Respect your Elder Scrolls
 

Rather cleanly split off from this thread and page

I decided at the start of the week that it was high time I actually sat down and played Oblivion, since I wanted to play an open world game but I was sick of Skyrim.

So after about half an hour I was playing Skyrim again. I lost track of the amount of mods I’d haphazardly installed last time I played it (about 6+ months ago?), so I’m going through the process of getting a fresh install and then carefully adding back in everything I’d thrown onto the pile before. There’s something therapeutic about the whole thing.

Morrowind? Also, Arena and Daggerfall are free at elderscrolls.com, if you don't mind fiddling with DOSBox.

I'm presuming you mean FPRPGs. If you really just mean an RPG without a linear plot, there's plenty more to recommend - Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Fallout...

I like first-person open world RPGs that minimize the amount of numbers you have to work with. Skyrim is my go-to, followed by New Vegas.

I do need to play Morrowind at some point as I like what I hear about it (more interesting world, more armor and clothing options, less hand-holding), but I get put off by the bigger focus on traditional RPG numbers.

In the end I just couldn’t stand the poor menu design and art direction of Oblivion. It hasn’t aged well.

100% agreed with Manco. I'm a huge fan of Skyrim, yet I've tried to like both Morrorwind and Oblivion. I just can't. Like what Manco said, They haven't aged well. And the fact Skyrim blew me away when I first saw it, playing the others feels like a downgrade.

I might try them again with Mods and also try out that mod Skywind, which hopefully should be out soon. But for now. I'm happy just playing Skyrim.

I think that Oblivion is considerably better the Skyrim in almost every aspect. I'm going to be murdered for that There are a few things that I do think Skyrim got better though, like making orcs not look like Shrek. But just about everything in Oblivion was more enjoyable to me. One of the things that always comes to mind, while it's only a small, minor complaint, is that the Argonians sounded way too normal. In Oblivion, the race had their own unique voice that definitely sounded like a mouth trying to speak a language not built for it. I also much much prefer the Oblivion plot over Skyrim's.

That being said, I still revisit Skyrim more. Why? Mods.

Oblivion just feels so bland and kitsch-y to me, that’s what puts me off. It’s the most vanilla fantasy world possible, combined with the plasticine-and-plastic graphics and Gamebryo’s delightful physics and animations. I would honestly like to explore the world, but the whole aesthetic of the game just repulses me.


Mods weren’t enough for me to like Oblivion. None of them seem as impressive as what people add to Skyrim.

The folks who are making Skywind are also working on a port of Oblivion to the Skyrim engine. If they do it right, I might be tempted, but as it is I’ll just be sticking with Skyrim.


Semi-related, but I always end up playing as a Khajiit because of this wonderful mod that changes all the Player dialogue options to match Khajiit dialect. Turns out Khajiit are sarcastic motherfuckers and I love it.

The Khajiit we're left as the wonderfully entertaining race that they'd been for a while, that made me happy.

See, that's where I highly disagree. Skyrim, undeniably has amazing graphical abilities compared to oblivion, I'm not going to act like it doesn't. But the art direction (aside from the race differences, most of the races in oblivion looked bad) in oblivion seems way better to me. In skyrim, just about every fucking place I looked at was grey or brown or covered in snow. Now I understand that it is that way to match it's location, but it doesn't mean that I think it's much better to look at. In Cyrodiil (where oblivion takes place) the landscape is vibrant, and overall nice to look at, and even then it's not all same-y as in the south the landscapes are a bit more muddy, in the north, it's more cold looking, and in dungeons it looks more.... dungeony? Point is, I feel that the visiual aesthetics are just way better in Oblivion, where in skyrim I feel blessed to look at a green tree.

I'd like to remind people that this is the 'What are you playing right now?' thread. If you'd like an ongoing discussion of a game you played a while ago, please partake in a relevant thread.

You mean... actually put in effort about a discussion? I dunno if I can.

Well sure we may as well have an Elder Scrolls thread, even if it’ll just die after a page or two. Let’s split this all off?

I agree with you about Skyrim having a more limited color palette, but personally I feel it’s justified by the much stronger atmosphere and setting. Cyrodiil feels to me like it lacks a strong environmental personality - it feels like Generic Cheerful Tolkeinesque fantasy land #86498, whereas Skyrim very much comes across as a fantasy interpretation of a medieval Scandinavian province. The duller color scheme ties to the bleaker weather and the rather miserable current affairs of the world.

Every time I try to play Oblivion all I can think about are Thomas Kincaid paintings. I just don’t think the more saturated environment and color scheme of the world translates into more atmosphere and immersion, sadly.

