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Original post by nilkn I played Morrowind a lot (it was my favorite game a long time ago), and quite frankly lots of the comments made here are wrong.

Oh, nice of you to tell us. Or maybe you're wrong? Or maybe you just missed our points? Lots of possibilities, and saying that "You're all wrong" isn't the most persuasive way of arguing.

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Anyone who explored the world and the caves would know that it was definately NOT empty. There were hours upon hours of informal quests to do that could be found inside various caves and strongholds.

Yes, and every cave looked alike, and every quest had you doing the same things, and every NPC said the same things.
But yes, as everyone has said, the world was huge, no one is arguing with that.
It was a huge, shallow, generic world, with lots of content that essentially wasn't worth seeing, because it was just like all the other content.

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I bet none of you guys who said the world was dull knew there was an underwater grotto with tons of perls in it in the lake right next to Seyda Neen (the place where you start). No offense, but if you explore, you'll find the world very rich and detailed.

And dull. Who cares about an underground grotto with pearls in it? Where does it relate to the game, to the storyline, to *anything*?
It's a massive, but dull world. Yes, there were lots of secret caves, dungeons and nice-looking places, but none of it had anything to do with the actual game.

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As for the comment about the world being populated by a few hundred people, that's simply wrong. I can't remember the exact number, but it's actually somewhere around 5 thousand.

I'd say it's populated by roughly 3 people. Yourself, and two NPC's who happen t be cloned 1500 times each.

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The quests really were not repetitive in any way if you did the informal ones.

Yes they were. Especially the informal ones.

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I do agree also that combat got tedious and repetitive, though I personally liked it because I hate the standard RPG system of clicking the screen over and over.

You liked a combat system that you found tedious and repetetive?

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And also, the classes did not merge as you went on. Your class had a major impact on how you levelled, especially on your attributes. That comment was wrong too.

No. :P
No matter your attributes, you still ended up taking many of the same skills, just because you needed them.

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- Totally open-ended. There was NOTHING to guide you in the right or wrong direction.

And that's good?
That's what turned into a sandbox which got boring after 3 hours, rather than a RPG where you felt compelled to play through it.

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And BTW, I'm not some psycho fanboy for Bethesda, I just happened to have played that game a lot with my cousin, and judging by my memory some comments made just weren't correct.

*shrug* Judging by my memory, some of your comments aren't correct. Thats because it's all subjective. And your subjective impression of the game is no more valid than others, even if you liked the game.

Morrowind is probably one of those titles best suited to those who like to explore. Don't get me wrong, I do like the game, though it does get bland sometimes.

Disliked:

Item Management - start gathering alchemy ingredients and sorting through all the crap in your backpack becomes a pain in the ass. One of the major reasons i NEVER took up alchemy. Afterawhile i just stopped looting for stuff, i was filthy rich and had nowhere to put any good loot.

Magic System - It was good, don't get me wrong, but sorting through it, again, was a pain in the ass. There was only 1 magic slot and enchanted items (which can spam your inventory) made toggling between all of them annoying outside the use of hotkeys. Other annoying things were that in order to make a spell effect, you had to have a spell with it memorized which just ended up (again) eating space, not to mention that ANY spell you make will not be as good as the default ones you can buy. Enchanting was also a complete joke, with an 80% failure rate even if your the grandmaster puba enchanter.

Combat - As others have said, really bad. I can't think of many games were i can try to hit a rat 10,000 times with a dagger and miss every single one. Nothing makes me want to pickup Halo and pistol whip a few guys more than that. *click**click**click**click**click*

Lack of Personality/Impact - this is rather twofold, on the one hand characters aren't memorable, they don't have any personality and spam out generic text (well, if you look at real life and how common people are can we say its really any different?). The other is as others have said, the lack of impact, i saved Morrowind and became a messiah, and nobody bats and eyelash. Whoo! Those 12 hours were well spent.

Liked:

Exploration - The vast tracks of the unknown, something about that makes me want to run out there and see what kind of mysteries and loot i can stea.. er find!

Apocalypse - Something about crafting extremely powerful enchanted items and then vaporizing entire villages just seems fun, however fleeting it is.

