Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-3547390-20180430135219

Exactly; it will be nice to be able to do things without dealing with constant noise.

I can confirm both do indeed offer great opportunities for exploration (I noticed your lack of Skyrim being mentioned, which makes sense, as I hear that one is highly scripted and locks you off areas until you level up for them). Both are very different animals; they belong in the same world, but behave so differently from each other. Morrowind is considered to be the best title, while Oblivion is sorta the black sheep people love to hate. It all depends on what you are looking for, but exploration is definitely prevalent in both. Due to the design, I feel it is a lot more exploration friendly than Daggerfall, where you pretty much avoided the above-ground world beyond going to a generic town.

Morrowind is good for its overworld exploration. It pretty much is famous for having a bunch of distinct areas; imagine the game like a theme park where there are plenty of unique vistas to check out. The biggest annoyance is the sheer amount of reading you need to do; there is no way of knowing when people will say something new, so expect to dig through a lot of the same dialog over and over. If you are like me and like exploring a town, that will pretty much tire you out; it kills all motivation after a few towns worth of that. If you enjoy walking, Morrowind is a great title, since that game is pretty much infamous for also not offering any ways of jumping from place to place quickly beyond a few "in-world" methods, which I rarely bothered with. It is also pretty well known for its horrendous journal system, it is very easy to get a bunch of quests buried on top of each other. One thing to embrace is the "freedom" of the game; you really get a full world to play with. That means it is VERY easy to break; it is quite difficult to not end up overpowered in some way, and half the skills are broken anyway.

I highly prefer Oblivion. There is some reading, but next to none in the vanilla game, most reading just comes when people add custom dialog. If the dialog is going to be the same, it generally is greyed out to warn you, and almost every NPC has something to say. Morrowind has a more "free" system, but it becomes a mess to dig through, and it all feels like the same thing over and over. You can still walk, the world is actually a lot bigger than Morrowind's, but most people will complain about how "small" it is because they use fast travel. Essentially, you can travel anywhere you wish at any time; really breaks immersion in my eyes. I tested it out when experimenting with some stuff, I was shocked how simple it made things; I highly prefer the fun of walking everywhere. Quests are a lot easier to manage, there is an arrow that can point you to where to go next, but you can set it to some other quest and pretend it isn't there. The game is more "balanced", there is no such thing as really getting overpowered, and it is pretty easy to get underpowered. Oblivion is a great game if you like pain. Unlike Morrowind, it isn't just a game of wack-a-mole, so it all depends on your abilities (think FPS gameplay) as opposed to dice rolls. Morrowind; the game gets VERY easy if you steal, which the game promotes fro the beginning, since things can cost thousands of gold and easily give you the money for constant training. Oblivion, you will be scrounging for pennies, and stealing is a lot rougher. Oblivion is a lot harder of a game than Morrowind; but it applies a lot more to your abilities than those of the skills, which mostly just augment you. I should mention I touched both on maximum difficulty, a lot harder than the "intended" experience. If you know what you are doing, Morrowind gets very simple, even with such a setting, so difficulty changes aren't too drastic. Oblivion? Normal versus maximum difficulty is an entirely different experience, I tried normal for reference, and it feels like a joke in comparison. Maximum difficulty is a nightmare; the world is against you and seeks to make you a corpse.

Morrowind is also very static, what you see in one game will be like that in future games, so you can easily know what to expect. Oblivion is a lot more unpredictable; things pretty much live their own lives. The insane stuff I have had happen in Oblivion is stuff that would never have happened in Morrowind, since the game is far more limited. Morrowind's modding community is mostly "a new building here, a new NPC here". Oblivion can do that, but it can also offer entirely new systems or ways of playing the game, on top of a highly unstable engine. Oh, that is a bit of a flaw of Oblivion, expect crashes. Morrowind is far more stable in that avenue, I never really crashed in that game, while Oblivion has it happen quite frequently (I have a mod that pretty much automatically saves every 5 seconds, so that gives you an idea of how shaky it can be). Oblivion is a bit less "free" however. Morrowind, you could sleep in any bed and kill any NPC (which does mean you can break quests VERY easily, but that is the expense for a free world). Oblivion, you can kill most NPCs, but some related to quests just will be rendered momentarily unconscious. If someone owns a bed, you can't sleep in it, meaning inns are far more important unless you can find some campsite.

