Yeah, I really don't cotton to people bitching about the games that came after Morrowind, based on the experience they had with Morrowind. It mostly seems driven from nostalgia. People really seem to gloss over the suckier parts Morrowind's mechanics, as if they don't exist, or they're charmingly forgivable in some way. Morrowind's roll-based combat mechanics suck. If I'm swinging a stick at as shalk, I should be able to hit that fucking shalk. I may not be able to do much damage to it, but I should at least be able to hit it. Spending a long time trying to find a dungeon based on the shittiest directions ever given is not a fun challenge; it's obnoxious. It's especially annoying because you have to fight off a damned cliffracer every three steps.
People also forget that there's a lot to the mechanics of Oblivion and those games that came after that were merely optional for a person to use, or they were necessary to the function of the game. Marking a NPC as essential was more than just idiot-proofing the game for players, it was also necessary because Oblivion was no longer a static world space like Morrowind was. People moved a lot more as they kept schedules, characters traveled outside of cities, where they could run into real trouble along the way, and cities and towns themselves were less secure, and violent events could happen anywhere. Marking characters essential didn't just prevent them being killed by the careless player, it also prevented them from being killed by a dangerous world, thus breaking the game. As for stuff like fast travel and quest markers, don't use them if you don't like them. (Yes, I know that in Oblivion, quest markers are kind of forced on you, but there are quests that have no markers in the game. Set one as the active quest, et voila! No more quest markers. Or, you know, you could always just mod them away.)
And speaking of mods, that's something that has become integral to the full experience of TES, ever since Morrowind, to the point where I feel like at this point, people who can't or won't mod are playing about half the game. Everyone is aware of modding, and everyone talks about modding, but I find it weird that nobody ever openly acknowledges it as a fundamental aspect of TES gameplay. I think that making modding so important to the franchise, and yielding so much control over the product to the fandom is one of the most brilliant maneuvers Bethesda ever made. It was an experiment with Morrowind, but it has affected the BethSoft open-world games ever since. It's become clearer and clearer with the efforts put forth from Morrowind onward, including Fallout 3 and New Vegas, that with these sorts of games, the most important thing has been to create a persistent world space that felt alive, and that people could use as a jumping-off point for building and customizing to their own vision. I think they've done a pretty damned great job with exactly that, especially with Skyrim. To me, that's not dumbing down or going backwards. That's smartening up and moving forward. A real D&D-type of experience is one in which the players can write their own stories, and TES has grown stronger and stronger in its ability to give players that ability with each iteration of the franchise.
