"You stupid N'wah!"The first game that I want to talk about is Morrowind. If you spend any amount of time on the IRC, you've probably heard me mention Morrowind, and by mention, I mean ramble on about it being amazing. There is so much to love about it, that I just can't help but come back to it over and over again. Sure, it is both mechanically and graphically outdated, but with a bit of willpower (and some modding), there is an amazing experience to be had.
First, there is the story. It is pretty difficult to discuss it in depth without spoilers, but I'll try my best to do so. In your first playthrough, you may see certain characters as moral good, and others as moral evil. However, if you stop and think about why these characters want you to achieve/fail your goal, you realise that everyone has their own motives, and this makes the morally perfect suddenly imperfect. Things only become more complicated if you read into the lore and find out about all of these characters’ backgrounds.
Graphically, Morrowind can hardly compare with modern games. Being a game released in 2002, the graphics are very outdated, and the draw distance can be incredibly painful. This can be fixed with mods (I recommend
Morrowind Overhaul if you want to play Morrowind. It not only greatly increases the graphical fidelity and draw distance, but it also optimizes the game to run on modern computers and fixes a lot of bugs), but I want to stick to talking about the vanilla game (well, vanilla plus expansions). However, even though Morrowind looks ancient, its world is still a sight to behold. The island of Vvardenfell looks so alien, with its bizarre regions and freakish creatures, that it feels completely unique to other games. There is the swampy Bitter Coast that you start the game in, with its abundance of insects and smugglers’ dens. The Ashlands, devoid of life and seemingly dead, yet native tribes still somehow manage to survive there after being pushed out of their homes by imperialist rule. Azura’s Coast, where Telvanni wizards reside in overgrown mushroom towers. The city of Vivec, made up of several smaller, indoor cities run by the major factions. Red Mountain, a place that has become so devastated by disease that it has been completely quarantined off by the use of a magical barrier. All of these regions have a distinct feel when exploring them, and it is amazing how meticulously both their look and their lore is designed. Even with Morrowind’s static AI, these locations feel even more alive than any other game world that I have ever experienced, even in other Elder Scrolls games.
As for Morrowind’s music,
it’s good.
Finally, I want to talk about Morrowind’s actual gameplay mechanics. There is so much to talk about here, so I’ll try to segment it the best that I can. I’ll start off by talking about the quest system. Unlike the later Elder Scrolls games, there are no quest markers. You are given written directions and descriptions of areas you are looking for. This may feel obnoxious if you are used to being told exactly where to go, but over time you will appreciate this far more. Instead of following an arrow from destination to destination, you are forced to explore the world. You are no longer just trying to find the most efficient path to your destination. This emphasis on exploration and players having to figure out situations on their own will be present throughout your entire experience with Morrowind. Exploration is highly rewarded in Morrowind, if not entirely necessary. The game can get very difficult in certain areas, since monsters don’t match your level like they do in Oblivion and Skyrim. This means that you have to look hard for rare or unique items to help augment your ability to combat them. Again, unlike Oblivion and Skyrim, high level armour and weapons are incredibly hard to get. You’re not going to find daedric armour in any old leveled loot list, and you certainly won’t be able to make gear on your own that far surpasses the usefulness of unique items. Rare items are reserved for highly important NPCs and difficult to find locations, and unique items are truly worthy of being ancient artifacts that have been created by gods.
Next, I’m going to talk about the start of the game. When you first start the game, you are going to be slow, most of your attacks are going to miss even though the enemy is right in front of you, and you are just going to be weak all around. It may be a pain to push through the start of the game for some people, but I actually really like that the game starts you off like this. It gives you a frame of reference. You start out the weakest that any of the three newest Elder Scrolls games will start you, but you end up as potentially the most powerful character in the three games. This really makes you feel like the epic hero that the story is building you up to be.
Now for combat. The largest complaint that new Morrowind players have is generally the combat. As I mentioned earlier, at the start of the game you are incredibly weak. The majority of your attacks will miss their target, but there is a good reason for this. A lot of complaints say that this is nothing more than a dice roll, making the combat completely broken, but this isn’t the case. Your success in combat is determined by many variables, so many to the point where it is hard to list them all. You have to think of how high your agility is, how high your opponent's agility is, how fatigued are you, how heavy your armour is, what type of weapon you are using, how well trained you are in using that weapon, what type of attack are you doing, and many other factors. I don’t think that this system is in any way perfect, but I don’t think that it is entirely broken either. Morrowind is an RPG at heart, and thus is very stat based. There are mods that make it so your attacks land a hit every time, but I recommend leveling up a bit and playing around with the system that the game has. You’ll find that a bit of experience and planning can go a long way in combat, making battles less of an endless barrage of slashes and more of a well thought out series of maneuvers.
