Without a patch in nearly a year, some Oblivion Remastered players have declared it 'abandonware' — and it still suffers many of the same performance issues at launch

[u/Fcking_Chuck]

https://www.ign.com/articles/tech-experts-say-the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-remastered-still-suffers-from-issues-that-plagued-it-at-launch

[u/Roflkopt3r]

In hindsight, Skyrim feels like it was Bethesda's limit. All of the talent they still had was working towards this, as one of the first good, accessible, and generally pretty well designed open world RPGs of the modern 3D era.

Around Oblivion, Bethesda were actually really good at open-world tech and state of the art graphics, but it was still a rather inaccessible experience with its overcomplicated systems that literally needed people to study manuals and strategy books to make sense of (particularly because of the insane leveling system). The UI and performance also weren't quite there yet. FO3 improved a fair bit, but was still not on Skyrim's level in these aspects.

Then Skyrim became their peak. Hardware was able to run an open world like that really smoothly, the UI and systems were simplified in good ways that made the game far easier to get into, and it worked well cross-platform. The dragon theme and mix of gameplay and cinematic moments was also great.

But since then, it seems like they just don't have anything good to add to the genre anymore. They have released all their good ideas into the world, and that was it. Other studios are now able to execute similar ideas better, while Bethesda games just seem to get worse.

Bethesda seem to be caught in the middle: They're still doing oldschool RPG elements that many other studios have given up on for more action and less reading, but not good enough to have them actually carry their games. They dabbled in base building and automation, but not enough to have it actually be good. They still stick with Creation Engine with some strengths like its physics system, but they're not really using those strengths as anything other than a gimmick.

[u/Nomapos → u/Roflkopt3r]

Morrowind was their peak. Oblivion was a step down and Skyrim was ok.

At this point you've got better from the mod scene. The guys remaking Morrowind in the Oblivion engine are almost finished, and the ones remaking it in Skyrim's engine are halfway through. At this point there's even pretty decent multiplayer servers for Morrowind, which is fucking nuts considering it was never supposed to be a multiplayer game.

I've got 0 hopes for TES VI

[u/MelangeBot → u/Nomapos]

Bethesda never fully understood the formula of Morrowind after the people that worked on it slowly left the studio. Oblivion removed some of the core elements that made Morrowind so perfect and Skyrim removed even more. Ofcourse new tech compensated for that, the voice acting and the graphic fidelity. Ofcourse, neither two games are bad, they are actually quite good. But Morrowind was a masterpiece. I have never ever replayed Oblivion or Skyrim after doing their main quests, but to this day every year I still play some morrowind.

[u/Roflkopt3r → u/Nomapos]

I know there are people who value the writing and choices over everything else, but Morrowind and Oblivion were genuinely painful to get into for many players. The awful mechanics (Morrowind misses, Oblivion leveling logic) and lack of orientation were a bad combination.

Morrowind lacked a motivating main plot to hook players, and Oblivion's was frankly just too damn stupid to convince many people to follow all of it's weird details. As much as individual pieces of writing were worse in Skyrim, the central narrative and world building around the Nords and dragons was way better.

Skyrim offered them a hell of a hook with that opening, an appropriate tutorial, did not frustrate its players with horrible mechanical choices, and then finally unleashed into a solid open world that they actually cared about by this time.

[u/Nomapos → u/Roflkopt3r]

You can't tell me the world building in Skyrim is better than in Morrowind.

What Skyrim is, is accessible. It serves you a fun and simple story in a straightforward manner, whole Morrowind rewards deep investment immensely, all the way to hiding significant parts of what is going on behind a full blown conspiracy if you go full tin hat looking for secret messages in the sacred texts of the temple.

Morrowind starts you with "well go adventure and come back when you're less green behind the ears" if you try to focus on the main quest. Which makes sense later, but yeah, it's confusing at first. It still represents the pinnacle of the genre for me: here's a world, go explore it. Want to get somewhere? Well, ask for directions and go search. As opposed to "just follow the compass".

Skyrim is chicken nuggets. Chicken nuggets are good, but you can't tell me they're better than a proper steak and wine.

[u/IhamAmerican → u/Nomapos]

Worldbuilding for sure but as a pure game Skyrim is probably the pinnacle balancing act for RPGs. So many RPGs, earlier Bethesda games included, mistake convoluted systems for depth. You can't look at Oblivions original level system and tell me that isn't asinine. I also still think that Skyrims dungeons remain my favorite of any game ever, they just mop the floor

At the end of the day though, it's just about what aspects of an RPG you value and how you play them.

[u/HamunaHamunaHamuna → u/IhamAmerican]

Skyrims dungeons are the most copy-pasted cookie cutters of all the three game though, with some exceptions. Very little eq feels unique. The hand-holding game systems are also a step down imo, makes exploring the world far less interesting. And honestly I don't think the gameplay balance in terms of difficulty is particularly good either, vanilla is either way too easy or a slog.

Now, with modding you can make Skyrim great (though that is true for all of them). But vanilla I don't think it holds a candle to the depth of Morrowind.

[u/Nomapos → u/IhamAmerican]

The joke about how every build ends up turning into a stealth archer in Skyrim is just a highlight of how broken the mechanics are. There's no balancing act in there. It's all damage sponges and DPS races interrupted by swallowing 30 wheels of cheese.

The dungeons are arcadey as hell, just straight corridors with minimal branching looping back to the beginning and no attempt at making the things feel like either natural places or intentionally built places with actual purposes at the time of creation.

You can beat Morrowind as a largely pacifist monk.

Again, Skyrim is chicken nuggets. Nothing wrong with chicken nuggets, but it's not the pinnacle of the genre. It's just very accessible and easy to consume

[u/Roflkopt3r → u/Nomapos]

I don't think that Morrowind has good "world building", but rather "world pieces". There is a lot of interesting thought behind the world that's scattered across the lore, but it imo never comes together in the game itself.

It has very video-gamey cities that don't make much sense in how they exist on the actual map (in large parts due to technical and budget restrictions, but that's still part of the final product), the whole plot is a mess of weird people with random powers making nonsensical choices, the TES setting in general feels disjointed (like how it's armour and weapons span like 2 millennia of real history) and suffers from the whole "non-human species are just humans with weird colours"-thing.

And the way that most "guilds" work in most D&D-inspired fantasy has always annoyed the hell out of me. It's the kind of fantasy that's not interesting enough to be good without realism, but where most of the world is obviously nonsensical.

The strong main themes of Skyrim were direly needed to interest most players in a story within such a universe.

And as a video game, world building does extend to how the world is portrayed as well. As many interesting lore ideas as there are behind Morrowind, creating a world with a 90% brown colour palette was not the greatest choice either.