even compatible and gives you thr option to turn thrm on or off via a menu. later the game would start crashing no matter what I choose.

Skyrim > Oblivion > Morrowind in my opinion.

I never even got through Morrowind. The first time I tried it, I did too much bunny hopping and my character ended up leaving the first town at "high level" even though his combat skills were low so he got blasted by everything outside. The second time was better but that time had the opposite issue - I made some sort of magic axe thing that was blasting everything easily and the game got dull so I quit.

I had much more fun in Oblivion, which I completed and even started a second time - mostly to play Shivering Island, which I liked quite a bit.

Skyrim was tops by far, though. The massive modding community made it a design-your-own-RPG! Plus 3D Vision worked great, making the place intensely immersive. Finding Blackreach has got to be the best exploration experience I've ever had in a game!

First one I played was Daggerfall and while I was amazed by the scope, implementation was buggy and the dungeons were often too confusing to navigate. Morrowind was epic, and I never finished the dlc because I put in ~500 hours in the main game with different characters so I forced myself to move onto something else. Oblivion was pretty but had horrible scaling and I hated random Oblivion gates. Skyrim had a great world to explore but didn't like simplification. ESO continuation of trend from Skyrim... HUGE world, very simplified, MMO
So order: Morrowind>Skyrim>Oblivion>ESO>Daggerfall

I like how different people have different preferences, just goes to show how Bethesda has evolved over the past 20 years. I think with Morrowind, they struck the right balance. With a couple of mods (especially the Fast Run mod), it becomes a reasonably good experience even after 20 years, which is something I can't say about a lot of games of that time. As far as Skyrim's world building is concerned, I did like it. Unlike in the case of Oblivion, different cities in Skyrim definitely had unique flavor. Solitude, Riften, Whiterun, Morthal, Winterhold, Windhelm had different things going on for them like thieves in the sewers, fight with the Forsworn (natives of the Reach), fight amongst different clans, racial segregation etc. Maybe not as good as Vivec, Balmora and Ald-Ruhn, but definitely interesting.

Tihskael said:

a reasonably good experience even after 20 years, which is something I can't say about a lot of games of that time.

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I'd be very interested in hearing which games from the past 20 years you're referencing here...

@lackblogger; All 3 Troika games. VTMB on GOG still ships with community made fixes if I am not wrong. Gothic's another example, terrible control scheme as I previously mentioned.

well those games were regarded as either clunky or buggy upon release, that's not a matter of not aging well, that's a matter of them having always been like that. The people who could cope with those issues back then will still be the same kind of people who can cope with those kind of issues today.

Also, apart from the first two Gothics in European provinces, most of those games weren't what the majority of people were playing back then, so referencing those games as "a lot of games of that time" is a bit of a stretch.

@lackblogger; I was referring to RPGs in general. There are games like Ocarina of Time with which I can still have a blast, in its original state. And yeah games like Gothic were designed like that, so now they are difficult to get into, but I think experienced players at that time didn't have much problems getting into them. As far as Morrowind is concerned, if you can play Skyrim, you can play Morrowind. Not a lot of things have changed since then.

Tihskael said:

so now they are difficult to get into, but I think experienced players at that time didn't have much problems getting into them.

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I don't think experienced players of today would have a problem getting into them? The reason less modern players probably try Gothic is because the brand died out so there's no new game to attract new players who will then back-track, whereas Bethesda has kept The Elder Scrolls alive so new players have something to buy and then back-track into.

And yes, I would say "a lot of games" from that era have aged very well and are still eminently playable to new players and experienced players alike and that you're only cherry picking a few easy pickings to make an overbloated faux-factual statement about a game you're a devoted fanboy of?

lackblogger said:

And yes, I would say "a lot of games" from that era have aged very well and are still eminently playable to new players and experienced players alike and that you're only cherry picking a few easy pickings to make an overbloated faux-factual statement about a game you're a devoted fanboy of?

