Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-96.252.245.207-20130116060134/@comment-24696651-20140627214150

24.11.114.161 wrote: I'm going to be honest and say i think Oblivion and Morrowind were superior to Skyrim in ALMOST everyway ex ept for graphics and voices, even though Skyrim had too few voices Oblivion litereally had 3 voice actors per race not including special charecters (Martin, Uriel, Mankar Camoran). I'm not quite sure about that. The quests and stories, I agree, were better; you had to work to get to the top in guilds and there were less dungeon crawls. But the levelling up system is in many ways mixed. Although Oblivion's levelling system made a lot of sense and were probably much deeper, the levelling problem was very annoying, as it made some of my characters simply unplayable at without turning down the difficulty (which for me is admittedly rather high). Also, in Oblivion you were locked into your choice from the start when you hadn't had much chance to play the game. While I admit a lot of fighting will be in the confines of a dungeon, a lot of it won't be, and you have yet to experience higher level spells. You are unable to make intelligent decisions about your class, simply because you will not have had enough time, and different situations, to decide what you will want to do with your character. In Skyrim, you can gain new abilities as you realise what sort of weapons and spells you use, and how you use them, and what might be useful. You don't have to level up particular skills to raise particular attributes. Don't get me wrong, the attribute system of strength, willpower, intelligence, et cetera was a much better way of fine tuning, but the mechanics for raising them were just a little ill-thought out.

Even though, as I have said in a previous post, combat in Skyrim was paper thin, at least there is something there. There is some customization and thought going into what spells and weapons you use, even if there is little skill in using them. You might, for instance, go in with a sword and a shock spell against a mage, trying to do so much damage they can't die before they hurt you, and the shock will drain their magicka reserves. Against a warrior, perhaps a few ice spikes to slow them down as you hack of their limbs with an axe. There is more than just matching your damages to their weaknesses; you have spells that combine health damage with other effects so as to more effectively deal with a certain archetype. In Oblivion. while you could switch up your spells, you wouldn't tend to use damage health or stamina because elemental damage was more effective - you'd just throw in a silence spell or a paralyse spell and start killing them (or at least I did). The combat was even more floaty than Skyrim though, and there wasn't even the bashing of the shield to interrupt a power attack, or indeed much point in a power attack. And Morrowind had the clunkiest combat I have ever experienced, with literally no sense of impact.

Is Skyrim perfect? No. Are Morrowind and Oblivion perfect? Again, no. They each have their own respective strengths and weaknesses in certain areas.