This is the only mod that is absolutely necessary for Morrowind.
You can see the huge changes it makes in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4rXsrZRchQ
In addition to Shimarenda’s suggestion, what I did to solve the slow walking speed was to always run, and then used a mod that greatly reduced the stamina hit to always running. If you’re interested I can try to find the name of that mod.
Yes, but it was on by default. The guide said to just accept the defaults if you didn’t have much knowledge regarding the choices, but I was thinking of turning it off.
I’ve now got an install of Morrowind as prepared by the guide linked above, and one with the Overhaul installed.
That…seems horrible!
Looking at my Morrowind folder, I do have several mods that I like in addition to the official plugins Bethesda released. Of these, I consider Book Rotate and Passive Healthy Wildlife to be nearly essential to my Morrowind experience.
Book Rotate: In Morrowind, books lie flat with the spine toward the left. With this mod, you can pick it up and put it down again to set it upright with spine toward you, and again to lie it flat with the spine toward you. It makes it easier to arrange shelves of books.
Gondola Fix: Over the course of the game, the gondolas around Vivec City will rotate until the stern is under water and the bow sticking up. This fixes that.
Modman Windowlights: I like lighted windows at night. I used a similar mod in Oblivion (cathedral windows are beautiful at night), and was so pleased when the early screenshots of Skyrim showed night scenes with lighted windows.
Passive Healthy Wildlife: If it doesn’t have blight and in-game books don’t say it’s aggressive, it won’t attack you unprovoked. This includes the hated Cliffracers (blight cliffracers still attack). Alits, kagouti, nix hounds, kwama foragers, and such will still attack since they are aggressive according to in-game sources. However, it is pleasant that not everything that breathes is out for your blood.
Ring Texture Fix: Rings are black in game because of some error with the textures. This fixes that.
Spz Year Patch: The game skips the month of Morning Star because it is number 0, but the code starts with number 1. This fixes that.
Even when playing it around the time of release*, I still used one of the ‘Better Heads’ mods to make the NPCs more attractive. The original head/face models were interesting-looking, but like Oblivion, the fan-made heads were generally much better (and more memorable to me as characters). If I were to play again, I’d probably use a lot of visual mods, but I wouldn’t want my view distance to be too extreme because the game seems to have been designed with the short view distance in mind (and the island might seem a lot smaller if you can see too much of it all at once). For me though, the beauty of the game is the creativity of its settings, cultures (revealed by quests, books, and dialog), and architecture. I doubt any texture packs could diminish that too much.
The movement speed was always way too slow, but if you’re open to a minor side-quest spoiler you could google instructions for finding…
something that lets you run crazy fast
The Boots of Blinding Speed will help you travel much faster, and they’re part of an amusing quest. Note that, IIRC, the boots tend to fit orcs especially well.
*(I mostly played the GotY edition because the original unpatched version of the game had a terrible water flickering bug that forced me to return it to my local EB games… Probably the last boxed edition of a game that I was able to return after opening).
There were so many bugs left in Morrowind, even after all the expansions and patches to those that you can’t really just offer a few mod suggestions, you have to throw the kitchen sink at it. The best place to start for info on that is the UESP:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Mods
The minimum effort is Morrowind Patch Project and Morrowind Code Patch, the minimum. Then use some of the great modding guides to get the kind of Morrowind you prefer, like from this link:
Any suggestions on what type of character is the most fun to play? It doesn’t need to be the most powerful class. I typically play melee fighters, but they are probably one of the most boring unless combat is good - which it isn’t in Elder Scrolls games. I’m not sure why I always gravitate to it on my first (and usually only) playthrough. I’m also open to some type of hybrid characters. I’m hoping to not get too caught up in min / maxing is that is possible. I don’t want to be a weakling that has a lot of trouble though. Thanks.
I remember making a laughably powerful melee based character with mysticism, and enchanting. I think Mysticism was the healing school…As in all of these games, melee ends up being exponentially more powerful due to attack speed, and clumsiness of trying to target/hit things at range. Every game they’ve ever made has sucked at range combat, at least for me. Running up and hitting things is perfectly viable in Morrowind, and possibly the best build.
Basically, make a paladin, and take enchanting. The stuff you can do with enchanting gets just silly powerful if you invest time into it.
The only things you can’t build during the game are your racial and sign bonuses. If you want to do some sort of hybrid build it’s pretty trivial to do so, especially once you get a decent cash reserve built up for training. I mean, my warrior was the guildmaster of the Fighter, Thief -and- Mage guilds. And this in Morrowind, where guild ranks actually have skill level requirements.
