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.
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.