"I am a sleeper, one among thousands. I bring you a message. dagoth ur calls you, nerevarine, and you cannot deny your lord. the sixth house is risen, and dagoth is its glory"

despite the doom and gloom about oblivion, it's morrowind that serves as the elder scrolls' greatest anomaly: an inflection point that swerved the series away from faceless maximalism, monolithic breadth, and randomized content. developed during a period of fear and uncertainty about the future of the company, todd howard sums up the philosophy behind the risk taking succinctly: "what's the worst that's going to happen?"

a meticulously handcrafted world you could feasibly traverse in real time, a multitude of elaborate static questlines, lessened emphasis on level scaling, fast travel relegated solely to in-world means, rich itemization, an enhanced dialogue system, smaller dungeons that approximate real spaces... to say the changes were significant is an understatement. while established pillars like the character creation format and learn-by-doing skill system remained largely in tact, nearly everything else was reimagined or reworked to fit a game that was, among many things, more local. where bethesda once crafted abstract worlds, here they'd take on the challenge of designing, establishing, and allowing you to inhabit an actual place

nine regions spiral inward, each housing numerous geographies, cultures and settlements; each with drastically distinct architectures informed by them. the mushroom towers of the telvani, carapace huts of gnisis or ald-ruhn, stone and thatched roof settlements of the imperials, yurts of the ashlanders, and crooked daedric ruins being but a few. where previous — and to a lesser extent subsequent — entries in the series drew from a standard palette of european history and high fantasy, morrowind takes great efforts to distinguish itself as something uniquely alien, largely thanks to artist, writer, and designer michael kirkbride

fittingly, you're a stranger — a foreigner, outlander, n'wah — tasked with observing and navigating the region, its factions and religions, and the splinter groups and fractured politics within them. if you follow the narrative throughline you'll be expected to gather some body of knowledge, but most of it is offered in the way of extracurricular research and after hours inquisition

it's a congruent approach that allows for as much or as little engagement with the absurd amount of subsurface lore and worldbuilding as possible. if you choose to delve you'll get stories full of contradictions, unreliable narrators, historical records, mythological yarns, rituals, poems, lusty argonian maids, and a guy who learned to wear heavy armour so well he could walk on his hands and fuck his wife without removing it. if you choose not to you can stick to the more utile texts like the red book of 3E 426 or dismiss everything altogether. you can go the whole game without knowing what a dwemer is, but you're covered: some folks don't know shit

really, you don't have to know or do anything. once off the boat you'll amble forward all sluggish and dim and likely spend most of your time wandering aimlessly, learning elaborate public transit routes, memorizing directions, and getting lost in vivec. while there's urgency to the main quest, more often than not it'll be sending you far and wide to hobnob, get the lay of the land, and delve into tombs and caverns

and therein lies the brick wall that fells many an adventurer: the combat. in a contentious swerve morrowind is the only game in the series that binds the success of basic attacks to dice rolls. your blade may look like it's passing through one of the dozen cliff racers that've chased you from sheogorad to the ascadian isles, but the outcome is up to chance — and chance is working against you in the early hours. on its face it's a bad decision; it inarguably feels worse than any other game in the series, but that's ultimately why it proves to be the correct one

morrowind has something of a hyperbolic power curve. odds are if you're new to the game you might make a build where rats are lethal, walking up a slight incline requires you to take a break, and your understanding of your weapon is fundamentally unsound in a way that shouldn't be possible. you're basically the biggest loser to ever grace tamriel, and after you meet jiub, sign your paperwork, and get lost finding caius cosades you'll probably find yourself poisoned, paralyzed, or worse. the beauty in this is how it enables a heightened level of contrast

by the end of the game you'll be soaring over the ghostgate adorned in Exquisite Shirts and Pants that eliminate fall damage and fatigue, wielding custom swords that siphon enemy agility ("malder's gait"), and hosting a gilgameshian hoard of artifacts so valuable you'll have to sell them to a crab just to get half the money they're worth. you'll become a living cartoon on some who framed roger rabbit or space jam shit, and the juxtaposition couldn't possibly be more satisfying — all because of those shitty fuckin dice rolls

morrowind is a journey, one that's as much about murking bureaucrats, finding a smoking hot telvani wife, getting called slurs, contracting a thousand diseases, and severing the threads of prophecy as it is being ""Nerevarine"" or anything else. for all its little flaws and idiosyncrasies it continues to creep up the list of my favourite games, and hell, I guess I love it

in the end after a hard fought victory I ended up back where I started: in caius cosades house, now stacked knee high with books, glass armours, boots of flying, sixth house trinkets, and a fire hazard's worth of odds and ends. in honour of my good friend the spymaster I decided to relax, hit the Good Skooma Pipe (Quality: 0.15), and get some rest...

I sure hope nothing weird happens with The Tribunal haha!!!

blows insane plume

It's a game of abstractions and endless complexity, but the way those integrate might seem confusing to one unfamiliar. Morrowind, if anything, is the greatest simulator of living in a fictional world ever devised. It might not care as much about the monotonies of day-to-day life in a setting like this, unlike some other games, but it immerses you in the culture and land in a way unlike any other.

