Some things I want from morrowind. 1. Natural break points in the main story: In oblivion's main quest you are constantly faced with an imminent danger that makes it feel weird to do side quests in stead of the main story. Morrowind provides a point where your task is to join guilds and do some adventuring, which is a natural point to take a break from being the chosen one to save the world from Mehrunes-Dagon/alduin/dagoth-ur. 2. Very open ended quests: There was one quest in Morrowind where you were tasked by the Archmage of the mage's guild to find out what happened to the dwemer. You were given some minor leads but you had to figure some things out on your own. I want at least one quest like this in tes6 and I think with modern tech and budgets it could be made much better with more permissive quest logic allowing for many ways to complete. 3. A hard to traverse bad lands: In morrowind there are good fast travel options between major settlements on the island but there is a lot of uninhabited area where you have to walk places. These expeditions are a big deal early in the game on a first playthrough. You have to consciously stock up on consumables before you head out.
My favourite thing about the disappearance of the dwemer quest is it's a completely unserious task. You are being sent to the store to buy elbow grease. The Archmage is giving this to you to get you to fuck off. The fact you actually can put together a working theory is icing on the cake.
I like quests that task you to find something and give you a lead but still let you use any other of the same item. For example when you need to return dwemer artifacts for the Thieves Guild. You could get them from the guy that took them, or you could find the equivalents from a dwemer tomb.
Morrowind's magic system is bonkers. I love having a Constant Effect slow fall enchantment of 1 point, so that I never have to worry about fall damage again, and it doesn't effect the rate I fall either. I have hot keys set up to swap rings so I can Levitate, I have rings that give me Fatigue regen. The game has sooooo many options. It's amazing. I struggled to play Morrowind and gave up several times, until something just clicked. Now I'm a badass Argonian Neraverine and nobody can stop me! I don't think Bethesda will EVER live up to our expectations and it'll fall short somewhat at this point. It'll still be fun, like Skyrim, but I believe the gameplay elements like Morrowind and Oblivion have will be sorely lacking :( Fingers crossed though! Elder Scrolls is my favourite game franchise and I'd hate to see it suck :(
There is a multiple mark mod, and there are propylon indices for teleportation around dunmer strongholds. I agree completely with you and would like both levitation and spears in TES6.
The biggest pro for Morrowind (imho) was the ability to make decisions which locked you out of factions or made the main quest difficult or impossible to complete. Allow players to fail. Its a game. Morrowind did a fantastic job of providing magical utility items to non-mages. The Mantle of Woe is severely OP. If you can use the Boots of Blinding Speed, you can use the same trick to equip the Mantle of Woe & gain a 5X mana boost. Sure, it gives you sun damage. Still, 5X mana in any and every interior space is insane. I'd love to see cursed items with hidden flags the player can't detect until the item is used. You can make scrolls in Morrowind, btw. Enchant a blank piece of parchment. Voila. Embedded and limited fast travel was/is great in Morrowind. You can plan your routes around particular hubs. Recall from home to the nearest temple. Run to the mages guild or silt strider and travel to the next leg of your journey, then hoof it the remaining distance. Personally, I liked fortifying speed & acrobatics and leaping across the map like the Hulk. Cliff racers? Just damage their speed so they can't keep pace rather than fighting all 20 billion of them.
Imo, one of the most important lessons is to reduce how many quests have you go into dungeons as Skyrim did. Morrowind had a memorable quest where you talk someone into paying their debts, and they decide to become a religious monk. Your reputation goes up from this simple quest and it expands the world quite a bit to see how the locals respect their religion. Skyrim probably would have made the quest you need to go to this dungeon to get an item so they can pay off their debts with it and would have been just like any other quest.
