Comparison: Morrowind vs. Oblivion

Well, if you had any doubts, this should change your mind:



Ha ha, just kidding. But seriously, I have wanted to compare these two games for a long time, but never really got down to defining what about each game was good and bad. Although a lot of what I'm saying here has already been said, I just wanted to give my 2 cents on it, since I love both games so much.

Disclaimer: I’m not a technical expert on computers, nor am I able to explain the subtleties in graphics, or really go into anything in-depth in mechanical terms, so keep in mind that this review will be mostly based on my game-play and “emotional” reactions to both games. So, if I complain about things and I fuck up and say things that turn out to be wrong, I’m sorry, but at least I warned you that this is not a “professional” analysis of the two games. This is just a reflection from a normal person who loves both games, has spent innumerable hours on both of them, and who, I can safely say, has managed to explore almost everything in both of the worlds.

Let’s start off with the easier argument: Oblivion > Morrowind

A lot of this stuff goes without saying: better graphics, better physics system, better map system, better journal system, more straight-forward combat. If you were a passerby and had to compare the two based on looks and face-value playability, most would (reasonably) pick Oblivion as superior. As far as how it looks, I remember being really impressed with Oblivion when it first came out, especially character and creature animation, which was clearly far better than it had been in Morrowind. So many aspects of gameplay were smoothed out, especially ones that had me tearing out my hair in Morrowind. When you hit a target with a weapon or spell, it always worked, and you got the satisfaction of having at least done something instead of that “whoosh” sound of you missing the target right in front of your fucking face that became so ingrained in my mind with Morrowind. I loved how the block option was manual, and you didn’t just have to wait for your character to decide to dodge an attack, plus you can block without a shield, which as far as I remember, didn’t happen in Morrowind. One thing about Oblivion that I really like was the leveling-up perks – when you hit level 25, 50, 75, or 100 for any skill you got new moves or were able to cast new kinds of spells, or other useful things that made gameplay easier as time went on. I gotta say, nothing is better than getting to 100 in Armorer and only ever having to carry around one repair hammer all the time. Some of these perks are pretty useless, like some of the jumping and rolling moves that you can do, and rarely come in handy, but some of the new power attacks for Blade and Blunt are quite fun to pull of successfully.

So, let’s talk about Oblivion’s maps. I can for sure say that my least favorite aspect of Morrowind was that it was too fucking hard to find anything in it. You would only get these vague text directions that rarely led you to the place on the first try, and even if you were on your mini-map it was hard to pick up that there was an entrance on the map that you couldn’t see in-game. I swear, there were way too many quests that I couldn’t complete just because I couldn’t find the damn place. Now, I’ll admit that was younger when I was playing this a lot – probably from about age 10 to age 15 – but I do think that for any gamer it would have caused problems. So, on the surface, Oblivion is miles ahead of Morrowind – the maps are clear, directions are somewhat unnecessary since it just points it out to you on the map, and all locations you will ever visit have their own map marker. Playing the game through the first time, it was such a relief to just be able to bring up the map screen and see exactly where to go. The fast travel option also came as a welcome addition – with Morrowind, one quest could easily become a long journey and the time it took even after you finished the quest to get back to whomever was going to pay you seemed tedious at the time.

The journal system of Morrowind seems to be universally accepted as a confusing, unorganized mess, so it’s easy to argue that Oblivion, at least in that category, has Morrowind beat for sure. You can view all available quests to you, or single out a specific one to see the sequence of events and what to do next. A lot of Morrowind’s more cryptic and confusing puzzles are worked out of this system because of the more directed journal entries – there is never a whole lot of speculation about what must be done in a quest because it will just tell you most of the time.
But now, to counter all that, let’s re-examine some of these aspects that, on the surface, appear to make Oblivion > Morrowind.

Are the graphics really better in Oblivion? Well, yes, they are, you can’t argue that. But I can say for sure that I don’t like them as much as Morrowind’s. In a way, they feel too real – it feels more just like a medieval European RPG than a completely new fantasy world. In Morrowind, sure, the stuff looked pretty stiff and waxy, but it had a wonderfully “weird” charm to it, and the sometimes sub-par visuals never hampered the game from being fun. But in Oblivion, I feel like I wasn’t in a whole new universe – the people looked too normal, the landscapes were uninspired, and the creatures weren’t strange and colorful enough. So, yeah, on paper Oblivion has Morrowind beat on graphics quality, but as far as personal opinion goes, I think a lot of people find a fascinating aspect of Morrowind’s visuals that was never there in the fourth installment.

