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filk

Morrowind

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I'm playing Morrowind again, giving it a real go for the first time since Oblivion was released.

 

Over the past several years I've often tried to start this game again. Traditionally, I dig out (before I had a Steam copy) and install the game, then spend about a day mod hunting, another day mod configuring, and two hours playing. This time, I've decided to play vanilla. I installed some bug fix mods and nothing else. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn't tired out before I even started and have managed several hours so far.

 

Many thousands of words have been written about what Morrowind does well, but I'd like to comment on some of the things I've run into that feel anachronistic playing in the modern day. The default movement speed is incredibly low, and you run out of stamina almost immediately. This works completely against the desire to explore and engage in non-quest driven activities. At the time Morrowind was released, I thought complaints against the dice-roll combat were absurd, but the degree of missing and miniscule damage done in this game makes the first ten hours of Baldur's Gate feel brisk. Furthermore, you level at a snail's pace; it seems impossible that I should reach a useful level by the time I have put in ten hours.

 

That said, everything that was good remains good. I love that I've joined a church that is a) unlike any institution in classic fantasy and b ) my first quest for that church is to go on a pilgramage to holy sites. In the days before quest markers, completion meant engaging with and living in the text. You cannot complete Morrowind without at the very least understanding the nature of the Tribunal and some history of the relationship between the Empire and the Dunmer. Finally, and most importantly, Morrowind is subdued. It can be heard just listening to Nerevar Rising compared to Reign of the Septims or Dragonborn - this is not a world of Imperial/Nordic anthems, but of poor woodwind players sitting by the river.

 

Anyway, I imagine I'll want to talk about it loads more as I continue, so here's a thread.

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This was me too.  I had dabbled with mods before and never gotten anywhere with the game. So recently I ditched the mods (apart from view distance, vanilla view distance is torture) and plunged into the game.  I didn't do many sidequests, the main quest was quite enough to deal with and it took me more than 50 hours to beat it. Morrowind does not give a shit, you need to dive into the text (there is a lot) just to be able to finish the game and doing so you can't help but to be sucked into the world even more. It certainly does things different than today's games, was very interesting playing it through so long after release.

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It's been years since i played Morrowind, but i seem to remember that sticking with lighter weight weapons early on would significantly improve my chances on the hit/miss rolls, i believe because you eat through your stamina at a much lower rate with those weapons. (Low stamina negatively affecting your chance to hit.)

I'm a big fan of the TES games, and Morrowind remains my favorite game in the series. It was always more than a little crash prone, and while it's filled with ambitious and interesting systems, it would still be pretty forgiving to say they were flawed. The reason i ended up sinking probably hundreds of hours into it was mainly because its world, Vvardenfell was such a vivid and interesting location to explore. I also loved having a quest giver tell me road directions to a location, and then me having to head out and follow road signs to get there. No easy quick travel and no always-present quest marker to absent-mindedly chase up and over mountains.

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Regarding movement speed, I've found enchanting to never have been as useful as in Morrowind to mitigate problems like this. I almost always enchant either one or two items I wear to buff Speed. Also, procuring the "Boots of Blinding Speed" in the world and using an exploit to disable the Blind balance to the huge Speed buff is a trick well-known to Morrowind faithful.

 

Leveling is indeed quite slow unless you specifically seek to undermine that system by really focusing on specific skills that are easily farmable like Repair, Alchemy, Athletics, etc.

 

Just reading this stuff makes me want to go back and play that game. I never put much time into the expansions and I only beat the game once despite playing 200-300ish hours with multiple characters.

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I also loved having a quest giver tell me road directions to a location, and then me having to head out and follow road signs to get there. No easy quick travel and no always-present quest marker to absent-mindedly chase up and over mountains.

 

Is there some kind of mod for Skyrim that would replace the quest marker with directions of some kind? The quest markers never really bothered me but I would be really curious to see how different the experience might be if you actually had to put some effort into finding a location.

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Is there some kind of mod for Skyrim that would replace the quest marker with directions of some kind? The quest markers never really bothered me but I would be really curious to see how different the experience might be if you actually had to put some effort into finding a location.

 

Even Better Quest Objectives

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Oh man, but mods are so awesome! I spent as much time installing mods and crashing the game as actually playing it.

