Summary of events:

• I watched a 6 hour Morrowind retrospective while grinding Flight Rising fodder

• I re-install Morrowind

• I keep building classes I don't end up liking

• I re-install Oblivion (2009)

• Decided that instead of my usual flighty-er playstyle, I'd play a tanky orc warrior

Interesting stuff to think about. I feel for a lot of games I bias more flighty-er playstyles that focus on fast hitting & evasion rather than tanking hits. For Oblivion, my first saves were faster spellswords. In Monster Hunter I would main dual blades and insect glaive.

Also in Oblivion, I like that it's easier to jump in with a build than Morrowind, and that class building still matters compared to Skyrim (which doesn't have a class system). I like Skyrim & sunk a ton of hours into it, but I feel like I end up gravitating to the same playstyles regardless of how I try to roleplay or what race I pick (insert joke about stealth archers here). And for Morrowind class building matters a lot (especially for the early game), but I keep getting too picky with builds and end up scrapping them. "this build is too slow" "I want to use long blade over short blade" "I forgot to spec into xyz stat". I'll get to it some day

I think the thing I like about Oblivion's class system is that it's a middle ground between "no class / everything is open" and "build your class carefully" (which makes sense, it's between TES3 and 5 afterall). So while you can do everything eventually, I feel it's a lot easier to build and stick to a build without worrying if I can bounce back from making it too inefficient

Back to my Oblivion save. Current character:

• Race: Orc

• Custom Class favoring Strength and Endurance

  • Major Skills: Blade, Block, Blunt, Armorer, Heavy armor, Hand-to-hand, Restoration

• Warrior Birthsign (starting bonus to Strength and Endurance)

• Factions as of posting: Fighter's Guild, Arena

things I noticed from my usual playstyle;

• Slower (at least at the start). I mainly use blunt weapons in this save too. So instead of hitting fast with a sword, I end up using more carefully timed, hard-hitting attacks

  • Raising my Athletics skill can negate this, but in the mean time it's slower going

  • I did intentionally leave out athletics from my major skills, since oblivion's scaling level system is brutal, so I don't want to level too fast.

  • It is annoying playing catch-up with quest NPCs though

• My build isn't optimized for evasion, but my stats resulted in being able to tank hits.

• I remember to repair my armor on the go more often

• NPCs do not like me due having nothing spec'ed into Personality (though I guess it's lore-accurate for TES orcs...)

Interesting stuff that makes for a fresher gameplay experience imo. Since you're forcing yourself to change your usual playing habits. I think I want to try different builds in both Oblivion and other games going forward too.