Couple of comments on both levitation and mark/recall. First, recall becomes much more powerful when used in tandem with the intervention spells. Those already fill the role of the plates you say, as there's usually a temple of either cult to teleport to in most cities of the game. And then you can use recall for going back to hard to reach places like the last dungeon you left or somewhere remote with no other travel option (like the Urshilaku camp during MQ). Theres also the stronghold index system and I wish there's an equivalent of that too. On levitation, I strongly believe it will not make a return, because iirc it's not in Oblivion or Skyrim because of technical limitations, like you commented on another video, but because of the design problem it creates: understandably it makes level design much harder to do, since flying around trivialises obstacles and dangers the devs would want to use to make places more interesting to explore. It sucks that they got rid of it but I get it. Jumping/running as skills should make a comeback tho, jumping should he easier to balance and personally I find it more fun than flying around. (Yes I prefer the jump spell to levitation in Morrowind)
@@shergoidold I get your comments about levitation, you are right. Just so an old man can keep his dream alive, im going to tell myself they’ll add it with a really high magicka cost and skill requirement and call it good.
I think you're both wrong about levitation. Think for a moment. Skyrim introduced Dragons. Oblivion had Imps it's easy to design flying enemies (Morrowind itself had cliff racers, but they were unfortunately set too low, making them fight ground players). Remember, it was Tribunal, not Oblivion, that cut levitation. Levitation requires "Open Cities," aka cities that aren't a separate cell from the world. It is a technical limitation. You are correct about Mark and recall. It was outright said in an interview that they didn't want the hard work of designing quests with it in mind
Levitation went away because Bethesda wanted to make more complex cities. Remember, levitation didn't work in Tribunal, which is where they started making Cities seperate cells from the outside world. Unless the next Elder Scrolls has less complex cities or the engine can now handle putting them in the outside world, levitation isn't coming back. 7:55 I think Scrolls and Staves should level Enchanting
The open cities mod for Skyrim worked fine for me with my mid laptop back in 2016, I think if they really wanted to make it work, open cities are totally viable.
@@paulchavez3039 You're forgetting that Skyrim was released for consoles in 2011. Remember, Obsidian using the same engine had to split New Vegas into sections because it would be too intensive otherwise
If you look at major cities like New Atlantis and Akila in Starfield, you’ll see they’ve already solved this problem. They’ve now added the dimension of interesting rooftops and staggering the height of buildings so that it’s interesting to explore even if you’re using the boost pack.
Might and Magic has a similar spell to your Mark and Recall idea called Lloyd's Beacon. You can set 5 places to instantly travel to. However, they go away after a few weeks based on your skill point amount. I would greatly prefer how yours is more permanent.
@@TheStolken plus they could come up with a name better than Lloyd. Something that sounds ancient and powerful, like Mordekainen. Lloyd is an IT guy who likes to wear flannel shirts every day
Maybe I'm wrong, but from memory, in Morrowind athletics skill also increased how steep of a slope you could run up. That and stacking spell effects was great.
the three icarian flight spells can be crazy useful in the main quest when you need to visit red mountain and the ash plains. Slowfall is your friend. Anyone can cast low level slow fall for a few seconds. Also lower level jump spells paired with lower level slowfall and levitate can really change early game travel. Mark and recall and the two intervention spells can get you anywhere in minutes without too much character investment Not to mention all the crazy loot you could find hidden above and below. When they added jetpacks to fallout 4 I was excited for more verticality in the game design but I feel like they forgot it.
I feel like horses (or similar) could be useful for the fast travel issue. A tiered system like Oblivion of increasing value horses, except instead of manual riding, make it where you can depart from a town on horseback and fast travel to known areas within a certain radius, with distance increasing with horse tier. Combine it with a network of interlocked fast travel systems (teleports, wagons, boats, whatever fits) and you could, if you invest in a good horse, get around easily. The trade-off being training, housing, and consumables you could buy with the same gold.
Morrowind is more effective at pulling you into it's world than it's predecessors or sequels. Pure atmospheric art. And its whole world is handcrafted, every item hand-placed, all terrain molded by an actual human. No procedural generation whatsoever.
I went into Morrowind knowing nothing except that the magic was cool, and it sure was. I travelled in style, I could cook up levetstion potions and chug 5 or 6 and then blast off like Goku to wherever I was going
Pre Watch comment: I predict ES6 will be the worse game in the series. There's a clear, defined, trajectory the games are going. Morrowind was pretty hardcore, Oblivion was medium core, Skyrim was soft core.... There's no way they re-introduce attributes, I'm just not that optimistic. If they don't have attributes I won't play it.
