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.
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.