Elder Scrolls Fan Debate: Skyrim vs. Morrowind

One thing that has always bothered me about the Elder Scrolls fanbase is how…….divided it is. I’ve seen other scenarios of this, namely in the Star Wars fandom. For example, in the Star Wars fandom, we have the Legends fans, Disney canon fans, Mandalorian fans, Sith fans, Jedi fans, Clone Trooper fans, Clone Wars TV show fans, Old Republic fans, Grey Jedi fans, Palpatine fans, and so on. These overlapping and conflicting fanbases will debate each other to the death on an innumerable amount of topics, such as, “Are the Jedi correct, or are the Sith correct?” “Is the Force good or evil?” “Are the Mandalorians more morally superior to the Jedi, or not?” “Is Palpatine the strongest Sith Lord?” “Is Legends canon better than Disney canon?” “Which Clone Wars TV show is better?” On and on, these fans, who all identify as Star Wars fans, will endlessly debate, argue, and even troll those who disagree with them.

But with the Elder Scrolls fans, the things that split them up aren’t the different factions one can join or the different races that each have their own history, it’s the games themselves. I originally thought that the fans would be divided along faction or racial lines. Like, some will be Altmer fans, others will be Nord fans, others will be fans of the Bretons, Imperials, Khajiit, or Argonians, others are going to be Wood Elf or Dark Elf fans, and some might even be fans of dead races like the Ayleids or the Dwemer. Similarly, when it comes to factions, I thought the fandom would be divided mostly between the Morag Tong/Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves Guild, the Empire, or the Stormcloaks. But while there are small fandoms that pay heed to these races and factions, the most prominent splits in the fandom are mostly divided along the lines of the games. Are you a fan of Morrowind, Daggerfall, Arena, Battlespire, Oblivion, or Skyrim? And as with the different fandoms in Star Wars, the debates can get rather……..heated. I’ve never seen a fanbase for a franchise be so hatefully divided as Elder Scrolls fans. With the Star Wars fans, most of their debates boil down to academic disagreements or good, old-fashioned trolling. But with Elder Scrolls fans, you’re either on one side, or another. The most prominent debate seems to focus around Skyrim players vs. Morrowind players.

And, I’ve gotta say, I’ll be taking the Skyrim players’ side on this one. While I always will have a soft spot in my heart for Oblivion, Skyrim, to me, represents the most refined version of the Elder Scrolls formula, the one that is the best version to compete with other RPG games. Morrowind, however, was a fish in a sea of giants, at a time when Final Fantasy 7 and Knights of the Old Republic were roaming around, Morrowind was trying to hold its own, gaining no superiority in either the Western or Eastern market, with most eastern RPGs following Final Fantasy VII’s example, while KOTOR was the trailblazer for the Western RPG market. It’s quite telling when Oblivion actually becomes a marked departure from many things that Morrowind has done, and Oblivion was where the Elder Scrolls games first began being able to compete on a larger scale with other RPG game series.

Quite frankly, I was a wee lad when me and my friends first played Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and we just got…...bored with it. We played around with it quite a while, then we got bored and went back to KOTOR and Jade Empire. For a game that was as confusing and clunky as Morrowind to be in the same boat with games like KOTOR and Jade Empire and later, Paper Mario 2, Morrowind really didn’t appeal to us that much. The vague directions, the clunky combat system, and the awkward graphics that made Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time look more organic by comparison, we just couldn’t be bothered to stick around to it when other, better games were cluttering our library. Then, I later came back and watched Morrowind’s story on YouTube, and while interesting, it was nowhere near the epic scope of the other RPGs I’ve played, and by that time, I played both Skyrim and Oblivion, as well as KOTOR, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Paper Marios 1 and 2, and the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy. I suppose I was harder to impress by then, but I just couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Morrowind, to me, seemed to be a great game for the time period it was released in, but when compared to other games that came out around the same time, as well as later Elder Scrolls titles, it just wasn’t able to compete.

PART I: THE STORY

The story of Morrowind was interesting to me, with different political factions and living godlike figures ruling over the Dark Elves, but it wasn’t as epic as say, KOTOR’s story, or that of the two following Elder Scrolls games. Even Final Fantasy XIII, as much of a joke that game’s story has been in the eyes of fans, it was more coherent and epic compared to what was going on in Morrowind. I liked Morrowind’s idea of a slow, creeping doom that was about to envelop the Dunmer people, led by a nationalist driven mad with power who wants to enact his own plan for world conquest and apotheosis. As the story unraveled, the plot of Dagoth Ur, the main villain, actually got me excited. This guy was building a giant robot, the Second Numidium, based on a previous model used by a previous ruler to conquer the whole continent, and he’s using the heart of a deity named Lorkhan to power it like a battery. Throw in political strife between the Great Houses and a plague virus, and I was interested to see how far the story would go.

Then the story just…...ends. The main hero, the Nerevarine, a reincarnation of a previous Dark Elf warlord named Lord Nerevar, gets the support of the right people, acquires the appropriate MacGuffins and then slays Dagoth Ur before he gets to using his massive robot powered by the heart of a god to conquer Tamriel. Akulakhan, the Second Numidium that Dagoth Ur was building, gets destroyed, and the Dark Elves’ patron spirit, the Daedric Prince Azura, thanks the Nerevarine for his heroic deeds.

Are you kidding me?

