Morrowind: Finally done

The appeal of Morrowind to me is the sheer diversity of character development. Having so many skills to choose from, and being able to take whichever you want, and a fully-customizable magic/enchanting system (how often do you get to make your own spells or enchant your own weapons? Not often enough!) really allowed you to make what you want of it. Sure, beyond level 20, there’s no challenge left in the world, but it takes awhile to get there.

If the world were more responsive (which wouldn’t take much), it would’ve been a great game. Make combat interesting, who knows…

I look forward to Elder Scroll IV, just because I think Bethesda has a great idea, but haven’t been able to pull it off yet. We’ll see.

I would have been more positive on Morrowind if they hadn’t so horribly botched the end game area, what with those dogshed-sized dungeons and laughably weak evil overlords. Not to mention the annoying Fedex parade before you even get there.

Having lots of stuff to explore is great, eventually seeing the limits of variety is inevitable, but there’s really no excuse for how lame the last part of the game was. No challenge, stupid story, boring and buggy to boot. At least The Sims didn’t pretend to be anything but a dollhouse.

Is it just me or has Jason dodged this question repeatedly?

Jason! Your public wants to know! Why for the love of all that is good and pure in gaming did you soldier on? Did you just think you were having fun the whole time and only realize once you were finished with all three that you actually derived no enjoyment whatsoever from them?

Sure it did. It forced every player who wanted to play it like a dollhouse to use the money cheat. It pretended to have an interesting career Sim/development model.

Building downtown is free. My wife loves that.

I don’t mind playing through the careers. It gives you something to strive for, even though it does seem almost impossible to get some of those promotions because they require so much going to work AND making friends AND developing your skills.

The Sims is okay for what it is. It’s fun in moderation, if you can’t find something better to play. I suspect, though, that most of us can.

As I pointed out above, I soldiered on to see if it was just me, or if it was the game. It was the game. :D

And “lots of skills, each of them pointless” doesn’t sound like variety to me.

Morrowind’s biggest failure for me was how it was, at its heart, about ethical decisions but failed to include any ethical repercussions. You COULD be a thief, mass murderer, helpful Paladin, crotchety wizard - but only in your own mind. The game simply relied too heavily on scripted results and just fundamentally lacked the design to allow players to see more tangible results from their actions. I could enter every peasants’ house, slaughter them all like sheep, and still be treated like a hero by the demigods themselves. And there wasn’t any point in becoming a do-gooder since at most all it being ‘good’ meant was choosing the non-violent path option. So i choose to bribe the bad guy instead of kill him (at least most quests were designed with two or three solutions). Hell even the heros of Warcraft 3 feel more involving.

Not that Morrowind wasn’t very good in many other ways, or similarly didn’t have other major problems, but the above was for me its most glaring fundamental flaw.

I wanted to become a god. I was mad when, at the end, there was no way to become a god. I had all the right tools.

You’ve just been playing too much BG2:ToB, Murph. :)

• Alan

Here’s an earlier thread about Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls series is the first (and only) attempt to do a massive free-form 3D RPG non-MMOG. When Arena came out it excited me, not only because the game was innovative and fun but because there was so much hope in the idea… Arena also predated the first big RP MMOGs by only a couple years.

Because nothing like this had been done before, gameplay included several experiments. In Arena things went well. Very well. With Daggerfall things self-destructed even apart from the bugs and unrefined code. The concept of randomized environments, which at the time looked like a good solution for content generation, wasn’t so good in execution. There isn’t much variety in the random generator Bethesda made.

So operating in reactionary mode Morrowind killed off randomization with lots and lots and lots of hand-placed objects. They celebrated the variety of the environments. But it was still a huge world and things were still same-o same-o and bland.

In most series, a game like Daggerfall would have been the last. Elder Scrolls stands not so much on what it has produced but on what it might produce, with a gameplay breakthrough or two.

