bigpotato5

No I get you. I recognized I may have been generalizing your comments and it seems like I did, so I apologize. I was kinda trying to express my own thoughts rather than a direct response to your comments so you could kinda get a sense of where I was coming from. But now I understand what you're saying much better as well. I can see how if you're more into role-playing it would make sense that Morrowind is much better. Oblivion is certainly a much more combat focused game than Morrowind. That style is what brought me into the TES series and its something I really enjoyed, so the shift in gameplay focus going back in time for me was probably just as discomposing as it was going forward in time for you. Perhaps I am assuming too much again, but I'm guessing you played Morrowind (or Daggerfall) before Oblivion. Your experience in that game colored your expectations of what a TES game should be, as my experience with oblivion did to me. You know, now that I think about it, I've never actually seriously gotten into a "role" in a role=playing game, since the "rpg's" i play usually have more of a focus on combat (probably reflects my roots as a console gamer). Maybe I'll start again in morrowind and try to approach it in that way instead of the way i'd approach oblivion and see if my experience improves.

On the one hand, I agree with you and I can (theoretically at least) see the reason why that's all important. It would certainly suggest that the game is a more robust experience as a result of these elements. But in practice, having more spells, more armor slots, more skills... notice how almost all of that is fundamentally tied to combat. In fact, combat isn't just fundamental, it's one of the few elements of the game that is (almost) completely unavoidable. You could feasibly go through the game without utilizing any given skill, even completely ignoring the story and the lore and what have you. But at some point you're going to enter a dungeon and something in that dungeon will inevitably want to "showcase the combat system" at you. (Before you tell me you could feasibly also go through morrowind without fighting either, you're right, but lets be real, that will very rarely if ever be the case). I may be generalizing your argument here so I apologize if that's so, but I get the feeling that fans of morrowind are trying to tell me that the complexity and depth of the combat makes up for it's flaw of being clunky/unwieldy and a general pain to play. But think about it this way: Say you are making an apple pie but you don't necessarily have the freshest apples. You could potentially use the right combination of spices and sweetener to draw attention away from the apple flavor. Even though the apples are bland, everything else kinda fills in what the apples lacks. But if you are using rotten apples, I'd say you'd be hard-pressed to compensate for the resulting flavor, especially since the apple is such a key ingredient. Similarly, I feel like Morrowind's combat system isn't just "bland", it's "rotten". It doesn't matter that there are this many varieties of spear or that many spells. If it isn't fun to use spears nor spells, adding variety and complexity doesn't help. This doesn't make Morrowind a bad game, because there is obviously so much more to the world than combat. But I think that Morrowind fans downplay the importance of combat in the game. What's the point of collecting the best armor if not for combat? What is the point of acquiring wealth in the game if not to purchase items which effect combat? I'm not trying to hate on your favorite game if you happen to share a different opinion than I do, I'm just giving my 2 cents.

So I was introduced to TES with Oblivion. I constantly hear people say Morrowind is the better "RPG experience" and I guess that means something different to everyone who says it. But I am having trouble getting engaged in the experience. Basically, my problem is that I find the combat to be horrendous, as you can probably tell from the topic title. I know what you're thinking, you've probably seen this topic many times before. But hear me out. Most mods I see to correct this issue try to make combat more like Oblivion's. The most common argument I hear against this from purists is that Morrowind's combat shouldn't be based on player skill but character skill, while oblivion reduces the depth of the combat by streamlining it. But perhaps more importantly, Morrowind's engine was not built to be like oblivion, so the mods won't really ever be able to emulate oblivion's more visceral style. But this doesn't get to the root of the problem that the illusion of real time combat mixed with the quirks of RPG's is a clunky and overall unsatisfying exercise in "rolling dice", as they say. But plenty of older RPG's use a dice roll system and their combat systems don't get nearly as much hate as Morrowind does for it's combat. This leads me to believe that there is a potential fix to the problem which takes morrowind's combat further from oblivion's rather than closer. Would it therefore be possible to create a mod which turns Morrowind into a TURN-BASED rpg, where trading blows, casting spells and movement in general are all done in turns rather than in real time? I'd imagine it would be something like the VATS system in Fallout 3 except in first person all the time, and everything including movement is done through menus. The system would activate any time combat begins (like when combat music would start playing) and the usual animations would play after actions are selected from a menu rather than a direct press of a button. I feel like a system like this would lend itself much better to the way morrowind is set up and wouldn't "betray" it's RPG roots. It would also give the player a more intuitive way of completely utilizing the tools at his disposal rather than clunkily sifting though both menus in the middle of a real time fight. It would rid morrowind of any pretenses to the action game genre which it's real time combat certainly suggests. Perhaps I am just an ignorant fool with no understanding of how mods actually work (this is true) and a bad understanding about what makes a game mechanic engaging, or maybe my dreams have come true and there is already a mod which does this. Regardless, I'd like to hear your opinions, so please share.