Today’s game is Morrowind. I wanted to try mixing things up a little and had gotten this last december so i decided to dick around for a bit in it. I ended up being a little surprised by how much i enjoyed all the reading it needs. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s incredibly tedious and annoying sometimes, but it comes with satisfaction upon finding your way around with the journal and having to navigate in an almost realistic manner.
I ended up reusing my Daggerfall character Nazita for it, even though with the timeline it doesn’t really work timeline wise. I made her a Rogue, though i’m not a fan of daggers so i’ve been training the longsword skill so i can use those instead in combat.
Speaking of the combat, I can’t say i’m a fan. Maybe there’s something i’m missing but it’s definitely a lacking point of it. I just find myself jabbing at the enemies until either one of us drop dead.
Graphically though? I find it to be really pretty. I really like the water especially. I’m not sure what comes from OpenMW and what comes from base Morrowind, bur at a core level i think it’s pretty.
I ended up just walking all the way to Gnisis to join the Empire and got the quest where you have too get the land deed. I ended up just stopping there though after heading into the mine and then turning back. I thought i had to go there to handle the Land deed morally, but apparently not.
Overall i think if i have to pick an Elderscrolls game that’s got overwhelming depth to it while still controlling a little weirdly, i’d have to pick Daggerfall. I still think Morrowind has a lot going on for it that i love but i think i prefer how Daggerfall looks, plays, and sounds.
Speaking of the combat, I can’t say i’m a fan. Maybe there’s something i’m missing but it’s definitely a lacking point of it. I just find myself jabbing at the enemies until either one of us drop dead.
One thing that’s perhaps not obvious from today’s viewpoint, is that stamina affects your hit chance quite a bit.
It is also a good idea to be rather skilled in your weapon of choice.
And of course, the real pro tip is to install a mod which changes the hit feedback. 😅
Stamina is the green bar, right? I had actually read about that after doing a surface level reading into the combat, I’m just not really sure how to incorporate that into the combat if it makes sense, as I believe it drops with attacks.
I’ll try getting my weapon skills up to help though, and maybe the mod too lmao.
You could always make stamina recovery potions for combat with basic food items and greatly increase your effectiveness. If you sprint everywhere and have zero stamina before a fight you won’t hit shit but potions or scrolls like argent glow can really change that.
Yeah, it is the green bar. And yes, it drops from attacking.
As has already been said, stamina potions are often quite worth it. But it also helps, if you switch to walking for approaching an enemy, for example (instead of running). If you’re sprinting across the landscape and get ambushed unexpectedly, then yeah, the game punishes you for being exhausted.
In general, Morrowind is much more roleplay than the later parts. You can optimize the fun out, by waiting around until your stamina recovers, every so often. But the game gives you enough opportunities to become filthy rich and overpowered, so that you shouldn’t need it.
I just didn’t like hit chance being a thing in a first person melee game. At all. If my sword connects with the enemy then it should be a hit. When the game decides to roll a miss it makes the game feel broken. It’s like clicking an icon on your computer and it not opening up. Then you click again and it opens. If it’s just randomly not opening it feels broken and unreliable!
Yeah, then you should get a mod for that. I can absolutely understand your qualm. Morrowind came out in an era when RPGs were still computerized DnD, and that’s a design decision which aged particularly poorly.
Admittedly, it was also perhaps just a bad design decision in general. In DnD, you don’t either roll a dice for each sword hit. Nor are you able to miss an enemy from just not being near enough. At the very least, they could’ve played a different sound, if your sword connects, but does no damage.
It’s really critical for me, to have it feel good.
Daggerfall also had this issue with missing but you could get your accuracy up a lot more easily and then you’d hit pretty much every time. The graphics of Daggerfall are of course much less advanced than Morrowind but the “thwack” sounds in DF feel chunkier and heavier, and the simple animations have an abruptness to them that really works for the game. It’s quite strange but combat just feels better to me in Daggerfall than Morrowind.
Of course Morrowind has the far better atmosphere, music, worldbuilding, exploration and all that. DF has the truly gargantuan dungeons though!
Morrowind is probably one of my favorites, but it definitely has not aged well. Going the mage route with custom spells can absolutely make you overpowered though. A single Damage Strength spell can cripple most enemies, as they become over encumbered by their few items in inventory.