 

Regardless, Morrowind Code Patch, Unofficial Morrowind Patch, and Pursuit Enhanced should be required mods for any playthrough. They'll fix a lot of the most basic wonkiness and crashing of the basic Morrowind. And for bonus awesomeness install: Morrowind Sound and Graphics Overhaul and Morrowind Rebirth

 

All in all it shouldn't take you that long to install the 5 above mods, and you'll get a great new experience out of them. I really miss what Morrowind was trying to accomplish in the newer Elderscrolls. It had a much more detailed, interesting, and thought out world than Oblivion or Skyrim did. They tried to make everything as interactive as possible, even if they really couldn't do it they at least tried. By Skyrim however even half the barrels and whatnot are faked and don't have anything in them, let alone being able to actually steal everything and then stack them willy nilly.

 

By the way, OpenMw is something I helped work on for a while. That logo up on the top is (half) mine! It's an open source entire re-write of Morrowind's engine. Bug fixes and new graphical tricks at the core, new modding possibilities, it should hopefully run a lot faster too. It's going to be awesome, and may well actually be out this year! And yes you can run mods with it.

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I've seen OpenMW before, hope it'll be to morrowind what OpenTTD was to Transport Tycoon. OpenTTD has 128 player servers that take several minutes to scroll through. 

 

I'll probably have more to add later but about the speed in Morrowind, I think you move slower if you're above 50% carrying capacity. Weight of equipped items MIGHT factor in but I don't think it does. You can cut transport times by a lot if you remember to use mark and recall in mainly 2 ways; mark a spot in a dungeon when you're full, use either almisi or divine intervention to somewhere, drop your stuff in front of the temple door and recall back to get more stuff. Then slowly drag the loot heap to a vendor when you're done with the dungeon. The other way is to mark a quest giver if you think you'll be returning to them and then recalling to get there fast. This is pretty much all the guild quest givers. 

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I have been keeping up with OpenMW developments. I just finished my Master's thesis, and I was actually thinking of getting involved in the project in my upcoming month off. As for the other mods, I think I'll stick to vanilla for now outside important patches. Particularly when it comes to graphics and sound mods, I have found that old 3D for me has passed into the realm of looking "classic", and I actually get a unique and valuable visual experience in low-poly worlds. I appreciate the recommendations, though. Besides, as I said in the OP...

 

Oh man, but mods are so awesome! I spent as much time installing mods and crashing the game as actually playing it.

 

...I didn't *want* to spend half my time installing mods this time around!

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I have been keeping up with OpenMW developments. I just finished my Master's thesis, and I was actually thinking of getting involved in the project in my upcoming month off. As for the other mods, I think I'll stick to vanilla for now outside important patches. Particularly when it comes to graphics and sound mods, I have found that old 3D for me has passed into the realm of looking "classic", and I actually get a unique and valuable visual experience in low-poly worlds. I appreciate the recommendations, though. Besides, as I said in the OP...

 

 

...I didn't *want* to spend half my time installing mods this time around!

 

Please do! The team is generally awesome and volunteers are more than welcome. The mods I linked are also mostly well documented and explicit in how to install, so hopefully it shouldn't take too long. They're all huge fixes and improvements, Morrowind Rebirth is about the size of a hundred other mods combined, and Visual and Graphics overhaul literally is a hundred mods combined. Wanted to give the most bang for your installation time buck  ^_^

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I was lost one afternoon when I ever-so-slightly caught a glimpse of something smooth and yellow against the jagged gray rocks that surrounded me. I turned to and peaked around the corner to face a beautiful and gigantic dwemer ruin, hidden in the wastes by a semi-ring of mountains. Without the "content radar" of the later games, finding something like that in Morrowind was so thrilling! According to Steam I only have 20 hours in Morrowind, but compared to ES IV and V I have so many more specific memories of III. Unfortunately, I was so concerned that I would screw myself over by leveling incorrectly that I ruined my character the other way.

 

Regarding movement speed, I've found enchanting to never have been as useful as in Morrowind to mitigate problems like this. I almost always enchant either one or two items I wear to buff Speed. Also, procuring the "Boots of Blinding Speed" in the world and using an exploit to disable the Blind balance to the huge Speed buff is a trick well-known to Morrowind faithful.

Am I right to assume that those boots make you blind for technical reasons, ie, the developers didn't think anyone's computer at the time could handle you running at that speed?

