Sign in to follow this  
filk

Morrowind

Recommended Posts

I guess i've never really looked at TES as a game to "beat". To me, it's a tool for generating stories, and abusing the broken alchemy system to be incredibly overpowered isn't, to me, an interesting story to play a part in.

Saying these things, i'm realizing that i hold TES games to completely different standards than i do most other games. I guess perhaps it would be awesome if you could have a game like TES that was also mechanically rock solid, but i generally try to be pretty realistic about games that are so huge and so ambitious.

Skyrim got closer than ever before to that lofty ideal, but you still ultimately end up with things like how much people are willing to waste their time grinding levels for blacksmithing. Where does it stop? Does that need to be "fixed" too?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There are weird systems in that franchise that encourage me, as a person who focuses too much on details, to do dumb things. Like, I won't do any important quests in Skyrim until I'm a high level because quest rewards scale to level. Dumb.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I look at TES the way I look at Stalker in the way you said it, Sno: "for generating stories."

Both of these games a ripe with unexpected situations that become so personal to each player. And listening to a player re-tell their unqiue experience about a game you played and explored much of makes you appreciate it more.

It's a rich tapestry of stories that makes those games.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There are weird systems in that franchise that encourage me, as a person who focuses too much on details, to do dumb things. Like, I won't do any important quests in Skyrim until I'm a high level because quest rewards scale to level. Dumb.

 

I also find that annoying. I seem to recall it being more prevalent in Oblivion than it was in Skyrim, but still annoying. It's a thing that inevitably crops up in the process of normal play and it's especially hard for me to ignore.

 

It might well just be a different kind of symptom for the same thing eot was talking about, however. Knowing too much about the game to simply take it at face value. You sort of have to force yourself to take a few steps back.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I look at TES the way I look at Stalker in the way you said it, Sno: "for generating stories."

Both of these games a ripe with unexpected situations that become so personal to each player. And listening to a player re-tell their unqiue experience about a game you played and explored much of makes you appreciate it more.

It's a rich tapestry of stories that makes those games.

It's weird. They definitely give the player more freedom to do stuff than most games, you can attack anyone, go anywhere, steal anything, but I still think of the games more as being about the hand crafted events / quests. When you talk about generating your own stories, do you mean more in a roleplay sense than sandbox / systems type stuff?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Abusing alchemy and making the most ridiculously powerful potions was the most enjoyable aspect of Morrowind for me.  I totally get why people love the story engine elements, and the lore/world, those things just don't click for me with the TES series. 

 

The toybox like set of tools you get that can be combined to make what is the fantasy equivalent of a gatling gun that fires nukes is what amuses me. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

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.

Isn't Wasteland 2 doing something like this?

 

About levelling in Morrowind and Oblivion. There's a big difference between the two. If you didn't build your character correctly in Oblivion you encountered hitting an enemy 50+ times to kill them while you stand in front of them and chug health potions. It wasn't that interesting. Alchemy/Enchanting/Spellmaking was very much nerfed in comparison to Morrowind.

 

In Morrowind if you had trouble in the combat due to not enough HP or not enough offensive power, you could turn yourself invisible, run really fast, fly over the enemy to avoid him or to kill him from somewhere he can't reach you. 

 

But most of it doesn't work very well without some kind of alchemy abuse, most vendors have somewhere below 1k gold on them for buying stuff, and they don't even buy at full value. Permanent enchants off vendors cost 120k+ I think but they never fail. If you try enchanting you break the gem most of the time with no result. 

 

I guess even without the crafting system you can still easily get through the game if you happen to find/look up on permanent enchanted artifacts like the Cuirass of Saviors Hide with 50%+ magic resistance, a suit of glass armor you can walk to and steal from the start of the game, the assassins that Tribunal added that are levelled for your convenience but the items dropped aren't. So you can sleep outside Seyda Neen and pick up 8k of items off something that's about as dangerous as a mud crab.

 

Also, Morrowind didn't have nearly as much levelled content as Oblivion, bandits didn't sprout glass armour as far as I remember. You could outlevel most stuff, at least in vanilla Morrowind. Also you could buy infinite training, though you had to find better and better trainers for stuff.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yup, that's what ultimately makes the leveling system in Morrowind work better than Oblivion's. Even if you truly have no idea what you're doing when you create your character, you'll still eventually grow your stats enough that you'll be able to beat enemies simply by out-leveling them. It just might take longer than if you read a min-maxing guide.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, absolutely, if you fell behind the growth curve in Oblivion, you would get absolutely wrecked by scaled enemies on the default difficulty. Skyrim has a similar scaling scheme, but it's harder to fall significantly behind the curve in that game because of the new character growth systems. Oblivion was also really bad about just taking weak enemies and ramping up their stats until they can hurt you, that was the worst thing about how they handled it.