The magic was what made me initially interested. I hear people talking about how utterly broken it is with very little restraints and it made me want to try it
Combat in Morrowind: *whoop* *whoop* *whoop* *whoop* AH!!! *whoop* AH!!! *whoop* *whoop* *whoop*
Fucking love this game. 10/10
Why walk when you can ride?
Why walk when you can ride?
Hottest pick-up line imaginable tbh
Omg, the water is so cool in Morrowind, at the time I bought a brand new GeForce 3 & it was the only card that had the shaders for the water!
Good times.
I also have a soft spot for it’s rpg fight mechanics, I’m not saying they are great, but it’s a certain charm & perhaps era (few years) specific nostalgia.
I’m also currently playing with OpenMW for the first time - it’s such an amazing project (also almost/basically finished).
The water really is pretty. It’s got the same quality that makes me love Ocarina of Time’s Water.
I can get home people love the combat, even if it’s not for me, all that depth and RPG like qualities makes it interesting
Yes!!
And oh no, I didn’t say I love the combat (maybe a bit at higher levels, but then again you can be kinda op at very low levels as well), it’s not a strength of the game, but that it’s still “interesting” to me might be the right word for it. Kinda like pumping skill into a slot machine (& it’s actually working).
The combat makes more sense if you custom class and put your preferred weapon skill into Major. And keep stamina high. A Redguard with Longblade and the appropriate weapon can kill a mudcrab in two seconds at level 1. You ideally want to start with your main combat skill over 40, if not 50-60. The best part: you don’t need to min-max since the level scaling is minimal. Just pick your favorite armor type/weapon in Major and the rest can be whatever you want.
The game does NOT make that all clear, unfortunately. It took me a few tries to wrap my head around it before falling in love with the game.
I might try that after starting over then (or see if there’s a console command to let me redo the class selection so i don’t have to start over)
I checked the wiki and Rogue should also have Axe, if you’re attached to the playthrough and don’t wanna restart :)
I saw people online mention that a rogue should be using an axe and even some people saying it’s one of the best weapons. I dismissed it as just me misreading it, I’ll have to check try it though because I almost bought one
deleted by creator
I’m glad you’re doing better! I notice it’s a reoccurring theme for people to go through stuff like that with MMOs.
My best friend went through the same thing with ESO and FFXIV because he felt alone and wanted to connect with people. He had spent roughly 400$ on FFXIV subscriptions alone until he got better, so I know how rough it can be.
But yeah, I have mixed feelings on ESO, and FFXIV while we’re on the subject. I had fun, but damn with how much money they try to siphon from the player it makes me not want to touch them and kind of cheapens the experience for me
deleted by creator
Welcome to Morrowind, outlander.
Now go kill that witch living in a hidden cave, some distance west of a dead tree.
I’ve been meaning to check out Morrowind, most people have been frothing about it since forever and… tbh, only Elder Scrolls game I have really played has been Skyrim, only dabbled with Oblivion and Morrowind.
And… oh, OpenMW is in my linux distro’s repository too, that’s one barrier removed already! I take MW is quite a bit more approachable than Daggerfall, but probably quite a bit less than eg. Skyrim?
Morrowind has far more to do than Skyrim and Oblivion combined. That makes sense when you realize that they dumbed down the games with each successive release.
When I started MW the first time and came back to it later, the biggest turn off was the attacks not connecting. But as long as you can accept that every attack has a dice roll happening in the background it’s fine. Also recommend using a map on a second monitor, since you got a physical version when you bought the game originally.
so, I take there’s no in-game map then? oof, but I can deal with map on second monitor.
attacks not connecting might bug me a bit, but I suspect there’s some mod for that if it ends up breaking my brain.
Thanks, these were good to know stuff!
There is an ingame map, but it works like a scratch off. Everything is obfuscated until you either talk about the location with someone or go there. The terrain changes from default brown to textured as you move through it. If you follow the roads you’ll basically draw them onto the map but there’s a lot of missions where they’re like, “follow the road to fort placething, then take the 4th left, look for a hill and you’ll find the door in the other direction.”
Frankly I always found it easier to look at a map, guess where the location is, and levitate or hoptoad in a straight line to that area.
There is an in-game map, but there’s no “magic quest destination arrow”.