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I was lost one afternoon when I ever-so-slightly caught a glimpse of something smooth and yellow against the jagged gray rocks that surrounded me. I turned to and peaked around the corner to face a beautiful and gigantic dwemer ruin, hidden in the wastes by a semi-ring of mountains. Without the "content radar" of the later games, finding something like that in Morrowind was so thrilling! According to Steam I only have 20 hours in Morrowind, but compared to ES IV and V I have so many more specific memories of III. Unfortunately, I was so concerned that I would screw myself over by leveling incorrectly that I ruined my character the other way.

 

Am I right to assume that those boots make you blind for technical reasons, ie, the developers didn't think anyone's computer at the time could handle you running at that speed?

 

You're incorrect, it still draws everything, it just makes your gamma go to zero. It'll only be partially darkened if you're a Breton with the magic resistance. It's a pun on the name I think, there's a spell called blind that makes everything appear darker, the boots give 100 points of it?

 

The classic usage of mechanics is to make a spell that gives you magic resistance of 100% or close enough that you can cast it for the minimum time allowed, probably 1 second. You cast that, enter inventory, equip boots, resist blind. Now you can walk around with them while still seeing everything.

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You're incorrect, it still draws everything, it just makes your gamma go to zero. It'll only be partially darkened if you're a Breton with the magic resistance. It's a pun on the name I think, there's a spell called blind that makes everything appear darker, the boots give 100 points of it?

 

The classic usage of mechanics is to make a spell that gives you magic resistance of 100% or close enough that you can cast it for the minimum time allowed, probably 1 second. You cast that, enter inventory, equip boots, resist blind. Now you can walk around with them while still seeing everything.

 

Everything this gentleman said is correct. Also, if you're a Breton you could just use a spell that complements the inherent resistance to that race. It made the boots much more easily accessible to Bretons from minute one, IIRC.

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Wait, how do you screw yourself over when levelling in Morrowind? Don't you just do things and then your level goes up, but everything's still pretty much driven by your skills? It's one of the few WRPGs I enjoy because I don't feel like I'm inevitably going to fuck up my character.

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Why do I like the dialogue system from Morrowind (and other older games like Wizardry 8) so much? It makes the conversations harder to navigate, gives you no indication whether an NPC has anything new to say about a topic, and always leaves you wondering if you skipped an important topic by accident. But it feels so much more like talking to a person, especially if you click on topics within the paragraphs based mostly of whether or not they happen to interest you. It feels like Wikipedia. =P

 

P.S. The old man who gives you the sweet-roll quiz and talks to you like you're eight years old, is the best of all the Bethesda sweet-roll quiz character creator guys. I still can't eat a sweet roll without hearing his voice say "Mmmmwhat do you doooo?"

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Wait, how do you screw yourself over when levelling in Morrowind? Don't you just do things and then your level goes up, but everything's still pretty much driven by your skills?

Morrowind and Oblivion's leveling systems are both completely broken. Daggerfall's might have been too, i don't remember.

The crux of it is that when you create your character, you choose your major skills, the skills that contribute to gaining a level. Nothing else does, but everything still contributes to the size of the attribute bonuses you get when you level up. This creates a weird situation where focusing on your primary skills nets you a substantially weaker character than you would otherwise have ended up with by focusing on your minor skills - only intermittently using major skills so you can level up and reap the rewards from focusing on those minor skills.

I mean, the TES games are not competitive in any way and consistently featured adjustable difficulty, but it was still a dumb and broken and completely counter-intuitive system. I always hated it, i was glad to see it gone in Skyrim.

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I would like an RPG try to go further with the Wikipedia-like conversations Morrowind had. I think it could be interesting to make a system that's not actually modeling a conversation, as all systems that have tried to model conversations have failed utterly. Having keywords you click, no typed sentences for your character and such could in fact make suspension of disbelief easier.

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Please do! The team is generally awesome and volunteers are more than welcome. The mods I linked are also mostly well documented and explicit in how to install, so hopefully it shouldn't take too long. They're all huge fixes and improvements, Morrowind Rebirth is about the size of a hundred other mods combined, and Visual and Graphics overhaul literally is a hundred mods combined. Wanted to give the most bang for your installation time buck  ^_^

 

I assume all of those mods more or less compatible? I looked at the Morrowind Rebirth page and it said it wasn't compatible with a couple aspects of the V/G Overhaul that could be toggled off, but neither of those two said anything about the bug-specific mods that you mentioned.

