Introduction
Morrowind is the third instalment of the Elder Scrolls series from Bethesda Softworks. It takes place in the same world as the previous games, Tamriel, but Morrowind itself is a separate province, with the action taking place on the island of Vvardenfell.
The game is available on both Xbox and PC, and I will be reviewing the PC version.
It is a single-player role playing game, where you play as one character who develops throughout the game. There are a variety of different races to choose from, as well as different skills and specialities available, so character choice is very varied. Your choice also has a large effect on how the game will play out for you, since different species are better at different tasks (i.e. Orcs are good at bashing, Wood Elves are good at being sneaky and using bows and arrows etc etc), and members of your own species will treat you favourably when buying or selling goods.
There are a large number of screenshots available from the official site, so I won’t add any of my own.
Gameplay
As mentioned above, the game is a single-player role-playing one. It is played in 1st person mode, although there is a slightly redundant 3rd person view too. You start off as a newly released prisoner on a boat arriving on the island. Before getting into the game you have to choose your name, race, specialities etc and receive your first orders. However, this is where the game varies from most others in that you don’t have to follow the orders at all; but more of that in a moment.
As you work your way out of the ship and through the customs and excise office, there is a minimal tutorial telling you about the controls (think Half Life 2 here), but you very quickly find yourself outside and on your own. When designing your character you can choose from a list of pre-set options, have your skills decided based on the answers to some questions, or choose them all from scratch yourself. You are not limited to only using the skills you choose (Heavy armour, marksmanship, sneak etc), but rather gain higher starting levels with them. The more you use a skill, the more it levels up, all the way to 100. In theory, with time, you could work all of your skills up to the maximum, but I’d be amazed if this had ever been done without cheating.
When it comes to the storyline and gameplay, Morrowind really is the first open-ended game I’ve come across. Other games like Thief 3 are described as being non-linear, but with them it’s a case of doing A then B or B then A. With Morrowind, you can really do what you want. There are a total of 13 different factions to join, including Thieves, Mages and Warriors Guilds, ‘Great Houses’, Religious Cults etc. You can join any number of these factions (but only one Great House), but since they do not all like one-another, you may be required to assassinate a member of another faction in which you are also a member, which generally doesn’t go down well with them.
Each Faction has its own line of quests and side-quests, and as you complete them, you advance through the ranks accordingly. There is also the main quest to undertake, should you so choose, but I personally got so distracted by everything else that there is to do that I to this day have not completed it!
The other main difference to other games is that there are no set routes to follow. In Fable, for example, you could only travel from one town to the next along a single path (or by teleporting, but meh), whereas in Morrowind you can walk through the woods or any which way you please. This can make navigating the game somewhat disorientating at first, but once you’re used to it then its great since you stumble across old temples and mines in the middle of no-where which are filled with goodies. In the game there are ‘trainers’ who, for a fee, will level you up on a particular skill. However, there are very few Master trainers who can train a skill all the way to 100, and they are often found at these out-of-the-way locations.
The story itself is played out through a series of missions you do for a certain faction (your initial mission from the start is to find the guy in charge). You find out lots of useful information through talking to the thousands of NPCs, but this is all text-based. Although there are a variety of standard spoken reactions the NPCs have to you based on your race, clothing/armour and reputation, they are fairly limited and quickly become repetitive. The text-based conversations also become repetitive very quickly, except for the unique NPCs who have parts to play in the main quests or have their own small quests of the "Help I've lost my friend/ring/virginity" type. To add to the lore there are also hundreds of books scattered throughout the game. Many of these provide information on the background of Tamriel and Vvardenfell, or tell little stories, but some are quite useful, and reading them levels you up one point on a particular skill. The rarer ones are quite valuable too, and are worth kkeeping to sell on. Even if you chose to ignore the books (I put them down straight away if they didn't level me up), there is still a lot of reading involved in this game.
