Morrowind: Ten years later and it's still an amazing game

I’m always mad at myself because I can never get into all of the books in these games. I find the majority of them uninteresting and I quit reading them other than to trigger a skill increase. I want to get absorbed into it but the good ones are too few and far between to me.

Arise!
Here is a 8 hour Morrowind retrospective.

Oh, only 8 hours, eh? :P

Man, I wish Morrowind on the Xbox had official mod support- so much of the game just needs small tweaks or was damn fugly (even at release), and mods fix that easy. Mods actually can work, unofficially - I had a modded OG Xbox that I used to run Morrowind w/mods on. Now that MS (almost) owns Bethesda it would be amazing to see them throw some resources to revamp it to get it up and running ala Phantom Dust.

From what I read, the Xbox Series is the first console that can actually play Morrowind at 60fps.

I tried it out on my XboneX, and it was super smooth, but of course I have no way to test framerate. I should give it a spin on the XSX-I wonder if the auto-hdr does anything neat in there.

I think the ES series is overrated including Morrowind.

This isn’t a RPGcodex thing is it?

Are they still around?

The reviewer points out that it’s best to restart the game with a fresh character to do each guild’s quest line. I wish I had done that, since I ended up breezing through most of the content. You shouldn’t have to metagame just to prevent yourself from becoming overpowered when you’re not following a tutorial or using cheats. I don’t really see the benefit in allowing players to join every guild in a single playthrough.

It’s one of the sillier decisions they’ve consistently made.

And I don’t metagame to prevent myself from becoming overpowered. I also don’t prevent myself from becoming overpowered, because it’s great. If you want an actually consistently balanced RPG with challenging combat, there’s mods, or better yet, other RPGs entirely because Bethesda’s never going to make one on their own. :P

They get better and better at it with each game though. I was completely overpowered really early in Morrowind and lost my will to keep playing. I had explored maybe 20% of the game so far. In Oblivion I was overpowered closer to the 50% mark. And in Skyrim, after 125 hours when I stopped playing, when I had already explored over 50% of the landscape, I’d say, I still was very much struggling in a lot of fights.

I was overpowered in Skyrim by level 30, and you can get up past 70 (I did, for an achievement). I also don’t think the combat is ever really challenging in an interesting way. You can turn enemy health and damage up, but you can’t make them smarter or get combat to a place where you’re making a lot of interesting moment to moment decisions or doing the sort of fluid combos etc that characterize, say, character action games’ fighting.

Oh wow. Thay video reeks of elitism, calling console players brainless and later games suffering from being sold to dumb kids.

It’s especially funny as author makes this argument and shows an example of him traveling somewhere and fighting a vampire. He says that the vampire is too strong and he’d go back but lack of fast travel would make it boring and so he is forced into an interesting situation and tough fight. And on the screen you can actually see what he means by a tough fight: a few minutes of clicking attack and drinking half a dozen of healing potions that he has too look for among 20 types of potions.

I can understand people liking older games storytelling and some complex challenging mechanics. And Morrowind might have a unique way of presenting an interesting and vast world with its own history. But anyone who pretends that the gameplay is somehow better cause it technically has more stuff in it probably has some sort of unique boredom resistance. People in this very thread talking about ES games allowing them to be OP too soon. But Skyrim and especially Fallout 4 are much much better in that regard combining interesting character progression with challenging systems.

He also mentions that Fallout 4 still uses fast travel and obviously doesn’t know that survival mode of Fallout 4 makes map navigation as meaningful as it ever was in an open world RPG.

Skyrim difficulty is also not great cause it changes the balance of the game. If you die in 5 hits and kill an average enemy in 3 hits it makes sense to eat some damage and thus improve armor skill. If you die in 2 hits and kill an enemy in 6 hits then the game forces you to adapt a tactic when you are not hit at all, relying on companions, summons and ranged combat. It’s not uncommon to have 100 weapon skill and 50 armor skill on higher difficulty in Skyrim.

