Reviews Videogame / The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind

If you think this isn't a review, thats fair. But I consider it a review by demonstration. These tips should help to give an idea of whats wrong with the game and how to avoid it.

1. thanks for the advice, I'll look into it for the graphical enhancement 2. always a good piece of advice for any game. remapping isn't too frustrating 4. isn't that the point of RPG's? less railroading? 5. well, there's not supposed to be really easy traveling. it tried for grittier realism 6. isn't that part of the challenge?

honestly, I've heard that a lot of the praise for this game is that it's like one of the few that holds your hand the least, so difficulty is part of the experience

want a REAL difficult game? try Ultima Underworld & then compare it to this CX

I haven't heard anyone defend the percent chance attack system. Everybody seems to recommend the Accurate Attack mod. And I've been a lot of places that praise the game. As for the Teleport Ring, its up to you. Yeah a lot of people claim the travel is an important part of the game. I played a substantial portion without a ring and then the rest with it and I don't feel like I was missing anything with the ring. I'd done enough wandering. Besides, the game itself does provide at least some systems as you level to allow limited fast traveling which undercuts any claims that travel is integral (the boats, the silt striders, the mark and recall spells, divine intervention, the compounds, its all just fast travel thats a little more convoluted). So if the game itself admits that fast travel is a reward for adventuring, I'm going to go ahead and get something to make my life a little easier. Trust me, the game is still plenty tedious even with that convenience. It doesn't teleport you everywhere and you have a LOT of petty errands to run. More than I can remember in any game I've played. Plus, as with quest markers and fast travel in later series, I actually explored MORE as a result of having the ring, not LESS. The ring was an assurance that I could go off the beaten path and still easily get back somewhere familiar.

4) I'm just giving a friendly warning. Morrowind has the most generally unlikeable population of any game I've ever played. Everyone is petty, murderous or spiteful. Lots of creepy perverts. The Empire can't be bothered to even drop you off in the right town to meet your initial contact. Its nothing but jerks the whole game. You go kill a vampire for a guy at one point and then he just decides "Oh and I want a bride." Like its my responsibility as the legendary hero to get him tail (this is in the main quest). When you contract the hideous death plague, the guy with the "cure" for the plague tells you he doesn't know if the plague will work and then decides to send you into the pit with all the sick people specifically so that you can see what a hideous freak you'll become if the cure doesn't work. The game is full of sadists like this IN THE VILLAGES.

So its either deal with a lot of that or bypass it. Your choice. Both are provided options in the game which I guess I'm thankful for the bypass but wish I'd known about it.

The game has some good stuff in it but its really needless what you have to do to get to those parts. It ends up being a shaggy dog story. And yes I've played other rpgs and yes this sounds like a description of all of them but Morrowind is moreso (Of course my baseline is all more recent games that have conveniences I greatly appreciate).

Oh. Also, the speed and levitate spells undercut the authentic travel experience as well. Seriously, you might as well get teleport rings.

Balmora isn't a port, so the Empire can't ship you there. It's more likely they'd actually ship you to Ebonhold(not 100% on that name), but Seyda Neen was probably chosen so as not to overwhelm the player.

This review is pretty spot on though. For me, Morrowind struck the right balance between ease of use and opacity. Once you figured everything out it was easy to break, but for a newbie it seemed like a big complicated world in which you had to struggle to survive. Another thing back in 2002 or whenever I first played it was the Mario 64 effect (my term, GTA 3 might be a more broadly applicable example), where you were just blown away by the sheer scope of things.

It's not the same now though. The early game was rather tedious, with the slow running, low stamina, 75% chance to miss attacks, etc. Skyrim improved on all of that, but also simplified things a bit much IMO. I liked how in Morrowind you had to equip each glove and pauldron separately, and could wield spears. Yeah spears were not optimal, but it didn't matter as you could go through the game just fine using them.

I think the thing with fast travel is that Morrowind fast travel was integrated into the world, rather than a UI element. Some people don't care about this, but when I played Oblivion I just flitted around everywhere with no concern for anything outside the fast travel destinations that wasn't part of a quest. So in Skyrim I turned it off and the experience was much better.

I tried playing Skyrim without Fast Travel and the game is just not built for it. That said, you can get mods like the "More Carriages" mod that help. Especially when you're playing Frostfall and Realistic Needs. This is a nice experience.