EasterEggs - there are some cute little things in the game that i liked hunting down. Like a Mudcrab that will buy (full price) items off of you. And hunting down the Cresent Blade, other stuff like that. :D

Backstory - they really put alot of effort into it, and its really neat to read about legends and stories and be able to see those NPC's ingame, it helps flesh them out more.

I can honestly say that I liked everything about the game. Maybe some more classical RPG elements like dragons and goblins would have been nice.

For me, the really bad part of the game was the vast opportunities to become invincible. The alchemy part of the game had some pretty bad overlooks. For example, it was possible to make a potion that temporarily increases your intelligence. Guess what governs how potent the potions you create are? Intelligence. Guess what happens if you setup workshop near a dude that can sell you as much ingredients as you need to make intelligence potions? Make a crappy potion, drink it, make another, drink it, repeat.

Eventually you're Mr. Hide. I once made a potion that would increase your intelligence up past 5000+ points (human max is 100 I think) and it would last for 8 months. I didn't drink it for obvious reasons. Anyway, once you morph into genius mode, you can create potions of any kind that give you ridiculous abilities for ridiculous amounts of time, or enchant items that make you practically immortal. This ruined the game for me. I became unstoppable and the game lost it's point.

No one mentioned my favorite element, lore. That was what it was all about for me. My goal was to find the coolest sword and shield, and the best armor. I hunted down every cave and hideout on the island searching for equipment. I didn't care much about killing the bandits, I just wanted to see what kind of gadgets they had. Unfortunately, there wasn't that much lore to be found. But I had a hell of a lot of fun finding what I did.

I'm not a fantasy fan. It annoys me that so many RPGs are only fantasy. Yet I couldn't stop playing this game. In fact, my jones was so bad that I once played for 31 hours straight.[smile]

I think there were "four Morrowinds," really. There was the sandbox game, the story game, and then there were the Xbox and PC versions of both. People who played for sandbox had a totally different view from those who played for story (as this thread shows); and I strongly suspect that they fudged some things on the Xbox that they didn't for the PC (my friend reported all sorts of oddities like being pulled back into enemies when trying to run from fights on the Xbox).

That said, I played sandbox PC Morrowind and couldn't have given a damn about the story. I had three frustrations with the game, but they're like owning a Mercedes with a few paint scratches:

• The questing system needed to have more surprises, which comes from variation
  
• Combat and magic needed to be balanced against powermaxing. Invisibility especially is WAY unbalanced. Monsters that see it, or constant effect areas that dispel it are a must next time around.
  
• The open-ended gameplay, because it neither really impacted the world nor was self-contained enough to be repeated over time, slowly became meaningless-- which drove you toward the somewhat ho-hum story. Nevertheless, in sandbox, and with the expansions off Vvardenfell, you had more than 40 hours of gaming.
  

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What Morrowind Did Right

"Classic" Quality
To take something Earnest Adams once said in a lecture called "The Secret To Eternal (Product) Life," Morrowind is one of those rare games that succeeds in being larger than itself.

With many other RPGs, while the emphasis on giving you a limited, focused experience often makes the game enjoyable, it robs it of deeper emotional impact. Most RPGs are simply a consummable experience. Fun, sure. But they're meant to be played and discarded.

The almost obsessive-compulsive attention to detail in Morrowind, on the other hand, combined with the sandbox freedom it provides, allows you to have lasting experiences that are resonant with personality.


Massive Exploration
I'm not exactly sure what those who've been complaining about more content want.

You had: Plantations, thief caves, sewers, demon-haunted caves, caves filled with more riches than you can carry, volcanoes with evil spirits, ancient Dwarven ruins filled with constructs and ghosts, wind-blasted steppes, exotic swamps, sunken ships, tribal villages, living mage towers, dungeons, keeps, crypts, hellish cultist hideouts, massive cantons, multiple themes for multiple towns-- and these were all handcrafted!

I think maybe the request for millions of different, individual faces / items / environments or whatever is the continuing dream for a more immersive world. I understand it, but economics and technology make me appreciate the game as it is.

Living World
Few RPGs have ever come close to the level of immersion, in terms of weather, animals and environments. If you get into reading the books, you begin to open up a window into a truly gigantic world, one that may come to rival AD&D's Faerun. Because of this, the environment takes on the emotional power of a second home.