For travel, I think it should be costly. Something that becomes trivial late game, but a key decision maker well into most of mid game. I've been using morrowind economy and difficulty mods, and it made it that I still need to weigh the risks of walking over taking a boat or silt strider and spending my precious drakes I could spend on more potions, scrolls or trainers.
skyrim has some powerful consumables, most of its master level spells are found at vendors as scrolls even at low character levels. It's nothing compared to a cool mobility spell in morrowind but it's still mass aoe paralysis or mass aoe damage spells. normal difficulty skyrim is just so easy that you'd rather sell all consumables or hoard them forever
Yeah, consumables should always be far more powerful than standard spells otherwise they become 0,5 weighing gold in your inventory and you never use them and if they would raise skills faster than regular spellcasting i would say that's awesome design and incentive for players to actually use them and make it fun. This is not even a TES problem but in every rpg where they are valued far higher in gold than their actual use ingame. Also dungeons should have inaccessible places or disadvantages where a simple scroll would make a night and day kind of difference making consumables far more interesting and involving. Limited fast travel options with good lore and quest design so good you can play it with old school journal (morrowind style) without map markers and without questline indicator would be bonkers. Ofcourse for more modern audience you could add toggleable on/off indicators for assist but for standard option i would like the game not to be too stupified.
Also i think almsvi and divine intervention should not be spammable spells but to actually require you to devote yourself to those higher beings to receive their blessings from their shrines first and when in need you could actually use it (if they hear you) when in need and they would intervene. The spells itself were super fun on first playthrough in morrowind and made world exploring so much more joyful and you would approach different positions in the world from so many different locations and you would always find some meaningful questing and places whereever you went.
At least bring back hand placed/non-scaling loot. I don't mind certain random items you come across being scaled to you, but something like, say, a holy relic or what have you should just be *strong* regardless of when you find them.
Maybe important magic items scale with you even after being acquired? Just so that it doesn't trivialize the combat while also not falling off at higher levels.
I do hope ES6 has attributes, but honestly I don't like how valuable they are in Morrowind. It kinda has the opposite balance of Oblivion. Those will be for the next part of the series. I think Morrowind really shined over other games in the series with its travel, consumables, cool loot, and movement progression.
@@theoldknight85 Yes, that is true, Morrowind offered so much freedom with the various systems. Oblivion had movement progression as well, not as much as morrowind, but there's a huge difference in movement between a lvl1 character and a late game character with high speed/strength/athletics/acrobatics. I just think an attribute system is the quintessential mechanic of an RPG game. Whether its KOTOR, early ES games, Fallout Games, JRPG games, POE, etc. Removing Attributes makes it an action/adventure game imo. I appreciate your videos and your interaction in the comments. There's not many people these days that I can banter with about Oblivion lol Looking forward to the next video.
You MIGHT be correct about travel as progression, I'd argue that is a case of people saying they don't want something because it adds friction but ultimately enjoying the game more because it is there. However, people like moving fast and jumping high. I think most people know they'd enjoy a double jump and being able to sprint longer.
I don't think masses don't like movement as progression. They don't like being awfully slow, which is the reason most of them hated the start of Morrowind. Oblivion did a good job making everyone reasonably fast no matter the character, then you could become way faster and jump much higher if you invested in it. That should be a good starting point for implementing movement as progression in ES6.
Some things I want from morrowind.
1. Natural break points in the main story: In oblivion's main quest you are constantly faced with an imminent danger that makes it feel weird to do side quests in stead of the main story. Morrowind provides a point where your task is to join guilds and do some adventuring, which is a natural point to take a break from being the chosen one to save the world from Mehrunes-Dagon/alduin/dagoth-ur.
2. Very open ended quests: There was one quest in Morrowind where you were tasked by the Archmage of the mage's guild to find out what happened to the dwemer. You were given some minor leads but you had to figure some things out on your own. I want at least one quest like this in tes6 and I think with modern tech and budgets it could be made much better with more permissive quest logic allowing for many ways to complete.
