As a gamer turned 17 only a few days ago, I come from a generation that many of you older types say has been raised on watered down, streamlined video games. A fantastic example of this would be the divide between the elder scrolls of old and new, for example, Morrowind and Skyrim.
I think it's interesting that so much controversy surrounds these two games, with Skyrim often being attacked and criticised for it's lack of depth and with Morrowind being frequently bigged up for it's copious amounts of detail, exploration and variety by comparison. While it's undeniable that Morrowind certainly has a lot more stuff inside its pixels, by the standards of the current market and in the context of modern video games, do you think we can still consider it to be a "better" game than Skyrim, or do you think it's inherently worse as a result of its age? Were older games better, or is all the perceived "depth" the result of unintuitive design?
MY OPINION: Having played a fair amount of both (and an absolute shit tonne of Oblivion, my favourite Elder Scrolls so far), I'm personally going to have to give this one to Skyrim. Deep and complex while it may be, I find Morrowinds game design to be completely obtuse; I can't stand being treated like a boyscout and being sent off on my way to find some dungeon in the ass end of nowhere having to check my notebook every 5 seconds to look up directions. I prefer Morrowinds added challenge (I find Skyrim too easy even on the highest difficulty) and I've no objection to reading text as opposed to being spoonfed story, but somewhere after about an hour of trying to find a single dungeon with vague as fuck directions to no avail, I eventually had to decide I simply wasn't enjoying myself all that much.
As a bonus question, do you think it's fair enough that I find Morrowinds lack of specificity boring, or is it an example of my being patronised and coddled by simplistic modern video games? I'm curious to hear what y'all think of the differences between old and new in video games.