What about the combat system? I do think in most ways this is superior, since it just makes more sense than it did in Morrowind. But I think the leveling system change was a mistake, and caused Oblivion to feel “done” much sooner for me than Morrowind – to this day, I feel like Morrowind still has stuff to conquer that I haven’t done before. But in Oblivion, you get to a point where, at about level 30, you pretty much have all of the best items in the game available to you and there are no real “challenges” on the road ahead. Also, it just takes too fucking long to level up in Oblivion. I’ve had a character that I literally played with consistently for over a year and I never made it past level 40. The huge drawback is that only upping your major skills gets you level advancement – advancing minor skills helps you increase your attributes when you level up, but it doesn’t bring you any closer to the next level in the process. At first, this isn’t a big problem, but after not too long you’ve maxed out a few of your major skills (I’ve found that any armor or Destruction magic skills get to 100 way before anything else does), and now, it takes that much longer to level up because now you have less options available. After you get past a certain point, leveling up just gets so tedious and by that time, as I mentioned, you feel like you’ve already done everything the game has to offer, so a lot of the times that’s went I quit playing the game for a few months. So, although fighting stuff is easier here, Morrowind’s leveling system and un-changing enemy difficulty allowed for longer playability and a larger sense of accomplishment.

As far as maps go, I did say the joy of finding shit easier in Oblivion really never got old. But I admit it takes some of the challenge out of the game, and the fast travel especially can, in the long run, make the game less fun. I mean, you can choose just not to use the fast travel, but that’s hard to do. Sometimes you just fought your way through a dungeon for an hour and you just want to exit the door and travel to your destination right away. With Morrowind, it was super annoying to have to walk pretty much everywhere, but it made the game seem so much more immense and you got so used to seeing the landscape. In Oblivion, I feel like I was not even on the roads that much and never got used to how the outside looked. In practice, though, the biggest complaint (fast travel or not) about Oblivion’s map is that it’s NOT BIG ENOUGH. There aren’t enough places to go in this game. To some extent, the map system makes this seem even truer, since it’s a lot less likely that you’ll just stumble upon to a new cave, since it’s marked on the map, whereas in Morrowind that happened all the time. But I don’t think that it’s just a psychological thing that comes about from stuff like fast travel or map markings – the game really is too small.

On a similar note, the journal system, while undoubtedly a leap up, can make the game too easy. Most times it just fucking tells you what to do, even when it’s completely obvious. Even stuff that might not have been clear right away could have been figured out without the journal detailing every word of what to do to get an item or defeat an enemy. While there were times in Morrowind where I was really stumped, I could use those few occasions to look up a strategy guide or something, while the rest of the puzzles were usually doable, if you spend some time with them. But in Oblivion, it just seems like it’s compensating for past mistakes by spelling it out all too obviously.

So, what is the take away from all this? Casual RPG gamers would probably go for Oblivion, because they weren’t used to an extensive game like Morrowind and they weren’t expecting something similar from the fourth game. But, among Elder Scrolls fans in general, there seems to be a consensus that Morrowind had many indefinable qualities that made it more fun, and kept us playing long after the main quests of the game were completed. It was just like we knew that something else was still out there, and that if you kept spending time with the game, that some weird crazy stuff would turn up from time to time. Oblivion feels a lot more like a linear-storyline game – there’s point A and point B, and eventually you will probably get to point B and be done with the game.

The reason I chose now to write this post is that rumors have re-ignited about Elder Scrolls 5 being in production, and some speculate that it even has been for the last two years. While it’s uncertain how long it will be before we get any kind of release date, some comments made by Bethesda people have implied that the wait is not as long as I (and, I assume, most others) had anticipated. So, with two really solid games behind them, what do I want to ask of Bethesda for a new TES game? As I mentioned above, unfortunately many of the things that made Morrowind great are kind of hard to explain or define, so it’s not like I can just make a bullet-point list of all the things Bethesda should fix. But I can take a stab at some general aspects that I want to see:

• More challenge
• More item variety and number
• More faction quest storylines (Mages Guild, stuff like that)
• Make the game weirder
• Make the game bigger (but don’t fuck it up like Arena)

So, yeah, I dunno, Bethesda, just work on that stuff I guess.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I’ve been wanting very much to do something like this for a while.