Morrowind - after Oblivion and Skyrim?

[Beskar]

But doesn't that fall under the "gamey" territory?

Whenever I play Skyrim, I usually make Mages and do Mage things with them, I don't need ingame limits. If I am an Orc Beresker charging through the battlefield, my next thought is not "become Archmage of the Mages guild" then complain about being able to do so because I started buying tomes from vendors and leveling up my magicka abilities, even to pass rank restrictions which is meant to encourage you to basically be a mage by learning magic

There are logical restrictions in the game, like unable to be a Stormcloak and an Imperial supporter and do both questlines. But 'class' is an abstract thing defined by the player and their ability to roleplay.

[TinCow]

Yeah, I agree with Tiaexz. One of the things that has always made the ES games unique is that you are never limited in what you can do by a 'class' and very minimally by character stats. In the ES games, if you want to do something just work at it and you eventually can. Some characters will be better at some things instead of others due to race and level up choices, particularly in Skyrim with the new perk system. However all characters tend to be an amalgam of classes. When was the last time anyone played an ES game and didn't use magic a few times, use melee weapons a few times, use ranged weapons a few times, pick a few locks, and brew a bunch of potions? In any other game, your character would be restricted to one or two of those actions at most, but in ES it's rare to not do all of them. It's freedom that makes ES so special, not just freedom of movement and exploration, but also freedom of character development.

[johnhughthom]

My current Skyrim character has only used a weapon once, and it wasn't actually to attack an enemy but part of a quest. It's still listed as my favourite weapon.

[spankythehippo]

In Skyrim, I only use swords, greatswords and the bow.

The class system, in my opinion, was vastly improved in Skyrim than in Oblivion. I initially chose Dark Elf when I got Skyrim on the release day. Several weeks ago, I made a new character as a Nord. I found it incredibly difficult to use magic as a Nord in contrast to a Dark Elf. In ES games, I never play a specialised role, i.e. warrior, archer, mage etc. I mix them up so I can comfortably handle any situation the game throws at me. I have used many spells to get me out of tricky situations. I constantly use Atronachs as distractions, because my follower is severely retarded, although a great fighting partner. Stealthwise, it would be better if I just charge right in, which is what my follower does.

I have a new question.

When there is a certain glitch in the game, do you exploit it? For my Conjuration, I used that Soul Trap glitch, where if you Soul Trap a dead body you level up the skill.

My most shameless exploit was the Ebony Blade glitch. For those who don't know, the Ebony Blade is a Daedric artifact which grants life steal depending on how many friends you've killed with it. What I did was I completely leveled up my Conjuration (using the Soul Trap glitch), completely finished the College of Winterhold quests and obtained the Dead Thrall spell tome. I sold some cabbages to that Pelagia guy outside of Whiterun (for those wanting to use this glitch, I recommend the Pelagia guy. He dies anyway in the Siege of Whiterun... Spoiler alert, by the way). I then promptly killed him and his partner. I used Dead Thrall to revive him and then killed him again with the Ebony Blade. I repeated this until Mephala was satisfied and granted me the complete lifesteal potential of this sword. Do you guys think this is considered "cheating"? I don't, since I used my magic skills to level up my blade. What's wrong with that?

EDIT: Upon reflection, my most shameless glitch exploit was the Urngeir one in Riften to level up Speechcraft.

[TinCow]

When there is a certain glitch in the game, do you exploit it? For my Conjuration, I used that Soul Trap glitch, where if you Soul Trap a dead body you level up the skill.

...

What's wrong with that?

No, I don't, at least not anymore, but there's also nothing wrong with doing so. IMO, it is NEVER wrong to exploit a glitch or otherwise cheat in a single player game. You're impacting no one other than yourself, so there's nothing wrong with playing however you want to play. The only time I've done something like this is in Morrowind, where I would regularly jump up large staircases. There was something about the nature of movement in that game that made jumps while moving up staircases very, very short. So, you could rapidly bash the jump button and easily jump about 10-15 times up a short staircase and several dozen times up a large one. That enabled rapid leveling of Acrobatics, which was also a quite silly skill.

[Conradus]

Acrobatics was very usefull imo. Let you get on higher grounds and you moved faster. Not to mention the scrolls of flying. Sometimes I put my acrobatics at 200 or 500 to travel faster by taking large strides :D

[TinCow]

Acrobatics was very usefull imo. Let you get on higher grounds and you moved faster. Not to mention the scrolls of flying. Sometimes I put my acrobatics at 200 or 500 to travel faster by taking large strides :D

Sure it was useful, but it was also ridiculous. Not only was it kind of odd that you could jump on top of houses, but it was also a totally absurd feature to qualify as an actual trainable skill. It was possible to go all the way to level 10 by doing nothing but standing still and jumping up and down. That's... weird.

Athletics as well was a bad skill. It increased just by running around. Combined with acrobatics, you suddenly had two skills that went up just because you were walking around the game world. You really couldn't even stop them from going up even if you wanted to. In a game where it really mattered which skills you increased on each level (to get your stat bonuses), it was a bad idea to include skills that you couldn't really prevent from increasing.