Bethesda’s mailbox is open if anyone has any gameplay ideas for them.

Given that MMOGs have taken over the “huge world” concept and people spend less time on a given game than they used to (and as all know who have played it, Morrowind is very time-consuming), is the Elder Scrolls concept dead? I’d say it is, barring a major gameplay innovation.

Elder Scrolls: A noble concept that failed.

I’m reluctant to call it dead. Morrowind has sold very well. It’s been a commercial success, so of course there’s going to be another one. And for all of Morrowind’s flaws, it’s done some things very well.

I’d wager that they’ll hit on a great formula soon. I expect ES4 to be great.

I enjoyed Morrowind, and have been playing it again lately (mostly to stave off my MMORPG jones). It isn’t really a great game, and it does show the limitations of a RPGs without a story to speak of, but… it’s kind of fun to just cruise around the world looking for treasure. For my money, it’s biggest flaw is that it doesn’t do that as well as Daggerfall did. (Not enough variation, for one thing.) OTOH, while not bug-free it’s a bazillion times more stable than Daggerfall.

Baldur’s Gate II was pretty good, but I got tired of the quest-on-a-rail thing that happens after Chapter 2…

Fantastic game - one of my all-time favourites.

That’s it?!? All day I’ve been thinking: “Wait until Desslock reads what McCullough and other people are saying!” and snickering to myself. And this is the best you’ve got? And then in the sequel thread you didn’t saying anything about Denny mocking TIE Fighter… man, you’re getting soft Mr. Lock. Becoming positively Elfin.

Yeah, wussy! Let’s hear some invective about video games!

played it, passed it to a friend and came back to it a year later.

Its entertained enough, but I can’t work up any passion for it. There was the general horde of spells, and weapons but in all they weren’t terribly different from another. You couldn’t visually distinguish a high level fire spell from the minor ones. Skills too, using an Axe was only an aesthetic change from a Long Blade. It didn’t mean an unique stance or the ability to really cleave something. Combat was bad, a pure numerical face off that wasn’t moderated by tactics or even your own twitch abilities. I’d much rather have the combo system from Gothic or something like Summoner’s click in sequence. So terribly static too, little life and less charm.

But it did give me 40 hours of play, enough for the money spent.

That’s it?!? All day I’ve been thinking: “Wait until Desslock reads what McCullough and other people are saying!” and snickering to myself. And this is the best you’ve got? And then in the sequel thread you didn’t saying anything about Denny mocking TIE Fighter… man, you’re getting soft Mr. Lock. Becoming positively Elfin.[/quote]

I’ve actually always been more of a Wing Commander guy than a TIE Fighter guy.

Re: Morrowind – my views on the game are pretty well known, or at least I’ve stated them a zillion times, including probably a dozen times here, so I didn’t see the point in reiterating them at length, especially in a thread with some obvious trolling.

I’ve also frequently said that I’m not surprised that a lot of people don’t like Morrowind – it’s not a game I would freely recommend to a lot of gamers, even though I liked it so much – the combat is dull, and gets very easy if you don’t feel like tweaking its difficulty, the NPC conversations lack any depth and the gaming world is too static – all true, and understandable criticisms expressed in this thread.

But for people like myself who love exploring expansive gaming worlds, stocked with lots of background depth and visual detail, there really hasn’t been anything comparable, other than Ultima 9 (which was fatally flawed) and the Gothic games (which are better than Morrowind, in many ways), and MMOs (which don’t allow solo players to really integrate and see everything).

There’s a great creative vision behind Morrowind - tons of little details, like the way each race decorates dwellings, the guild and house dynamics, the novelty of the creatures, the mystery of the dwarves, the political conflicts between the elves and the Empire, the relationships between the Daedra, the evolution of the Morrowind within the Empire – much of which isn’t presented in a dynamic way in the game (which is another reason why many gamers won’t be satisfied with Morrowind), but solely uncovered through exploration and observation and reading, but that doesn’t make it any less immersive if you’re interested in those things (and I can completely understand people not being at all interested). The basic gameplay mechanics in Morrowind are pretty simple, and probably not very satisfying, if you’re not interested in any of that other stuff. But to me, it was an amazing, interactive, freeform novel.