Moving on, I’m going to talk something that draws people to the Elder Scrolls series as a whole, player choice. This is something that Morrowind excels at. In terms of how you play the game, there are so many options. For weapons, there are short swords, long swords, blunt weapons, axes, spears, shields, hand-to-hand, six different schools of magic, and various ranged weapons, such as bows, crossbows, and throwing weapons. For armour, there is heavy armour, medium armour, light armour, and unarmoured. These are just the skills with obvious combat applications, and they are all viable, even hand-to-hand and unarmoured. Not only is there a huge amount of choice, but you can mix and match these abilities. Want to be a battle mage, decked out in enchanted heavy armour, fighting enemies with a spear and buffing yourself with spells? Go ahead. Want to put a focus on doing a high amount of damage and dodging most attacks? Try playing an unarmoured long blade wielder. You can even play passively. Feel free to summon or tame creatures to fight for you and focus on buffing and healing them from a safe distance. All of these different styles of play allow you to replay Morrowind so many times and still have new ways to experience it.
Continuing with player choice is Morrowind’s huge variety of joinable guilds and organizations. If all of those different styles of play weren’t enough replayability for you, how about 16 different factions for you to join, including three different Great Houses, which are large groups struggling for power over the island of Vvardenfell and Morrowind as a whole, guilds set up by the Imperials who are trying to remake the province of Morrowind in a "more civilized" way, two competing religious temples, three different vampire clans, and many more. Not only do all of these guilds offer a huge variety in quests and experiences, but they also all interact with each other in different ways. Every faction has different alliances and enemies, this means that you aren’t going to be joining the majority of the guilds in a single playthrough like you could in Oblivion and Skyrim.
Finally, I’m going to talk about how amazingly cool Morrowind’s magic system is. Every play style in Morrowind has different things that make it unique, which will cause different players to favour different playstyles. For me, my favourite way to play Morrowind is as some form of a caster class. The magic system contained in Morrowind allows for so much variety, that it is hard to get bored. There are three things that make magic so fun for me. First is the huge number of pre made spells. Sure there are your usual damaging and healing spells, but there is even more than that. You can learn spells that unlock doors, allow you to fly, buff your stats, befriend enemies, and a bunch of other cool things that I don’t want to give away. Second is making your own spells. Every time you learn a new spell, you also learn the effects that it is made of. So if you learn a healing spell, you now know how to make spells that heal people. Combined with the fact that there are a huge variety of spell effects in the game, you can make nearly any spell that you want. If I want a spell for traveling long distances that allows me to fly, increases my speed, and makes me invisible so that no flying enemies attack me, I can do that. If decide mid playthrough that I want to start using armour and a long blade as a mage, I can make a spell that summons a sword, some armour, and buffs my strength stat. This makes a mage very versatile, but it is incredibly expensive to make spells that are this strong. On top of that, it can be very difficult for anyone other than the most skilled of mages to cast complex spells. This means that you can become over powered, but you have to earn it. Finally is enchanting. Enchanting is very different in Morrowind than in the later Elder Scrolls games. There are three types of enchantments, on hit enchantments, which affect an enemy in some way if you hit them, on use enchantments, which act as spells you can cast without draining your mana pool (which is very important because mana doesn’t regenerate in Morrowind), and constant effect enchantments, which, as the name would imply, constantly affect your character in some way. Constant effect enhancements are some of the most powerful items in the game. Earlier I said that you can’t make items that are more powerful than uniques, and that isn’t entirely true. You can enchant very powerful items, such as a ring that gives you regenerative health or allows you to fly endlessly, but there is a catch. These types of enchantments can only be made with very rare, unique souls. You’re going to have to search hard to find a soul capable of making constant effect enchantments, and when you find one, you have to make sure you use it wisely. Also, you have to either find a highly skilled enchanter, of which there are only a few in the game, or be a highly skilled enchanter yourself in order to make these enchantments. If you aren’t powerful enough, you run the risk of destroying the soul that you are trying to use. I love that it is so difficult to get these powerful enchantments for two reasons. One, you have to earn the right to godlike power, and second, it is great for roleplaying. That may sound a bit cheesy to some people, but it is true. You can play a character who killed a god in order to achieve amazing power. Emergent gameplay like this is where Morrowind shines.
I’m sure I missed a few things, but I feel like I’ve somewhat adequately summarized why Morrowind is still amazing after 13 years. It hasn’t aged perfectly, but I would say give it a try. As I said earlier, I recommend using
Morrowind Overhaul to graphically enhance the game, as well as make it run better on newer computers. Also, if you have any questions about Morrowind or mods for it, feel free to ask me. I feel like I can speak from some place of knowledge, having played about 100 hours of Morrowind over the past few weeks. Thanks for reading my really long post.
Pretty Pictures Taken with Morrowind Overhaul that I Found Online: show Also, I’ll probably talk about System Shock 2 next, so look forward to that. I'm going to be talking about the recent popularity of niche simulator games next. Nevermind, whatever happens, happens.
