BigBallinStalin wrote:I've never played the earlier ones.
In the last two ES games, the options are diverse, as far as storyline goes; however, each sub-quest/story is very linear. It's almost always go to A, kill B and/or pick up C, then return. Then, there's a really weak story to carry that sequence through.
There's no real consequences either. If you join the Legion, you can walk around the Stormcloak cities, and everything is cool. That makes no sense. There's no back-stabbings, being double-crossed, or anything really exciting happening (one minor exception to only one part in the Thieves' Guild story, but the rest was lame sauce). It's very one-way and anticipated stories. There's also missions where you're suppose to sneak around, but you can just stand up, destroy everyone, and hey, no one's angry, your boss is satisfied either way, and everything is happy-go-lucky again. Makes no sense.
Your actions are detached from the game. No matter what and nearly always, regardless of your actions the game still continues as if you have no impact on the characters because the game still sticks to its linear stories and linear sub-stories. If my actions don't matter, then I can't feel any attachment to the game.
Fun example, that dwemer city Marketh (or whatever it's call in the West). You can enter the Wizard's museum, go in further, kill the freakin' guards, murder Captain Whoever, and come out smelling squeaky clean. Jarl Whatever is like "oh, hello there! blah blah blah!" and the Wizard says, "Gee, thanks for finding that Thing for me!"
Haha, wat. There should be trade-offs and consequences. If you do X, Y, and Z, then sorry you can't do these other sub-quests because you annoyed Mr. Pink, Blue, and Green.
And the sneaking in that game is ridiculous. You can just jump behind someone, enter sneak mode, and WHOA HO HO time to steal stuff! That's not difficult, which reminds me:
This game is too easy past level 15-20. Even on Master mode, it's no big deal, and you don't need to stock up on potions and all that crap. The hardest opponent was this mage who challenges you because he moved around like a monkey on PCP. It was surprisingly difficult. Why not make a room where you have 6 of those freaks causing you trouble?
Those are all valid complaints about the series.
Even in Morrowind, which is in my opinion the best of them, the questlines are relatively straight forward, with little to no twists. There are a few instances of your actions having consequences, such as by doing a certain quest for the fighter's guild, you are then blocked from joining the thieves guild, but only if you aren't already part of the thieve's guild. Also, with the three great houses, you can only join one of them, once you join one, the members of the other two will generally not like you much. One good thing about the quests though is that you can choose if you want to do one or not, sometimes at least. Since you have multiple quest givers for most factions, you can simply go to a new questgiver if the current one gives you a quest that you or your character would not want to do.
Other than that, your actions are still pretty generally unattached to the game. But I would say that the setting and story make up for it in this one. Unlike OB and SK, it starts off slow, treating you as a normal person. Instead of right off the bat people telling you that you are the only one who can shut down the OB gates, or you are the dovakhiin, they look at you like you're a nobody, because you are. Not until you get like 6 or 7 quests into the MQ is it revealed that you are more than meets the eye. Hell, the first time you meet your main contact for the MQ, you are told that you are too green, he can't trust you to send you out into the field, and that you need a cover identity. He sends you out to find some guild work, or to go out and just find trouble. Basically he's saying go gain some levels and come back when you're more powerful so I don't have to worry about sending you out to your death.
Unfortunately though, Morrowind is even worse about being too easy past a certain level. But it's also much harder at the beginning of the game than either of its 2 predecessors. This is due to an absence of level scaling, for the most part. There are certain creatures that scale along with you, along with the random loot, but other than that, most people and things are static. That bandit you saw in some cave back at level 1 who had on basic armor? If you leave him be, come back to that cave at level 20, he's still going to be in the same spot with the same armor and same weapons. No bandits running around in extremely rare glass or daedric armor. Hell, there in the vanilla game, there was only 1 complete set of daedric armor, and that's being worn by the oldest wizard alive, who is a fucking badass in the game. Other than that, you have to search far and wide just to find an almost complete set of it. As for glass armor, there is only one place where you can even buy/find the glass gauntlets.
Anyway, there's much more I'd like to say, but I'm about to leave for an awesome 12 hour round trip drive to pick up my nephews, so I need to get off of here. But you should definitely give Morrowind a try. If you have a computer that can run Oblivion, then you can make Morrowind look better than Oblivion with mods. Not to mention add in so much new content that you won't even recognize the game any more. It can be hard to get into after playing the 2 newer ones, but it's well worth it. I would recommend perusing
this page for more information.