Nice to see another Elder Scrolls player
Mostly
Morrowind, really. There's a lot I like about
Oblivion - much better combat mechanics, f'rinstance, and technically gorgeous visuals - but it just really hasn't aged well. Too many elements dumbed-down, and some changes that were intended to make things better just made them worse. (Particularly the way the magic system replaces gradually lessened spell-failure chances with arbitrary "milestone" skill levels where you're allowed to cast better stuff, making all the skill levels in between feel pointless, and the leveled-difficulty system, which is clearly intended to keep you challenged but ends up making you feel increasingly frustrated as the difficulty rapidly outpaces your character development to the point where you have to pour like two dozen arrows into a single random bandit!) Plus, it just doesn't feel like as much of a
world so much as just a generic fantasy playset, as compared to
Morrowind's frankly alien landscape - partly because, like a lot of fantasy works, it looks pretty much like France, and partly because having fully-voiced dialogue means there's a lot
less of it to flesh things out, because every line costs money :/
I'm told
Skyrim is an improvement on most of those fronts, at least, but I never got out of the tutorial dungeon on account of my system's inability to handle it. Hopefully it'll have more of what I liked in
Morrowind than
Oblivion did...
But since your going PCI-E youll be better off You could pick up an Radeon 4870 or nvidia 260GTX for a really good price (Ive payed around 25-30$ for each) and with any dual core socket 775 CPU and that card you can run nearly all the latest games in low settings at least (Tried an E6300 overclocked @ 2,2GHz with an 260 GTX and it run both Skyrim and Borderlands in mid settings) under Windows XP.
Yeah...I don't mind AGP, really, but it's much harder to track down a Socket 775 board with AGP than it is to just go PCIe, and anyway I got the card on the cheap at the recycle center so it's no big deal. Just gotta get around to getting a board + CPU combo and then I can cannibalize the RAM and extra disk storage from my current Core 2 box (non-gaming, as it only has the one PCI slot! Stupid little micro-ATX boards...at least it was cheap.)