Morrowind launched as I was finishing my Freshman year of high school. Being a huge fan of RPGs, I'd followed Morrowind's development for a full year before it launched. In that time, I played and replayed the Daggerfall demo many times since my parents wouldn't allow me to buy a game with nudity in it (lmao). To say that I was hyped would be an understatement. It's the one and only game I've ever pre-ordered, and I even spent the summer saving for a new computer since I was only able to hit 10-15 FPS with the clunker I had when it released. I spent hundreds of hours exploring and trying out different types of characters in the early 2000s.

I returned to the game in 2007 and 2012 (after playing Oblivion and Skyrim), but just couldn't get properly invested and quit about 10-15 hours in each time. I finally came back for another round this month, and finished a 50ish hour playthrough, including the Main Quest, 5 guilds (Thieves, Mages, Morag Tong, Imperial Cult, House Hlaalu), and the main storylines of both expansions. This was my first time actually completing the main quest and Bloodmoon, though I'd made it a fair ways into both in the past. Here are my thoughts:

Story:

You're (possibly) a reincarnated ancient general recruited by a (sort of) Goddess/Demon to fulfill a prophesy and bring the end of a Tribunal of (formerly) mortal (sort of) Gods who usurped divine power from the heart of the (kind of) god responsible for the creation of Nirn and (big maybe) killed you in a previous life. Also, there's another dude who was with the Tribunal at the time and was totally corrupted into some sort of seductive vampire thing that's weaseling his way into people's dreams and making their faces fall off to make room for face tentacles. It's cool and trippy as heck. That said, it doesn't really provide much room for emotional involvement, which puts it behind a lot of its contemporary JRPGs and some CRPGs like Baldur's Gate 2 in my eyes. Still, though, rad stuff.

The Guild stories are mostly just, even for the time, boring fetch quests, and the vast majority of the miscellaneous quests around the world are a bit too simplistic to really get invested in.

Tribunal has some really neat concepts in the story, but it's one of the few games that I just can't accept the actions I'm forced to take. I don't want to help the dude that's clearly sending assassins after me or the very clearly crazy (former) goddess, dammit. I wanna help the guy who makes mecha dinosaurs.

Bloodmoon has a neat story, even if it's a bit frustrating to actually play. I like Norse mythology and re-enacting legendary deeds, so I was all on board there.

World:

It's an open-world game, so the quality of the world is pretty darn important. Luckily, Morrowind delivers some bombshells in this department. The cities are excellent in concept, ranging from pseudo-middle eastern architecture, to giant mushroom towers, to crabshell megastructures, to a series of big ol' floating cookie cutter buildings. Dungeons were also neat, especially the creepy and alien daedric dungeons, and the almost-steampunk dwemer ruins.

There's a lot of background everywhere you look, which really fleshes out this alien world you become a part of. Despite being fairly uninteresting, the guilds do give you a feeling of actually being a part of a fictional group and having to work your way to the top. Frankly, in 2001 or now, it was only the bizarre world and lore, along with the freedom, that really kept me in the game.

All of that said, the World would have been WAY better aesthetically if it weren't so damn gray and muddy looking in almost every region. The Ancestral Tombs and various caves were all way too similar to one another. More importantly, the NPCs were, by and large, very flat and uninteresting. Only a few NPCs were given any amount of back story, and far less were written with a unique voice to their dialogue. Despite all of the really cool concepts, the actual human aspect just wasn't there, generally speaking. I think the one liners common in JRPGs of the era did more to add character to the towns than most of the NPCs in Morrowind.

The books were amazing and weird and I love Michael Kirkbride.

Music:

Freaking Jeremy Soule put out some major bangers. I still get a bit of chill when I hear the drums and flutes at the beginning of the main theme. The epic scope of the main theme really gets you ready to go on an adventure, and the battle music perfectly builds tension. One of the all time greats, in my humble opinion, and I usually prefer stuff more in the range of Nier/Automata or FFXIII-2. Or I guess Devil May Cry to be compare it to something more contemporary.

Gameplay:

2002: Ugh, I guess I can live with this.

2019: Yikes.

