Morrowind is my favorite RPG of all time. You should definitely play it. It scratches an itch that Oblivion nor will Skyrim be able to scratch. KHAndAnime

You work for the company?!?! WoW! Or send me a link to that pre-alpha you got that allows you such insight!

Speaking realistically though...

Morrowind will feel dated to you in a lot of ways, but it's a better made game than Oblivion hands down.

Don't let the early combat get you down. Unlike Oblivion, with enough work you can become a god in Morrowind.

It's also vastly bigger, but compensates by telling you nearly nothing about quest objectives, so be prepared for the trade-off.

It has less social features, like a lack of housing and that kind of thing, but it doesn't stop you from just killing the guy with the cool house (I'd recommend the rich guy in Balmore that's the target of the second thieve's guild mission. He won't be missed and has a huge house to occupy), and moving in.

Graphics are a little dated, especially in the menus, but it has a ton of functionality, so try and see the shiny horizon through the decade-old graphical mist.

It doesn't hold your hand like a lot of more modern games of its type, especially Oblivion, but if you give a real chance, and let it grow on you, it will haunt you forever. (In a good way.)

What I'm saying here is: go for it.

[QUOTE="Grodus5"]

[QUOTE="menes777"]

Yeah, streamlined is the the way to spin dumbed down to make it seem more palatable.

rhazzy

Let us compare the difference, shall we? Say I own a steel company (I don't, by the way), and to make my steel I had to get iron ore from a mine, send that ore to a refinement facility, then send the refined iron to a different facility to produce steel. Say I'm an incredible mineral engineer and I figured out a way to convert iron ore directly into steel without having to purify it first. Is that dumbing it down? No, thats called streamlining.

Now take stats in Elder Scrolls. The iron ore are my skill ups. When I level up, I can refine those skill ups into attributes. Those attributes, like the purified iron, are used to make something else, derived statistics. Endurance's only purpose was to govern health, intelligence's only purpose was to govern magicka, willpower governed magicka and stamina, and so on and so forth. But now I've come up with a way to cut out the middle man, aka the refinement process, and now instead of turning skill ups into attributes which then get turned into other statistics, I am now turning the raw level ups directly into the statistics that really matter: health, magicka, and stamina. What you see as dumbing down, I see as streamlining the process to make a more efficient system.

Ok lets analyze ur comparison:

•"I figured out a way to convert iron ore directly into steel without having to purify it first"

Now you see...you begin ur argument based on a assumption...What is the assumption that you make?Well in ur head,you imagine that every gamer out there wants the final product and wants to limit himself to that one final product,in ur case the "steel"...well thats not the case.

Have you ever thought about what would happen if after the process of purifying the iron ore...when you have the "refined iron"...you will not use that "refined iron" only to make "steel" out of it?You do know that u can make a lots of other things from that iron and not only steel?

Instead of having only stats like "health","magika","stamina" maybe i want more...Instead of creating new things,developers this days turn back to the beginning of RPG games when you would only have health and mana...

We were here already...instead of going forward and invent new things...we are going backwards,thats gaming nowadays...very sad!

I don't know man... Daggerfall may be one of the biggest, deepest games ever... But it also highlights a lack of mouse use, and an extreme abundance of cardboard cut outs. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a graphics whore that thought halo was an improvement over pre-existing FPS games of much higher quality in every department but graphics, but there is an element of endurance when moving backwards graphically. I think we can rest assured that won't be the case here.

That being said, there is a fine line between dumbing down and streamlining. Morrowind was a streamlined Daggerfall. Oblivion was a dumbed-down Morrowind.

They are removing things here, including some of the more useless magick skills, as well ( I would assume) as things like athletics. Do I necessariliy agree with the removal of primary stats? No. But given how good the game looks, and how they have described combat and stealth, and the fact that I'm a pretty die hard Elder Scrolls fan, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until gameplay proves me wrong.

They are, let us remember, adding things as well. First of all stealth and ranged combat sound infinitely less retarded than they were in Oblivion. They are also adding real crafting, which is hardly ever a bad thing. Let's just wait and see how it turns out, instead of posting drama-queen threads. Hmm?

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/elderscrollsvskyrim/news.html?sid=6308882&mode=previews&tag=topslot;title;1

"the demo was on an Xbox 360"

"Howard noted that the eight original character attributes from previous Elder Scrolls games have been condensed into three: magica, health, and stamina."

My worst fears about the game have been realized. R.I.P. a once great franchise and developer.

superfluidity

To me Oblivion kind of paved the way for this anyway. Stats were merely things I clicked on after sleeping to level up. They had already given them a fairly hard cap at 100 (Whereas in Morrowind you could become a demi-god by making and using strength potions of limitless potential), and to be honest with you, while I agree with your dissapointment at the principal, they weren't the things I focused most, or even some of my time on in Oblivion, because they had purposefully designed them out of the game. Now they're just making it official.

That being said, Star Wars Galaxies had stats but you could not adjust them (Except via certain ****s, but even then you had an overall pool to draw from, and couldn't exceed the maximum point usage no matter how you re-arranged them), and it did fine.

WoW's characters' stats cannot be modified except by equipment.

Diablo III's stats cannot be modified by equipment.

And I don't believe any of the above were/will be failures because of a lack of primary stats. They all have good mechanics include good combat systems and most importantly good skill systems, which in Syrim sound awesome and better than ever. So I wouldn't make sensationalistic remarks like "I will not be buying this game" just yet, especially if you enjoyed any of its predecessors. Who knows, you might find that you don't really notice them being gone.

