>>9121
Not the guy you were responding to, but:
> Morrowind's script/dialogue is frankly shit
I'll agree with this up to a point - from a realism point of view I totally agree that the written dialogue if read out is totally stupid sounding and would be contrived and immersion breaking.
That said it isn't a voice-acted game. You need to look at it for the standard of it's time.
It isn't really immersion breaking as you're reading it anyway, you're probably imagining it being read out in some voice in your head, and that is very different to hearing someone actually say it out loud.
Yes it's dated and it would get ripped to pieces if it was in a game that came out this year, but it isn't. The games SHOULD be getting better at this sort of thing as the technology and graphics and so on improves, and yet a lot of people argue that this isn't the case, and this is a problem.
> the civil war is pretty intertwined with the main quest
Even Bethesda would admit they massively simplified and dumbed down the civil war in the game compared with their intentions and vision for it.
I wouldn't say the war was badly implemented or mundane, but what bothers everyone is that it could have and should have been so much more.
In general the problem people have with the progression of the Elder Scrolls series is that games are becoming more and more "here is a path for you to follow and a simple progression of spells/items to use as you level up", and people simply call this "dumbing down".
But it's not quite dumbing down, I'm not saying new lore is completely noob friendly, but the change in tone (which isn't down to so casualization conspiracy at Bethesda, its down to new writers and designers) is there to see. And there is more of a focus on having the player follow more polished paths of play than just doing whatever occurs to them.
The advantage of this is that the game feels "better made", if you're only going in painstakingly crafted dungeons and using pre-made balanced spells and so on the game flows well and you're only seeing the bits of the game they had the time to test to death, something Bethesda have got a lot of grief about in the past (how often have people said it was released before all the bugs were found).
Compare that with the older games where you could do pretty much anything, and in ES2 you even had virtually infinite automatically generated dungeons and landscape. Of course if it is made this way and you have a million players playing a million different ways more bugs are going to be found and complained about. If you can make your own spells etc. there is more that isn't going to be perfectly balanced.
Ultimately you have a choice between a smaller scope game which is more polished and has less bugs, or a massive game that is inevitably going to have all sorts of bugs and broken mechanics.
A good demonstration of this is the towns and cities in the games - from the huge bland generated cites of Daggerfall, to the pre-made sprawling flat buildings of Morrowind, to the smaller closed off cities of Oblivion, and finally the cities of Skyrim that are design-wise unique and beautiful, but comparatively tiny.