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See how good Classic Fallout has aged, its developers don't seem to struggle with the game they themselves designed, at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dajGzCKRYw
I am cherry picking a few easy pickings? That's your argument? You sound like this:
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Oh dear

Looks like I've walked into an argument this guy's been having with other people on other forums

FYI, the original Fallout is well over 20 years old and would be comparable in age to Daggerfall not Morrowind, and, yeah, not so many new fans of Daggerfall either my good friend

A difference of 4 years. Arcanum came in 2001 and its the spiritual successor to Classic Fallout. Not huge technological advancements were made by Troika, I am afraid. If you can compare Arcanum to Morrowind, you can surely compare Fallout to it. And no I haven't argued much about how games have aged over the past few years, but I do sometimes think about it.

Why are you still referring to Arcanum as a "Lots of games of that era" example? No-one outside of specialist forums has likely ever even heard of it...

I mentioned 5 RPGS of that era (Fallout, VTMB, Arcanum, Gothic, ToEE). I only mentioned Arcanum for the second time because of your Fallout argument. These are the games I am familiar with and mechanically I don't think these aged well. You can play Ultima VII, have a blast. You can play Jagged Alliance 2, have fun. After all this time, some games feel just right, some don't. Maybe its just personal preference. I'm done with this debate. Have a nice day.

Tihskael said:

I am cherry picking a few easy pickings? That's your argument? You sound like this:
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Yeah, we are not going to do this. I detected some words in that YT video that are not allowed in black and white on this site, don’t know if you really think those words apply to lackblogger as well, don’t care, and no I did not watched the entire 5 minutes. I have got better things to do.
You say whatever you want to say about how according to you lackblogger is sounding in your own words, but I am not going to allow a trend where people refer to videos to say how people are sounding. Next thing I know moderation has to check hours of video to see whether the content is in line with the TOS.

Fair enough

Sorry if you've posted some weirdness before this post, but rather than edit my previous post I'll make a new one that will probably be relevant to your reply anyway if you did reply:

Let me just pop over to Metacritic and find out what people were playing "lots of" in the general RPG-sphere in 2002 when Morrowind came out:

Ooop, top of the tree looks like Warcarft III, I think there's still lots of people who play that one. In fact this game was the headline news game just this year across the entire gaming world.

Next up is… hmmm… oh yes, Neverwinter Nights, a game that's been relevant and played by many for each and every year since it was made.

Maybe Morrowind will be next? Oop, no, it's Freedom Force. I'm afraid I don't know much about that and it's current playable state as I've never tried it.

Ah, now we get to Morrowind, ah well, nearly at the top, always the bridesmaid, never the bride, eh.

Dungeon Siege is next on the list. Again, one I've never played but I haven't heard that it's unplayable from people who've said they've replayed it recently.

Age of Wonders II, not really RPG, but in the ballpark and is one of those genre benders that gets talked about a lot round here. Yes, I played this one this decade and I believe it's a good seller on GoG and new AoW games are a still a prominent feature of the gaming world.

Icewind Dale 2. Apparently this struggles on Windows 10, though I've never tried so can't confirm, but is known to be a bestseller on GoG. This one could well die due to software incompatability, but not because people don't want to play it or because the game is difficult to play generally.

Divine Divinity. Well, I'm sure there must be people still digging into this, what with Divinity being such a big current name.

Arx Fatalis. Yeah, probably not so many people playing this one, I don't know, not really a 'big brand' so…

Heroes of Might and Magic IV, yup, same as Age of Wonders.

Might and Magic IX, right at the bottom of the list now, moving into the red 'shitty' games. Yeah, not sure I'd say this was ever 'playable'. Nor played really.

Shall we do the other years?

I think it's subjective. I find Troika games infinitely more playable today than Morrowind. And Morrowind is one of my top 3 games and my favorite from the TES series. Yes, Troika games have the reputation of being buggy and unfinished, but as far as mechanics go, they aged well in my opinion. You criticize them for being shipped with community patches on GOG, yet need mods to have a "reasonably good experience" with Morrowind. Some other games from that period that I think aged better than Morrowind are Fallout 1 and 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights, Gothic 1 and 2, Diablo 2, and that's just RPGs. I still regularly play Half Life and Counter Strike 1.6, and other non-RPG games that aged better than Morrowind are Quake 3, Red Alert 1 and 2, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3, Warlords Battlecry series, Civilization 3... I can go on.