Everyone hates you, everywhere pushes you away, everything is too strong to be fought and nothing makes a lick of sense. To successfully integrate into the culture of Morrowind is to basically become a scholar of your own; it's highly advisable to just explore towns, do little errands for people and read books, not only because they provide skill-checks, but often the written information is genuinely useful. What you'll find is one part metaphysical mindfuck once you dig too deep, but another part that's a world that characterizes itself perfectly. Most quests you do are just random tasks you're doing for folks, and you're not typically treated like a legendary figure just for engaging in questlines, but you become more intimately familiar with Morrowind itself, and when you've gone around doing enough quests, reading enough books, plundering enough dungeons and stealing enough herbs (like you should) for the right amount of time, you've breathed in the culture of Vvardenfell. When you fulfill the ancient prophecy, it means something; because you've already learned why and how the ancient prophecy matters. Being able to meet a member of the Tribunal or Sixth House is about as impactful as it should be in the lore, and If it isn't painfully clear already, Morrowind's immersion is excellent and it's the iceing on the exploratory cake of the gameplay. Wandering over a hill and finding something enlightening or just plain fucking weird is great, and the game offers you a million ways to deal with it. It's not a game about dialogue choices per-say, but a game of more general choice. There's nothing the game tells you that you can't do due to your build, just stuff you're not as good at, so preparative thinking before every quest can be essential to make the most of your abilities and minimize the worst. Often, you'll find completely unexpected solutions for quests that came solely as a result of your usage of the mechanics, and it always feels rewarding seeing it happen. There's a point in the game where you'll notice there's buildings that you have to levitate up to, just because: hey, there's genuine wizards in this world! That's Morrowind at its best, and it's up to you to see what will work out... or maybe not, cause you can just go explore elsewhere!

Where it loses people is in muddied abstraction; the game doesn't give many dialogue choices, conversations are treated like browsing wikipedia, it's extremely vague about what some things are supposed to represent in animation terms and, while this is all a flaw of not utilizing the visual part of the medium more, it's easily fixable by letting your mind do the work. Walking up as a newcomer and asking about key-questions to random people in the street, often things they won't know about, feels like the equivalent of asking around in a genuine new place, just scrambling to get clues on the area. Having your character not be visually shown missing hits or dodging them might seem tacky, but mentally fill in the blanks and realize that it serves to convey the dangers of Morrowind, and furthermore, that you can reach a point where you're able to dodge thousands of hits hurdling at you; it's just straight up awesome. There's lots of places that really needed more detail, and the AI can be downright laughable, but by the endgame you're hardly thinking of that because it fed into your growth so well the whole time. For all these abstractions, weirdly complicated mechanics, missed opportunities or immersion-killers, it's incredible that you can still feel perfectly immersed as an outlander at the start being beaten down by shitty insects, and be equally immersed as a CHIM-enlightened Telvanni super-mage who can jump across the continent, blast down fireballs strong enough to eviscerate entire cities and summon armies of otherworldly invaders to do your bidding. It's all immersive, and it all makes perfect canonical sense in Kirkbride's Godhead fever-dream; including console commands! It's an unmatched sense of immersion, it's got unmatched storytelling, it's got an unmatched power curve, the exploration is wonderful, and it has a setting more fascinating than any other fantasy world... well, barring maybe one exception. Praise the Sixth House, and play Morrowind. Try not to view the slow-walking and missing hits as a negative, but as a necessary part of the games mechanically nuanced RPG mechanics; it's all meant to convey the dream, and you're the Nerevarine, not the sharmat. Go forth on your adventure, unless you happen to not be the one, in which case, your time may come again, Moon-and-Star.

Probably the only game I played where breaking the mechanics is actually encoded in the story. Pretty satisfying that basejumping the entire continent to stunt on the xenophobic slave-owners is an entirely valid experience. The hard cap on this is that Morrowind easily has some of the worst UX I've ever seen for a game in this era, the map is trash, the inventory system is a mess, and there's so. much. menu. clicking. All this combines with a doo-doo melee system and lackluster quest design to make the early game a slog to play, which is why I broke the game with some console commands and legal exploits. This is easily the best magic system in TES though, spellmaking + alchemy allows for a lot of creative and powerful ways to assert your magical dominance--basejumping, super fast levitation, instanthearthing, autoheals, etc. are totally possible if you know your way around.

Still, the real sell is the main quest, which is actually interesting and a decent look at religious prosecution, the ambiguity of prophecy, traditionalism, etc. with some nice epistemological moments thrown in. The sub theme of what delineates the coincidental from the supernatural is a totally unique thought for video games, as philosophy of religion is totally unexplored in pop culture despite how dominant religious modes of thinking are in our secular age. I mean, you may call yourself a secularist, but if "why do good things happen to bad people?" is a compelling question for you, you're still pretty much a theist. You do have to kind of draw all the philosophy of religion out though, as the actual dialogue and plot-by-plot moments only mention the actual meaning of what's going on in passing; it's thematics are best discovered on long, laborious walks both in-game and out-of-game than through digging journal entries or dialogue.

Ultimately, Morrowind is a game that requires a bit of digging and finessing to make enjoyable, but its such a unique experience with unique things to say its hard to be too mad at it. Patience and faith is the core to all religious experiences after all.