3. A hard to traverse bad lands: In morrowind there are good fast travel options between major settlements on the island but there is a lot of uninhabited area where you have to walk places. These expeditions are a big deal early in the game on a first playthrough. You have to consciously stock up on consumables before you head out.
oblivion mq does have 2 big break points, the argonian lady that studies commentaries and later blood of the daedra
Mehrunes Dagon
My favourite thing about the disappearance of the dwemer quest is it's a completely unserious task. You are being sent to the store to buy elbow grease. The Archmage is giving this to you to get you to fuck off.
The fact you actually can put together a working theory is icing on the cake.
@@opheliagrey2597 it's like asking someone to solve the fermi paradox
I like quests that task you to find something and give you a lead but still let you use any other of the same item.
For example when you need to return dwemer artifacts for the Thieves Guild. You could get them from the guy that took them, or you could find the equivalents from a dwemer tomb.
Morrowind's magic system is bonkers. I love having a Constant Effect slow fall enchantment of 1 point, so that I never have to worry about fall damage again, and it doesn't effect the rate I fall either. I have hot keys set up to swap rings so I can Levitate, I have rings that give me Fatigue regen. The game has sooooo many options. It's amazing. I struggled to play Morrowind and gave up several times, until something just clicked. Now I'm a badass Argonian Neraverine and nobody can stop me!
I don't think Bethesda will EVER live up to our expectations and it'll fall short somewhat at this point. It'll still be fun, like Skyrim, but I believe the gameplay elements like Morrowind and Oblivion have will be sorely lacking :( Fingers crossed though! Elder Scrolls is my favourite game franchise and I'd hate to see it suck :(
The speed and jump distance you could reach as a high level character werewolf in the Bloodmoon expansion was brilliant.
There is a multiple mark mod, and there are propylon indices for teleportation around dunmer strongholds.
I agree completely with you and would like both levitation and spears in TES6.
The biggest pro for Morrowind (imho) was the ability to make decisions which locked you out of factions or made the main quest difficult or impossible to complete. Allow players to fail. Its a game.
Morrowind did a fantastic job of providing magical utility items to non-mages.
The Mantle of Woe is severely OP. If you can use the Boots of Blinding Speed, you can use the same trick to equip the Mantle of Woe & gain a 5X mana boost. Sure, it gives you sun damage. Still, 5X mana in any and every interior space is insane.
I'd love to see cursed items with hidden flags the player can't detect until the item is used.
You can make scrolls in Morrowind, btw. Enchant a blank piece of parchment. Voila.
Embedded and limited fast travel was/is great in Morrowind. You can plan your routes around particular hubs. Recall from home to the nearest temple. Run to the mages guild or silt strider and travel to the next leg of your journey, then hoof it the remaining distance.
Personally, I liked fortifying speed & acrobatics and leaping across the map like the Hulk. Cliff racers? Just damage their speed so they can't keep pace rather than fighting all 20 billion of them.
Runescape got it right where if you play the game, you unlock things that make playing it a bit faster and more efficient
This, 100%. Honestly when he was talking about teleport plates, all I could think of was the Home Teleport system in RS3
Imo, one of the most important lessons is to reduce how many quests have you go into dungeons as Skyrim did. Morrowind had a memorable quest where you talk someone into paying their debts, and they decide to become a religious monk. Your reputation goes up from this simple quest and it expands the world quite a bit to see how the locals respect their religion. Skyrim probably would have made the quest you need to go to this dungeon to get an item so they can pay off their debts with it and would have been just like any other quest.
Gothic 3 had that teleport system, where you needed to find each city's respective teleportation stone to be able to "fast travel there"
Couple of comments on both levitation and mark/recall.
First, recall becomes much more powerful when used in tandem with the intervention spells. Those already fill the role of the plates you say, as there's usually a temple of either cult to teleport to in most cities of the game. And then you can use recall for going back to hard to reach places like the last dungeon you left or somewhere remote with no other travel option (like the Urshilaku camp during MQ). Theres also the stronghold index system and I wish there's an equivalent of that too.
On levitation, I strongly believe it will not make a return, because iirc it's not in Oblivion or Skyrim because of technical limitations, like you commented on another video, but because of the design problem it creates: understandably it makes level design much harder to do, since flying around trivialises obstacles and dangers the devs would want to use to make places more interesting to explore. It sucks that they got rid of it but I get it. Jumping/running as skills should make a comeback tho, jumping should he easier to balance and personally I find it more fun than flying around. (Yes I prefer the jump spell to levitation in Morrowind)
@@shergoidold I get your comments about levitation, you are right.
