Just for the record, video made a different point.
I can see beauty in preparing for the road, but Morrowind didn’t realize this idea properly. In Morrowind overworld enemies rarely respawn so travelling back from a dungeon is almost always safe. Travelling by silt strider or boat or mages guild is very cheap. Your allegiances never affect your travelling options (unless you’re vampire, I guess). You never see a transportation map. There’s plenty that could be done to make travelling both downtime and interesting choice, instead it’s just busywork.
Fire lowers target armor. Ice drains stamina. Lighting drains mana. Projectiles travel in a different way.
I now remember that even when I played Morrowind I was drawn to unique spells on sell. They had names suggesting some stories behind them. Those custom granular tools would work in some kind of tactical XCOM game where every point matters, but in an RPG like this you turn magic into accounting by constructing a spell with mana cost = damage * duration * area, instead of earning services of archmage who sells you uniwue slecific Firestorm spell.
Edit: btw, look at Tyranny. Here’s what I’d consider a spellmaking system that earns its place in a game.
I didn’t say they didn’t have other differences. Just that it doesn’t really matter. I have absolutely never had a fight turn on elemental damage draining my stamina or whatever, and insofar as it’s mattered when I was dealing it out, it was because I was trying to fireball someone who was 70% fire resistant or similar. Most of the time I just went with fire because it was easiest to come by and most consistently damaging.
I’d honestly be more interested in learning cool unique spells with backstories etc myself, but Skyrim doesn’t really deliver on that front either. And I agree, Tyranny’s spellcrafting is better.
Alright, so despite you guys posting in a Morrowind thread who obviously hate Morrowind, I have just reinstalled.
Haven’t fired it up yet. I’m going to be playing via GamePass. Someone got a handy link/guide for mods (and how to install them on GP) that make this game NOT look like a game from the 90s?
Above is just a sample of the old Morrowind save games that I’d… uh, saved, and relocated a few weeks ago on an old laptop. They feature the same character, Omsty Nudd, a Breton Mage who I (as you can see) I started in 2003 and continued with over the years. The most recent save that I located was 2012.
So I decided that not only was I going to return to MW, I was going to continue with Omsty Nudd rather than starting over.
Problem is, by the time I got to 2012 my game was heavily modded. So I spent the last three weeks trying to located those old mods, most out of date, in order to be able to run the nine year old save game without error messages and crashes.
I mostly succeeded. I located virtually every mod, and I skip past a couple of error messages when I first run it, but now everything seems fine. Perhaps I’ll get crashes later, but now I’m play Omsty at level 10, having explored a huge swath of the continent but still not far along in the main quest.
tdlr: I have now played the same character in Morrowind in three separate decades.
I’ve just installed Morrowind on my Steam Deck, and OpenMW to help bring the engine to a slightly more modern state- you can get it via the Discover thing on the Deck Desktop. It plays pretty smooth so far with all the shadows/shaders/etc turned on, but I’m still Vanilla otherwise. Now over the next few days I fall down the rabbit hole of installing mods. Wish me luck.
I dearly, dearly love Skyrim. And in many ways it’s a better game. BUT…
Morrowind was one of the most…impactful games I’ve ever played, in terms of how I view games. I have so, so many fond memories of it, and it just did so many things I’d never seen before. I don’t really do mods much, but I often consider slapping some mods on it to make it a little prettier and running through it again.
It’s so easy to break, but so much of it was just so, so good.
Even without fully voiced dialogue, terrible character models (even in 2002), crappy combat, and those damn cliff racers, Morrowind is the most immersive game I’ve ever played.
Everytime I have to walk in the rain on overcast days that theme song plays in my head.
Definitely helps that it was something special at the time, but I believe even now it still has a magic that the sequels don’t. Part of me wonders if the graphics of that era helped contribute to a place that was detailed enough to really feel present in, but also lacked enough detail that it gave a sense of kind of desolate isolation. Thinking about the locations kind of takes me back to the same feeling I got from Darkshore when WoW launched.
Morrowind is my favorite Elder Scrolls. The first copy I had was a game of the year 2003 Xbox edition that kept skipping every so often, in practice slowing down the gameplay to 1/10 what it should have been. I pored over that physical map like Bilbo Baggins in the animated Hobbit (I wonder where it is today). I played it for hours and hours anyway before finally a clean copy.
My brother figured out how to build this insanely OP character using Ash Yams or something (with a little help from the internet as I recall). The Tombs, man, the Tombs! It had such a consistent method of environmental heroic storytelling. It was so real. Anyway, my brother finally beat the game; I never did (although I kept making new characters). I think I got lost in one of the southern cities; there was just too much going on. That Redoran town that was inside of a crab shell! The mage city that you had to levitate to get to! That random incident where the guy just falls out of the sky (lol)! The Silt Striders and the guilds!
It was an awesome game, one of my favorites of all time.
Oh yeah, I was floored when I walked in on my brother’s game and he was just chatting it up with Vivec.
The physical map made the game seem so much larger than it actually was, so travel times weren’t really an issue for me: it was more the experience of ‘oh, I’ve been walking for a while, I must have gone far’ when digitally speaking it’s but a stone’s throw. My point is, the developers focused on the experience (and yes, the combat is annoying, Ridge Racers especially - the rest of the game is just so awesome I hardly notice it).
I also like the Silt Striders because they give you a cut to black point A to point B sensation of having traveled a long way. The first time I played, whatever the $&^% that town on the river is called seemed immeasurably far from Seyda Neen. Because you don’t just have this overworld fast travel option, there are a ton of cool places you have to hoof it to get to (although the Silt Striders take you to most of the important zones, I think). It just works. Finally filling in a mental map of the digital dark spaces that coincide with the physical map’s rendering was also an experience.
I think it’s because the Dunmer/Morrowind setting was so unique. It felt like some ancient, alien civilization thanks to the incredible building/town design.
The sequels were more of the standard European medieval-influenced fantasy setting.