I haven’t played a Bethesda game all the way through since Fallout 4 came out, and every time I’ve tried I’ve fallen off. The earlier ones start slow and open, with almost no direction (let alone plot) and RPG systems that seem designed to intimidate. This isn’t necessarily that unique among 90s RPGs, but compared to my favorites of the time they just felt focused on different things. The more recent ones have gone all in on what those older games hinted at, throwing out almost all of the strenuous, simulation-ey flavor in favor of a more frictionless experience that lets you indulge in expansive escapist tourism in a medieval world. Morrowind sits in the middle, intimidating and slow at the beginning and diving into wide open tourism as it goes on, but once I pushed past that opening and began paying attention to the tourism, I found an island that’s refreshingly alien and starkly gorgeous in a solemn way.

Trudging around from city to city, taking stock of the unique (or at least non-traditional for a western RPG) architecture, and just breathing in the destroyed air. Vvardenfell is a surprisingly small place for an open world game, but it’s packed full of cities different cultures, set in a couple different biomes, none of which feel normal. The forests are filled with giant mushrooms, the entire north side of the island is covered in dark destroyed wastelands, and the swamps seem to grow directly out of the forests. The greenery is a dark deep green, verdant and comforting, and as that falls away in the mid game, the wastelands’ scarred rocky landscape pull that back.

The landscape just hints at the insular culture of the Dark Elves, or Dunmer, who live on Vvardenfell. Most of the game is about you exploring their myriad cultures from an outsiders perspective, learning to be respectful and diplomatic of their customs, their legends, and their religion. I’ve got a soft spot for games that do this, and I really think Morrowind might be one of the more interesting in that crop. I won’t go too far into it because, you know, it’s a huge part of the game, but I just loved the way the whole dunmer and ashlander societies were set up and explored. Not to mention the way that the game provides you with a near-infinite amount of reading material to explore the lore if you want it.

The RPG elements are fun but admittedly not incredibly deep once you get used to them, but that works for me, as that’s not the focus in this game. Morrowind set the future focus for Bethesda at the time, and it’s still the high water mark, the most specific and intentional, and for me the most beautiful.

Passou aniversário, carnaval mas finalmente terminei Morrowind, e meus manos.. que obra.

Já adianto que eu sou um chupa saco de The Elder Scrolls mesmo não jogando tanto quanto a galera costuma jogar (Fazer play de 1000 horas e os caramba a 4) porque eu simplesmente não consigo me apegar tanto em um jogo assim, dito isso se prepare para ler elogios desproporcionais e baseado totalmente no meu gosto pessoal.

Após o Daggerfall ter sido um projeto ambicioso que infelizmente por limitações da época não brilhou tanto quanto devia, Morrowind veio como algo mais sólido e alcançável e meus amigos.. mesmo que ele não tenha um mapa de 161km como o seu jogo anterior, ele é bem mais trabalhado nos cenários, ambientação e personagens.

As cidades de Morrowind são vivas e a caminhada (lenta e dolorosa) entre as estradas e montanhas de Vvardenfell causa uma sensação familiar a de você andar de carro no GTA san andreas por toda Los Santos, ou seja, te coloca totalmente no ambiente do jogo e transmite aquele toque de aventura essencial em um RPG.

Negociações, Guildas, missões que vão de ''resgate o meu anel perdido'' até ''reconstrua um templo antigo PA CARALH*'' resume brevemente o que a aventura em Morrowind é. Ah e já deixando claro esse jogo aqui é muito casca grossa, diferente dos outros Elder Scrolls que tem uma pegada mais casual, Morrowind foi lançado em uma época em que videogames ainda era algo muito de bolha, então ele é bem dificil mas.. óbvio que da pra quebrar o jogo e deixar ele bem mais tranquilo.

''Mas e ao tempo, Lawan? Morrowind sobreviveu ao tempo?'' Infelizmente diferente da gente, Obras não andam no tempo e morrowind sofre de problemas que desanimam a gameplay, problemas claro que não eram nada pra se esquentar antigamente, só que hoje da muita complicação na cabeça. Ter que ficar seguindo Pontos cardeais pra saber onde ta tal caverna é uma coisa que me cansou demais no jogo, e fico muito triste que não há nenhum mod (e provavelmente não vai ter) que adicione quest marks no jogo, já que isso tornaria ele bem mais aproveitável.

É claro que, muitos irão dizer que a falta de marcadores agrega na experiência de Morrowind, só que eu discordo. Apesar de ser legal sair explorando, pulando montanhas e andando nas estradas enfrentando todo tipo de bixo e achando quests bizarras, isso se torna meio chato depois de um tempo e torna o jogo bem cansativo pra uma segunda run.

Mas uma coisa tenho que bater muita palma, as quests secundárias dele são perfeitas tanto as de Guilda e as aleatórias que você encontra pela cidade, são muito bem trabalhadas e eu só achei chata as da guilda de assassinos mesmo, não vi muita graça

Pra quem for querer jogar Morrowind hoje em dia quer ter essa experiência clássica, sugiro que coloque uns mods de correção já que o jogo tem bastante crashs e coloque também o mod Easy Escort, esse mod vai facilitar as suas missões que forem de escolta já que a maioria delas são bem chatas e quebram se tu fizer uma coisinha de errada, afinal de contas a IA do NPC que tu tem que proteger é horrível e ele acaba travando em uma pedra sempre. Com esse mod ai tu pode andar direto pro lugar que ele ta destinado e ele vai ta sempre perto de você. Mas claro se tu for puritano, só baixe os patch mesmo e seja feliz