To be fair, some of the very first Skyrim mods I installed were ones that focused on lighting and weather, to try and make the world a little less brown and grey. I want to try installing an ENB mod sometime as a lot of those make the world much more colorful and vibrant without going overboard; a lot of them are fairly resource-intensive though which puts me off.

*Cough cough*



And all using less system resources than vanilla Skyrim.

*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*

OK, I’ll make you a promise: next time I get fed up of Skyrim I’ll give Morrowind a shot. On condition that I get to hassle you about everything from what mods to install to any complaints I have about the game.

I started on Morrowind when I was about 9-10, and I adored it. It was my first RPG and I had so much fun playing it. I created my own guide for the game using maps that I'd gotten whoever had internet to print out, and I drew the creatures in the game and named them. I spent hours upon hours, tirelessly trekking the landscape searching for every artifact and secret. Besides Oddworld it was the first game series I fell in love with. It's a shame that I ended up breaking the disc, but luckily many christmasses later I found the PC GOTY edition waiting for me. MODS AHOY.

Also I booted up Skyrim for the first time in a month and it must've been taking steroids or something because it looks stronk.

Oh man, is that vanilla? Other people’s Skyrim screenshots always look better than mine for some reason.

I really need to try morrowind again, last time I tried it I started having fun, then suddenly a brick wall of difficulty had me stuck for an hour, eventually just making me give up and uninstall. That was like, freshman or sophomore year though, my patients (and dare I say it, my intelligence) has rose since then.

As much as I want to, I can't really disagree. Cyrodiil is right in the center and doesn't have much special for it. If it weren't for the giant spire, it could be hard to tell where you were. However, I still prefer the varied look aver the same brown and grey.

Fun Fact: Cyrodiil was tangled Amazonesque jungle, with the native Imperials being based on extinct Mesoamerican empires (Mayans, Aztecs etc).

Then the Lord of the Rings movies came out. All lore referring to Cyrodiil's original incarnation has been retconned to in-universe translation errors.

Prior to this, Tamriel's token Green And Pleasant Land™ was Hammerfell. Some of the Oblivion team have acknowledged that this would have been a more sensible choice.

That's not vanilla. Skyrim without mods looks pretty low res ugly

Yeah I use an ENB (though I can't remember which) and as many high res texture packs sa I can find. It just doesn't usually look that good. The only reason I stopped playing Skyrim was to take a break from the mod I was making, I may have to pick it up again sometime.





It was pretty sp00ky stuff.

I've got a lot of graphic enhancing and immersion mods and they all work really well together. Here's a list of what I've got, In case anyone was curious.

Realistic Lighting without Post-Processing
Superior Lore-Friendly Hair HD textures
Wet and Cold < My favorite. Adds lots of particles and effects for rain and the cold.
Splash of Rain
Better Dynamic Snow
HQ Snow Textures
Expanded Skyrim Weather
Supreme Storms
Towns and Villages Enhanced
Trees HD
Lush Grass
Pure Waters
HD Plants + Herbs
Pure Weather
Enhanced Distant Terrain
Dynamic Fires
...And a few others which are just minor tweaks.

Like making the night sky look breathtaking
http://i.imgur.com/stYoPK9l.jpg
I'm sure they're others which are better but I've used these for forever now.

Fixd

That image is clearly down-scaled from it's original resolution, though.

Yes because it would really stretch the thread out if it wasn't down scaled.

If you want full resolution screenshots, go to my Steam

Sadly I have to make do with the standard textures due to my GPU VRAM. Handily, that doesn’t cause performance issues with gameplay changing mods!

I have spent most of the day downloading mods, installing mods, modifying my load order, silently cursing crashes, fixing mod load order problems, testing mods, and generally fucking about and tinkering with a clean install.

Currently downloading mod #71. THEN I’ll be good to go.

I was never silent when I did.

My first mod was back when I said I wasn't going to install any mods until I finished the main quest line, but something about Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid as a follower was too enticing.

I think the first mod I downloaded was one of the handful I downloaded when I first started getting bored with the vanilla game: Immersive Weapons, Immersive Armors, and Climates of Tamriel. I’m still using all of them even now.

There’s a lot of damn good Skyrim mods out there. I wish more games were built with modding in mind.

I don’t know why, but I’ve never gotten to the point where I wanted to play with lore-unfriendly mods.

I know why, because TES is incredibly fucking immersive and things like that break it. I uninstalled after having the novelty of one of my favorite characters be there because I looooove TES world.

Status update:

For the first time ever, I killed the Frost Troll. You know the one. i may have abused its AI to get it stuck in place fuck youuuu

That was something else, the combat in Oblivion felt more of a challange, where Skyrim felt more of a cinematic.

Morrowind's combat was challenging, but not in a good way.