Seriously, it's bad. No, a "dice roll" system does not make it feel like I'm playing a D&D campaign. Not even a little bit. It just feels bad. I literally remember wishing the gameplay was either Baldur's Gate style RTWP or properly action back in the day. The movement and animations are stiff as all hell, even for the time, creating a very clunky game feel. On top of that enemies mostly just walk straight at you and get stuck in the environment at some point or another, even with mods to improve combat AI.

Each and every mechanic is spectacular broken in some way. Why click "Bribe 10 Gold" 100 times when you can just make a "Charm 100 pts for 1 second" spell and bypass the whole ordeal. The unarmored skill didn't actually increase your armor like it showed (easily fixed with mods these days, of course). Hoo boy, alchemy was nuts with those fortify intelligence potions. 100% chameleon enchants so nothing ever sees you again? I shouldn't have to go grab some boots that turn your eyes off just to get around at a reasonable clip. Hyperlinking text Wikipedia-style is great for reading dry information, but not so much as a conversation system in a video game. The level up mechanics were bizarre and encouraged grinding misc skills just for stat points. The incentive to maximize endurance first was also obnoxious. While the text directions for quests were generally good enough, the 10% that weren't REALLY made wish there were quest markers. I can still get plenty immersed with a red dot on a map, but having to bring up a wiki because the game gives you outright incorrect instructions takes me right on out to frustration-ville.

Oh yeah, the spawn rate in Bloodmoon was crazy and felt like a bad mod.

With all of that said, the jump spell is awesome and one of my favorite ways to get around a game map ever. This may seem like a minor thing, but it was legitimately a major source of my enjoyment this playthrough.

Mods:

They're mostly necessary to fix the absolutely broken parts of the game. You can also make things look a lot prettier.

Unfortunately, I've never found any combination of mods that leads to me enjoying the actual gameplay. While some of the issues are able to be fixed with balancing mods, the overall game-feel just isn't good.

This time around, I played with Morrowind Rebirth (which actually fixed a lot of my issues with balance) and some mods to change the leveling system and such. I wanted to tackle at least some of Tamriel Rebuilt since a friend/former roommate of mine was an admin for the mod for over a decade. Unfortunately, I was running on fumes to just get through the main quest, and the expansions were already more content than I really wanted.

I think the mods for Oblivion and Skyrim are a lot more transformative, but each game had a 5-10x bigger playerbase than the previous, and obviously better technical assets to work with (even if the engine didn't change as much as people would have liked).

Final Thoughts:

Despite how big of a mess the game is, I managed to have fun with many playthroughs in the early 2000s, and it was great to get back to the game and FINALLY finish the main quest and expansion quests. I think I'm well and truly done playing the game at this point, since it took me 15 years to be ready for another go this time, but I will always love reading the bat-shit crazy lore.

15 years after its initial release Morrowind continues to captivate every time I play it, restoring in me a sense of exploration, mystery and wonder that no game has reached again. The intricate and compelling story, in depth lore, engaging world, beautiful music and art style combined with the best sense of progression and power makes Morrowind my favourite RPG of all-time.

Story

Morrowind is a Bethesda title, so you start as a mysterious lowly prisoner. However even mysterious lowly prisoner is too much praise, you start a pathetic wretch. You’re poor, everyone hates you, you miss most of your attacks with your awful rusty dagger, fail even the simplest of spells, you look like a peasant and you’re completely bewildered. This is an essential part to Morrowind’s story and gameplay, as the two are inextricably linked. As you progress through the engaging main quest and participate in the various guilds and clubs you continue to grow. The growth extends beyond simple stats or equipment upgrades, of which there are plenty. The main element of growth is within you as a player, you understand the world better, how to navigate and how to persuade people and before you know it, this world and game that felt so alien and uncontrollable is your own sandbox to play in.

Morrowind is the last Elder Scrolls game to have an engaging and intricate main questline. You will be exploring cults and prophecies and through this your understanding of the world and its characters will increase. This is mostly due to Morrowind’s brilliant dialogue system, which is almost entirely text based. The writers were free to throw as much dialogue at you as they desired, with no consideration of factors that were detrimental to future Elder Scrolls games, mostly voice actors. There is so much history and lore to learn from the characters that you will spend hours and hours reading what they say to you. The system is not perfect however, there is little variance in how the characters will respond to you so certain dialogue options are always the same. Though you quickly learn who to talk to about what and this is when your knowledge of the world, its factions and characters is important.