 

Morrowind and Oblivion's leveling systems are both completely broken. Daggerfall's might have been too, i don't remember.

The crux of it is that when you create your character, you choose your major skills, the skills that contribute to gaining a level. Nothing else does, but everything still contributes to the size of the attribute bonuses you get when you level up. This creates a weird situation where focusing on your primary skills nets you a substantially weaker character than you would otherwise have ended up with by focusing on your minor skills - only intermittently using major skills so you can level up and reap the rewards from focusing on those minor skills.

I mean, the TES games are not competitive in any way and consistently featured adjustable difficulty, but it was still a dumb and broken and completely counter-intuitive system. I always hated it, i was glad to see it gone in Skyrim.

 

Yeah, in Morrowind it's really best to put in one or two (two may be pushing it) things you actually like and are sure to use in Major Skills so you still level at a decent clip on the back of the one thing you're using often but still build up those attribute points through everything else you're using. I typically make an armor skill my major skill, because then the leveling up happens at a similar rate at which I battle. So, I do a lot of social/quest stuff, get in a couple battles, level, rinse and repeat.

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 I typically make an armor skill my major skill, because then the leveling up happens at a similar rate at which I battle. So, I do a lot of social/quest stuff, get in a couple battles, level, rinse and repeat.

 

Phew! I kind of ended up that way by accident, as I chose a pre-built class Pilgrim. Medium Armor is the only major skill I'm using a lot.

 

When I played Morrowind as a kid, I never cared about this stuff. I just learned to use the terminal to cheat if I wasn't strong enough to do something.  B)

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...so it sounds like if I play the way I normally do, with as little foreknowledge as possible and just discovering the systems and what's good and bad on my own, then I probably won't screw myself over later.

 

So it's basically the opposite of every other WRPG I've ever played. I fuckin' love this game.

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TES games aren't really games you should try to min-max, is the point to make. The flaws are absolutely there, but the experience is so inherently adaptable that it doesn't really matter unless you're prone to noticing and being bothered by such things.

Magic and alchemy in Morrowind are also completely broken, but you won't really care because it's fun regardless and there's nothing in the game that pushes you to notice that something's wrong.

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I ended up playing Morrowind in high school, when I had all the time in the world, so I played it a whole whole lot. I think it was a lot easier for me to get into games that were perhaps less approachable. I still love it, and think it is a fantastic game, but I can't tell if that is nostalgia or not. It certainly does things in a way that shows its age, but I loved the range of environments, and some of the spectacles like the ghost fence -- at the time I encountered it, just wandering around, it was amazing and I had no idea what it was.

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Magic and alchemy in Morrowind are also completely broken, but you won't really care because it's fun regardless and there's nothing in the game that pushes you to notice that something's wrong.

That actually let me ruin my own playthrough. I wasn't having very much fun with the combat early on (got pretty frustrated with it actually) but then I found out about alchemy. When I realised I could enter an endless recursive loop of making potions that would buff my potionmaking, I couldn't resist it. I don't entirely blame the game, because I did have to put in a lot of effort to break it, but at the same time it's hard to resist a boring but effective way of beating a game. The problem for me is: when do I stop? If you can break the game systems to that degree then any difficulty is in some sense self imposed. I didn't want to gimp myself by not doing it, because I hated the combat when my charcter was weak, but being a god was only marginally better.

 

The "don't use it" argument might work for some people but it doesn't work for me. It's also why I don't like how in Path of Exile's permadeath mode your character doesn't get erased, it gets turned into a non-permadeath character. Then it's on me to bring myself to not play that character! It's totally different from the game taking it away from me.

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I dunno, if you consider that "beating the game" then I guess it ruins it for you. I never thought Alchemy was so gamebreaking because it seemed to have the biggest impact on economy, for me, which is something that's generally not very relevant or important by the time you naturally would game that system. I suppose you could also create potions that make you nearly invincible, but there are also other things that feel broken when you level them up enough like Sneak that I don't feel using a potion to win is really breaking anything that isn't broken just through spending more time than you would using Alchemy.

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