Item Creation
The fact that you can have magic items created is a great money sink (avoiding making money pointless later in the game). It allows for lots of different play styles.

Character Interaction
If you ever had to take off your clothes ("dumpling" [lol]), you'll appreciate the creativity that went into what was otherwise a pretty pedestrian NPC interaction system.

Good Journal
After a patch, the indexed journal made keeping all the quests nice and easy.

Modability and Expansions
I'm still finding interesting content to download, and that has kept the game on my hard drive.

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Just a final thought: If the guys at Bethesda did their job right, I think you should have the RPG fanbase pretty well split on loving or hating this game. Why? Because the term "RPG" is so annoyingly vague and open to multiple interpretations that it covers a ridiculously large audience.

And there's no way to please that audience uniformly. If you delight the sandboxers, you'll tick off the story folks; the Anime RPG fans will hate the combat, but the FPS fans will love it; and don't even get started on XBox vs. PC gamer expectations...[rolleyes]

I think they fudged the UI on the PC compared to the xbox actually. I've played both versions, and the only thing PC had over xbox (other than mods.. we aren't talking about mods in this discussion) was the resolution.

The UI on the PC was really combersome, where as on the XBOX it was faster and easier to work with.

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Original post by Vampyre_Dark I think they fudged the UI on the PC compared to the xbox actually. I've played both versions, and the only thing PC had over xbox (other than mods.. we aren't talking about mods in this discussion) was the resolution. The UI on the PC was really combersome, where as on the XBOX it was faster and easier to work with.

Now see, I played both Xbox and PC and found the EXACT opposite! [lol] The overmap was so cumbersome on the Xbox, as was the save/load dynamic (though that might have just been hardware).

What really threw me, though, was the lack of precision in swordfighting. I'm a pretty decent contender when it comes to Halo, so I know it wasn't unfamiliarity with the controller. But it just seemed that the character moves and turns like a freakin brick versus being able to whirl around with a mouse. I lost fights I never would have lost on the PC.

Of course, YMMV.

@Spoonbender:

Wow. I apologize for offending you -- I truly didn't mean anything I said as a flame. But seeing as you took it that way, so be it.

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Oh, nice of you to tell us. Or maybe you're wrong? Or maybe you just missed our points? Lots of possibilities, and saying that "You're all wrong" isn't the most persuasive way of arguing.

Yes, I suppose you could use the argument that everything is defined relative. However, if you want to do that then this conversation is pointless. And I didn't say "You're all wrong", I said many things said simply weren't true.

And yes, I know that isn't the best way of arguing. That's why I included the rest of the post.

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Yes, and every cave looked alike, and every quest had you doing the same things, and every NPC said the same things. But yes, as everyone has said, the world was huge, no one is arguing with that. It was a huge, shallow, generic world, with lots of content that essentially wasn't worth seeing, because it was just like all the other content.

I'm sorry, I just don't agree that the world was empty and generic. True the dialogue was horrible and lacking, and true the caves looked similar, but it is not true that they contained the same things and were all the same. Most caves were in fact very unique in their layout and contents. Some caves constituted three to four hours of exploration if you were to discover everything they hid.

And besides that, there was a lot of stuff that was not caves. There were farms, slaves, slave masters, slave trade centers, etc.

If you feel the world was lacking in content, then well that's your problem, because it's simply not true. You probably didn't pay near as much attention as you think you did.

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And dull. Who cares about an underground grotto with pearls in it? Where does it relate to the game, to the storyline, to *anything*? It's a massive, but dull world. Yes, there were lots of secret caves, dungeons and nice-looking places, but none of it had anything to do with the actual game.

Rich, detailed, yet dull? Those don't go together very well.

So just because something has no immediate purpose in the story means it's dull? You yourself just testified that it had lots of secret caves, dungeons and nice-looking places. I believe you've contradicted yourself here.

But you are right that most of the world didn't have anything to do with the story. And the story didn't have anything to do with most of the world. That's all fine and dandy. Here's the problem: the game wasn't made exclusively for the story, nor was it made exclusively for the "sandbox" exploration. It was made for both -- whichever one you wanted to do.

Therefore, whether the caves have purpose in the story is irrelevant.

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I'd say it's populated by roughly 3 people. Yourself, and two NPC's who happen t be cloned 1500 times each.