Outra coisa que recomendo pra deixar a experiência mais agradável a quem for casual, é utilizar alguns cheats do console de comandos, se você gostar claro. Não há problema nenhum nisso e não vai afetar tanto a sua experiência se você souber mexer neles direitinho, e eu sou a favor da diversão então, se isso vai te entreter mais no jogo, faça. Não se sinta mal.

the tragedy of morrowind is that it's just cool enough and has just enough incredible lines and concepts in it, like "the study of acausal effects", to really rev up your imagination and make you think elder scrolls kicks ass. but it doesn't kick ass. they never made a better one of these after this, and this one is just okay overall.

to me, the main thing working against it and the reason i couldn't get into it back in the day was the monologue interface that completely kills any illusion of your character being an actual person. their personality can exist only in your head -- and that's fine if you're inclined towards inventing that kind of thing as you go, but then the series decided that instead of a limitation, it was a core feature of its identity. this is why, to me, bethesda game worlds feel barren: ultimately i'm not playing a person that either fully belongs to them, or even is a believable fish out of water outsider like in bloodborne. i'm playing the protagonist, and everyone else is an npc. that sucks. you can't live like that in any world, fictional or otherwise.

Two decades later in the world of Skyrim, and eventually, The Elder Scrolls VI, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is still a game worth playing. As the series' first foray into 3D, you will certainly feel its age. As soon as you deal with the graphics (whether through mods or through self discipline), and figure out exactly how combat rolls work, you will be thrown into a vibrant, almost alien world with nothing but the name of some bald dude in a distant city. That's it, get out there; you are immediately handed access to a world filled with interesting quests, guilds, dungeons, exploration, and treasures. In classic The Elder Scrolls fashion, your main storyline involves saving the known world from certain doom, and of the three post 2000 TES games, it has a strong argument for being the best in the series.

If you've only played Skyrim, and to a lesser extent, Oblivion, Morrowind will certainly be a learning experience for you, even as a fan of the series. If you're willing to bear with the ancient systems that run the gameplay, you will find the game to be a unique glimpse into the world of The Elder Scrolls that will reward your creativity and curiosity.

I've tried to get into Morrowind so many times over the years, and it just never sticks. One time I found myself falling in love with it mechanically, gleefully playing with spell construction, but eventually fell away from it when I got tired of being sent across the barren fucking map to deliver a message over and over. I think at this point I should give up and accept that what I'm looking for does not exist in TES before Oblivion. No matter how much I try to wander through Morrowind hoping to find charming little stories like you get in later Bethesda games, I won't find them. In game books are a really nice supplement which I enjoy, but they don't make up for the utter lack of character anywhere in the game world.

Morrowind is loved by TES lore purists and hardcore RPG players alike and while I share many of their preferences, this just doesn't come together into a cohesive whole at all. There's no flavor to the world. Each area feels the same, NPCs are not individuals you can speak to and learn about, etc.

It's a pity, because mechanically I really enjoy what's here. It has this unique way of making the game really difficult to play straight-up, but teasing you with all these different skills and methods of progression that are just asking you to abuse them. It's such a fun sandbox to play around in, I just wish there was any life in it.

Это. Было. Ахуенно.

Сколько раз я начинал новую игру. Сколько раз я стоял и слушал деда канцелярского. Сколько раз я пешком топал до Балморы. И только в этот раз я решил полностью вкусить игру и пройти НУ ХОТЯ БЫ сюжетку.
От магического потенциала здесь глаза разбегаются. Это сказка какая то бесконечных возможностей. Может бг3 только пришёл к уровню Морры, хз не дошёл до бг ещё))
Тут даже есть полностью иммерсивные квесты, я ахуел как осознал это во время прохождения одного из них. И их здесь не 3 не 4, больше намного.

Закрыл свой давний гештальт, наконец то полностью прошёл ориг Морровинд.
А dlc когда нибудь потом)))

with winter having arrived and snow on the ground, i've been stricken with an urge to play a bunch of skyrim... largely to try some mods i've long been curious about, like the fully voiced and uniquely smart and funny khajiit companion, inigo. my character is one with a background in thievery and a curiosity for the arcane, now become a full-on wizard complimented by magic of stealth: silencing illusion spells and conjured bows... having long thought of skyrim as the most restrictive of the elder scrolls especially with regard to magical creativity, i'm discovering there's more to it than i'd known. naturally, this brings about a need to talk about one of my favorite games:

morrowind.

actually, i really want to talk about both. i want to talk about the nature of roleplay in these games, and what it means to inhabit these characters of our own making and imagining. see, there's been plenty of debate as to whether bethesda care any longer about making 'true' rpgs, having in many ways simplified the experience on a granular level, depriving the player more and more of their options and ownership over the experience of playing their games. i do think there's a lot of truth to this, though i feel there's more to be said.