Gameplay

You begin Morrowind by selecting a race, which confers individual strengths, weakness and a power (ability). Then you select a class, you can choose from a list of preset classes though the best option is to make your own in which you will select major and minor skills to focus on. There are a lot of skills here and they are all very powerful in their own way. For example I went a sort of battle-mage with a focus on heavy armour, spear, alteration and conjuration. Conjuration allowed me to summon creatures to aid me in battle, but more importantly I was able to summon very powerful weapons and armour early in the game. Alteration allowed me to fly, open locks, breath underwater and walk on water which were incredibly useful for traversing Morrowind’s maze-like terrain and dungeons or finding secrets.

Combat can be either one of Morrowind’s strengths or weaknesses. This is because the game uses dice rolls to determine damage and hit chance, much like Dungeons & Dragons. The result of this is that when you are low level, have low stats or low fatigue you will miss more attacks than you hit and it can definitely be frustrating. However, the same rules apply for the enemies so as your character progresses the enemies are less likely to hit you. So by the end of the game you can hit most of the time and some enemies miss most of the time. This adds to the insane sense of power you get as you progress through the game, and the game always offers new challenges for you to overcome so it never feels easy.

Presentation

Morrowind is 15 years old now, and it is starting to show its age though maybe not as much as you might think. Graphically there is much that can be done with mods, however I tend to stick with some simple post-processing effects and a widescreen resolution (Morrowind Graphics Extender). Fortunately for Morrowind the world design and art-style is very unique so the poor graphics don’t stand out as much compared to other games of the period. Morrowind was a good looking game at the time, and certain aspects such as the lighting and real-time shadows are timeless. Certain textures can be quite poor particularly characters, but they’re not horrendous and after a little while you get used to them. The animations are average, which is to be expected from Bethesda but at least it doesn’t have speech animations, so if you just play in first person the animations are fine. One thing that definitely stands the test of time is the music, Morrowind has by far the best Elder Scrolls soundtrack and the main theme in particular seems to have a direct connection to the part of my brain that tells me to play Morrowind (not that I mind). Overall presentation here is a mixed bag the graphics are ok and with mods you can make the game look pretty good and the music is divine.

I heard so much about Morrowind before playing and after putting around 90 hours into the game I can see why people love it but I don't think it is the greatest game ever made. I've haven't tried the expansions yet but I've completed the main quest, and several of the guild quest lines. I played on the highest difficulty using light armor and short blades. It is very stable, I only had two crashes in the whole game.

Overall I really enjoyed it, with some graphics mods it still looks very good, the world is very original and alien seeming and it is fun to wander around, the writing is good and some of the storylines, especially the main quest, were interesting.

The first problem is that it gets too easy, by level 20 even though my weapons and armor weren't great, only a small number of enemies gave me any problem at all. I don't mind the dice rolling for hit chance but when there is no challenge left, combat is just standing there clicking the mouse waiting for the enemy to die.

The second problem is that dungeons become boring very early on. I love exploring in elder scrolls games but when the game is easy, it's hard to care about getting more loot and most dungeons have no puzzles or storylines they are just corridors with some monsters or hostile npcs.

And the final issue I had was the amount of fetch quests and escort quests. The mage's guild was the worst - after 16 really dull quests I gave up on it. There are quests with good storylines and some with choices to make but there are far too many dull quests.

But despite these flaws I still highly recommend it to fans of open world games, it is atmospheric and original and still very enjoyable 16 years after it came out. I plan to play it again in a couple of years and this time do the main quest at a much earlier lever and play through the expansions.

Overall I enjoyed it a little more than Oblivion but not as much as Skyrim. Also flying is awesome! I really wish they had kept that in later games.

This game is one of them. Morrowind is one of my favorite games of all time. I consider it a must-buy for any western RPG fans. It is a game full of adventure, atmosphere and charm.

