I honestly found Oblivion to be extremely boring. seems like the majority of my play time was spent navigating chat windows or traveling between locations. in my opinion, the whole first-person RPG concept works a lot better with guns (ala Fallout) than it does with melee weapons. there's a reason that fantasy RPG's are usually 3rd person.
Just admit it, you love guns
Anyway, care to tell me the concrete difference between playing a gun class in Fallout and a ranged magic class in Oblivion? Besides slightly slower projectiles I don't see much of a difference.
The only part where I'll agree 3rd person perspective is better is in melee combat between thief/ranger classes - that's why there is a 3rd person perspective function in both Morrowind and Oblivion.
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Anyway, both games (TES3/4) have their strong and weak points.
Morrowind
Pro:
- Very rich and natural world. You genuinely feel like a small insignificant speck on the map when you start out, well into the midgame, like the world will go on just fine if you just happened to drop dead.
- Better leveling/skill system that contributes to the above. The draw of the game is being genuinely useless in the beginning and slowly working your way up into a glass-armored death machine or diplomat. The sense of progression is slow but very real.
Con:
- Melee combat for low level characters is even more ridiculous than that of Neverwinter nights. Swinging a sword through your opponent's head five times while not doing any damage or even getting a sound confirming your hit makes for very frustrating encounters until you level up. At least in NWN, the one or two times per minute your character attacks it will result in *some* damage.
- CLIFF RACERS ,,lol
Oblivion
Pro:
Better melee combat, better graphics, more varied quests. Overall better production value.
Con:
- The world feels too centered on you. Practically every character you talk to appears to have been waiting for you, and you only, to fix their problems. Plot-driving quests everywhere. Right from the beginning of the game, it's entirely apparent you are some godsent killer-hulk-to-be. You get to see the emperor dying and speak to him yourself, he tells you you're the chosen one, gives you amulet that the fate of the world depends on, "go save the universe", etc. In Morrowind, you start off as a prisoner without a history that is let go for some unknown reason and all you're given is a letter from some soldier in a nearby town. The rest is up to you to discover. In this aspect, Oblivion is a lot more cinematic (gaming's most recent fad, yay!), but it detracts from the genuine
adventure feel of the game. Which leads me to the next point:
- Retarded leveling system. Seriously. I can skip most quests and go right to one of the toughest dungeons and kill the big bad mofo at level 5. If I go back into the starter dungeon after 80 hours of play, I will encounter level 60 sewer rats that would have killed me just by looking at me, had they been there when I first started the game. Enemies leveling up with the player character just kills
any sense of progression in the game. It takes four stabs to kill a bandit at level 3, and it takes four stabs to kill that same bandit at level 100, because suddenly, he's wearing blood armor and has gained 60 levels. Nevermind how anyone in the various towns is still alive when there are juggernauts like these just strolling about.
The only characters exempt from this rule are the town guards, who are always so strong I keep wondering why they even need me to save the world when they've got a legion of terminators at their disposal already.
TL;DR: Morrowind is an open-world RPG with slightly clunky melee combat. Oblivion is it's action-game offspring with better production.