getting to the point... before considering all the differences in the systems—how you build your character and develop their skills, defining their nature through mechanics and so forth—we have to consider the very concept of these characters, the intentions at work before we get involved. i'm setting oblivion aside here because it's a bit of an outlier in that you fill the shoes of an interloper, while the "real hero" of the story (the one who'll be remembered in the history books) is martin. in skyrim, you're meant to be the dragonborn, undeniably enjoying the favor of the gods unless you deliberately avoid the main quest (perhaps even going as far as installing an alternate start mod so you can just be a bandit in the wilderness or a fisherman or whatever). in my current run through the game (more like run around, given how these work) i've decided to embrace this blessing and use it to better the situation in skyrim as much as i can. my traveling companions are a vampire princess (my gay wife) and a recovering skooma fiend. (the latter is entirely a mod creation, while the former is augmented by several mods and they interact with voiced dialogue and radiant ai conversations and everything!) so, getting to morrowind: things are considerably more ambiguous and complicated, here. i'm going to keep it somewhat short because i'd prefer not to ruin the experience for anyone interested in giving the game a try—suffice to say the whole matter of whether you're any kind of chosen one is up for debate, and the range and options you have in the course of defining who your character is are considerably... more. or, well. at least it seems to be that way. it largely is... but it's also just different.

your choices in skyrim are essentially reduced to yes or no: yes, i will explore this destiny as dragonborn. no, i will not. yes, i will go to the college of winterhold and become arch-mage, or no, i'd rather not do that and perhaps instead become a nightingale, master of thieves. of course, you can choose to do all of these things—or to do none of them. and it sometimes does go further than that, such as when faced with the matter of joining the dark brotherhood. (i'm going to spoil some things here, so skip to the next paragraph if you'd rather avoid that.) having taken it upon yourself to murder the terrible, abusive matron of the orphanage in riften at the request of a young boy calling upon the infamous death cult, their leader eventually abducts you and locks you in a cabin with three blindfolded strangers, tells you that one of them has a contract on their head, and forces you into deciding which one to kill. a cruel initiation. (an interesting note is that the clairvoyance spell points toward one of them, though there's no other indication of which would be the correct choice, if any.) you have one alternative: kill your captor, free the others, and set about laying waste to the entire dark brotherhood. this is an actual questline, its availability as a path of action not readily apparent given the gravity of the situation—a bit of thinking on your feet is required to discover this. it's not always easy to stumble into these sort of options given the nature of questing in skyrim, where you're typically pulled along by quest markers... but they are there, and it's always refreshing.

morrowind is another beast entirely. beyond acceptance or denial, the matter of how you proceed is dramatically more self-driven. there are no quest markers. rarely will an npc tell you exactly where to go, and even when they do it's up to you to find your way. and then there's the question of how you'll go about accomplishing whatever task, left entirely up to you. you're not just an adventurer or a mercenary—you're an investigator. you keep a journal describing most of your interactions and observations in the game itself, and it's never a bad idea to keep notes of your own outside of the game. i've seen plenty of others describe dialogue as a bunch of wiki pages or whatever, entirely boring and so forth, but holy shit do i feel the exact opposite. i don't think there's any other game that fills me with such a desire to delve into its world and learn everything i can to understand its nature, its history, its people, and my role among them. reincarnation of a legend or not—and it's up to you to decide, not just via yes or no, but in the text, in your imagination, your headcanon, in the details. my favorite nerevarine is an iconoclastic wanderer who feels empowered by her otherwise bewildering involvement with the blades and, as an outlander to native dunmer 'culture', places the eradication of the enslavement of the khajiit and argonian races high on her list of motivations. becoming a demigod through her own efforts (albeit guided by prophecy) is just the icing on the cake. you could play through (in, around) morrowind a dozen times and find a new path, deepen the path(s) you've previously found interesting or exciting... it's just a game that makes me dream like no other.

also, you can (if you so choose) eventually craft spells that let you jump across the entire island of vvardenfell. or simply fly. you can't levitate at all in these other games! (well... without mods.)

i'm really enjoying my time with skyrim right now, and i think i've found a way to play a role i find fulfilling and comfortable with my own personality... but these games always lead back to morrowind, for me. it won't be long before i feel the pull back to vvardenfell once more.

In high school, one of my friends bought me a copy of Morrowind for the Xbox when he found out I got an Xbox. He really liked Morrowind, and wanted me to like Morrowind too.

This was 2005, and Morrowind for the Xbox had been out for a while; so had the Xbox itself. Most people had traded in their Xbox by this point, because Halo 2 had been out for quite a while and there was nothing else to play on the Xbox; this sent the cost of Xbox games through the proverbial floor, and ironically resulted in there being lots of games to play on the Xbox, even if you didn’t have a ton of money to spend because you were 16 years old. I played Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK 2 EO, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Burnout 3, Fable, Psychonauts, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Ninja Gaiden Black and a whole load of other really good games that did not really cost a lot of money. I did not, however, play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, because The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is really boring. It’s a game about walking between Wikipedia pages.

Despite the fact that Xbox games were very cheap and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was very boring, I was still touched by my friend’s gesture of buying me a video game. As such, I spent about four months of my life reading about other people playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind so that I could convincingly lie to my friend about playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. That’s how much I liked my friend. That’s how boring The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is.