The final feature I’m going to mention is the Construction Set. This is the tool used by the developers to create the game, its quests and landscapes, and is provided with the game. This has encouraged a huge community of players who build their own characters, buildings, quests, and even entire landscapes akin to those in the Bloodmoon and Tribunal expansions. This adds infinite variability to the game, and is well worth looking at. The best two sites that I found for mods were Gamers Roam (which is currently down for some reason) and Morrowind Summit. I have a few favourite mods downloaded which I have in a 825KB zipped file and can give to anyone who wants it (or WEY could upload it to our download section?). They just make the game more playable without any major changes, such as making the sign-posts readable without having to hover the mouse on them, and altering the behaviour of cliff-racers (Vvardenfell’s bird species) so they only attack when provoked.
Sights and Sounds
Its worth baring in mind that the game was released in early 2002, so its not the newest of games, but for its time I think it looks great. The world itself looks very nice, and there tends to be a progressive change in landscape from, say, open grazing land to woodland to mountainside. There are distinct regions within the area, and they all have their own architectural styles as well as the flora and fauna. There are also distinct sounds to each area too, such as noisy crickets and bugs in marshy areas. More of these were added in a plugin for the game from Bethesda.
When playing in 1st person mode, it generally looks good and follows the sort of movement that you’d expect from such a game. The game is very atmospheric, with different music kicking in when you’re under attack, entering dungeons, or just walking about, and I personally never found it got irritating.
The different areas are fairly well designed, although the dungeons, mines and tombs in particular become slightly repetitive after a while. The differing architecture between regions and races is a nice touch tho.
Stuff that sucks
Now for the bad points. The main gripe most people have is the transport. Some towns are linked using either Stilt-Striders (like a bus) or boats, but its often a case of finding the one nearest where you want to get to and then hiking the rest of the way. This means that you do a LOT of walking places. This can often take the exciting edge off the game, and is a bit of a let-down. This issue is being tackled in Oblivion so once you have walked to a particular town you can then teleport yourself there later on.
Also, the open-endedness of the game is not to everyone’s tastes. Its very easy to become distracted by side-quests. There is a journal function in the game so you can keep track of what missions you’ve currently accepted and what the latest gossip is, but even then it can be difficult to pick up where you may have left off, especially if coming back to an old mission after a fair amount of time. In a similar vein you can come across an artefact and sell it or leave it someplace only to discover later that it is vital to a particular mission, which can be very frustrating.
The other common complaint is that the combat and magic systems are too simple. Combat usually involves simply hacking away at your opponent till one of you dies, with blocking done as a mix of your skill level and luck and no input. Casting magic is equally simple, and despite the array of spells available you tend to only end up using very few.
Conclusion
All in all, I think this is a very good game. It is vast, and once you get into it then you just keep discovering more and more. The controls are simple and easy to use, and the basic premise is a good one.
The support for the modding community is a very good asset to the game, and has created near-infinite possibilities for extending its playability. 100 hours is an often quoted figure for gameplay, and with having had xfire to back me up, I’d say I well exceeded that.
However, it may not be to everyone’s liking. The slow start can make it hard to get into, and the ease of distraction can make some people lose interest. My personal advice is to give it a fair go if it doesn’t immediately grab you, as it has a lot to offer and is a very absorbing game indeed.
The full Game Of The Year edition with both expansion sets is available from Play for £9.99 delivered, and is a bargain.
Score :
System Requirements
Minimum
• Windows ME/98 128 MB RAM
• Windows XP/2000 256 MB RAM
• 500 MHz Intel Pentium III, Celeron, or AMD Athlon processor
• 8x CD/DVD-ROM Drive
• 1 GB free hard disk space
• Windows swapfile
• DirectX 8.1 (included)
• 32MB Direct3D compatible video card with 32-bit color support and DirectX 8.1 compatible driver
• DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
• Keyboard, Mouse
Recommended
• 800 MHz or faster Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor
• 256 MB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, or ATI Radeon 7500 or faster video card.
Supported Videocard Chipsets
• NVIDIA GeForce4
• NVIDIA GeForce3
• NVIDIA GeForce2
• NVIDIA GeForce 256
• NVIDIA TNT2
• ATI Radeon 8500
• ATI Radeon 7500
• ATI Radeon 7200
• ATI Radeon
• ATI Rage 128
• Matrox G550
• Matrox G450
• Matrox G400