I played the game for the original Xbox. I wonder what it is like on PC? I'm tempted to buy the game again, it is currently on sale on Steam and if often goes on sale. Unfortunately I completed, with the help of my Prima strategy guide, Morrowind on Xbox almost 100%. I think there were two quests I couldn't complete due to bugs or I couldn't find them or didn't bother. But I did almost every single quest in the game.

I think there are expansions that I imagine are worth checking out that I did not have on the Xbox version... ahh screw it I'm picking this game up to play again.

The graphics used to be great, the water effect was awesome back in the day.

The music is incredible in this game. Very memorable. Great music to put you in the mood for adventure and a new exciting world unlike any other. Speaking of world, it's the setting that really makes Morrowind special. It's just the right blend of the familiar (orcs and elves) and the new (the weird creatures and landscape).

Allright so this next playthrough has this goal: Finish the main story and as many side-quests as I want, and finish the expansions!

Still, I am marking this GREAT game as "Played" and I would encourage anyone to try to do the same.

I'll start by saying I have a love/hate relationship with Elder Scrolls and Bethesda Games in general.

I love the world and vibes the games create. Jeremy Soule is one of my top listened to artists.

Morrowind is absolutely peak Elder Scrolls in my mind. The world feels truly unique, and learning about it, and about its rules is incredibly fun.

However, like all Bethesda games, while there is a lot happening, the world itself often feels static, frozen in time. I get this is so that you as the player can make your own story in this fantasy sandbox, but that isn't really the game style I enjoy.

However, I was resolved to finally beat Morrowind, my favorite of these genre-defining games.

The main quest is pretty solid. The core story and flow is interesting, and you end up having to do a pretty nice variety of stuff to complete it. However, about 50% of it is mostly just "go from point A to point B and convince person X of a thing." Particularly towards the end.

The lore here is great, but the implementation, is not as much.

I really like the way Morrowind's stat progression works, but by level 36 (I completed the game on lvl 40) I was so much more powerful than everything else I just blew through it. Combat is bland mashing left mouse button to smash things, even as a stealth person, since sneak attacks are stupid hard to get.

Overall I still like Morrowind, it will always hold a special place for me. But I was more then happy to be done with it for a few years :D.

The most important decision of my life was instigated while walking through a maternity ward. I got lost in the maze of halls while trying to find the room my brand-new nephew was in. At each turn I saw new parents, new grandparents, supporters, and wellwishers. I saw the staff who keep the biological industry cranking away every day. I felt a profound, but nebulous, tug on my guts. I had stumbled upon some fellowship of individuals who were all involved with parenthood in one way or another — the fucking, the pregnancy, the support, the birth, the gifts, the punishments, the generational joy, and eternal exhaustion. I knew they existed, but as a new uncle I was now part of it and seeing it all condensed into one floor of one building made me confront it in a way I hadn't ever needed to. A seed was planted within me at that moment, though I was consciously unaware of it.

That "Dagothwave" video was probably where it started. Was its 11 million views just because the song is fun, or because Morrowind was more popular than I thought? It had been many years since I played an Elder Scrolls game, and I had starry-eyed memories of losing whole nights in Tamriel. Maybe it was time for another? But Morrowind is part of that "older" game group, which is bucketed less by age and more by how rough the mechanics are. The pupil-dilating treadmill of loops and rewards hadn't manifested yet, and we had to make do with fun-but-flawed for the more ambitious games. It couldn't be that bad or people wouldn't love it so much, right? I was missing something, if even just closure regarding the game's quality. Would it resonate with me, or is it just a nostalgia trip for others? Well, look at that — Morrowind is on sale.

For most of my adult life I wasn't brave enough to have children. I felt like I didn't have my shit together, and didn't feel like I had achieved a sort of mythological peak self needed to endure parenthood. "Do you think we were ready?" my father once asked me. "We weren't. Nobody is ready, so stop waiting to be ready." No matter by evolution or God, most of us have been given all the tools necessary to keep a baby alive — It's just buried beneath job-related anxiety and trivia about TV shows. When I saw my brother successfully raising his son, I started feeling like maybe this was something I could do. That exclusive parent's club wasn't actually exclusive. Maybe I was brave enough after all.