I played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind again tonight via the weird time-travel magic of the original Xbox emulator, and I was unsurprised to find that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is still really boring, despite the fact that you can now see further than before and the textures look nicer (or so I’m told) and the game loads really fast (gotta load all that text!). I’m sorry, friend from the past - but if you somehow showed up on my doorstep tomorrow with a new copy of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for me, I’d still lie to you about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind being really not boring. Some things never change!

obviously u can take me with a grain of salt if u know my tastes,,, but for however badly vivec is laid out, or however weird it is that a bunch of white guys from maryland keep trying to do meaningful commentary on imperialism but their main nuance is to make the occupied peoples Xenophobic and Supremacist, or however overly small and unmotivated the soundtrack is, this rly does come closer then just about anything else to fulfilling the Promise of the computer rpg world. definitely not necessarily the computer rpg, its not really reactive enough for that...but when i first found out about skyrim as a Young Child, the promise that was made that intoxicated me was that i was going to enter an entire world, believable and living, which was my playground but that existed apart from me. currently i do think the Open World is probably best served by less traditional games...eastshade, lil gator game, even death stranding use their spaces for more Big Expressive Ideas then simply to emulate some kind of Reality thru compromised shorthand. but morrowind nails on the goldest possible version of itself...a small island, culturally and politically dense and self-sufficient but still involved in larger conflicts, extremely diverse in terms of aesthetics but all feeling coherent anyway. u see where they get their food, where those who want to get away from everyone else live, where the centers of local and occupational government are, the slow errosion of any imperial structures the further away you are from seyda neen. and the granular growth of the RPG Journey is equally intoxicating...the emphasis on pure Numbers rather then real-time skill is a roadblock to some, but its the main thing that sells your progression...the way it fundamentally feels to do things is appreciably different at the start and end of the game. the faction quests in particular were a huge highlight for me, very simple moment to moment, but their cumulative effect is way more impactful then anything i can recall from skyrim.

when open world games let me keep playing past the completion of the main quest, my main way to achieve closure before the uninstall is to simply walk all the way back to the starting area, preferably to the place i first took control. i aim to do this without any fast travel or consulting the map if possible. in some games this is more feasible then others, but morrowind is perfect for it. in doing so i passed thru some of the first roads i ever walked thru, the first big city i found, the first imperial outpost i found, the first ancestral tomb i raided before giving up on tomb raiding and becoming religious out of penance, the little town where i met the first memorably weird npc who gave me a quest, and finally the place where i killed my first mudcrab. it was, genuinely, a greatly emotionally pregnant experience. the main quest is great honestly, and i love how it ends framing itself as basically a superhero origin story for your character. but more then anything, it felt like My adventure. my aforementioned religious penance, the time i spent adventuring in the bitter coast and west gash before ever going to balmora, the way i slowly clawed my way up to the top of house redornan (which started full of hostile ashlanders and ended with me having a mansion and every guard fawning over me), the way i stumbled into a levitation artifact about halfway through my playthrough that i used up till the end of the game, the way being the nerevarine caused a crisis of faith which had me embracing my new self but still holding onto my temple beliefs stubbornly, and the way that the ordinators that were supposed to be killing me for being a heretic ended up mostly killing me for stealing their sacred armor. i dont think any other of this Kind of rpg has given me these kinds of memories, not even my beloved new vegas. wealth beyond measure indeed.

There is a tendency when dunking on Bethesda games, to criticize them from the lens of their failure to be like other RPGs- The Witcher 3 is more cinematic and refined, Baldur's Gate 3 more densely written, Fallout 1 more actually good, so on and so forth. The truth is that Bethesda games suck much more tragically and pathetically on their own terms than in comparison to other games, Todd Howard who began his career with monumental works of termite art in the end forsook the dream of the Bethesda game. The dream of the bethesda game was always to create a holodeck, a simulation for you to inhabit totally- 'Why the hell would I pick up a spoon?' someone asks, perfectly reasonably expecting game mechanics to exist for gameplay reasons, but it's just that you can pick up spoons because it's something a person is able to do. Personally I think this dream is perhaps misguided, but nevertheless they pursued it, which is admirable in its own right.

"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
The message you receive upon killing a crucial NPC points towards the commitment towards the holodeck dream, it will continue on even if you totally fuck up, and indeed there are generally ways around the death of those crucial NPCs provided you understand the simulation.

And fear of people misunderstanding the simulation is what drove bethesda to make many crucial NPCs invulnerable in Oblivion, you never know when you're actually in a simulation or not anymore, even as the NPC AI had become much more sophisticated with schedules, likes, dislikes and habits, the places you could engage shrunk, and then even the ambitious NPC AI in subsequent games was stripped back for ever more presentable and simpler systems, to the point of Starfield doing deliberately what Morrowind had done out of technical limitations 20 years prior: 24/7 vendor NPCs with no schedules, likes or dislikes, who exist only in service of the player.
But maybe most telling of all, was that in Fallout 4 they decided that the player need a good reason to pick up a spoon.

Six years and a switch in directors, platform and setting led to their slowest but also their most intense and atmospheric work. Morrowind - however, is actually two games in one: The deliberate explorer and the moon-jumping alteration mage. The former is where the trademark 'haunting' component of dungeon-crawlers takes over the world, turning it into an agonizing wasteland in which the mood, weather, wildlife and natives are all hostile in their own way. It's also a classic example of exploration, first by dropping the tutorial dungeons, reducing fast travel to a paid service and - after a few minutes of walking and character creation, begins by wishing the player "good luck!". What comes next is perhaps the most 'involved' form of navigation ever. Via signposts, checking for directions (using a quest menu that takes after a messy journal) and frequent use of the map, players basically perform the gameplay loop of towns in prior TES games outwards. A similar process also affects its structure, as Daggerfall's dungeon verticality translates into complex world geometry (hills, mountains, valleys, even floating areas). The addition of random encounters (not only while resting, and whose rate becomes comical lategame) lends a new layer of tension to traversal, and in-between - their talent for strange-but-memorable moments shows in its roadside quests.

