(elder scrolls voice) have you heard of the white people
we hail from a distant land known as europe
gonna be honest: playing skyrim is mostly just making me want to play morrowind
i have played countless hours of skyrim already and still have no idea how to get anywhere, but i've become very familiar with parts of vvardenfell, and i know more or less how to get anywhere from anywhere by public transit
i've come around. morrowind's lack of free & arbitrary fast travel and quest markers forces you to actually learn your way around and encourages exploration. letting you just voip from point to point chasing a little arrow devalues the setting by encouraging you to interact with it as little as possible and turns quests into tedious checklists
the real irony of all these convenience features is that morrowind has one that neither oblivion nor skyrim have: the nerevarine takes notes. aside from a few annoying oversights, she writes down just about everything she hears, and it's all indexed alphabetically by topic. a real twilight sparkle. which means if i forget something important i can usually look it up in the journal
I definitely felt like part of my brain was simply not being activated the first time I played whichever Saints Row introduced giant arrows hovering in the air to tell you which way to turn.
yeah. spending a few hours with skyrim after playing morrowind, i'm feeling this. i've got all these cool mods that are probably more interesting than the base game but the whole framework they exist in feels like it's trying to discourage me from actually experiencing any of it
why would i ask a random townsperson for more information when there is literally an arrow floating above the thing i'm looking for