Which old Bethesda game should I play first?

And alchemy.

Did you play Prey (2017)? Developed by Arkane Austin, published by Bethesda.

Incredible game, and seriously amazing DLC (Mooncrash). The combined release has been free a couple times on the Epic store, and they might repeat it in the upcoming holiday giveaways.

I watched Noclip’s The Making of PREY documentary the other day, and it made me really want to replay them. If you aren’t sold on Mooncrash, watch Skill Up’s review.

QT3 Prey thread is over here.

That Trek gif was the only proper way to respond to the thread at that point. Nicely done.

You have made the correct choice, Morrowind first is the way to go, and heavily modded is the way to play. When you get to Fallout : New Vegas you’ll appreciate the QOL improvements in Obsidian’s (published by Bethesda) design. Both games have fantastic world building and story, and are great fun.

That said, I agree with @Scuzz, Morrowind is simply too far back into history for me now. I played all the way through Oblivion a few years ago when it turned 10 years old, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but even that game was starting to look and feel on the verge of aging out at that point, even heavily modded. I just can’t see myself throwing dozens of hours at Arena, Daggerfall or Morrowind now when I know I still have a lot of unfinished Skyrim content and whole unplayed RPGs from the past decade sitting in my backlog.

In fact, this thread reminds me that I haven’t even started Fallout 4 yet and I own the complete GOTY Edition. Hmmm…

I played Morrowind at the time it came out and I loved it, but the combat was seriously unsatisfying and the game was so unbalanced that after about 22 hours I was walking around and could kill anything easily. I loved the world, I loved exploring it, but with no satisfying combat I stopped playing.

Over the years I did go back with some mods, but the mods really only changed the graphics. I did try a few that tried to change the balance and the combat, but it was still pretty poor.

Starting with Oblivion, the combat was much much better using a controller, and on Skyrim they brought that controller combat to the PC version too.

So, in summary, I’d recommend Fallout: New Vegas, even though I haven’t played it much, but it’s in my backlog and I will get to it.

…says the guy with a clip from the Ultima IV title screen as his board avatar… ;)

I actually played KOTOR for the first time only a year or so ago, so I can handle outdated graphics. The gameplay might be rough, though. We shall see! I’m diving into Morrowind this weekend.

If the balance means I can wipe out anything, that’s fine; I’m really in it for the story, mostly. I just finished up the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition a few months ago, and that’s all I really cared about there.

Naturally in the end of ME3… I killed all those motherfuckers. Shame to lose the Geth, and that’s a horrid sacrifice to make, but no, “merging together” is not the ideal solution, not when I proved all the species of the galaxy could band together without it, when independence from the machines and the ability to fight and resolve our own conflicts is what we were fighting for all along, you electromechanical twit. And obviously replacing you just means becoming what I’d fought against all that time. FREEDOM AIN’T FREE BITCH

Welp.

Dunno if Morrowind is going to happen, but I haven’t given up yet.

The main issue is the 4k monitor and a certain bug that demands I run it in a window. Which means I have to mod the text in order for it to be readable. But that’s causing “crash to desktop” level issues.

I may just try vanilla Steam-enabled Morrowind if I can’t solve the issues. And if that doesn’t work… I’m shit outta luck.

…I got it working AND more or less playable. Somehow. Miraculously.

Congrats, you won! What game are you going to play next?

A tip I don’t think I saw on here is that since skill levels are based on usage that if you take something like acrobatics (I think that’s the one that affects jump) you can just bunny hop all over to level it very quickly. That also gets you character levels fast.

Now I get to play the actual Morrowind game, hahahaha.

I remember that being a problem in Oblivion; if you got a bunch of character levels because of e.g. Acrobatics, suddenly your combat ability was no longer adequate for the opponents you then faced. I was almost unable to finish Oblivion because of that and had to cheese it a lot at the end.

Part of what made Skyrim so great was that it got much more balanced that way.

I feel attacked.

I don’t remember if Morrowind has no enemy scaling or just limited level scaling, but it’s less of a problem because of that. Although it will still have some of the other problem where you don’t get as many points into your combat attributes.

Yea, I don’t remember Oblivion scaling that way. By half way thru the game you seemed dominant.

The difference in Oblivion is the quest equipment. You can over-level yourself by leveling up things like acrobatics and such, and have trouble fighting enemies, especially if you chose poorly on your offensive skills. But if you follow the quests in the game, especially the main sidequests in each town, you’ll find equipment that more than compensates for that, and makes you an unstoppable killing machine.

Of course, you could totally miss those quests in a massive game like Oblivion, so that’s a possibility too. But the quest reward equipment is very good.

My memories of Oblivion are mainly entering one of the “cracks in the world” early and getting my ass kicked by the knights there, then later going back and returning the favor.

But I do remember something of each village having side quests.

I made poor choices.

Yeah. That.

My memories of Oblivion are rosy (despite having made many poor choices) because it just seemed so gorgeous at the time. Plus, Sir Patrick Stewart. Since it was included with the special Steam deal that I got Morrowind and (of course) the 10th anniversary edition of Skyrim with, I’ll probably dive into it again at some time. Maybe even without mods.

But Morrowind and Fallout: New Vegas, first. And then this copy of Doom Eternal I’ve paid for but yet to play through. (Good Lord, Bethesda is getting all my moneys…)

Anyoo. Game is playable on modern equipment, mostly. I wish I could play fullscreen but there are issues if I don’t, like, reboot the computer before attempting to do so. Which is more of a hassle than having a window.

Oblivion was…merely okay.

I ended up crafting a 100% Chameleon invisible ring and just sprinting past all the mobs to the end.

To be honest though, if somehow I was forced to choose only one publisher to give all my moneys to, Bethesda would be the one. I can’t think of any other publisher with a catalog that spans thousands of hours of my life over nearly 30 years and includes so many titles that I considered “incredible” at the time I played them. It’s one hell of a track record, and anyone who has ever worked for Bethesda and/or one of their developers should be proud.

Well, I gave Morrowind my best effort. Let me put it this way: I can see why it’s so beloved by those who played it when it was new. But it’s not a game I have the patience for at this stage of my life. It needs … a LOT of patience. It’s not that the world is large or has a lot to explore; it’s that they’ve spaced all of it out so much, that you’re spending so much of your time just walking down brown halls, or through a brown landscape, to get to a new brown location to meet more brown people. And you have to take ten minutes to get from one interesting thing to another.

I got as far as hearing that there was a Nerevarine (?) prophecy, but not to the point where I found out i’m it.

So I’ve just started Fallout: New Vegas and holy hell is it a change. Sure, everything’s gray instead of brown, but I don’t feel like I’m taking forever to get from place to place (because I’M NOT,) I feel like the game balance is better, the character models and animations are not complete trash so even with 0 mods it still looks and plays great…

I’ve had more fun playing 15 minutes of FONV than I had in 20 hours of Morrowind.

I thought Oblivion was good. As in all games like that you eventually reach God status and the game gets easy.