I don’t really disagree, however most of the game is spent outdoors, which makes a flying archer or caster infinitely more overpowered than a melee character can ever hope to be. This is especially true because whomever wrote Morrowind’s AI forgot to account for the innate abilities of NPCs. In other words, you’re only going to get fireballed in the face if the devs decided to manually give the enemy a special ability to throw fireballs above and beyond any standard ability to throw fireballs the enemy might have.
Once upon a time there was a mod that attempted to fix this, and actually did a fairly good job of it. I forget what it was called, but if you go looking for it, do realise that the mod DRASTICALLY changes the game difficulty. It’s a lot of fun if you have a high level character. If you don’t, you’ll probably just get rekt a lot.
You can hit tilde and enter “enablestatreviewmenu” in the console. That opens up the character creation menu, allowing you to change things like race, birthsign and character model.
Warning! If you do this, you will instantly lose all your spells, as well as any persistent effects based on your character. You will also have to save and re-load for the changes to take full effect. What this means is basically that you’ll have to use console commands to give yourself any spells you may have lost, and that you should definitely NOT use enablestatreviewmenu after you get to a certain point in the main quest which gives you a certain immunity.
Well, sure, if you start breaking out things like console commands you can do pretty much whatever. But I meant there’s no in-world, game-mechanical way to change those things AFAIK. Whereas skills and stats are a matter of finding a trainer and dumping some gold on them. (Or abusing alchemy and enchantment and spell creation. Because they are supremely abusable.)
I decided to start focusing mostly on magic because I rarely play that type of character and I probably won’t do a second play through. My primary are: long blade, destruction, alteration, conjuration, light armor
minor skills are: athletics, enchant, light armor, speechcraft and mercantile
Maybe I should have had alchemy in there instead of mercantile
On one hand I like the list of known topics for conversation. On the other hand I hate the list of topics for conversation. Some of them are quite long and they say the same things that you’ve already heard. Is there any way to tell that a topic may lead to new information so you don;t have to waste time repeating the same info with different people?
I added one of the speed mods and that makes the game go much better. Holy cow the default walk and run speed was painful. If only there was a mod to remove or grey out conversation topics that wouldn’t lead new information.
I am using the Overhaul mod that upgrades the visuals and it does look very nice for such an old game. Frame rate can be spotty, but for a game like this beauty trumps frame rate.
Wandering through Vivic looking for the Fighter’s Guild reminds me of the reasons I tend to stop playing these games. Too much tediousness. I like wandering the wilderness, taking in the sights more, but trying to do quests brings you into the cities. Not fun for me.
I loved Vivec for its visual and story/cultural design (especially the idea of segregated Cantons and a foreign quarter; I’m guessing they took inspiration from colonial era China), but navigating in and out of the sewers and hallways can be a pain until you get your bearings. In reality, the cities in Morrowind are not that large once you get to the point where you can step back and see the world building, but like everything in the game it seems like a lot of it was built with little barriers and rails to artificially extend the travel distance between points. Once you can move faster, and once you know your way around and have some handy abilities (jumping high, slow fall, levitation, etc.), you can take shortcuts that make the cities feel kind of small.
IIRC, I used to make heavy use of a ‘slow fall’ ring when traveling around in Vivec because I could jump down from the upper level of one canton and float across the canal to the next canton.
Also, IIRC, magic was really underpowered in Morrowind (as it has been in most of the Elder Scrolls games), so I’m afraid you may find it frustrating. Magic is fun when you can use it, but the extremely slow mana regeneration (requiring most chars to sleep) makes wizard chars pretty ineffectual. I think at one point I used the Construction Kit to mod myself a mana regeneration ring, and that made a wizard character much more viable/interesting.
I personally really liked archery (plus longblades, blunt or spears) in both Morrowind and Oblivion, so that’s what I would’ve recommended if I’d caught you before you created your character.
I don’t think you need to do any questing in Vivec for quite a while, that I can recall. And none of the other cities are nearly as big or hard to navigate. By the time you do need to go there you can probably have a reliable source of levitation and maybe a few other handy travel augments.
The fighters guild and the main quest both brought me to Vivec. I had levitation, but not enough mana to cast it more than 1x per sleep.
I don’t know if this is an accurate assessment, but it seems like Skyrim had more quests taking place outside of cities.
I don’t have slow fall, but I took advantage of the fact that in a some places the walls had a slightly sloped part that I could jump and slide down without taking damage.
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.