I had always heard that Morrowind could be a bit of a slog to play. It supposedly contained a good share of "some bullshit". Forums are filled with people telling you to never do X and always take Y, and though I know better than to listen to drive-by comments by anonymous cage-rattlers, I was afraid of having a bad time just because I chose basket weaving as a main skill and not moose taming ("everyone knows moose taming is a broken mechanic and the final boss is LITERALLY impossible without it. You idiot."). I don't like using guides, but I told myself that I would only use one for building my character. Hell, I beat all the infinity engine games without following guides, surely I can do this. Was I underestimating how 30+ years of gaming experience could support me? It's easy to forget that most games want you to succeed, especially those lacking that arcade DNA that lingered too long in home releases.

Bringing a newborn into your home is a unique, if unsettling, experience. Your comfort is thrown into disarray. Life for today's fertile generations is a pinball table of diversions injected mainline. Introducing a child reconfigures so many of those bumpers and ramps and flashing lights. Priorities get shuffled. People get shuffled. Things you once loved get knocked down a few pegs. It's not that you can't do them, but you no longer want to as much. A mother once told me "I don't go out as often anymore, but half of that is because I'd rather spend time with my son." This isn't a mandate of total isolation, but rather a declaration of the tectonic shifts that can occur in a parent's brain.

The running speed was the first thing to make me groan in Morrowind. Running felt slower than walking in most games, and walking was glacial. Eventually I learned that jumping is faster than running, but jumping drains your endurance. Endurance is used for most of the game's mechanics. It governs hit chance, and bartering prices and a hundred other things. It regenerates automatically, but slowly. Even with a full endurance bar I was barely hitting my enemies. One small rat gave me a run for my money. Then I faced two rats at once and got demolished. It became apparent that I would have to engage Morrowind on its own level. If the game felt janky and unfair then I must play janky and unfair.

The first couple weeks of parenthood are a blur. You're forgiven for not brushing your teeth or texting someone back. After some time it begins to settle, but only slightly. Three months is right about when your routine sets in, and that routine is more of a guideline. At least you feel something finally solidifying. You take baby steps out of the cave, careful to not let the sun melt your retinas. You hit your stride. And just then you're thrown off by something. A growth spurt, a sleep regression, an intellectual leap. You have to reset and build your routine again on the fly. Things become settled again. Then, once things feel solid, there is another upheaval. A new food aversion, an obsession with a stuffed animal that borders on criminal, another sleep regression. At some point it clicks that your new normal is a river, not a pond. If your children are always changing, then so must you. Accepting this is important for everyone. These shake-ups are happening for a reason. With their growing pains comes discomfort, but also the joy of getting to watch them grow.

While on an early quest that I was too weak to beat, I figured out that enemies don't chase you through loading screens. So I would go through a door, smack on the enemy for a while (missing 95% of the time), and then head back out the door when my health got low. After regaining my strength I'd go back in to do it all over again. Sure, the enemy heals too, but this let me train up my weapon skill enough that, eventually, I was able to actually kill the guy. I also cheesed out my first chunk of speechcraft levels. Then, I spotted a weapon that was way, way better than anything else I could buy or receive from a quest. It was watched over by a guard, but I was able to cram myself between a shelf and some other furniture and steal it (after many attempts) without getting caught. In the Morrowind manual, it says "The essence of any Elder Scrolls role-playing game has always been simple: let you do what you want, and make sure you have fun doing it." This gave me a license to play as I wished, not how I thought it "should" be. Morrowind can feel unforgiving in those early hours, but if you milk the game's many broken mechanics, you will become an unforgiving player. Through this philosophy, I eventually annihilated all foes in my path, ran at top speed, and sweet talked my way out of a few quests.