If you're implying the dialogue was repeated a lot, I'm already aware. So you're argument is partially correct, though there were technically, as I said, about 1500 unique NPCs.

Though saying only 3 had unique dialogue is just silly. In the first five minutes of the game you encounter quite a bit more than that. Generally every character with any significance in the story or any of the many quests had unique dialogue.

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Yes they were. Especially the informal ones.

I'm nearly convinced by now that you didn't play the game much at all. Perhaps I should elaborate on "informal" quests.

Did you ever hear about the Daedric quests? You can activate various daedric shrines throughout the world and do quests for the Daedric gods and goddesses. One of them has you resolving a conflict between two Gods who made a bet.

How about the "love" quests? Did you know about the key-hunting quest in the tower of the guy who cures you of Corprus? There's countless others, but I'll leave them unmentioned.

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You liked a combat system that you found tedious and repetetive?

For one thing, since we're being particular here, whether tedious and repetitive are bad is defined relative to the person. Therefore your question in theory is unanswerable. But nevertheless I'll assume for now that the above adjectives are "bad".

Yes, I liked a combat system that I found tedious and repetitive. Why? Because I considered it a nice step up from the standard combat of most RPGs which consists of sitting and clicking, which is infinitely more tedious and repetitive. So I liked the combat system relative to the conventional system employed by most RPGs today.

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No. :P No matter your attributes, you still ended up taking many of the same skills, just because you needed them.

Alright, I admit this one is arguable. The reason I stand by my point is that my first character was horrible at combat because I had a bad class/style of play combination. In fact, I came to a point where I couldn't get beyond level 24 because I wanted to fight with swords exclusively, but my class was designed for swords and magic to be used in conjunction with one another. However, my attributes were too far geared toward close combat for me to make the switch.

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And that's good? That's what turned into a sandbox which got boring after 3 hours, rather than a RPG where you felt compelled to play through it.

Reread my post, please.

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*shrug* Judging by my memory, some of your comments aren't correct. Thats because it's all subjective. And your subjective impression of the game is no more valid than others, even if you liked the game.

No, my statements were not opinion-based. It is a fact that the game had lots of content. It is a fact that there were technically somewhere around 1500 unique NPCs (can't remember the exact number right now). It is a fact that you can use silt striders and mages guild transports to avoid walking. It is a fact that there was an underwater grotto near Seyda Neen. It is a fact that, if you explored thoroughly enough, the informal quests weren't repetitive. It is a fact that combat was tedious and repetitive. It is a fact that I liked the combat despite that.

Actually, the only thing I said that wasn't fact was about the classes merging. In my opinion class had a big impact, but I agree this one is arguable.

I was staying well clear of this thread because it's an obvious fire hazard, but this gem I had to highlight.

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Original post by nilkn If you feel the world was lacking in content, then well that's your problem, because it's simply not true. You probably didn't pay near as much attention as you think you did.

If the world had so much content you really wouldn't have to pay attention to it to notice right? If you go out on the road during rush hour you don't have to look very hard to find cars...


I really didn't like Morrowind, there was no story telling, no flow what so ever. Nothing to drive you through the story. Travel times were horrendous. I don't play a game to walk 15 miles to buy something I need, I can just take a walk to the next town IRL to get the same experience. People keep saying that Morrowind's huge world is a plus, I think it's one of it's main shortcomings. At least in Daggerfall you had the fast travel options. Overall the world was bland, barren and for the most parts boring. The NPC dialogue was monotonous and the quests were equally monotonous and repetitive. It was basically a smaller and less original version of Daggerfall but with better graphics. I rather play Daggerfall any day of the week.

What was good? well... I don't know really, Whatever I could say was good with Morrowind could also be said about daggerfall, minus the graphics. So I guess the high point of Morrowind is its graphic engine.

One big positive about the game, is that you could set out to have a goal that had nothing to do with the story, and still have well over a 50 hour game ahead of you.

I had one guy who's goal was to be the world's best assasin, another guy who was the leader of the thieve's guild, one guy who's job was to explore the world no rock left unturned. Depending on what your goals were, you could have about 15 different 50 hour games.

Too bad running the great houses and the guilds never meant anything once you did them.