Morrowind did do some enemy scaling, but in the sense that it would actually start inserting new and tougher enemies in amongst the weaker ones. I also really liked how there was a kind of implicit hierarchy of challenge. Wild animals kind of came lowest on the totem pole, then your generic cavern bandits, then the undead, and then dwemer automatons a little bit beyond that, then you're into the sixth house enemies, and finally the daedra as the big scary end-game enemies. In Oblivion and Skyrim, you're never really faced with making a choice about having to steer clear of a location that seems like it might be really dangerous to you, because you can kind of safely assume that everything will be scaled to your level. (Again, Skyrim is a bit better about it than oblivion, they do actually do a bit of difficulty gating.) I think that's a big part of why Oblivion, and Skyrim to a lesser extent, can have a feeling of sameness in all their dungeons.

The other big issue with scaling is that it... When it comes to discovered items and quest rewards, you don't, as much, get those highs of "Aha! I found this awesome thing in this dungeon!" There was a super cool multi-cell dungeon in Morrowind started from a quest given by a random bar patron somewhere in Vivec that i used to do early on in most of my Morrowind playthroughs. It had a lot of really great items, including a few daedric ones. That doesn't really happen in Oblivion and Skyrim, since you mostly always get level-appropriate rewards.


Beyond that, glass armor and daedric armor are really rare in Morrowind, there's only a handful of NPC's that wear glass armor, and maybe only one that has daedric. Contrast to Oblivion, hit level 20 and the game decides to just start throwing bandit after bandit with full suits of glass armor at you. It makes the cool stuff feel not so cool. (This specific issue, i feel, Skyrim is a lot better about.)

In short, i think dynamic scaling sucks.

 

 

It's weird. They definitely give the player more freedom to do stuff than most games, you can attack anyone, go anywhere, steal anything, but I still think of the games more as being about the hand crafted events / quests. When you talk about generating your own stories, do you mean more in a roleplay sense than sandbox / systems type stuff?


Kind of a bit of both? There's just so much to those games, and it tends to overlap in unexpected ways. It's not like TES games are simple, linear paths. I love getting into a TES game and just picking random direction to head off in, just set out exploring. Finding new quests, incidental events, dungeons, towns, settlements, whatever. (Or, when it comes to Oblivion and Skyrim, witnessing quirky AI routines do ocassionally surprising things.) I think you can tend to miss out on a lot in those games if you're determined to stick to the main quest paths, there is so much going on in every TES game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Lack of (noticeable) scaling is something I really appreciated in Fallout, I think they nailed it much better there. When you saw a dude in hulking metal armor or a huge mutant, you knew you were in trouble.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There was definitely some pretty harsh scaling in Fallout 3 too, but the experience certainly wasn't smoothed out as much as Oblivion's. I was also probably being a little too hard on Skyrim, i do think it handles it a lot better than Oblivion did. Oblivion was the low point here, the whole game just feels so smoothed over and uniform, I think you need those peaks and valleys.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There was definitely some pretty harsh scaling in Fallout 3 too, but the experience certainly wasn't smoothed out as much as Oblivion's. I was also probably being a little too hard on Skyrim, i do think it handles it a lot better than Oblivion did. Oblivion was the low point here, the whole game just feels so smoothed over and uniform, I think you need those peaks and valleys.

 

Yeah, but they need to do a lot better in a lot of areas. I kind of feel like Either Skyrim represents whacked priorities (crap quests and writing while all the money is spend on making each area of the world unique) or wasn't given enough time or something. Oblivion's problem was too much ambition in not enough time, I can forgive that. But having such janky basics like bad combat still in Skyrim was... ugh.

 

Hope they get better for Fallout 4.

 

PS to Jon Cole, yes the mods are pretty compatible other than the handful of things you need to change for the graphics part.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So, installing all those mods was kind of a pain and I suppose I did something wrong because it wouldn't boot until I deleted one of the mods included in that big MWSG pack. If I had to do it again, I'd probably just use that single mod because it basically installs a big suite of mods including various bug fixes patches in a fairly automatic fashion, doing as much as taking control of your cursor and automating some fairly complicated tasks. I don't know how much overlap there is between the various bug patches, but as a non-expert I can't imagine it's worth installing more than one. I ended up not installing the Rebirth mod just because I didn't want to further complicated my Morrowind folder and add too much unfamiliar stuff.

