The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)

I played this game for the first time back in 2003. I remember being about 20 hours in. Wandering into a cave, killing a powerful mage and then saving my file. What I hadn't realized at the time is the mage had cast a powerful DoT on me. Thus locking me into a permanent death loop... my 20 hour playthrough completely ruined. I was demoralized. I quit and never went back until recently.

Morrowind doesn't run properly out the door. Bethesda and Steam don't support it. Fortunately Open Morrowind exists. It's pretty quick to get it running and that's all you need to get Morrowind to run properly. You can then run the game in 4k resolution, with some bug fixes and the game honestly looks good. Sure it's an early 2000s game, but I find the art style to be endearing. The third person camera is... janky to say the least but honestly in a more comical sort of way.

After Morrowind Bethesda would make pretty significant changes in the game design. They would allow for convenient fast travel to any location you have been, they would add quest markers on maps and in general have a more sensible leveling system. Morrowind does have fast travel, but its contextualize into world building. There are numerous Silt riders that will be able to take you to most major cities and villages. Then there's the mage guild which overs you teleportation to the four major cities. There are boats that will take you around to various ports throughout the land. Finally, the Dunmer forts that have teleport rooms as well. Morrowind does have plenty of ways for you to get around. Though, there are no quest markers. Sometimes a quest giver will mark a location on your map, but this is honestly pretty rare. Most of the time you need to relay on their directions that will use landmarks. These directions vary in quality, but overall it's pretty neat to have this more old school style of questing. There were plenty of times where I still needed to just look it up on a wiki, but overall I did enjoy making my best efforts of trying to figure out the quests without a guide. A part of me wishes they kept this type of fast travel. It makes the game more immersive and forces you to interact with the world more often while not inconveniencing you too much. It was a good balance that they tragically scrapped.

There's also a far more enjoyable and silly form of fast travel... alchemy. The way alchemy works in this game is linear stacking of the buffs you consume. Drink 50 potions that increase your strength by 10? Now you have 500 strength! What's particularly silly and broken about alchemy is how the quality of your potion scales off your intelligence stat. Thus, if you drink a ton of pots that fortify your intelligence you start to make significantly better potions. Using this exploit, I was able to increase my intelligence to 40000, which allowed me to make int potions that could increase my int by 250 points for like 15 minutes. Then with my super brain, I made levitation potions that made me fly at mach 1 for 20 minutes. True fast travel unlocked! I also made mana and health pots that basically gave me infinite mana and health for 20 minutes. I was a god! Breaking the game is honestly the main appeal of Morrowind. It's a janky mess of a game but has a lot of personality due to these weird interactions.

The biggest mistake Bethesda made going forward was removing levitate from their games... zooming around the continent at Mach 1 was so much fun. Imagine Oblivion or Skyrim and doing that! I get that incorporating flight in a game can be challenging but man would it be worth the pay off.

Leveling is really odd in this game. You pick main and secondary skills, where leveling up 10 times in any of these skills results in you leveling up. When you level up you get 3 tokens that can be added to any of your main attributes. If you used skills affiliated with an attribute, you can potentially increase a given attribute by even more. The max modifier is 5. To achieve this level, you need to level a skill 10 times that is associated with a given attribute. Sound confusing? It is. You basically need to use miscellaneous skills (that won't impact leveling up) to gain enough modifiers for the attributes you want to level... leveling is honestly a big pain in the ass. There are mods out there that make this more sensible... but morrowind isn't really a game about efficiency so don't stress about it. Worst case scenario, level alchemy and chug a bunch of potions.

Early Morrowind is slow and punishing. Your base movement speed is really bad. You can get around this via alchemy, but in general, before I unlocked Mach 1 potions, Morrowind is a vibe game. You will be walking a lot and slowly. Combat is certainly floaty, but once you get strong combat encounters will end quickly. That said, Morrowind is a very hostile world. Almost everything will angrily try to kill you. The worst being the flying Racers who are everywhere and will chase you to the ends of the earth...

