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(Modded) Game Review: Morrowind
2014-Jul-14, Monday 21:26
Morrowind is my favorite game. I'll always clarify it when it comes to others. Chrono Trigger is my favorite console RPG. Warcraft III is my favorite real-time strategy game. Unreal Tournament '99 is my favorite arena shooter. Modded Fallout 3 is my favorite brutal post-apocalyptic scarcity simulator. But Morrowind is my favorite game, full stop.
I've been playing it on and off since it came out (in 2002!) and this represents only the second time I've beaten the main quest. A lot of my playthroughs ended up being strangled by mod conflicts and bugs, but I kept trying again and again because I love the game to bits. The lack of voice acting is actually one of the biggest bonuses, in my mind--there are long passages of exposition, argument, debate, theological exhortation, and so on that absolutely wouldn't fly in a modern game environment due to costs (as Skyrim aptly demonstrates), and it also meant that modders could seemlessly slot their own questlines and creations into the game. One group of modders actually took it on themselves to rewrite huge chunks of character dialogue to give hundreds of NPCs unique backstories, rumors, perspectives on the Empire, quirks, and so on, and because it's all text-based it all fits in nearly seamlessly. That's impossible to do in the later entries in the series.
Another great part is the setting. Skyrim is fantasy Scandinavia with most of the interesting bits of Nord culture erased, though they did keep the Buddhist notions of time being cyclical and the Indo-European-style barrow burials (also, they don't actually go a-viking). You would never know from the game that they have their own names for the Divines, for example, unless you run into the one guy in the whole province who still calls Kynareth "Kyne." Oblivion throws out all the interesting tidbits of lore ever said or demonstrated about Cyrodiil before it came out in favor of bland pseudo-medieval Europe, which is objectively worse than the previous characterization of the Roman Empire farming rice in a jungle.
Morrowind has much more interesting terrain than either. It has the variability of Skyrim's climates but with an additional twist of the fantastic, from the swamps of the Bitter Coasts to the savannah of the Grazelands, from the rock pillar islands of Sheogorad to the desolate beauty of the Ashlands, from the twisting rock corridors of Molag Amur to the blight-blasted hell of Red Mountain. And creatures that aren't just the standard fantasy ones, like the guar that are used as pack animals, or the silt striders that also function as the transportation system, or the kwama with their multiple castes and the mines where their eggs are harvested, or the various terrible minions of the Sixth House. Or, yes, even the cliff racers, as annoying as they are. Even when I first loaded it up and the graphics were awful, I loved it.
Nowadays, mods help. Here's an example of what I see when I play Morrowind:
( Read more... )
I've been playing it on and off since it came out (in 2002!) and this represents only the second time I've beaten the main quest. A lot of my playthroughs ended up being strangled by mod conflicts and bugs, but I kept trying again and again because I love the game to bits. The lack of voice acting is actually one of the biggest bonuses, in my mind--there are long passages of exposition, argument, debate, theological exhortation, and so on that absolutely wouldn't fly in a modern game environment due to costs (as Skyrim aptly demonstrates), and it also meant that modders could seemlessly slot their own questlines and creations into the game. One group of modders actually took it on themselves to rewrite huge chunks of character dialogue to give hundreds of NPCs unique backstories, rumors, perspectives on the Empire, quirks, and so on, and because it's all text-based it all fits in nearly seamlessly. That's impossible to do in the later entries in the series.
Another great part is the setting. Skyrim is fantasy Scandinavia with most of the interesting bits of Nord culture erased, though they did keep the Buddhist notions of time being cyclical and the Indo-European-style barrow burials (also, they don't actually go a-viking). You would never know from the game that they have their own names for the Divines, for example, unless you run into the one guy in the whole province who still calls Kynareth "Kyne." Oblivion throws out all the interesting tidbits of lore ever said or demonstrated about Cyrodiil before it came out in favor of bland pseudo-medieval Europe, which is objectively worse than the previous characterization of the Roman Empire farming rice in a jungle.
Morrowind has much more interesting terrain than either. It has the variability of Skyrim's climates but with an additional twist of the fantastic, from the swamps of the Bitter Coasts to the savannah of the Grazelands, from the rock pillar islands of Sheogorad to the desolate beauty of the Ashlands, from the twisting rock corridors of Molag Amur to the blight-blasted hell of Red Mountain. And creatures that aren't just the standard fantasy ones, like the guar that are used as pack animals, or the silt striders that also function as the transportation system, or the kwama with their multiple castes and the mines where their eggs are harvested, or the various terrible minions of the Sixth House. Or, yes, even the cliff racers, as annoying as they are. Even when I first loaded it up and the graphics were awful, I loved it.
Nowadays, mods help. Here's an example of what I see when I play Morrowind:
Even just looking at this, I can hear the music...
( Read more... )