Alteration spells define the other side of their program, a hyper-busted strategy where magic becomes as freely explorable as its world. Movement-related ones such as levitate, jump and slowfall take on higher parameters - with access to more extreme effects via spellmaking, and the result is a progressively wild game of 'fast travel' in which players cross incredible distances with a single leap. Levitation - in particular, revolutionizes dungeon progression the way that Jump does to the overworld, while other spell types, whether new (conjuration) or expanded (illusion & mysticism), also benefit from the bugs/oversights of such a wonderfully broken spellcrafting system. Essentially, users must choose between slow-burn wandering and a superhero sim. What these two playstyles have in common is that the overworld is now the centerpiece.

Not every change is a huge plus (e.g. verbose topic-based dialogue system, combat that relies heavily on stamina) but the rest marks a major step forward in quality, variety and personality.

When people praise Morrowind, it's usually about the rich and alien world, complex nature of its story and lore, the freedom it gives to the player, the many political conflicts present in its setting that make it one the most unique of its time, heights that Bethesda never reached again.

However, I'd like to point some aspects of it that show how much attention to detail went into making it. For example, as I was exploring the West Gash region, I came across a cave and decided to explore it. Inside, I realized that it was pretty interesting, with underwater sections and even a hidden passage that led to a smugglers hideout. There was even a friendly NPC and a really rare in-game book about smugglers.

Then, I decided to search in a wiki if the place was related to any side quest, and it wasn't. It was just a random cave in the game that players could explore out of curiosity. Yet, it seemed like they carefully crafted it to look like a real place, a real cave used by smugglers as a hideout.

There are many other examples, like how the house of an NPC is organized in a way to reflect their field of work, social class or even personality. Just thought that was interesting.

After replaying Morrowind in full for the first time since I was like 12, I think a couple things have been reaffirmed to me- things I had forgotten in the last decade since I actually played through it from start to "finish". I'm planning on going back to tidy up loose ends and play the expansions once I've gotten through another game or two, but even though I don't know if I'm ever gonna write a complete and comprehensive "review" of Morrowind, I wanna write down the stuff that came to mind while I was playing it:

So firstly, I think I sort of forgot how profoundly this game influenced my taste and defined what I like in video games. There's something about Morrowind's approach to crafting a rich, unfamiliar world and making the player slowly piece together its mysteries that stuck with me, and even now I feel that in some of the games that I've come to love in the past few years- Pathologic, Caves of Qud, Oleander Garden's Hexcraft games (please play Harlequin Fair), and even Kenshi (which I'm playing now specifically because I'd heard it took heavy inspiration from Morrowind and I wanted to see how it felt diving straight into after finishing this) all hit this note for me, and I think that it's this part of Morrowind that sticks out to people most. Its world is imaginative and alienating, extremely detailed and storied, and you're arriving to it as an outsider. Everything is overwhelming when you first step in, and there are mysteries to be solved both in terms of the history of this world and the mechanics that will help you survive it. When people talk about Morrowind, this is what they remember- that sense of scope that actually drives the player to read the in-game literature and mess around with its mechanics until they feel at home in its swamps and deserts of ash.

That said: oh my God does the ever-present combat make exploring that beautiful and alien world a chore, and in a world that's as genuinely vast as this anything that's going to deter you from exploring it feels like a huge flaw. For a game that's remembered for and finds its identity- at least retroactively in 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓘𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓖𝓪𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓗𝓸𝓫𝓫𝔂- in its harsh and unforgiving world and the joys of conquering it, it's kind of sad how much of the game is turned into a trivial but time-consuming annoyance once you realize that the primary obstacle to overcome is its combat. It's absolutely everywhere- the game is silly with things to stab, and doing so becomes as dull as unflavored oatmeal once you have a large enough health pool and offensive skills to basically steamroll everything in your path. And yet, it still takes just enough time and effort to kill things that it doesn't stop being a thing you have to account for while adventuring. I've heard a lot of people talk about how rewarding it is to get strong enough and understand its systems enough to solve the puzzle of how to get infinite stamina, craft artifacts and spells that let you run with infinite speed across its terrain and fly over mountains, and become permanently invisible to enemies while still retaining the ability to chop them to death as they repeatedly scream their race's possible surrender barks. And that's true! All of that is rewarding, but it's mostly for the reason that it lets you bypass the parts of the game where you have to kill your 8 hundredth cliff racer or Dremora Lord or smuggler who begins a fight by screaming "It's about time... I HAVE SOME FUN!" before dying in two hits. Morrowind's terrain and world is lush with ancient ruins and mysterious caves, and your reward for delving into them is the most boring swordplay in the world. Fighting a woman whose body is made of gold in an ancient place of forbidden worship somehow manages to become rote and routine. Vvardenfell stops feeling threatening. If I'm placed in an unfamiliar situation I can be confident that I have something in my spell list or some weapon in my inventory that can totally nullify whatever's waiting for me.