Another interesting aspect about Morrowind is the spell crafting. It is very fun to make your own custom spells, but there are plenty of caveats and limitations (unlike alchemy). For one thing, you are limited by your ability to successfully cast the spell and the cost to cast. Thus, while technically you can slide the damage modifier to be something absurd like 1000, you probably would never be able to cast a spell that does that much damage unless you chug an absurd amount of potions to boost your stats based their natural limit. Still, you figure out quick that making a fireball that damages in a 20 foot radius, imposes 100% weakness to fire and does damage for a few seconds is a near auto-win spell and fun to use.

The story of Morrowind is fairly generic. You go from rags to messiah like all Elder Scrolls games and most grand adventure stories. Still, the writing is good. I found the characters and Gods you interact with to be compelling. Honestly my favorite Elder Scrolls main plot. of course, like with Oblivion and Skyrim, the side quests are also good. I liked both DLCs as well. One is Mournhold and the other is a small insular island with Nordic folks and Werewolves. Both are fairly dense sandboxes with colorful characters and multiple side quests to pursue. While both DLCs seem to be intended as end game, I stubbornly went to them early. Fortunately I had potions that made me essentially a God so no big deal. My only real gripe with the DLC is how pretty early on you will start being randomly assailed by Dark Brotherhood assassins. This is a neat way to direct you to Mournhold, but honestly this happens way too early. Not only are these assassins going to fuck you up, but going to Mournhold early will also result in a bad time... they really should have delayed the dark brotherhood assassin attempts to much later in the game after you've progressed the main storyline to a later stage... other than that both DLCs are enjoyable and present unique cultures and quest lines.

In conclusion, this is a janky mess with a lot of charm. With Open Morrowind it really isn't that bad to get this running on modern hardware. It has a cult following for a reason. Certainly my favorite Elder Scrolls game. A more humble time.

I have no doubt this game was groundbreaking at the time, but it's not fun today. First problem: fatigue. Fatigue is like stamina in this game, except everything drains it. Walking drains it, jumping drains it, all attacks drain it, it just gets super low super quickly. Second problem: linearity. This is an open world without the open. Every single trail you go down is almost completely linear, leaving no room for exploration. Along with that, there is almost nothing to do along said trails. So most of the game is just taken up with walking and nothing else.

It also doesn't have fast travel, so you have to spend even more time walking. Stealth in this game barely works, You can walk up to somebody fully invisible, steal something from a shelf beside them, and you'd get detected. On top of that the combat isn't that great either. You have a chance to miss your attack if you have low enough fatigue, which you probably do because of how easily it drains, and all you really do is swing your sword over and over again. So really, nothing about this game is fun. The only plus I can give it is that everyone walks like they just shat themselves, and it looks funny.

So I played Morrowind for the first time like +10 years ago, and just recently got motivated to finally complete the main quest.

I have to say that the main quest sucks haha. I mean, completing the thieves guild questline for example seems so much interesting to me that going around convincing everyone that I'm basically Jesus Christ.

After playing Oblivion and Skyrim, I feel that Morrowind is actually the most "soulful" of the 3 and the one that really represents to me what an Elder Scrolls game should be: a game where you are encouraged to completely break and abuse the mechanics to become invincible and get crazy powers. I mean, you can also do this to some extent in other TES games but not to the degree that Morrowind offers.

Anyway, just do yourself a favor and embrace the madness of Morrowind!

While Oblivion feels very empty and the blandest one in the series (the dialog quality of Oblivion being on the same level as "I like dogs!" doesn't help), well Morrowind is more straight to point (it does not waste time in filling areas with unique enemies, interesting areas) and at least has that unique weird subtle atsmophere going for it, the world of morrowind feels interesting even if most npcs just have wikipedia entries as dialog and most of what they have to offer is a quest of you going to somewhere you might get lost to have to eliminate a rat infestation.

I've been marathoning this series during the Quarantine and it has taught me one thing: Bethesda cannot write dialog, or not write at all in general really later on, not a single conversation throughout all of their series feels natural, I am sad to say that Skyrim is actually the best even if it holds some of the most simplistic dialog ever.

There is a lot to venture around however, this game is ABSURDLY huge, again it's apparently a game that has been in development since 1997, combat is a little hard to get used to as it is mostly you spamming attack and hoping you don't miss and the enemy gets hit, but it really isn't morrowind's worst feature, if anything it is pretty straight-forward after a while, with the exception being that hit-boxes will ALWAYS be an issue on a lot of enemies. But if you are patient, you can simply get a portable bedroom, fight a lot of enemies (unarmed is also overpowered for some reason), go to sleep, rinse and repeat until you are somewhat competent and fighting is somewhat satisfying.