I tend to agree with the statement that Morrowind is in many ways less impressive than Daggerfall. Or, perhaps, what Morrowind was supposed to accomplish was far less ambitious than Daggerfall’s design. Morrowind is a gorgeous world with an perhaps the best designed full setting ever created and fleshed out for an RPG (okay, so it’s not nearly as original as it wants to be but it’s a helluva lot more impressive than a ‘Warcraft’ or other generic fantasy setting). The gameplay, though, isn’t that far removed Daggerfall. The real problem for me is the reliance on scripts.

Daggerfall was scripted but it had the ambition of being a dynamic environment of never-ending roleplaying. Jesus what a great idea! How much would I pay for that?! Randomized quests, dungeons and, in theory at least, dynamic factions whose relationships with your character defined him and unlocked all kinds of content and conditional quests. Loads of hidden surprises - enough that unending rumors were spawned about what else might be in there that just hadn’t been found yet.

Daggerfall had massive amounts of territory to cover (and while much of it did look the same there are definitely regional variations). It was possible to create a thief that just preyed on one particular small town as a career. Or you could wander around the world on any quest you could dream up - almost every possible character concept (except mercantile) and relevant gamecode was there to support it. And the well never ran dry. Always new quests and rumors floating around. Sure they got redundant but more variety and variables could have fixed that. But you never felt you were rationing quests so you didn’t ‘spoil’ them for a future character. You could do what you wanted to and when.

Imagine a game that looked like Morrowind but actually had the gameplay of a Daggerfall - a Daggerfall which actually worked as intended. That’s what Morrowind should have been.

Brian, you beautifully articulated what I was having a hard time putting my finger on wrt Morrowind. I’ve been searching for many years for my RPG utopia, which is the vision (but not the execution) behind Daggerfall. A large, varied, reactive world in which you were completely free to create your own storyline and the world would adapt to and support that storyline. As you said: you want to be a thief who preys on a small town because the law enforcement isn’t as tough as in a larger town? Cool - perhaps you can spy on a meeting in a bar in which you learn about a great opportunity for your thieving, perhaps there’s a young lady you can pursue who’s the daughter of a rich businessman, sexy but spoiled, who like the company of someone from the underside, maybe at some point there’s an election for mayor and the winner wins on a law and order campaign and suddenly life for a thief becomes very difficult (ah - but the police chief might be bribe-able.) A similar reactive and evolving and interactive world in which you could be a noble hero roaming from town to town, building allies and jealous enemies, or any one of many storylines.

I realize how difficult that would be to program. Daggerfall tried to do this, and I tried desparately to make it work, but it just had too many inherent flaws to realize it’s vision. I was stoked for Morrowind, and there is some enjoyment for the “free form” fanatic in just wandering the world and creating in your mind the interactions the game doesn’t overtly deliver, but in the end the zombie nature of most characters kills the game for me much more than the combat, etc.

FWIW: if I ever become wealthy enough I can quit my day jobs and pursue game development, I’ll find a way to produce my dream RPG: a 40s era detective RPG, in the noir style of Chandler, in which you can play a male or female dectective in a well developed city filled with a consistent set of characters (homicide detectives, mob bosses and their underlings, dames, politicians, etc.) with whom you can develop different types of relationships (and which effect relationships with others), new characters that come and go, and a “case generator” that generates an endless supply of cases for you to solve (or not.)

That’ll sell like hotcakes.

You all have me thouroughly confused as to whether I am going to enjoy Morrowind or not. I really wanted to be told if I was going to like it or not, but with the crevasse that seperates the detractors and supporters, I will just have to see for myself. Darn it.