Toddler's are difficult. There's a lot of big, inexplicable emotions. Exponential intelligence spikes ensure that every safeguard you make will be tested, and often overcome. She learned to climb on the table? You remove the chair. She pulls a container of brown rice from the pantry, drags it over, and climbs on it to climb on the table. You put a child lock on the pantry. She figures out the child lock. And so it goes, on and on. The desire to appease them is so high, because you are so physically and emotionally exhausted. We don't like to show her screens. Maybe put a TV show on so I can empty the dishwasher? We don't like to give her junk food. I'll give you two M&Ms if you eat some of that avocado on your plate. There are times and places to compromise your parenting beliefs, but when and how often? I vowed to never be the parent who wheels their kid around a store while they stare at YouTube slop at max volume. Can I guarantee I'll never be that parent? Not ever? Just this one time, we’re on vacation, we just need to pick up the toothbrush I forgot, just in and out. My willpower must match my convictions if I'm to be the parent I believe my children need.

Playing on PC, I have access to the command console, allowing me to enter commands that can do nearly anything. At first I used it only to get myself out of broken situations. NPCs in Morrowind love to block small doorways. I had to start using the command "ResetActors" to reset them to their default position so my path was clear. Then I saw another command, "ToggleCollision" which lets you move through NPCs - and everything else. The floor, the walls, and all objects have no collision with you, allowing you to infinitely float through the game without the use of a Levitate spell. I really disliked the layout of the biggest city in Morrowind, Vivec. It's a cool concept, but a slog to actually traverse. I started using "ToggleCollision" to move between simple quest tasks. I never used it in a dungeon, or to avoid a combat encounter. I was technically cheating, which is funny because I played with minimal mods to keep the experience as "pure" as possible. I started to wonder who I was trying to impress. What was I trying to accomplish? Morrowind has so many unintended shortcuts and exploits. I grunted through enough bad combat and traveled with a snail's walking speed. Would a few more hours of it really matter? That line from the manual comes to mind again "...and have fun doing it." I was having fun. Does anything else matter?

You can be vigilant and fastidious, but your kids' footprints will encroach most (all?) rooms of your home. Toys and books and damage. Though, there is a profound feeling of rightness in those quiet, post-bedtime moments when you tip-toe about the place picking up toys and socks and chunks of strawberry. It makes me feel like I have control, that I can reset the place as I want. "On the eighth day he cleaned up after his kids, for they did not have the dexterity to put the stupid little parts back on a battle-ravaged toy." The sounds can't be escaped, either. The crying, the yelling, the repetition of a book quote, the words you accidentally say, the words they make up, the nauseating kids music, the slightly more tolerable kids music. A lot of it becomes background noise. Some of it becomes really specal no matter how many times you hear it. When, from my office, I hear "Go upstairs. See daddy," my heart flutters. I often come out to see her then, and in that moment all of the unhinged howling from a refused nap is forgiven.

There is something endearing about early 2000's graphics. The triangles began to smooth out, but not too much. The novelty of 3D graphics and CD audio had worn off by then, and more effort had to be made. The tools were so new, the techniques so rough, and the disc space so limited, that characters and landscapes exhibit a unique, impressionist style. They can't get this to look real, but can they get it to feel real? Morrowind's cohesive, if drab, style feels real within its own logic. It's a world of claustrophobia. Most buildings are small, but even the large buildings have cramped, labyrinthine interiors. The outdoors feel suffocating, with the world covered in fog. The game's draw distance is lower than you'd imagine, even at its max setting. This is likely a way to increase performance, but it works so well to increase the mystery. Your character is an "outlander" and this alien world is not your home. Vvardenfel, where the game takes place, is stranger than most fantasy worlds. Even we the players feel like outlanders. You don't travel by horse, but on a gargantuan flea with a hollowed out back. My eyes see the low fidelity texture maps and weird looking faces, but when taken together as one, my brain interprets it all as unequivocally Morrowind.

It's tough work, more so than I could have possibly imagined. The only reason parenting works is because each point of frustration is exceeded with a larger point of something greater. I hesitate to say love, or joy, or fulfillment (though all of those are present), because those are terms my pre-dad self had defined. The feeling I get from parenting is something different. Similar to doing a drug for the first time and thinking "I didn't know the human mind was capable of this." It's like that, and I don't have a word for it. Maybe I don't want a word for it. I just know that every time my toddler throws a fit at bedtime and I feel at the end of my rope, the frustration is so temporary. Because once she inevitably settles down and falls asleep, I take a look at her in the baby monitor and her sleeping face makes my heart fill with whatever-this-feeling-is. It's a good feeling. Real good.