This was the perfect set-up for a massive catastrophe that would have impacted the hero in ways that would have hit home for many players. Dagoth Ur was once a noble man, driven mad by his use of the Profane Tools of Kagrenac, almost as if he was another Isildur from Lord of the Rings, a formerly noble figure whose proximity/use of tools far beyond his scope corrupted him and led to his downfall. Imagine if that culminated with him stomping around Morrowind, attacking the other Great Houses as well as the Empire of Tamriel that had occupied Morrowind, around the same time when said houses were too busy bickering to put up an effective resistance. Imagine if that tragedy shapes Morrowind for years to come, and Dagoth Ur was one step away from victory before the Nerevarine shows up with the Profane Tools to destroy the Heart of Lorkhan, and then everyone sees the Nerevarine coming out of Akulakhan's remains as the victor, slaying Dagoth Ur and the Second Numidium and bringing peace to Morrowind with crowds cheering at the victory.

Now see, THAT would have made for a great story. But that’s not the story that we got. Instead, the big bad gets foiled BEFORE he can even start with his world-conquering plan. The story ended at what should have been the end of the first act.

How can I compare this to other stories? Imagine if, in Star Wars, instead of the Death Star being destroyed at Yavin IV, it gets blown up by a spy triggering the self-destruct right around the time Tarkin and the other officers realize that it’s operational. Imagine if it gets destroyed before even blowing up Alderaan. Or, imagine in KOTOR, if Darth Malak and his Sith fleet get destroyed in that space battle above Taris right before the start of the game, and the rest of the Sith kill each other in a massive power struggle that results in their mystical space factory, the Star Forge, getting destroyed. Or, in Lord of the Rings, imagine a scenario where right after Sauron forges the One Ring of Power, someone tackles him and both he and the ring fall into the fires of Mount Doom, permanently killing him and ending his threat with the destruction of the ring. Or, imagine in Game of Thrones, if King Robert caught Cersei and Jaime Lannister having sex in the first episode around the same time Bran Stark did, and Robert just has the incest twins imprisoned while Bran doesn’t get crippled.

I can also point to this one part in the Nostalgia Critic’s review of Last Action Hero, where Charles Dance’s assassin character was threatening to use a magic movie ticket to pull Hitler, Dracula, and Hannibal Lecter into the same place, which made the Critic elated. Then the assassin character gets killed, and his plan never gets carried out, which pissed off the Critic to no end, with him grumbling that the one good concept of the film never got carried out.

There’s a reason why stories like Star Wars didn’t do something that stupid: they wanted to show the scale of the threat to the heroes and show what it will be like if the bad guys win. In order for the audience or player to intimately understand what the cost of failure is, a taste of said failure had to be served up. In the original Star Wars, we saw this with Princess Leia being forced to watch as her home planet got annihilated by the Death Star. Similarly, in Knights of the Old Republic, which took place 4000 years before the original Star Wars movie, we saw Darth Malak level an entire city-world in a matter of minutes, with his fleet raining down a laser monsoon on the Coruscant-esque city world of Taris, turning an outer rim world that was almost as sophisticated as the Republic homeworld into a flaming ruin. And this was a city-world that the player got intimate with for the first few hours of the game. KOTOR 2’s Darth Nihilus annihilated a Force-sensitive world with his life-drain powers, which indicates how much of a twisted freak that he’s become; you hear of it from people’s talk of the planet Katarr being annihilated, and later, you get a survivor from that world show up on your ship, having been indoctrinated by Darth Nihilus to do his bidding. After defeating this Visas Marr, you can get from her the full story of Nihilus’ assault on Katarr.

Another good example is the game series Halo, where, prior to the first game, Combat Evolved, the enemy force known as the Covenant glassed numerous human worlds and killed most of Master Chief’s Spartan companions, and to top it all off, they chased away a remnant human force to the ass end of space, where they wind up on the eponymous ring-world. The first two levels of that first game even establish the situation of how screwed the good guys are, with the Master Chief having to leave the Pillar of Autumn while watching the Covenant slaughter the ship’s crew, and once they land in Halo, the Chief has to round up human survivors. The humans enter the proximity of this ring-world, in this massive space cruiser, with tons of soldiers getting ready for battle, yet the first two levels has them getting their butts kicked all over the place by the Covenant as their massive warship crashes on Halo. This establishes the Covenant as a legitimate threat.

All of these stories had one thing in common: they were very successful and were considered some of the best in their genre. The first Star Wars film launched a franchise and made a young George Lucas into an American success story. KOTORs 1 and 2 were considered some of the best Star Wars stories outside of the movies. Halo followed Star Wars as another sci-fi franchise that sold millions and became a powerhouse of science fiction and media. It goes to show that if the villain actually had his way at least once in the story, if the heroes get intimate with the price of failure, then the story becomes more intense, and the player/audience will be more invested, because the price of failure for the heroes has already been made concrete to the audience. Granted, in Morrowind, you spend quite some time before you get to Dagoth Ur and his robot construction kit, but still, it felt as if Morrowind was more like a prequel to a better sequel story that never happened. It was quite fitting that the next game, Elder Scrolls Oblivion, washed itself of the Morrowind plot entirely, and was focused on an entirely new realm with entirely new problems.