Just so an old man can keep his dream alive, im going to tell myself they’ll add it with a really high magicka cost and skill requirement and call it good.
I think you're both wrong about levitation. Think for a moment. Skyrim introduced Dragons. Oblivion had Imps it's easy to design flying enemies (Morrowind itself had cliff racers, but they were unfortunately set too low, making them fight ground players).
Remember, it was Tribunal, not Oblivion, that cut levitation. Levitation requires "Open Cities," aka cities that aren't a separate cell from the world. It is a technical limitation.
You are correct about Mark and recall. It was outright said in an interview that they didn't want the hard work of designing quests with it in mind
Levitation went away because Bethesda wanted to make more complex cities. Remember, levitation didn't work in Tribunal, which is where they started making Cities seperate cells from the outside world. Unless the next Elder Scrolls has less complex cities or the engine can now handle putting them in the outside world, levitation isn't coming back.
7:55 I think Scrolls and Staves should level Enchanting
The open cities mod for Skyrim worked fine for me with my mid laptop back in 2016, I think if they really wanted to make it work, open cities are totally viable.
@@paulchavez3039 You're forgetting that Skyrim was released for consoles in 2011. Remember, Obsidian using the same engine had to split New Vegas into sections because it would be too intensive otherwise
If you look at major cities like New Atlantis and Akila in Starfield, you’ll see they’ve already solved this problem. They’ve now added the dimension of interesting rooftops and staggering the height of buildings so that it’s interesting to explore even if you’re using the boost pack.
@@streakingclothed I haven't played Starfield, are cities connected to an Open World area or do you just fast travel from them to planets?
'more complex'
Might and Magic has a similar spell to your Mark and Recall idea called Lloyd's Beacon. You can set 5 places to instantly travel to. However, they go away after a few weeks based on your skill point amount. I would greatly prefer how yours is more permanent.
@@TheStolken plus they could come up with a name better than Lloyd. Something that sounds ancient and powerful, like Mordekainen. Lloyd is an IT guy who likes to wear flannel shirts every day
@@theoldknight85 LOL, Lloyd could be flipped backwards like Werdna is just Andrew backwards in Wizardry.
Maybe I'm wrong, but from memory, in Morrowind athletics skill also increased how steep of a slope you could run up.
That and stacking spell effects was great.
the three icarian flight spells can be crazy useful in the main quest when you need to visit red mountain and the ash plains. Slowfall is your friend. Anyone can cast low level slow fall for a few seconds. Also lower level jump spells paired with lower level slowfall and levitate can really change early game travel. Mark and recall and the two intervention spells can get you anywhere in minutes without too much character investment
Not to mention all the crazy loot you could find hidden above and below.
When they added jetpacks to fallout 4 I was excited for more verticality in the game design but I feel like they forgot it.
I feel like horses (or similar) could be useful for the fast travel issue. A tiered system like Oblivion of increasing value horses, except instead of manual riding, make it where you can depart from a town on horseback and fast travel to known areas within a certain radius, with distance increasing with horse tier.
Combine it with a network of interlocked fast travel systems (teleports, wagons, boats, whatever fits) and you could, if you invest in a good horse, get around easily. The trade-off being training, housing, and consumables you could buy with the same gold.
Morrowind is more effective at pulling you into it's world than it's predecessors or sequels. Pure atmospheric art.
And its whole world is handcrafted, every item hand-placed, all terrain molded by an actual human. No procedural generation whatsoever.
I went into Morrowind knowing nothing except that the magic was cool, and it sure was. I travelled in style, I could cook up levetstion potions and chug 5 or 6 and then blast off like Goku to wherever I was going
Pre Watch comment: I predict ES6 will be the worse game in the series. There's a clear, defined, trajectory the games are going. Morrowind was pretty hardcore, Oblivion was medium core, Skyrim was soft core.... There's no way they re-introduce attributes, I'm just not that optimistic. If they don't have attributes I won't play it.