Sins of a Solar Empire

Starcraft 2

Empires: Dawn of the Modern World

In no particular order.

[QUOTE="snared04"]

1. How did you lump Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania into the same category...?

2. Why is this on the PC Games forum since we seem to be discussing Wiiware and other console-ish games?

3. Try Castlevania Symphony of the Night if you haven't yet, it's like 10 bucks on XBLA, and is, hands-down the best Side-scrolling RPG ever made.

GL.

Advid-Gamer

1. I gave him suggestions.

2. Forums are seperated into topics for reasons.

3. Stop trolling.

Well, I was merely pointing out that

A. There is no "exploration" genre.

B. While they loosely share that aspect, those games would never be categorized together.

SOTN is waaaayyyy better than the DS ones. It has the biggest, best Inventory system, and by far the biggest explorable area of the series, along with awesome mechanices, plenty of hidden items, etc etc etc.

I would call AM Alice pretty straightforward by comparison imo, though I'll definitley hit up the sequel.

If you're just generally interested in games where you get to explore a bunch of things, then Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion will definitely keep you busy for a long, long, long time.

Gl.

[QUOTE="SkyWard20"]

[QUOTE="snared04"]

Well, you have to define "surviving" first. :) Star Wars Galaxies still "exists" but it is little more than a shadow of a thought of its former self, and I wouldn't categorize that as surviving.

Few MMO's ever get the actual "axe", and that's very company based anyway.

I mean, I would consider (Not commenting on gameplay or quality here, merely player base) Lotro, AO, AoC, etc. all failures at this point because of their lack of market, and in the cases of AO and Lotro, for their share of the market largely coming from their Free 2 play.

rzepak

LotRO is a commercial failure because it doesn't meet...your standards? I've always heard it had a steady community.

He does not understand the not only is F2P profitable but its the way of the future in the overcrowded mmo market.

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Not only is it not truly "F2P", it doesn't try to be. Want to compare it to a more known standard? Take the Lotro "f2play" model, and impose it on WoW:

You'd be allowed in the starter zone, plus maybe a couple others. You could run around a few more, but the quest giver NPC's would ignore you. Actually make to lvl 20, and you couldn't buy a mount, nor a faster one at 30, nor a flying one at 60, etc.

You also wouldn't be allowed to participate in BG's or most of the dungeons, so have fun grinding your way to level 85 on mob kills alone.

Hope you're happy with your starter class too, because you only have 1 character slot.

Oh yeah, and if the servers are crowded that day, you get to sit on a waiting list.

You also can't acquire or trade more than X amount of money.

To unlock 90% of the features of Lotro, you have to pay either a monthly fee, or shell out what would equate to 6 months+ in cash to buy the content. So their f2play model is a scam at best.

AO is a little different, but also about a decade old, and the newer content that the serious AO players play is also not free. So if you want to be a serious player, you have to pay anyway, if you'd like to try it out, then you can do it for free.

Please post your degree in financial analytics for me, because I'd like to see where you're coming up with this wave of the future garbage. No serious company looking at producing a lasting game in the MMO market would EVER agree with you. Period. You think ToR is going to be f2play? I don't think so. You think the next-gen MMO by Blizzard is going to be f2play? I don't think so.

Never heard the "no such thing as a free lunch" addage? Don't fall into the illusion that any of these games are ACTUALLY there to provide you with a service for free. They would go bankrupt in record time if that were true. Use your head.

Subscriptions have, and WILL ALWAYS EXIST for SUCCESSFUL (and unsuccesfful alike) MMO's, because that's the cost of developing and maintaining an MMO. Period.

End.

[QUOTE="snared04"]

Well, you have to define "surviving" first. :) Star Wars Galaxies still "exists" but it is little more than a shadow of a thought of its former self, and I wouldn't categorize that as surviving.

Few MMO's ever get the actual "axe", and that's very company based anyway.

I mean, I would consider (Not commenting on gameplay or quality here, merely player base) Lotro, AO, AoC, etc. all failures at this point because of their lack of market, and in the cases of AO and Lotro, for their share of the market largely coming from their Free 2 play.

SkyWard20

LotRO is a commercial failure because it doesn't meet...your standards? I've always heard it had a steady community.

A product that does not sell is a failure as a product. No other way to describe that, and you can call that a universal standard, not mine. Steadily small, yes.

This is Blizzard's extraordinarily poor attempt at anti-bot measures. You might have noticed it doesn't work on bots, as they run willy nilly in and out of games without a care in the world so yes, it's people like you and me that actually get punished. Thanks Blizzard, way to fail.

As to the actual problem, I usually stay way from it for at least an hour before trying to log back in. The reason is, any and every attempt to log back in extends the temp ban time by X number of minutes, so you don't want to sit there and spam log in attempts, as you're only hurting yourself. Be warned that they can last up to 3 days, so if within 3-4 hours you're still getting the message, I'd email Blizzard and tell them to quit being a douche bag.

EDIT: Is it not the height of hilarity that someone makes a game centered around finding items which is best done by getting as many runs as possible in on very specific monsters, and then implements a system which basically bans them for being too efficiente at it? Lulz. gg Blizzard, better luck next time.

Titan Quest + Expansion

Deus Ex : Invisible War - not nearly as good as the original but worth a playthrough

Fallout 1/2

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscure - only if you're feeling bold. I consider it the ultimate RPG test.