And where Morrowind failed, Oblivion and Skyrim succeeded: The plot of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was that a Daedra-worshipping cult named the Mythic Dawn assassinated the Emperor of Tamriel and started opening Oblivion Gates all over the Imperial Province of Cyrodiil. The Emperor dies before the player’s eyes, and this causes the Dragonfires in the Temple of the One to give out. This then allows the Mythic Dawn to open Oblivion gates before cities like Kvatch, and you see the full devastation a Daedric invasion can cause with an entire town destroyed by the Daedra. Kvatch serves as the Taris of Oblivion: a show of what will happen to the rest of the countryside if the Champion of Cyrodiil gets lazy. We see people in despair, people questioning their faith in their gods, the city’s castle has been stormed and the Count of Kvatch lies dead in his own home. At that point, the game practically issued a threat to the player: this is what happens to the rest of the country if you fail. All this death, all this suffering, all this despair? This scenario will repeat all over Cyrodiil unless you succeed.

Oblivion learned the lesson of KOTOR and the original Star Wars well: that if you allowed the audience to see what the villains are capable of, if you showed just what kind of chaos they can reap, then they get invested. Then now, the story becomes personal for the audience: we see what can happen if the bad guy succeeds. The image of the Daedra trampling over Kvatch is burned in the minds of the players, and so they go on the main quest of Oblivion with a sense of urgency, thinking that if they don’t succeed, other cities will follow Kvatch to the grave, just as the players in KOTOR know that what happened to Taris will happen again and again all over the galaxy unless Darth Malak is stopped.

And Skyrim does the same thing as well: the first thing we see of the dragons in Skyrim is one of them attacking the city of Helgen in the tutorial and leveling the place. Just as the headsman’s axe is about to fall on the player, a dragon appears, and with a mighty shout, it invokes a storm that drops fireballs all over the city while the dragon itself continues to fly around and destroy things. With that one act, the storytellers got across the fact that these things were not to be trifled with. Visiting Helgen again after the tutorial will basically show it to be a dead husk of a city, filled with nothing but bandits rummaging through the ruins. This also applies to the rest of the game, where the player is hunting dragons to save Skyrim from their threat.

And Skyrim goes a step further from Oblivion: whereareas in Oblivion, the Daedra besiege only Kvatch and are fine with just hanging around outside other cities with their Oblivion gates, the dragons randomly attack almost anywhere, from the wilds and the roads, to even the cities and guild halls. I can’t count the amount of times where I had to defend Morthal, Dawnstar, or even the College of Winterhold from these beasts. They even attacked walled cities like Whiterun, Solitude, and Windhelm. So imagine that a player has taken a liking to the city of Whiterun, to the point where they’ve bought a house there and married someone there. Then imagine their horror when a dragon attacks the town and the citizens scramble for safety. Now it’s personal. A dragon is attacking the player’s home town, which can end with the player losing a merchant or two that they heavily relied upon. The threat of the dragons is so real for the people of Skyrim, that people from any town can die because of them. And that can happen IN-GAME.

Heck, at one point, I was doing the Thieves’ Guild questline in Windhelm. I was there to rob the city blind. Then the city gets attacked by a dragon, and I was like “Oh crap, I have to help defend the city in case the dragon might kill any important people that I might need later!” At one point, in the Dawnguard DLC, when I took the side of the vampire-hunting Dawnguard, I was sent to poke around in a town near Dragon Bridge about clues as to where a Moth Priest went, and the whole affair was a quiet scouting mission. But when I did the mission for the vampires, suddenly, the town got attacked, by TWO high-level dragons, no less, and the mission turned into two vampires saving a town from two powerful dragons who were about to burn everyone into cinders. And at another point, I was going back to Solitude after completing missions for the local Jarl, only to find a dragon attacking the city while the soldiers from the local barracks were dogpiling the damn thing.

With the dragons being a real and constant threat to the actual citizens of the towns and cities the player visits, the player gets a sense of just how threatening these dragons are. Which of course, gets the player to be more motivated for the main plot of dealing with Alduin, the dragon who destroyed Helgen, the dragon who can end the world if he so desired. Some might say that Alduin being a less nuanced villain makes him worse than Dagoth Ur, but the difference between the two is that the former’s minions are an actual threat to both the player and the citizens of Skyrim, in a literal sense, while the latter is more akin to a threat that doesn’t even fully materialize.

And of course, we come to the contention that the Morrowind fans have about the story of Skyrim: that it’s very basic, against a very white-and-black bad guy. If that was the case, then the same can be said of Dagoth Ur. Whatever nobility he had evaporated when he was tempted by Kagrenac's tools. He’s just another Isildur or Gollum, at this point, tempted by another object of power, who just wants to take over the world and be the source of all power. He just wants to be God, which again, is a cliche bad guy thing to do. Unlike the Skyrim Civil War, you can’t take sides, you just have to fight Dagoth. Unlike KOTOR or the Dragonborn DLC, you can’t just take the big bad’s power and use it yourself, the way Revan can retake the Star Forge and the Sith Empire, or how the Dragonborn can use Miraak’s shouts to ride dragons into battle. Heck, at least the defeat of Alduin nets the Dragonborn a cool dragon ally and the ability to call heroes from Sovngarde as an in-game benefit. All the Nerevarine gets is a ring.

The difference between Alduin and Dagoth Ur is that the latter is just another wannabe conqueror who got corrupted by greed and powerful artifacts. That’s a trope that’s far older than me and Elder Scrolls, ever since Tolkien chose to put that in his Lord of the Rings series. Alduin, on the other hand, is more like a force of nature that can talk. All he needs to do is yell, and fire rains down from the sky and burns down whole towns. He doesn’t need to use sacred artifacts or leech off of the heart of a god; he already is one. Dagoth plots from behind the scenes to take over a country, Alduin shows up in your face and destroys a city with mere words. It’s quite obvious that both are cliche, dark as hell, irredeemable bad guys, but at least Alduin plays that role better. One can talk about how Dagoth Ur used to be noble in the past, but Alduin used to do his job in the past as well, which would count as him living up to his responsibility as the world-eater. Both of them just decided to deviate from their proper paths. The only difference is, Alduin does the job better because he actually managed to be a full threat instead of getting wiped out before assaulting the world like Dagoth did.