My Morrowind experience was one of extremes. Difficulty and ease. Excitement and tedium. Too much story and too little story. Like the manual suggests, you are allowed to experience the game however you'd like. As a consequence, it bends to you. Are you rushing through the story? Nobody is going to stop you and make you read that book. Did you choose the best weapon in the game? The combat won't be challenging. Will you ignore the towns that the main campaign doesn't bring you to? The world will feel small. This isn't unique to Morrowind, but it feels magnified by the game's hands-off approach to your experience. The game gives you a rare amount of control, but with that comes the burden of making the most of it.

I've struggled with various mild-to-medium mental issues since my late teens. I seem to have a little bit of everything, but none enough to interfere with my duty as a taxpaying cog. Vague depression, occasional anxiety, and some form of mild ADHD. With age, some of these have gotten worse, and some better. Therapy helped, but never got me totally where I wanted to be (I still strongly endorse therapy and still go, just less). I had a moment this past summer where all the facets of my mental glitch cocktail bloomed. It came to a head when I yelled at the Roomba. Moments later, I told my wife I was going to call a psychiatrist and talk about medication. "This guy has got to go," I said, referring to the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. I hated the idea of medication, even though my therapist had gently prodded me about it for so many years. It felt like giving up, like falling into the herd of sheep who medicate instead of tackling the core issues. Then I thought about my daughter, and the kind of father I want her to have. What's better, a medicated "sheep" of a father who can devote himself to his family, or an unmedicated guy who yells at the Roomba? For our kids we give up so much time, energy, and money. You expect all of that, and any parent will gladly tell you about it. What I didn't expect to sacrifice was part of my identity. When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, I decided to get in shape. I wanted my family to know a strong, capable father. I've been consistently exercising and eating better ever since. Trying medication for some of my mental issues has been eye-opening, and nothing like the horrors I was warned about years ago. My identity as some kind of independent, grumpy, gatekeeping outsider was juvenile. I'm "Dad" now, and shaking off the cocoon of my old identities is growth, not concession. My daughter is reconfiguring me into a better person, even if she doesn't know it yet.

I have played just about 90 hours of Morrowind, which makes me uncomfortable. Bethesda RPGs have this insidious trap of getting you to do just one more quest. There never feels like a great stopping point. After a long dungeon you want to head to town and call it quits. Well, let me sell my junk first. Oh, wait, this guy has a cool helmet on display. Can I steal it? OK, OK I'll just go get my next quest from the Mage's Guild and then I'll log off, I mean it. There comes a time in games like this where I decide to just crank out the main story, because completing that usually dulls the drive to explore the whole world. So that's what I did. I left the guilds behind, never got the best gear, and never made that game-breaking Chameleon spell I wanted. Morrowind was draining my very limited free time. I like to paint, I want to learn Dio's Don't Talk to Strangers on the guitar, and I want to get started on my second book. I put my in-game aspirations to the side and did the right thing. I obliterated Dagoth Ur, claimed my title as Nerevarine, saved the game, and Alt+F4'd.

My wife and I talked about having a second kid, but never came to a final conclusion. "Maybe in a few months we can think about it," we said. We were still confined to a crappy apartment and the thought of cramming another body in there was scary. So we decided to hold off "for now" with the understanding that both of us might one day want another kid. My wife got pregnant about a month after that conversation. After the initial grumbling discomfort there came a sense of relief. We both feel that we waited too long to have our first child, and here we were almost doing it again. It wasn't perfect timing, but I think back to my father's advice. There is never a perfect time. There is no perfect anything. There is only the story you're living/creating in this particular play-through. Ours would include a second child. Though, the instant he popped out I got a vasectomy.

