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.
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.
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.
They at least fixed the water walking in Oblivion. You could just look down to start swimming.
But yeah, I did that to a character or two as well. I think one time I thought a permanent levitation spell would be the tits. Then I found out about how slow it is.
ETA: my headcanon is that all the janky glitches and trucks pipe pull off in their respective playthrough are all actually canon as well. It would make sense too, because there are multiple instances of characters figuring out they're in some sort of dream/simulation/thing, and Tiber Septim becoming a god, and the general fragility of their reality.
Morrowind, and to a greater part the elder scrolls is the primary inspiration for my meta canon. Every character in every game I play is actually controlled by an eldritch entity that can see all possible iterations of a reality. When I die, I get shunted back into the aether and re enter the timeline at an earlier point. That's why, to the NPCs, I know every trap, map, and position of enemies. It's not even the first time I've eaten an iteration of this timeline. Ultimately, at the conclusion of the game, after collecting all the relics, which are Meta-canoned as items that survive the death of a timeline, I slay every living entity in the plane. The combined metaphysical ripple caused by an enormous a historical event followed by the death of all sapient life fules the entities escape from this timeline and travel to a new potential destination.
To this day, the only game I can't go back to play with this is far cry 5, which is the first game that managed to best my entity.
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
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.
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.