Lets Talk About Morrowind
Lets Talk About Morrowind
Morrowind is an Open-World Fantasy RPG, the third entry in the mainline Elder Scrolls series. Popular and well received on release, going on to sell more than 4 million copies. Nowadays it is often seen as clunky and difficult to get into, but those who put in the work are rewarded with one of the best games of all time.
I love this game, but I didn't always. Skyrim has been my favorite game since I first played it a decade ago, so of course I wanted to play the previous games in the series. But everything in Morrowind went against my natural instincts. Quests felt confusing, fog is everywhere, and despite being open world you are usually pushed to travel through narrow trenches. There are guards in the main city, who once offended, will NEVER forgive you. What ended up working for me was a full focus on the main quest. Once I'd defeated the evil powers of Dagoth I felt like Vvardenfell was truly mine.
I wouldn't feel right making a post about TES 3 without mentioning the alienness of everything. Most other Elder Scrolls games are pretty close to the standard fantasy setting. Morrowind is not. Everything is bug or crab like, the palletes are dismal, and the people are strange and just as hostile as the environment. You really feel like you exploring a foreign land. Its something I hope they recapture in the next TES game (if it ever comes out)
What I love about Bethesda RPGs is that they are first person, and focused on completing well written quests. We are starting to see this genre take off, and some good prospects are releasing soon. But the selection is still limited. If you enjoy this style of gameplay its worth learning the jank to experience the wonder.
The weirdness was so perfect and that personality and flavor is completely lacking in Skyrim. There was so much more variety in items and the unique stuff was great. This really enriched the storytelling and made for a lot of memorable moments. One of my favorites is when you're just walking through the world and an NPC just falls out of the sky, hits the ground, and dies. Then you loot his corpse, get his unique item of super jumping, and probably 99% of players immediately try it out, launch into the stratosphere, and splat like a tomato in exactly the same fashion. Or there were the unique boots that massively increased your running speed, but made you blind. Crafty players could leverage magic resistance to reduce the blinding effect and basically zoom around at superhuman speed with sunglasses on. Magic actually felt magical, compared to Skyrim where it amounts to little past being a source of damage. The system was designed to allow you freedom and find ways to surpass human abilities, and I think the world of the newer games is conversely designed to limit you as much as possible. No spellcrafting, extremely limited enchantments, few summoning options, no levitation, and the scaling system actually disincentivizes leveling. All the gear is essentially the same. It's a tragedy.
Now if you N'wahs will excuse me I have some clouds to yell at.
11Morrowind is a lot like the UK.
The weather is bleak and depressing, and everyone in the capital is rude.
It's impossible to get a house unless you do a lot of favors for one of the great houses.
Jobs are all zero-hour contracts where you have to buy your own equipment, and once you account for wear you might not even be making minimum wage.
9Still my favorite one, spent hours playing it with my friend. The journal entries for the quests get vague and sometimes buried with other entries. Kinda added to that charm though, The best part about it though was you could find great items/equipment without it being quest related. Something the newer games dont have. Exploring is best in this game. Skyrim didnt really give me the same incentive to explore
7I really wanted to love that game. I built a computer specifically for it. And I played it a LOT.
But the world seemed so dead.
I started by wandering the wilderness and finding all these little dungeons. But when I went to follow the roads they led to... all the little dungeons.
Once I'd been through an area there was nothing left alive.
And then I had to start modding to enjoy the game more and eventually hit on the concept that I don't want to play a game that is released incompleted and expected to be completed by the community.
I haven't built a machine from parts since then.
6In retrospect, I can't argue that it's an empty world. But during my time with the game as a teen, during its original release period on Xbox, it did not feel empty at all.
I'm wondering how much it had to do with the lower render distance / fog on Xbox, because without that I can imagine a totally different game. I'm also wondering how much had to do with essentially every playthrough of mine being wearing the boots of blinding speed and some magic resist so I could see. The big empty world felt small and populated when traversal doesn't take as long. Not saying that's good design, but I can imagine disliking it with the default move speed. Compared to many other similar games I played since then, most of the content felt worthwhile. Oblivion and especially Skyrim fell so short of the bar that Morrowind set for me because so much of the dungeon content felt like worthless filler.8
Definetely good years for all kinds of RPG fans. There were no ready concept how they should've been built, so there were a space for experimentation. And that game was wild.
5I loved this game back in the day and also just never got far in it because of the gameplay being flat out bad.
I'm glad I played this when it was new and exciting and that it led me to be hyped up for Oblivion, which I enjoyed more, and Skyrim which is my favorite of the series.
I love the immersion these games provide and just being able to, to an extent, exist in a somewhat live-in feeling world of magic and adventure is a feeling I haven't gotten from any other game series.
5I bounced off this when I was younger, but came back to it once I saw this quick retrospective and got caught up in their enthusiasm. Played it and really enjoyed myself along with the world and the power curve. I figured out what held me back and fixed it (slow movement, so took the steed sign). Finished the main quest. I still need to go back and do the expansions at some point.
5It's my favorite game of all time. Nothing has ever been as immersive for me as that game was. I spent so much time digging into the books and discussing the lore with people on the forums. I wish I could recapture the feeling I had from that game but I don't think it's even possible as an adult with all the other responsibilities I have distracting me.
3