If you like exploration, Oblivion can offer a lot, especially since it can be rather unpredictable and random. You have a decent idea of what to expect, but things change up, and I have had entire towns be massacred or go on a mission to kill bandits only to find a naked cat person charged into the middle of the area and slaughtered most of them. Morrowind versus Oblivion is pretty much an argument of length versus depth. Would you rather a decent sized valley filled with a bunch of tiny puddles? Or would you rather an expansive forest filled with some moderate sized lakes? Basically, in Morrowind, dungeons are pretty short linear romps; you will be disappointed if you actually like dungeon delving. Oblivion is a lot more satisfying in such an avenue, and actually makes it fun, unlike Daggerfall. Not to mention there are far more respawning enemies, which makes for a continual living world (note respawning in this case is good, mainly because it is a RPG and not a FPS); Morrowind will be a lot safer. Granted, I customized my Oblivion setup as I wished to make things even more chaotic; NPCs randomly decide to steal my loot and other such devious things, making it quite hard to keep any consistent funds.

The biggest irony is that I find myself liking a mage role in Oblivion; in Morrowind it was so monumentally frustrating to become depressing. The system was a mess; it still can be in Oblivion, but there are nice ways to bind things to hotkeys so you don't need to dig through lists. Stealth is far better in Oblivion than Morrowind; the latter is pretty much a joke. On the other hand, breaking into buildings was quite fun in Morrowind as it was all based on timing it when others weren't around. In Oblivion, breaking into houses pretty much will always be detected no matter what you do; you will find you just use stealth to avoid enemies as opposed to using it to rob from a town, since the latter is against you. Between that and melee being near useless on max difficulty due to enemies killing you in 2-3 hits, magic is better to gravitate towards.

I know what you mean, it was a very odd feeling to actually try out Oblivion. I had been hyped on it, but was expecting it to fall short, especially after my annoyances with the first three Elder Scrolls game. Morrowind is tolerable, I sunk a lot of hours into it in truth and explored about half of the world on foot, but it was also very good at making me dread seeing any new places due to how much of a slog it could be.

It is a rather odd thing. People just don't realize what is going on around them, or don't care, and it gets rather depressing.

I wonder if the creator of Abu looks like that. Would be interesting if he was always shirtless, hairy, and angry.

What is the point of life if not to live for passions? And one of the best passions is to explore, to experience, and to have fun. Even in the horrible games I play, I often get stories out of them, ones which definitely are nice to reflect back on. That is what adventuring is about. Speaking of adventures, I got another one done today, a bit bigger than normal. I think it might be our first official "mod", even though it is essentially just such due to having a bunch of graphics changes, including menus. We have a whole new page just for it due to those menu changes, Mobsters On Parade 2.

Ouch, that is quite depressing indeed. Latin reminds me of symphonic metal, most of it ends up being a joke due to an over-reliance on choirs yelling Latin words. It can be useful at certain times, but there is definitely a point where you start realizing that is essentially all they are depending on. Or, you know, the fact that most are just pop bands. Tarja-era Nightwish was a good example of a better band, it is a shame what happened after she left.

That essentially is how I do things. I tend to just let myself ramble and let the words convey what I feel. I write long enough paragraphs without needing to think about each and every word. If I stop and think about it, I believe my biggest weakness is that I tend to repeat the same thing ad-nausea. It seems that I generally get compliments about my "writing" ability, which I still find odd, since I don't put much effort into it. There is no thesaurus beside me as I write, nor is there a need to stop and think about another "use-case" for the words I pick. This is just how I naturally write, shrugs.