I should clarify that I played on Master difficulty in Skyrim. I didn’t choose that on purpose, the game got that from my Xbox 360 preferences. Usually games didn’t use that. The 360 had three system level settings:

  1. I prefer controls inverted.
  2. I prefer inside-the-car camera views in racing games
  3. I prefer hard difficulty

Most games ignored that third setting, but unbeknownst to me, I played Skyrim for many many hours without going into the menu and looking at the difficulty to find out I’d been playing on Master difficulty the whole time. And it was perfect. I would not have chosen that difficulty myself because of how poorly it was implemented in Oblivion. Basically adding to difficulty just added hit points to the enemy, and difficulty was a 1 to 100 scale. But in Skyrim Master difficulty was really well balanced right from the start of the game.

You don’t think being able to craft your own spells and do more complex, varied enchantment (and, e.g., do potions that let you jump higher or spells that let you levitate) is more interesting? I will grant you that Skyrim’s system of perks is a better way to do character progression (even if the actual perks aren’t very interesting and it’s still not up to the standard of, well, a lot of RPGs or e.g. ESO), but I think mechanically Oblivion and Skyrim are mainly downgrades, and the degree to which combat is improved is much less than the degree to which other systems were made less interesting.

If not in fact, he’s a Codexer in spirit for sure.

Spell making is a good example of a feature that sounds good on paper but isn’t good on its own when you implement it (same with Morrowind travel through transport services). It offers you freedom and flexibility that turns out to be a toy you try once and discard. From the point of view of challenge it’s very exploitable (raise attribute for 2 seconds so that i can open a menu and do all I want for a cheap price) but let us not even talk about the challenge.

It’s a boring system with granular customization you don’t need. You never know your enemy stats so it’s not like you prepare for specific challenges. Skyrim’s hunting down of unique spells seem far more interesting to me than theoretical possibility of creating mass murder spell that would wipe out a whole town in a single blast. Skyrim’s 6 basic attack spells (fire, frost and lightning rays or projectile) are much more interesting to me than any of the infinite destruction spells Morrowind can provide, cause those Skyrim spells have additional effects and behave differently instead of just being a flying sphere.

We RPG players often fall in love with systems potential or promose. But I can tell you that spell making system of Morrowind was implemented much better later. In Fallout 4. Weapon modification in this game is basically a good version of spell making. Weapons have modifications that give you interesting and noticeable choices. Like allowing you to charge a weapon, or add a stock making aiming slower but more precise. If you have advanced skills you can add more interesting unique properties. It’s mostly not about improving weapons, but about customizing them. And I’d argue Skyrim has a little of that custimization. If you get deep into magic skill trees you can cast unlock powerful spell empowering using more mana and both hands to cast. If they double down on that thwy might allow you to apply various trade-offs like that to spells in a next TES game and it’d be a proper spell crafting system, and not just playing with sliders.

The fast travel options in Oblivion and Skyrim may be convenient, but that convenience comes at a cost. There were fast travel options in Morrowind of course (teleport, boat, silt strider), but they made sense in the game world and couldn’t be abused to the extent of the later games. It made the world feel more coherent and less “gamey”. You actually had to travel around the continent instead of just opening the map and clicking on a location, completing your quest, and then opening the map and clicking on another location to get your reward.

Was following directions and trying to find your objective on an unmarked map occasionally a challenge? Yep. Was walking back to town after completing a quest boring? Sure, sometimes. Is there something wrong with that? Do all games need to hold your hand and remove any and all down time in the pursuit of some pure action-reward-action-reward-action-reward gameplay loop? I could not disagree more. That’s not what these games are supposed to be about. They’re supposed to be about getting lost in another world. Morrowind did that better than most.

For the record, the combat in Morrowind sucks, and always did. It was serviceable, but hardly a selling point. Bethesda’s games have improved upon that aspect tremendously since, even if they’re still not particularly great.

It is thrilling at first when you create spells and enchantments where you’re thinking “Cackling evil Laughter**** I’m breaking the system. I’m going to be unbeatable”. And then you play the game further and you realize, oh, you did break the system. You really are unbeatable. And suddenly it’s boring.