Sometimes, a more nuanced villain is a better one. Like when people bashed Unicron from the first Transformers movie because he was just a malevolent force of nature with little in the way of a motivation other than greed and hunger. People in the SW community despised the Sith Emperor from Star Wars: The Old Republic for being just another force of nature that’s evil when compared to the nuanced Darth Traya from the previous installment, KOTOR 2. Traya showed the player the faults of both Light and Dark Side in KOTOR 2, while the Sith Emperor was just a Sith version of Unicron who had designs to devour a galaxy.

But the thing is, Dagoth isn’t even half as complex as Darth Traya. Dagoth Ur’s story is one that’s basically set in stone; a good man falling from grace into folly. So in this case, a malevolent force of nature like Alduin is certainly better than the cliche story Dagoth Ur had. Malevolent forces of nature still had their charm: like when Unicron ate a whole planet just because he can, that displayed how ruthless he can be and the scale of the threat that the heroes faced in that first Transformers movie. Likewise, the Reapers from Mass Effect, having ruled the Milky Way Galaxy in secret for millions of years, wipe out all organic life every 50,000 years-that made them seem incredibly advanced and frightening for the setting. Same for the Sith Emperor who sought to destroy the galaxy, because that would make him more powerful, and because he can. As he said: ”There is no death, there is the Force-and I am its master.” Having someone wielding that much power and being a threat spiced up the Old Republic story, especially when there was no shortage of cliche, power-mad villains running around in the game.

Moral of the story: just because Morrowind fans say that the story and the villain were better, doesn’t make it true. Morrowind’s story ends just about as it got the most interesting, and its villain and his backstory and motivations aren’t anything new to someone like me, which sinks the story argument that many Morrowind fans whip out like week-old fish.

PART 2: CLASS SYSTEMS

Or, as I’d like to call it, D&D-itis by Morrowind fanboys.

The biggest contention from Morrowind fans when it comes to gameplay is that Skyrim, in its gameplay and leveling system, is deviating from the classic roots of role-playing gameplay which is based on Dungeons and Dragons. They state that the classic roots of RPGs are based on D&D class systems, which Skyrim does not have. And as such, they attest that Skyrim is not a true RPG, and therefore, not a good game, because it doesn’t adhere to classic Dungeons and Dragons class systems, which is the core of role-playing mechanics and gameplay. The fact that Skyrim had the audacity to not include a class system and give the players freedom to accept bonuses and level skills as they please without the constraints of a class system is one of the major aspects of the Morrowind fans’ hatred for Skyrim.

I’m about to say something revolutionary: Morrowind doesn’t adhere to D&D gameplay either. None of the Elder Scrolls games does. Why? Well, let’s go back to what Dungeons and Dragons is:

IT IS A MULTIPLAYER BOARD GAME WITH DIFFERENT CHARACTERS AND CLASSES COMPLEMENTING EACH OTHER’S WEAKNESSES WITH THEIR STRENGTHS.

The game splits the characters up into different classes to force them to rely on each other and cover up for the fact that each character is flawed. You have melee specialists, ranged specialists, healers, stealthy characters, and they all make up for the fact that each one has limits due to their class.

This is why Morrowind’s class system was constricting, because leveling skills outside your class takes more time. The class system in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was not as constricting, since not only can you level up skills outside your class, but you can also have companions to make up for the skills that you didn’t level up. Same goes for KOTOR’s third-person Shooter successor, Mass Effect. In Elder Scrolls, you have one character at any given time, and outside of pack mules and summons, that’s it. In KOTOR and Mass Effect, the game gives you three characters at any given time. In fact, KOTOR even questions you if you don’t go out with a full party of three, and Mass Effect 3 doesn’t even let you leave non-combat areas unless you have three party members, while the first and second Mass Effect games didn’t even let you leave your ship unless you had three party members, outside of a few missions. This is because they adhere to D&D’s reasons for having class systems in the first place: these games want you to have a balanced party and skill set.

This is why class constraints in Elder Scrolls doesn’t work, because in the end, you’ll just want to master every skill anyways to make up for the fact that you’re alone, while in KOTOR, it’s okay for your main character to not have every skill and feat. It’s expected, even, because of the fact that your party has other playable characters that can make up for that lack of skill. Let’s say the player makes their main character a soldier or a Jedi who is a meathead combat specialist who is only good with rifles and lightsabers, and he or she sucks at almost everything else from spellcasting to tech and security, devoting almost everything to combat. So the player who controls that main character would bring a spellcaster along for healing and destructive spells, as well as a tech specialist, to get through computer systems and open locked doors and containers. That’s why the idea of class systems limiting me didn’t bother me that badly in KOTOR when I figured out how to play the game. I don’t always have to be the tank, because I can bring someone else who does that, while my character can cast healing spells and strike with offensive spells and another character uses ranged attacks and opens locked doors and containers. I can afford to make my character focus on things like spellcasting and not worry about the fact that my character has the endurance of a wet blanket, because they can hide behind other characters who have the armor and stamina to endure heavy punishment while my character hides behind them and uses healing and offensive spells.

