I've been on a real Elder Scrolls journey between my last post and this one. I did this:
I think if I want to really dive deep into one of these games it will be Morrowind, eventually.
Absolutely loved everything about it. All the praise it gets is deserved. The world feels truly unique and alien, and way the main narrative is pretty much exclusively conveyed through fragmentary and unreliable accounts is probably the best writing I've seen in a video game. The diagetic fast travel hit the sweet spot for me between convenience and immersion. And it's definitely the best wizard simulator I've ever played.
And then I went on to try Oblivion, which I loved less but is still a very good game. For the most part it's an awkward middle ground between Morrowind and Skyrim and it feels hobbled visually by being an early-ish game for that console generation (the Shivering Isles expansion looks
so much better than the base content!), but there are a lot of worse things for a game to be than the awkward middle ground between two beloved all time classics. It's neither as streamlined as Skyrim or as free form as Morrowind, either narratively or in terms of user experience.
For 99% of players, probably either Skyrim or Morrowind will be better. But there are some areas where that middle ground hits a sweet spot. The guild quests in particular benefit from not being quite as narrative driven Skyrim's series of You Are The Chosen One guild stories, while also being more in depth than Morrowind's series of just doing sidequests with a sudden escalation at the very end. The final Thieves Guild quest in particular feels like a culmination of everything that lead up to that point, and it also is one of the quests that uses the game's setting in the Imperial Capital to the fullest to create the sense that you're pulling off a grand heist. I think I'm the least likely to ever come back to Oblivion, but I'm glad I played through the major questlines. That felt like more than enough though, so I don't want to search around for every last little sidequest.
And that brought me back to Skyrim. One of my big discoveries playing Morrowind (on a very old Mac laptop using OpenMW) and then Oblivion (on a Windows PC, now that I have one of those for the very first time) was that I like these games much better with a mouse and keyboard. And, importantly, it's possible to play it with the unofficial patches that fix the constant bugs that were still in the Switch release. Coming back to Skyrim with a mouse and with keyboard, with the unofficial patches, and also with background knowledge from Morrowind and Oblivion, I'm enjoying it so much more now that I realize the ways its major events are a very direct continuation from the previous games. And I can appreciate how streamlined the levelling system is after two games of planning my actions around self-imposed handicaps to try to get two or three +5s to each stat every level.
One thing I'm surprised by is how fast you level up in Skyrim. I was thinking I'd try using more Illusion magic, but I thought I'd just complete Bleak Falls Barrow before going up to the Magic School and I'm already at Level 6! I kind of already feel like to make it work I'd have to start pretty much putting all my perks into Illusion or nothing will work at all due to enemy level scaling and the way Illusion spells have level caps. I probably should have gone to the magic school before doing any big dungeon, I guess, since only having Fury in there limited my ability to level up Illusion much. (When I could use it, it was very helpful though.) I may have ended up in a situation where I'll have to level it artificially to work because in practical situations it won't have any effect. Not that it's hard to level up Illusion, especially once you get Muffle. I just was surprised by how fast my level shot up in there relative to Morrowind and Oblivion...