 

The game looks about like I remember it, which I think is as much praise as I could heap on those mods because going back to old games usually means disappointment at how bad they look comparably to newer games. The draw distance is almost certainly much better than it used to be and texture resolution is pretty good, but most importantly it feels cohesive, which mods rarely manage to do while maintaining the integrity of the original game. I didn't get very far, just wanted to get a taste (I'm in the middle of a handful of games, so I'm not ready to dive in headfirst).

 

Man is movement speed slower than I remembered. You really do move super goddamn slow at the beginning, regardless of armor weight or anything like that. I don't know how I got into this the first time around, before it sunk its teeth into me and I could restart the game ad infinitum and bear the flaws. I imagine I'll make a bumrush to a city of note so I can actually get some gear that may make the early-game a little more bearable. One thing that Oblivion and Skyrim do a little bit better than Morrowind is really give you the tools to get into trouble from the very beginning, as opposed to Morrowind where all I have to do is face two enemies at once, run out of stamina in two seconds, and die within ten seconds.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

When you talk about generating your own stories, do you mean more in a roleplay sense than sandbox / systems type stuff?

A mixture of both but more of that latter.

There are many unqiue npc interactions during every gameplay that enrich games. Not only that but match that with the many different ways a player can play those games, which pop up many more unqiue interactions.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Made a little more progress over the last couple days, finishing up my fourth quest in the Fighter's Guild and about halfway through the pilgrimage for the Tribunal Temple. Definitely starting to run into money problems, though. After hitting the initial windfall of Dark Brotherhood armor (thanks, Tribunal) and buying myself the best equipment I could find, I now am struggling to come out ahead on quests after repairing my gear. The only reason I haven't done my pilgrimage yet is that I don't really have extra money for all the offerings...

 

I'm very torn about going quest sleuthing through the cities I've visited. I've already been in Seyda Neen, Balmora, Caldera, Vivec and Suran for varying durations and if I'd gone through those cities with a comb looking for every side quest I would have quit by now. I don't trust conversations with regular NPCs to be worth my time, particularly because you end up clicking through rumours, advice, Background, my trade and so on, all of which takes time. How do you guys approach it?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Made a little more progress over the last couple days, finishing up my fourth quest in the Fighter's Guild and about halfway through the pilgrimage for the Tribunal Temple. Definitely starting to run into money problems, though. After hitting the initial windfall of Dark Brotherhood armor (thanks, Tribunal) and buying myself the best equipment I could find, I now am struggling to come out ahead on quests after repairing my gear. The only reason I haven't done my pilgrimage yet is that I don't really have extra money for all the offerings...

 

I'm very torn about going quest sleuthing through the cities I've visited. I've already been in Seyda Neen, Balmora, Caldera, Vivec and Suran for varying durations and if I'd gone through those cities with a comb looking for every side quest I would have quit by now. I don't trust conversations with regular NPCs to be worth my time, particularly because you end up clicking through rumours, advice, Background, my trade and so on, all of which takes time. How do you guys approach it?

 

Be careful about that Tribunal content, starting a new game with it installed will push you towards it almost immediately, but you are absolutely not ready to do it. Get as far as Mournhold so you can stop the attacks, but then leave it alone. The caverns beneath Mournhold are the hardest dungeons in the game, you might even be better off doing the second expansion, Bloodmoon, before Tribunal. Both are geared towards higher level characters though, try to be in the vicinity of 20-30 before touching them. Tribunal, in particular, is good to leave for after the main quest, since its story ties into that a lot and the items you get in the main quest will make it tremendously more manageable.

As for finding quests, aside from the obvious ones - the main quest, the guilds, and a couple other factions - there really are quite a number of incidental NPC's that can start random side quests, but you'll usually be able to tell right away if the NPC has a quest to offer, because they won't be spitting out generic dialogue at you. (They'll usually have a unique introduction that cuts straight to the point, if i recall correctly.)

If you don't feel like talking to every single NPC though, hitting up those rumor/whatever dialogues over and over is the way to find the quest starts in a given area.

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think what I love the most about Morrowind is the world itself. Everything just feels so alien in the creature and building design. I had such a hard time getting into Oblivion because the world felt like generic fantasy compared to Morrowind. Skyrim still wasn't as good but at least it was better than Oblivion.