But in Elder Scrolls, you don’t have that privilege. You don’t have an entire party to make up for each player’s weaknesses. So it makes perfect sense when Skyrim allowed characters to level up whatever skills they want without making it harder for the skills outside one’s class, because aside from companions who can only serve as pack mules or combat support, and summoned monsters who die after a certain period of time, the main player character is alone. So it makes sense to say, allow the Dovahkiin to master every skill from magic to stealth to melee combat, because they’re all alone, and it’s better for the player to have the freedom to have all those skills and level them easily because they have little in the way of support if they devote themselves to a single path. Companions can die permanently, and summoned creatures can die in all sorts of ways. And in the end, players want characters who can do everything anyways. Class systems in older ES titles made it easy to level up a few skills while made it hard to level up others, which runs counter to the fact that class systems existed in the first place to balance the players and force them to cooperate.

In both Skyrim and Oblivion, I tried to corral both my Dragonborn and my Champion of Cyrodiil into being spellswords, similar to the Jedi, (because in my personal story, she WAS a Jedi who got trapped in Nirn) but in the end, I wound up having them master stealth and ranged attacks along with magic and swordplay, because I wanted to experience everything the game has to offer, and I didn’t have party members with me all the time to make up for the limitations of what I construed as my role-playing class. Nor did I have the patience to start a new game to create a new role. So it just became easier to make my spellsword into a wonder-child who masters all skills, who can be as light as a feather, as fast as the wind, as durable as a rock. Even in Oblivion, where class systems still somewhat existed in a limited sense, I wound up turning my squishy spellsword into a hard-rock gladiator who wrestles with minotaurs and kills people with her bare hands. Heck, when she got thrown into the Shivering Isles dungeons with nothing but rags, she used stealth spells to sneak through then she beat the guard to death with her fists. She even beat quest bosses like Mannimarco, the master necromancer, with her bare hands, while in her jammies. Why? Because she CAN. In the end, the class systems I picked out for her in that game were inconsequential-she just wound up mastering almost everything anyways.

The main reason that classes exist in Dungeons and Dragons is to balance the gameplay and force the players to rely on each other. It’s a teamwork effort more than it is a role-playing effort. It’s not about playing pretend like some costumed weeaboo in an anime convention. It isn’t just about playing the role of a stealth fighter, or a thief, or a spellcaster, or a warrior. It’s about covering the other guys and protecting their sorry backsides when they need help, because when you run across something that your skill set can’t settle, you’ll rely on those other guys to help you. In a similar fashion, the best way to play Mass Effect and KOTOR is to have different characters with different skill sets. For example, in KOTOR, a Force-reliant team would get crushed when they face enemies that resist Force powers and can only be crushed by heavy melee attacks or blasters. A melee-heavy team would get shot to death by ranged attackers, or get bogged down by offensive Force powers that weaken and damage them. A ranged-class team using blasters would get screwed if they fight Dark Jedi enemies who can use the Force to jump up to them and hack them to death, or if they fight against melee fighters with energy shields and heavy armor that soak up blaster fire. Similarly, in Mass Effect, a Biotics-heavy team can send enemy forces flying, but they would be unable to open locked doors and crates full of heavy loot and cash, and same goes for a team full of soldiers who go all Rambo on the enemy. A team full of tech specialists geared to fight robots would be flat-footed when fighting purely biological enemies like the Rachni or the Thorian Creepers.

In Elder Scrolls, for most of the time, YOUR CHARACTER IS ALONE. And in most cases, most Elder Scrolls players want to master every skill anyways, so Skyrim just made it easier for everyone and got rid of the class system that was more suited to games with multiple characters. All Skyrim did was make that process easier, by letting the player level every skill as if it were a preferred skill, and by switching out permanent birth signs that give permanent bonuses with Guardian Stones whose bonuses can be switched at any time. They improved upon the Oblivion formula, they didn’t destroy it.

The Morrowind fans complain that they can’t play a role in Skyrim, but THAT IS PATENTLY FALSE. In Skyrim, as well as Oblivion, to a lesser extent, you can level up every skill you want to use for the role you want to play. Want to play as a thief? Then level up the stealth skills. Want to play as a warrior? Then level up the melee combat skills. Want to play as an archer? Then level up archery. Want to play as a mage? Then level up magic skills. I can roleplay as a magic smith of Daedric weapons who crafts and sells weapons for money. I can roleplay as an assassin who uses vampiric powers to improve my stealth and assassination abilities at night. I can roleplay as a paladin who uses holy magic and weaponry against the undead while defending myself with heavy armor and healing magic. I can roleplay as a Dark Lord who mixes dark magic with melee, combining magic attacks and the summoning of undead minions with an evil, soul-sucking mace or a big “fuck you” fire sword that I forged myself, essentially becoming Sauron without the need to rely on the One Ring. Heck, at one point, I was bored, so I had my character roleplay as a captive of bandits or vampires by having my character sneak into the middle of a bandit or vampire stronghold, only to “escape” and kill each one of them with a dagger. At one point, I even roleplayed as a captive of the Stormcloaks and got myself arrested on purpose so I can fight my way out of the Palace of Kings by myself.

Being able to roleplay as more than one role at a time isn’t a bad thing; it’s a good thing, because it gives the player more freedom. Freedom is the ONE thing that Elder Scrolls has over other titles like KOTOR, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, and the Witcher. And of course, being the entitled brats that they are, the Morrowind fans hate the fact that the player has this freedom rather than celebrate it. Rather than celebrate the expansion of the one thing that separates Elder Scrolls from other role-playing games, they curse Skyrim for expanding it.