And I think the most tragic part of this is that the combat kinda needs to be there- not even just from a gameplay perspective, but from a thematic one. The world of Morrowind is a violent and hostile and alien place, one where the wildlife really will rip you apart, one where there are incredibly powerful Slavery Wizards who have dedicated their lives to insane quests for power- one where a volcano at the very center of the world spews a disease that twists people's flesh and drives them to murder. The game has humor and triumph and comfortable, cozy locales outside the wilderness, but even then it's hard to shake the darker, more threatening elements of Vvardenfell. The world of Morrowind needs to be filled with danger to feel real, and it's a shame to me that the danger present in it becomes nullified way too early and way too easily, especially if you already have a knowledge of the game's systems. That, to me, is its biggest shortcoming.

And yet, in spite of that, I really, really cannot bring myself to not love Morrowind. For all my problems with it, there's so much passion here, so much effort to make a world that's not just expansive and has a complex history, but that's genuinely beautiful to behold. I sometimes wondered why this game always looks so much less appealing to me with community-made patches that add more realistic textures, with mods that dramatically change the lighting or saturate the colors to make the game more "vibrant", and like, after my most recent playthrough I think I put my finger on it. Morrowind's world is designed to feel ancient and alien, and its color palette reflects that- the title screen is clearly trying to evoke an ancient, weathered parchment; the skill icons look like eons-old folk art, simple and abstract. Most of the brightest colors are reserved for UI elements that need to stand out like the Health, Magicka and Stamina bars, while the actual world tends to use more muted colors. The simplicity of the textures, the murkiness of a lot of the game's visuals- I genuinely feel like these things slap so fucking hard. I'm definitely far from the first person to notice this, too. If you're looking for a genuinely excellent visual mod, I need to recommend Morrowind Watercolored v2. The mod is excellent and has a complete understanding of the appeal of Morrowind's visuals- all the textures are based off the originals and none of them try to add extra detail; instead, it makes some subtle changes to make the game's textures appear even more like a moving painting in a way that you really won't even notice unless you're looking for it. Morrowind is not meant to be a place you could potentially inhabit. You are stepping into a dark fantasy world that's long been lost.

There's also a very real sense that this game was made by humans in a way I don't get out of Oblivion or Skyrim. The fingerprints of Morrowind's developers and designers are left all over the world- in the imaginative writing and lore, in the fact that some of the most powerful enchanted items in the game were made to commemorate forum users who died during the development of the game whose ashes you can find, and even in the extremely self-indulgent multi-part quest where you can enter a loving and passionate friends with benefits arrangement with a Khajiit thief. Morrowind is an extremely flawed game that also is absolutely teeming with soul- it feels like the sort of game that would be way, way rarer in the AAA space today. In Morrowind every Easter Egg is a reference to some forum poster or in-joke or an environmental designer's favorite Monty Python sketch; in Skyrim you climb to the top of the world to find a tribute to Notch Minecraft, serving as a subtle assurance that, even if Bethesda's legal department had a problem with him, Skyrim's developers certainly don't :) It's hard to put into words, but I get the impression Morrowind was made by individuals who cared and had ideas in a way a game like it simply wouldn't today.

Final note: the main quest's approach to prophecy and myth and how it's used to shape the narratives and attitudes of entire cultures is really cool. Surprisingly clever and more well thought-through than I noticed as a tot.

For all it's jank, this game really is something special. The world is deep in lore and intrigue, with so many interesting concepts explored around history, religion, politics, etc. While the quests aren't as open-ended as in some other RPGs, they usually manage to position the player in relation to some institution in a manner that adds to the world-building. A fairly bare-bones side-quest early in the game had me investigating a murder, and through its simplicity managed to explore institutional racial bias more effectively than any other game I've played, putting up huge barriers in the pursuit of the right answer and few barriers in pursuit of the wrong, with the same reward either way. A perverse incentive indeed.

The way the player moves through the world works in tandem with the phenomenal world-building; the player is very much rooted to the place they are in. By this, I mean the lack of fast travel and other conveniences puts the player right in the moment. Fast travel can only be done through in-universe means at specific places. The effect this has on immersion was so amazing for me, with the annoyance I felt from this huge inconvenience being massively outweighed by its positive effects. I think my favourite moment comes at the end, where after beating the game you just have to turn around and walk all the way back.

I didn't quite finish all the main quests. The core game was amazing, but I definitely need a break after Tribunal. I enjoyed the city in all its Oblivion-ey glory, but way too much time was spent in confusing awful underground caves and sewers. I've heard Bloodmoon is better, but I might wait until the game is fresh again before I go there.

All in all, I love Morrowind deeply, though it's far too whacked out for me to give it the full 5/5. I think the direction the series went from here is deeply disappointing. The world-building in Oblivion is dreadful compared to this, both in terms of the writing and the way the player interacts with the various institutions. On the other hand, Oblivion was at least far too ambitious with its systems to the point of becoming an amazing thing to fuck around with, so much so that I put in nearly 100h during the pandemic. Skyrim is just FINE. Really doesn't inspire anything in me.

UPDATE: Just finished Bloodmoon. Honestly it didn't do a huge amount for me. Solstheim isn't a patch on Vvardenfell in terms of geography, history, wildlife... just anything really. Bounding around as a werewolf is fun, but the werewolf-exclusive quests are horribly balanced around its use, to the point where the player must either lower the difficulty or wait until they turn back into a human. I did the former, marking the first time I ever lowered the difficulty in Morrowind. Both expansions are ok, but the main game handily outclasses them.