I still have an itch to create a new character in Morrowind since my first playthrough was so bumbling and exploratory. I took skills I never used, and didn't know about the Mark and Recall spells until ¾ through the main campaign (maybe a guide would have been nice after all). I would have a blast now, knowing how I'd like to play and what I would want to achieve. There is also such a wonderful modding scene, I would install so many QoL mods, and texture mods, and whatever else looked cool. Maybe one day. No two play-throughs of Morrowind are the same, and that's part of the beauty of these games. When given free rein in this strange world, will you battle for justice as the Nerevarine? Or will you collect every single bottle of skooma, drink them all, and then try to kill Vivec wearing only Boots of Blinding Speed?

So just rejoice in the suffering, because tribulations are both a burden and a building block. Make something.

I might one day write a more in-depth review of this one, but I just wanted to get my thoughts out mainly for myself since this was one of the more interesting games I played this year.

Overall, I came out of my playthrough feeling really positive! I clocked around 45 hours into it to do the main story, the entire Fighters guild questline, some mages, Temple, Imperial Cult, and Redoran as well. The writing for lore and its key players is not only really intriguing but paced really well in my opinion, but every quest in the main story made me engage Morrowind's interesting world and world.

The core gameplay is a bit clunky, relying on a dice rolling system on whether attacks connect, as well as large formulas where your current level of stamina affects almost every roll the game makes for almost every skill. This reliance on stamina is a bit of a chore to deal with, and it is recommended to equip yourself with some sort of magic item early on that reduces your stamina drain. In addition, the game is just too easy (I just set the game to 100 max difficulty during the 4th and 5th trials and left it there until the end of the game, after incrementally increasing it during my run), but it gives you so many player options and variety that it stays fun, even if I could chop my way through every single enemy with ease. This game more than any other elder scrolls game to come after it rewards player experimentation, and player option above anything else. From handcrafting your own spells, to powerful enchantments and Levitate, which is one of the most fun spells in the game, you are given many ways to resolve most issues the game throws at you. With a high level of persuasion, you can talk yourself out of trouble in most cases as well, allowing for nonviolent solutions to problems. (Or ways to talk yourself out of dealing with the law by instigating targets you intend to kill)

I do wish all the minor dungeons were a bit more interesting and worth doing, and that the tiny non-faction affiliated sidequests had more meat to them, though Oblivion still wouldn't fix the boring minor dungeon issue either. But any quests having to do with a faction were awesome and expanded on the world in meaningful ways. Never before have I wanted to read the books in an elder scrolls game more than now. Honorable mention to the Temple faction, which requires a lot of reading to know how to progress the quests in that chain.

In conclusion, I appreciate the meaningful option that the player is given, and the depth of many of its systems and world, while understanding that the game falls short on some of its side content. In addition, most combat encounters are a breeze, even on the highest difficulty. It was the world to explore, its multicolored solutions to issues, its cultures to engage with, and its meaningful narrative that kept me with this one from start to finish.

This is honestly a light review, there is so much more one could delve into when discussing Morrowind, but I do not have the want to spend more time on it right now, and is more so meant to be a time capsule of my thoughts upon having finished the game recently. I cannot recommend this game enough, if you can get past a painful first 5 hours, it has a lot in store for you to get lost in.

The only reason anyone would rate this game 5 stars is because they played it when they were younger and they miss their childhood, so they think everything from those days were great (welcome to the world of nostalgia). Guess what, this game is garbage.

First, playing this game is as much fun as reading the Old Testament. You have to read through hundreds of pages of extremely boring wordy and dry material to even have the slightest idea what the heck the story is about because they never really explain it in the story. But don't worry about the story because the game puts you into a hypnosis state by making you do the same mission 100 times (go to this location and deliver/steal/pick up this item X 100) that by the time you are finished, you won't even remember what the story was and won't care either (and you won't miss out much).

When you consider the fact that most of the text in this game has font size 7 and there is no voice acting, you'll need a magnifying glass just to read most of the text anyways, so don't even bother. Just go ahead and do the same mission 100 times (like the game expects you to do), deliver those items to all those places like the UPS guy until you get tired of it and once you are done, go pick another game, a game that's actually well made with a good story and interesting missions (basically any RPG game made after 2000 except for this one).

Oh also, since 95% of the game consists of reading wordy boring long tedious text, they might as well call this game a visual novel.