Nothing stops me from role-playing in Skyrim or Oblivion. I can roleplay as a spellsword. As a barbarian warrior. As a thief. As an assassin. As a mage. As a smith of powerful magic weapons. And the ability to play as one role or another doesn’t intrude on that. The fact that as a thief, I’ve got good blade skills and spells makes it even better, since it means I can fight my way out if I get caught, or I can use stealth spells like muffle and invisibility to sneak away. The fact that as a warrior, I’ve got a strong knowledge of healing magic, makes my role play better, since it makes me seem more like a paladin from Warcraft who mixes healing magic with heavy armor and melee attacks, and that makes me a better damage sponge, which is what warriors, with their heavy armor and high constitution, are supposed to be. The fact that as a mage, I’ve got good sword skills does not intrude in my roleplaying as a mage, because what’s so bad about a mage that can swing a sword, like the way a Jedi can swing a lightsaber while using the Force? None of my abilities in my other skill trees prevent me from roleplaying as a certain class of character, because the whole aspect of roleplay is to play pretend, and having extra skills on the side doesn’t break that immersion.

I’ll even say something that would send most Morrowind fans into a furor: Final Fantasy XIII is a better D&D-style RPG than Morrowind is. That much-maligned game captures more of what makes D&D such a great system when compared to Morrowind.

Yes, that’s right, I went there.

That’s because of the fact that, despite the obvious limitations of Final Fantasy XIII, with its linear story and direction, the gameplay still consists of different characters with different roles, classes, and skills, all complimenting each other. Some characters are ranged fighters, others are melee, others are magic-users, and others are damage sponges. Of course, you can make it so that each character can master each skill, but they all come with a skill that they specialize in, and you can position them to make up for each others’ shortcomings and make a balanced team that can adapt on the fly and change battle strategies depending on what enemy they’re fighting and what condition the team is in. They can turtle up to defend and heal, they can go all-out with magic and melee attacks, or they can damage the enemy with status ailments to make them softer for a later assault.

Now that is proper D&D-style gameplay. Cooperation between classes to achieve a goal. Not this obsession with playing as a mage or a thief but getting angry that one can easily master skills outside of those classes. That would be bitching. Whereas what FFXIII had in its combat, however, is the actual essence of what D&D as a game is: different classes, with different attributes, each accomplishing something for the team.

And of course, the Morrowind fanboys will try to counter all my points in this topic by saying that in Morrowind, one can level up all the skills anyways, and that picking a class would just give one an advantage when it comes to a certain skill early in the game. To which I say: that makes the class system redundant. Being able to master every single skill, every single discipline, just makes a class system pointless in the end. And it’s not that hard to level up skills in Skyrim in the first place: just get one of the Guardian Stones that favor magic, fighting, or stealth skills, and upgrade skills based on that, since those stones make leveling those skills easier and faster. In my first playthrough, I took the mage stone, then after some time playing, I discovered that my destruction and restoration skills were high because I used them both a lot. In my second playthrough, I maxxed out Conjuration faster than the other magic skills because I instinctively pulled out conjured swords and summoned monsters whenever I get into a fight.

Leveling isn’t that hard. Get the right stone and level the right skills, and you’re good to go. And in the end, the class system I toyed around with in Oblivion wound up being pointless, because I originally wanted a spellsword who has magic and melee, but in the end, I wound up upgrading more than that, and I wound up being a master thief, assassin, and heavy melee combatant as well as a mage. In short, it just became Skyrim with different graphics and story. So yes, all that belly-aching over the lack of a class is pointless in the end, because even in a game with class systems, class becomes pointless. I could have chosen another class entirely, and the result would have been the same.

PART 3: COMBAT

And of course, the actual combat. The part that most people who play Fantasy RPGs look forward to. Where it is made crystal-clear that Morrowind gets utterly eviscerated by Skyrim. And almost any other RPG series, really. I mean, geez, your average JRPG kicks Morrowind in the nads when it comes to combat. Paper Mario can do it, and that’s an RPG for kids. It’s an RPG for ten-year-olds or for parents who want to buy an RPG for their preteen progeny. And it plays better in combat than Morrowind does. And the first Paper Mario came out one year before Morrowind. And yet its combat, while turn-based, has a basic appeal and immersion that Morrowind lacks.

Why is that?

Because Morrowind’s combat is a mix of real-time and dice-roll combat.

Oh, for the love of………

Where do I begin?

I remember someone from Youtube who described the problem best in his words:

“A real-time first person system implies that hit chance should be dictated by your skill as a human with a controller/keyboard & mouse. With this system, you are the character.

A stats and dice-roll based combat system is designed primarily to compensate for limited control and a total lack of visual cues. It's a layer of abstraction between you and the player character.

Mixing them both is what makes the design of the Morrowind combat system objectively bad as they are two diametrically opposing systems.”

-Goodmanperson55

And that just shows the problem with Morrowind combat rather conclusively: they tried to mix two diametrically-opposed combat systems into one clunky, ugly, immersion-breaking hybrid. Morrowind is a game where you have to aim at the enemy and slash at them to hit them with a melee weapon, yet at the same time, it is also a game that uses a dice-roll to determine whether or not you actually hit the enemy.

And that in itself is contradictory.