It the map has locations named and there’s a compass, I’ll manage. The quest pointer in later bethesda games is “a bit” too much handholding, imo. But that said I’ve seen some mw memes about some cube and how hard it is to find… No idea what that’s about but probably going to find out :P
The in-game map has information on only the places you’ve visited. There’s a minimap that can work kind of like a compass. That cube quest was super frustrating the first time I did it. If you spend more than an hour on it I recommend just looking it up on the wiki. It’s one of the first main quest missions.
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Dwemer_Puzzle_Box_(Morrowind)
That’s the only cube I can think of, and it was pretty straightforward to find, provided you could handle the enemies in there.
The one that’s truly difficult to find was one of the daedric princes temples. I searched all over that coastline. Turns out the entrance is underwater…
The attacking stuff is most noticeable at the start, but as you level up your skills you’re gonna connect almost every attack.
It is, but just take it slow. I’d suggest the Tamriel Rebuilt mod(s), but I also want you to experience the game as vanilla as possible.
oh for sure (near vanilla) experience for first time. Gameplay changing mods etc are for playthroughs after the first one.
I take the Tamrield Rebuilt mods are mostly quality-of-life -stuff?
Very little QoL, but an absolutely fucking massive map expansion and all the quests that comes with it. They just released the latest bit they finished last spring. It greatly expands all the major questlines and guilds and adds a couple more, introduces new ways of fast travel like water striders, new enemies and creatures, so many new towns with NPCs and their own dialog. It’s a lot. But I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Elder Scrolls regardless.
It’s a project that’s been in production since a few weeks before Morrowind even released (but that’s more just a fun fact). It’s been worked on off-and-on over time, but really picked up speed a few years ago when Morrowind started becoming popular again.
This video explains pretty much the entire thing.
ah, in that case I’m gonna venture forth without it. Expansions are cool, but I kinda want to get my feet wet with the base game first. QoL mods which make the experience have “less friction” I’m entirely fine with
Having been playing it off and on since release, you can honestly get away with just playing the base game in OpenMW and using Console command to fortify your weapon skills. With those at 100, you don’t wiff 9/10 swings but combat is still mechanically unpredictable enough to feel like you’re not over powered. Back on original Xbox you could even do it by constantly reequipping a bound weapon. If you’re a hoarder like me you don’t even need a house mod to display all your stuff, you can get one for free by picking the tower sign and breaking into a quest house. Even comes with a dead guy to use as a crate.
Or you could do “soul trap on self” combined with a “fortify skill” effect
Ralen Hlaalo manor. That house is awesome to use as a player home. You can drop stuff around to decorate, use any of the containers as storage, and it’s just a nice big house.
My head canon is that soultraping yourself like this binds the spell to your soul forever. That’s an actual part of the spell but most people don’t do it because you could end up like the dozens of characters I had to abandon because a permanent effect is actually a problem in a number of ways.
Waterwalking forever seems great until you need to swim to that section of cave for the quest.
Just make sure to buy a weapon that matches your skills. If you put your preferred weapon/armor in Major Skills and keep your Stamina over half, the otherwise clunky combat feels much better. Have fun!
It’s definitely a froth-worthy game. But I played it way back when it came out in 2002. I think nostalgia plays a big role in my enjoyment of it.
I’d say it’s about the same as Daggerfall, at least in my opinion. The controls though I feel were a lot better communicated
I love that first screenshot. Sometimes possible ads for his service still pop into my head:
“While not everyone can spend every waking minute with a flea the size of an elephant, you can experience my joy for just a small fee.”
“Not encountering enough nightmare fuel during your arduous journey through the wilderness?! Why not experience a relaxing ride to your destination, with ample nightmare fuel right below your saddle?!”
Edit: One more!
“Sure, you could pay me to lead this montrosity out of your sight. But consider - if you sit down right on it’s back, you’ll be the only one who never has to look at it!”
I started the original Oblivion not long ago, been playing for some tens of hours. First time experiencing the Elder Scrolls, it’s an interesting game with quite some depth. I got turned into a vampire and am doing a vampire quest and it’s a bit tedious with not being able to stay in the sunlight but other than that it’s a good game.
Oblivion doesn’t feel too far from modern game mechanics, but what about morrowind?
Morrowind is practically exactly in the middle between Daggerfall and Oblivion, in terms of mechanics complexity. May elements are “dumbed down”, but many remain as complex (if changed). Oblivion “dumbs down” a couple of extra elements, but nothing as drastic as Skyrim.
I misread game as grave. I was worried there for a second.