I guess I have more of a problem with the lack of quest markers. I know, some people like verbal directions but that part of the game was always annoying to me. I couldn't really memorize the directions and it was easy to get confused with them. In a few cases, the directions were flat out wrong (like telling you that a place is 'west of town' when they really mean 'in the western part of town' spent exploring west of town before I figured that out.).

I ran out of words in the review but I will say there is stuff to like about this (I guess you can infer that from the fact that I bothered to provide tips for how to play it). Its got interesting landscape and somewhat unique monsters (although if I ever see another Cliff Racer, it will be too soon, there are regions were you encounter a new one every five seconds). The story has an interesting amount of complexity to it. For all I said about how petty and cruel the residents generally are, the general sociopathy and paranoia has its own charm and can be quite humorous.

I don't think this game is for me then. I would have loved this a couple years ago, but now I just like efficiency and good story, strong voice acting and a robust create-a-character system, hold the tedium.

I would like to watch a let's play though. Just to be familiar with everything. It's probably just a game I would have had to grow up with. But I had no one to encourage me to play computer games really. :(

@Lakija

I recommend you to read Unhappy Anchovy's new Morrowind LP: http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ua-plays-morrowind.299766/

Of the three Elder Scrolls games I've played, Morrowind was my least favourite- and this review more or less hits all the reasons why I found it such a frustrating bore. Say what you will about the following games, but hell at least Skyrim and Oblivion had fun. And in terms of scale, Morrowind is apparently a drop in the ocean compared to Daggerfall.

I'm definitely looking forward to Skywind. I think Morrowind's story and quests will be great when combined with Skyrim's gameplay and UI. I feel like my frustration with Morrowind's antiquated systems kept me from getting the most out of the experience.

I'm not a fan of people using "nostalgia" as the only reason why people would enjoy something older. Although I played Morrowind before playing either Oblivion or Skyrim (and even then, that was only in 2010), I only got as far as Balmora before my hard disk failed (for unrelated reasons) and I and lost everything on it, including my saves. I didn't feel like going back to it for a while. I actually finished Oblivion and Skyrim before I finally decided to get back to Morrowind (without any mods, only a few bug fixes) and I still prefer the latter for a number of reasons, including the cooler landscapes, enemy variety, more interesting spells like levitate, more skills, more armor parts, guilds that actually acknowledge the existence of other guilds, etc.

The only thing I'm not huge on is the fact that, even though the keyword-based dialogue system is pretty cool, a lot of NP Cs end up saying the same things (which I wouldn't mind as much if the repeated dialogue had only been limited to filler NP Cs).

Let's agree on one thing here: in order to be played comfortably, Morrowind MUST be heavily modded. I don't think anyone can disagree on that.

My personal opinion on Morrowind is that it's easily the most lore-heavy of the trio and has the biggest variety of things (spells, skills, monsters, cities, etc.). However, Morrowind's truly serious problem, once you fix the lesser ones with mods, is that the world feels dead and empty. This is caused by various things that Oblivion mercifully fixed:

- NP Cs can only stand around, and are incapable of using furniture, reading, sleeping and so forth.

- NP Cs are incapable of talking to each other. True, Oblivion's random conversations were clumsily implemented, but they still helped.

- The majority of conversations are just walls of text, in a way that makes them feel disconnected from that NPC puppet that is supposed to be saying them. Oblivion fixed that by giving NP Cs unique faces, making the camera center on that NPC's face, and with voiceovers for every line.

As a result, while Morrowind is richer in lore and content, it eventually makes you feel alone in an empty world devoid of life. And while Oblivion was, at least in my opinion, dumbed down way too much compared to Morrowind, the way it manages to feel actually alive is what makes it so much closer to my heart. A guilty pleasure, if you will.

\"Morrowind MUST be heavily modded. I don\'t think anyone can disagree on that.\"

I disagree with that. And like I mentioned before, nostalgia has nothing to do with it, since I completed Oblivion and Skyrim long before Morrowind. I\'ve also played much more dated games recently and loved them. Some people want different things from their RP Gs.

I forgot to touch on this before, but I also like the dice-based system, by the way. I like RP Gs that depend more on character skill than player reflexes. For RP Gs in general, I like having factors like \"dodge\", \"block\" and \"accuracy\" that you can improve in.