Who needs flying when you can teleport ;)
Btw, your distant land is desynced compared to close meshes. Lot of trees vanishing/changing mesh when you jump/fly.
For travel, I think it should be costly. Something that becomes trivial late game, but a key decision maker well into most of mid game. I've been using morrowind economy and difficulty mods, and it made it that I still need to weigh the risks of walking over taking a boat or silt strider and spending my precious drakes I could spend on more potions, scrolls or trainers.
good way to get you to explore early game and not waste time retreading ground late game
skyrim has some powerful consumables, most of its master level spells are found at vendors as scrolls even at low character levels. It's nothing compared to a cool mobility spell in morrowind but it's still mass aoe paralysis or mass aoe damage spells. normal difficulty skyrim is just so easy that you'd rather sell all consumables or hoard them forever
I’m sure they will allow some manner of floating or flying, given the jet pack capabilities in Starfield
Bro MrMattyplays is looking to throw hands with his most recent Oblivion remake video, hoping to see you cover it!
I personally have no interest in playing morrowing cause I do not have any Nostalgia but love watching videos about it.
Careful dabbling, because once it catches, you're HOOKED.
You don't need to have nostalgia to play good games
Yeah, consumables should always be far more powerful than standard spells otherwise they become 0,5 weighing gold in your inventory and you never use them and if they would raise skills faster than regular spellcasting i would say that's awesome design and incentive for players to actually use them and make it fun. This is not even a TES problem but in every rpg where they are valued far higher in gold than their actual use ingame. Also dungeons should have inaccessible places or disadvantages where a simple scroll would make a night and day kind of difference making consumables far more interesting and involving.
Limited fast travel options with good lore and quest design so good you can play it with old school journal (morrowind style) without map markers and without questline indicator would be bonkers. Ofcourse for more modern audience you could add toggleable on/off indicators for assist but for standard option i would like the game not to be too stupified.
Also i think almsvi and divine intervention should not be spammable spells but to actually require you to devote yourself to those higher beings to receive their blessings from their shrines first and when in need you could actually use it (if they hear you) when in need and they would intervene. The spells itself were super fun on first playthrough in morrowind and made world exploring so much more joyful and you would approach different positions in the world from so many different locations and you would always find some meaningful questing and places whereever you went.
At least bring back hand placed/non-scaling loot.
I don't mind certain random items you come across being scaled to you, but something like, say, a holy relic or what have you should just be *strong* regardless of when you find them.
Maybe important magic items scale with you even after being acquired? Just so that it doesn't trivialize the combat while also not falling off at higher levels.
How is reintroduction of attributes not first on your list? lol you really don't like attributes do you?
I do hope ES6 has attributes, but honestly I don't like how valuable they are in Morrowind. It kinda has the opposite balance of Oblivion. Those will be for the next part of the series.
I think Morrowind really shined over other games in the series with its travel, consumables, cool loot, and movement progression.
@@theoldknight85 Yes, that is true, Morrowind offered so much freedom with the various systems. Oblivion had movement progression as well, not as much as morrowind, but there's a huge difference in movement between a lvl1 character and a late game character with high speed/strength/athletics/acrobatics.
I just think an attribute system is the quintessential mechanic of an RPG game. Whether its KOTOR, early ES games, Fallout Games, JRPG games, POE, etc. Removing Attributes makes it an action/adventure game imo.
I appreciate your videos and your interaction in the comments. There's not many people these days that I can banter with about Oblivion lol Looking forward to the next video.
levitation makes game too easy against melee opponents
movement as progression is something that masses doesnt like, and so i think itll be a cold day in hell b4 bethesda puts it back in any of their games
You MIGHT be correct about travel as progression, I'd argue that is a case of people saying they don't want something because it adds friction but ultimately enjoying the game more because it is there.
However, people like moving fast and jumping high. I think most people know they'd enjoy a double jump and being able to sprint longer.
I don't think masses don't like movement as progression. They don't like being awfully slow, which is the reason most of them hated the start of Morrowind. Oblivion did a good job making everyone reasonably fast no matter the character, then you could become way faster and jump much higher if you invested in it. That should be a good starting point for implementing movement as progression in ES6.
Have you ever played Dragon's Dogma II?