Board Thread:Morrowind/@comment-12277465-20150219060203/@comment-67.170.132.125-20150219171350

I should make something clear -- I'm not talking about graphical fidelity here. I mean the aesthetic. Like I mentioned, I consider Oblivion a far better-looking game than Skyrim, despite Skyrim having higher fidelity, because of the color choice and aesthetic design. While Skyrim does have a number of different environments, they all have the same drab, washed-out look, and that tends to make them all visually boring.

Now, I would prefer a vibrant, alien land, full of exotic plants and massive forests (floating continents are an easy way to imply alienness while maintaining fairly conventional plant life), with enormously varied environments, and vast cities. But none of the games offer that. Morrowind offers alienness, I guess, and Skyrim offers variety (although it's neutered, as I said, by the poor aesthetic choices), but only Oblivion seems to have a visually pleasing environment.

Actually, this extends beyond just visuals. To put it simply, I would like to live in Cyrodiil. (Ignoring for a moment the lack of technology. Let's pretend I have to live in Tamriel.) I would not like to live in (fourth-era) Skyrim, and probably not in Morrowind. Everyone in Skyrim is either a jerk or evil, all the organizations are falling apart, Morrowind blew up, the Empire is dying...basically, ancient death lizards returning to take over is the least depressing thing in the game. It's just an unnecessarily unpleasant environment, whereas Cyrodiil is, while not saccharine, at least something of a nice place to be.

The other thing is the cities. I haven't seen anything to imply that Morrowind's are any better than Skyrim's tiny walled theme parks, leaving Oblivion as the only modern TES game with reasonable settlements. Granted, my main source for Oblivion info at the moment is SorcererDave's Idris playthrough, in which he uses Better Cities and a number of other mods, but the Imperial City is clearly several times the size of Solitude even without it.

I basically feel like Morrowind is going to be like wandering around the Winterhold glaciers in a snowstorm without Clear Skies, where you can't see three feet in front of your face and it's just pointless wasteland as far as the eye can see. Which, as mentioned, is three feet.