Haha, ABF gets a taste of his own medicine

[A Black Falcon]

You're digging that whole even deeper, Brian! You even stated in this very thread that you need not play Morrowind to form an opinion on it, which contradicts what you're trying to say right now.

I laugh at this display of buffoonery.

No, I am trying to say that they are seperate issues! Discussing Morrowind is one thing and the subject I tried to talk about in that thread (and failed because of how you reacted and then acted) is a different one.

And I am not saying anything about Morrowind that anyone here or any article I've read about it or anything else has proven as false. If there were such things and they were pointed out as wrong, I would stop saying them... but I am for the most part (or I should be and when I am thinking about it I am not) not talking about Morrowind in detail. Why did I mention that Gamespy article? As I said, I was trying to illustrate my point about how Morrowind wasn't perfect according to the critics, how they all say it's similar to Arena and Daggerfall, and how the larger themes I talked about for Arena (big but little variety or uniqueness, conversations with NPCs, etc) translate over on the whole to Morrowind.

GR's defence of the Morrowind conversation system later actually to me reinforceed my point that one thing you suffer by making a game so big in scale was to weaken the story elements... now, playing Morrowind definitely would let me be specific here which is why I try to not be specific and just say that in general open-ended ones have weaker and less focused stories and more focused ones are the opposite.

Now, that does ignore the whole subgenre of more linear RPGs where the story is just an excuse to kill things, but for the most part those are action-RPGs or older games from before story became as important as it is now... still, they should be mentioned in comparison because when Arena came out it was definitely not as noticably far behind the competition as Morrowind was when it came out, despite how there are significant upgrades in this category in each TES game...