As the above quote shows, in a real-time melee combat system, the deciding factor as to whether or not you will hit something is based upon how close you are and how close your targeting reticle is to the actual target. Like say, in Halo, where you can use weapons like hammers, swords, and guns with bayonets for melee, the determining factor for you hitting your opponent is how close you are to him and if your targeting reticule is pointed at his body when you slice away. If you’re close enough and you’re targeting him, it connects. If not, then you miss. Whether or not your attack hits is determined by your movements and targeting. Your skills in closing the distance between you and your target and aiming at said target is what determines whether or not you hit said target.

And in a dice-roll combat system, it is a roll that determines whether or not you hit. Like say, in KOTOR, where the characters all automatically lock on and close in on the enemy. What determines whether or not your attacks hit are the dice-rolls that come from your agility and strength modifiers when compared to your target’s. Since your character automatically locks on an enemy, and they automatically move closer to them, movement is taken care of, and the challenge lies in whether or not you upgraded the right stats, and what kind of enemy you’re facing.

When separate, these two systems are balanced systems of combat. One relies on your movement and targeting, the other takes care of those two factors for you and instead relies on your leveling of your character and you bringing the right gear and stats to a fight. But when combined, it makes for a clunky, aberrant mess. So, in Morrowind’s combat system, not only do you have to aim and get close, but even if you got up to the enemy and stabbed them in the chest, that stab can still miss if the dice-roll values for your stab is too low. Even if you stab them up close, with the knife going through their torso.

ARE. YOU. KIDDING ME!?

So, having no official class system is immersion-breaking, but having a sword or knife go through someone’s chest and not even hit isn’t? This has got to be the most immersion-breaking thing I’ve ever seen in an RPG! The Morrowind fans have to be some of the biggest hypocrites I’ve ever seen in gaming. They have such massive double-standards when it comes to immersion that it’s not even funny! And the Morrowind fans’ excuse for this is even more hilarious, when they say that the melee attacks not connecting responds to how in real life, people aren’t that skilled with swords and daggers. I’m sorry, but I was under the impression that if a 78-year-old grandma took a dagger and shoved it into my belly, it’s going to hit, even though she has the knife skills of a geriatric and the speed of a turtle with down syndrome. This isn’t immersive gameplay, guys. It’s the farthest from it. It just goes to show how clunky and dated Morrowind is.

Not even the worst Final Fantasy game is that un-immersive………..

Morrowind’s combat exists in a sad limbo: it’s not a perfect real time combat system like Skyrim, and it’s not even a good dice-roll combat system like with KOTOR. In Skyrim, the game is real time, so when you hit a target at the right range for your weapon, it damages them, no matter how great or small. In KOTOR, they have different attack and defend animations that have the defending character dodging, parrying, and blocking, to show whether or not the attack connected. Characters would jump out of the way, block, or duck to evade sword swings. This made the dice-roll combat immersive, since it showed that when the character missed his attack, it was because the enemy was fast enough to dodge or block the attack. It didn’t break immersion by having a sword strike that clearly connected to the chest miss. The only time that happens is in a glitch. Otherwise, normal combat would show a miss by having the enemy dodge or parry the attack. Same goes for blasters, some characters duck, others evade, and sometimes, blasters handled by people with not enough dexterity would just plain miss the target. They didn’t have a blaster shot connect to the target and read as a miss.

So basically, KOTOR has the dice-roll system perfected, and Skyrim has the real time combat perfected, which leaves Morrowind in a grey area where it does well with neither. It’s an un-immersive version of dice-roll combat, and it’s a clunky and immersion-breaking version of real time combat. Not only are the combat animations clunky, but they miss at times even when they clearly connected. So as someone who played real-time RPGs, turn-based RPGs, and RPGs that were a hybrid between both, I think it’s fair to say that I’m in a good position to judge Morrowind’s combat, and as I said, it’s completely inferior to Skyrim, let alone any other RPG I’ve ever played.

Of course, the Morrowind fans would counter by saying two things: first, that one should just put more points in the right skill set so that your attacks don’t miss, and second, one should use their imagination with the combat to make it feel better. As one Morrowind fan once told me, “Animation doesn't make a game, if you can't fill in the blanks with your imagination, you are severely limiting yourself from enjoying a lot of gaming experiences.” Yes, despite the fact that video games ARE A VISUAL MEDIUM. If imagination is what’s required, I won’t even bother playing a video game, because I’d just grab some old action figures, some pieces of paper, write out names, roles, and stats for each, and I’d have my own tabletop RPG in no time at all. As for the first argument, extra points just means more grinding, which means less time spent on playing the game as it should be-naturally experiencing things as they come along. Which goes to show how bullshit the excuses Morrowind fans throw up are.

If imagination is all that’s required, then video games are completely unnecessary. Heck, I just bought a Darth Vader die-cast figure to go along with my Darth Maul and Boba Fett die-cast figures. I can just write a story and stat sheets for characters represented by other action figures and make Darth Vader the final boss for a dungeon that I created with my storytelling, with Fett and Maul as mini-bosses. I wouldn’t need a video game for that kind of “roleplaying.”

