>>11250I played MW for the first time since about 2011 a month or two ago. I was used to spending solid weekends setting up precarious leaning towers of mods for Skyrim just to make the thing playable and then it crashing every few hours.
The power progression was great, the breakable magic/enchanting system was great, the sheer number of unique shit everywhere was great, the variety in quests was great (even the fetch quests felt different most of the time), and there were a lot of unique moments with mechanics that they took away, particularly levitation.
I remember during one late Temple quest involving the taking of the Shoes of St. Rilms from Ald Sotha that I had powered myself up using the overpowered levitation spell at the Baar Dau shrine. I flew over to Ald Sotha, realized that I was still too fucking weak to take on the daedra at the shrine (power levelling mercantile and speechcraft is fun), so I came up with a solution.
Since I had levitate, I flew in there, stuck as high as possible to the roofs, grabbed the shoes, and realized that I had just gotten overencumbered. I couldn't move and I was surrounded by about 7 daedra that could one-hit kill me. I didn't want to drop my gear, or any of the rare shit I had collected, since it was a long time since I went on a storage run to Caius Cosades' house.
I found that I somehow had 60 pounds of booze in my inventory so I methodically dropped them at the shrine, one by one, all in the inventory pause menu. Then I flew away to safety.
I never had a moment like that in Skyrim. I never had those emergent gameplay moments at all where I could imagine amusing stories. All the stories I had from Skyrim were times that something glitched out and I ended up with a dragon skeleton killing a companion or some bullshit. In Skyrim I never even came close to having a story about recovering some old saint's slippers by flying into a daedric shrine, dropping off a shitload of booze, and flying back out.
Hell, the removal of levitation had far-reaching consequences for dungeon design. Most Morrowind dungeons, especially high-level or Tribunal dungeons, have a bunch of nooks and crannies only reachable through exploration by levitation or water walking. Can you imagine how much Skyrim's dungeons would break if it had levitation? A solid 80% of them had the linear end-dungeon shortcut that dropped you off at the start of the dungeon that was (usually) just too high up to reach. Levitation in Skyrim outright breaks most of its dungeons.