 

Now I really want to play Morrowind again. The only thing I'm not looking forward to is how tedious it is fighting cliff racers.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think what I love the most about Morrowind is the world itself. Everything just feels so alien in the creature and building design. I had such a hard time getting into Oblivion because the world felt like generic fantasy compared to Morrowind. Skyrim still wasn't as good but at least it was better than Oblivion.

 

Now I really want to play Morrowind again. The only thing I'm not looking forward to is how tedious it is fighting cliff racers.

 

There's a mod where you make cliff racers go extinct when you kill enough  ^_^

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

When I think about it, Morrowind is probably the game that formed 90% of my interests when it comes to both fantasy worlds and games in general. Years later, weird, intricate, carefully-crafted fantasy worlds are like my gaming crack.

 

And not only was Vvardenfell a huge, varied place to explore, but unlike Oblivion, Skyrim, and so many open world fantasy settings since, it was weird and intricate; mysterious and intimidating; old and lived-in. I still remember making barefoot pilgrimages to holy sites, stumbling across Ashlander tent-settlements, and desperately searching through bookstores to find out why the dwarves suddenly all disappeared. Opening the game case and laying that huge, glossy map across the table to pick out new places to travel felt pretty amazing.

 

And nearly every little thing in the world contributed to its unique sense of place, from the open xenophobia of many of the native Dunmer, to the way that the cultural encroachment of the empire (as well as the Nords in the very north of the map) is felt in varying degrees throughout the island through something as simple as competing architectural styles. It felt like Bethesda put so much thought into every little aspect of the game, and these details really made the game what it was.

 

Yeah, it's mechanically pretty broken, and yeah, plenty of games have made bigger, shinier, more grandiose game worlds, but so few have ever had the weird, byzantine glory of Morrowind.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I always loved the opposed mythologies and the contradictory and unreliable historical accounts, it's something a lot of fantasy universes don't really do. Usually they tend to subvert their own mysteries by just dumping out a very clear and unambiguous narrative for you. Skyrim and Oblivion struggle with this, i think. Oblivion, especially, but Skyrim also fails to capitalize on some fun ambiguities that were previously laid out in the fiction for the series.
 

A lot of the world building in Morrowind just felt very real, it seemed appropriate that parts of its main quest had you sifting through libraries to try and put together a picture of what your role in the unfolding events should even be.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I always loved the opposed mythologies and the contradictory and unreliable historical accounts, it's something a lot of fantasy universes don't really do. Usually they tend to subvert their own mysteries by just dumping out a very clear and unambiguous narrative for you. 

 

Man, it frustrates me to no end the way so many fantasy worlds just have a kind of incontestable, in-world canon (especially when every merchant and town guard is happy to regale you with these stories at the drop of a hat). History isn't just interesting because interesting things happen in history; in large part it's interesting because of the conflicting accounts and the grey areas and the difficulty of pulling something together with any kind of narrative coherence.

 

When a games developer says something like "We've created ten thousand years of history and lore for our game" it nearly always feels like they're missing the point. Like, there's a reason History undergrads don't just read Hume's The History of England and call it a day. History is one of the most conflicted, shifting field of inquiry there is - you can't just write 'John founded the kingdom of Johnplace in the year 338, and he ruled with a benevolent hand for many years, before The Dark appeared.' and call it lore, or call it history. I mean, you can, but you suck. Have people in your game disagreeing about the facts. Have varying, conflicting mythologies and interpretations of events. Have people outright lying to you. Have a book with a heavy-handed introduction exclusively dedicated to slagging off a competing historical scholar.

 

In conclusion: Morrowind is one of the only games that do history well, and might only be topped by The Void, which is definitely the best at history.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There's a secret book in Morrowind called «The Nerevarine Delusion» by Richard Hlaalu-Dawkins.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There's a secret book in Morrowind called «The Nerevarine Delusion» by Richard Hlaalu-Dawkins.

 

I don't believe you of course. But that would be the best.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I played Morrowind for the first time last year (it came out during a time where I wasn't playing games much, but I enjoyed Oblivion and Skyrim so I knew I would like it).  I really enjoyed the world a lot more than that of Oblivion and Skyrim, I think because not only did the world feel more rich and full of things to do, but also because it was quite alien in aesthetic, which is a nice change from the typical fantasy environment.  I got 90 hours in when I had a weird crash and when I reloaded the game my saves were all from about 35 hours in - crushing.  I haven't touched it since, but reading this thread is inspiring me to go back and play it again, maybe with some of the more "essential" mods since the first time through was vanilla.  

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this