I mean, it’s not the same thing as KOTOR’s love scene with Bastila and a male player character, because Lucasarts back then was a bit conservative (all canonical endings are light side, for example, and homosexual characters in that time weren’t publicly allowed) and wouldn’t allow for sex scenes in video games: it wasn’t Mass Effect, for heaven’s sake, so a respectful black-out as Bastila and the male player character “express their affections” for each other is understandable. It allows you to fill in the blanks whether or not they just exchanged a long, passionate kiss, or if they really did close the door and plow each other. But when it comes to combat and gameplay, trying to shove it up with imagination, especially if it’s a game that’s a first-person RPG, is horrible. That can be excused if it’s a primitive RPG from the SNES days or a Gameboy game that doesn’t have the tech to show battles, but a top-of-the-line PC or Xbox game? Really? Final Fantasy VII didn’t have that problem, so why should a game that came later than that have any such hurdles?

CLOSING THOUGHTS

The sad fact of the matter is, the Morrowind fanboys, despite having love for a game that was good for its time, are blind to the facts. Other games that came out the same time could blow Morrowind out of the water. The following iterations, Oblivion and Skyrim, showed how weak the formula and gameplay of Morrowind was. Morrowind’s story had intrigue, but not enough in terms of style or substance like say, KOTOR or Mass Effect, or at least the epic scale and threat level that Oblivion and Skyrim presented. Like Oblivion and Skyrim, it took plot points from other fantasies, but unlike Oblivion and Skyrim, it didn’t go with its premise the whole way through. And the excuses that Morrowind fans have against Skyrim and Oblivion range from somewhat tolerable complaints (such as the removal of certain skills and mechanics like levitation and spellcrafting) to downright idiotic and asinine ones (such as the lack of role-playing options, which is nowhere near true, or the aggravation over “simplified” dialogue, in lieu of Morrowind’s copy-and-paste text boxes) that don’t even make sense. And the thing is, I’m not just comparing Morrowind to other Elder Scrolls games, but also other RPGs as well, because games are made to compete with each other, especially games of the similar genre, and if I can get something out of Paper Mario, KOTOR, or Mass Effect that I can’t get out of Morrowind, then I’ll obviously flock to those games and choose them over Morrowind.

So for me, it’s not that hard to take the side of the Skyrim-fanboys here. Skyrim follows Mass Effect and Oblivion in role-playing games that are more real-time when it comes to combat, which serves the role of a real-time RPG well. Skyrim’s lack of a class system makes it less restrictive and redundant; making up for the lack of party members, they decided to give the player free reign to carve their own path to greatness. Since unlike KOTOR and Mass Effect, they don’t have dedicated party members of 2-3 that can make up for the shortcoming of the player character, they decided to make it so that the player character has no shortcomings when it comes to leveling up and skills. Skyrim’s main threat was more dynamic than Morrowind’s, and the same can be said of Oblivion’s. Morrowind’s events changed the course of politics for one province. The Oblivion Crisis shaped the next 200 years for all of Tamriel, and Skyrim’s Dragonborn defeating Alduin prevented all of mortalkind from falling into slavery under the dragons.

In contrast, Morrowind’s mix of real-time and dice-roll combat is asinine when compared to games like KOTOR which did it better. The story ends before the most interesting part, the activation of another Numidium, kicks off. The graphics aged horribly, unlike the old Nintendo games like Super Mario World and Zelda Ocarina of Time which still carried a certain charm with them. The class system didn’t help much, the dialogue was mostly bland with no voiceovers, and this is just one year before KOTOR came out with a fully-voiced world and cast, along with its better combat and graphics. For the same systems, (Xbox & PC) no less. While Morrowind’s players constantly taunt and bitch at the Skyrim and Oblivion players, Skyrim and Oblivion continue to gain renown, down to the point where both games have been carried over to the 8th generation of console gaming, even though they debuted in the 7th generation. Down to the point where Skyrim became so popular, the newest Zelda game tried to copy it and Skyrim itself got a Japanese debut complete with a voice dub for Japanese players.

All the Morrowind fans can do is cry foul and whine about the popularity of Skyrim, while they do nothing to show Morrowind’s good side, and the things about Morrowind that they praise (text boxes, imagination in combat, ability to role-play) reveals how dated Morrowind is, or how asinine their complaints are. And no matter how many love letters Bethesda writes to them, from the Dragonborn DLC to the Morrowind DLC in Elder Scrolls Online, the Morrowind fans keep bitching about how it’s not Morrowind. Bethesda went out of its way to make TWO DLC packs about Morrowind as a way to assuage the Morrowind fans’ vitriol, and they got nothing but shit from said Morrowind fans. They took the story of the first Dragonborn, a man who mind-rapes the Elder Scrolls’ equivalent of rogue angels, and placed that in Solstheim to connect it to Morrowind so that Morrowind’s culture would be exposed to the Skyrim fans. They brought Morrowind to ESO to get the massive number of MMO Elder Scrolls players into Morrowind. And in both cases, the Morrowind fans continued to vent at Bethesda, whining about how both gestures of goodwill are useless because it’s not Morrowind, the game.

If they love Morrowind so much, nobody’s stopping them from playing it. Them complaining about how everything isn’t Morrowind rings shallow when Morrowind is readily available to be purchased online, so if they don’t like games that aren’t Morrowind, nothing’s stopping them from playing Morrowind. Or working with modders for Oblivion and Skyrim to recreate Morrowind in those games with those games’ graphics and game engines. Instead of whining about things, they can use that energy to affect the change they desire, by supporting Morrowind mods for Skyrim or Oblivion. But in the end, they choose not to focus most of their energies there; rather, they focus most of it on complaining about not having something that they actually can have and play anytime they want.

And that, dear friends, is the real tragedy of it all, when it comes to the debate between Skyrim and Morrowind.