Morrowind as a game experience feels like an endless series of falling down very long stairs sometimes, for example you get sick (very easy to get sick around swamp areas) and nobody wants to talk to you, kinda putting a dent on everything, so this puts you on a quest on figuring out how to relieve your sickness, you talk to everyone and one npc mentions you can go to an altar, then you travel, talk to someone else and they say there is only an altar very far, then you finally get there and the ALTAR isn't easy at all to find, say what you will about JRPGs but at least those games put a cute bright symbol to show where you could visit a cleric or whatever to get cured, anyways the design is a bit clustered and confusing and almost very little feels concentrated, to even find an altar is sometimes a mystery and I there are several forum posts asking "I'm at the place where the alter is where the hell is it?" and apparently it's somewhere that BLENDS So much with the environment rather than you know, somewhere where it should be very easy to find. Morrowind IS FILLED with that! You might lose quest important items this way as well due to how de-centralized the design feels. It is truly a game that only accepts the most attentive people that practically have to live in Morrowind for years to not get stuck.

My biggest gripe with morrowind is how quests are structured and how a lot of it just feel like errands, and considering how large (and the fact that there is no fast-travel outside of these cool flea buses) a simple quest such as eliminating a rat infestation or finding a dungeon can take SO LONG. I can imagine if this was your only game in 2003, you would spend the rest of your life with it and be content with what you got, after all this is one of the first of it's kind and I could imagine if I ever got this game when i was 16 or 12 I would be overwhelmed, however nowadays most people have done life improvements towards the RPG FPS genre, whenever it be quest markers, fast-travel, and other things that would make an experience feel more compelling to a completionist, like little collectibles or "you cleared this dungeon!".

I think the best explanation of how mixed my feelings are on morrowind being this huge interesting world is perfectly exemplified, is the city of vivec, it's basically 9 temples that are all split into this one big city, and in concept that is wonderful but in practice it takes you a century to go to a simple store area or even find someone in the middle of these 9 cities that are all kinda designed like a maze at times. It takes a long time to even memorize the locations on your own, im sorry oldschool players but the quest marker was the best thing invented for these kind of games where nothing is what it seems, morrowind apparently came with a map and a huge walk through so it was when people relied on that instead.

This feels all so very weird because I was always felt under the impression that Skyrim wasn't the best in the series, but apparently, it is the only accessible one in the series and there's probably a reason they re-release it as many times as they have now, or why all of the fans usually replay it more than the other entries.

For what I can understand: You had to be there when morrowind was big to truly enjoy it, because when a quest goes "Oh yea go to this dungeon that is in between the very first city you went, and that other city" which is such vague instructions you cannot help but get lost with the other 4 dungeons in that area, you might not have all the patience in the world to go through all of this. With that said a lot of mods have made morrowind age better than Oblivion which just kinda feels bland in the end, at least morrowind is interesting and (believe it or not!) crashes less than Oblivion when it comes to modding. And that'S GREAT because the way most would play morrowind today is after every single inconvenience "hmmm, I wonder if there is a mod for that" and you download a mod to fix it! It won't fix all of the issues but it doesn't change the fact that you are to some extent pushing yourself to see the enjoyment in what was once the truly vast interesting world of morrowind.

I wish there was a mod that made this map in-game: https://mwmap.uesp.net/?centeron=Andrano+Ancestral+Tomb, but i gotta use it on my side.

Oh and there is actually a mod for making NPCs not repeat wikipedia articles and thus confuse you which NPCs actually do new information or a quest. Morrowind has glimpses of interesting writing but it it buried deep within the fact that most NPCs are just wikipedia pages you have already read! Also despite everything, I do appreciate the weight that everything carries, the first 10 hours you wont have anything but later on youll be able to find means and it is satisfying.

If you detest how 90% of this game is fetch quests and going back and forth for just a simple item, I recommend using coc console commands for your own DIY fast-travel, which does make the experience more tolerable.