I've been playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for the last 3 weeks or so. Haven't played it in like...20 years. Some things hold up well, some not so much. I'll go into more detail once I'm finished.
Pretty much finished Morrowind again. It's amazing to think how awesome it was, truly groundbreaking nearly 24 years ago now. I'll admit even coming from someone who has a vast NES collection, it is a bit hard to see those late 90s/early 2000s attempts at 3D games today. The textures and polygons are just so crude, you can't help but compare them to more modern games given the 3D nature. I spent about a day and followed this guide to download 100 mods to bring Morrowind up to speed a bit (But keeping it vanilla gameplay).
https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Morrowind_graphics_guide
I kind of wish I hadn't done that though. Turns out that guide is a bit outdated already. Apparently there's an Open MW project (
OpenMW) that does basically the same thing (Although if you are into modding it may break a lot of mods made in the old Construction Kit). It's still a work in progress, but they've done some cool things if anyone decides to get back into an updated Morrowind experience and doesn't want to download 100 mods. I didn't try Open MW, but here's a screenshot of what they've done and it looks as good or better than all the mods I used:
I digress. As far as the gameplay, it still holds up well after all this time. It plays just like the later Elder Scrolls games, just without some of the creature comforts and bonuses the later games had. Combat feels very similar, it's solid for the time and still is satisfying. It's super tough in the beginning while your skills are low, I forgot about that. It's especially tough if you're trying to train a new skill. You really have to lean into your major skills early because you don't have any cash to train up weak skills in the beginning and it's incredibly difficult to level some skills until you get some points in them. You can't even land a hit typically with skills you don't have at least 30 points in, and you don't skill up unless you hit. Speechcraft in particular, for the first 50 points you basically have to spam the button for hours and get little to show for it as it's almost all failures. That means the points actually come easier at the end rather than at the beginning which does go against logic a bit, you would think mastery would be more difficult than getting familiar.
The lack of immediate fast travel is both refreshing and at times frustrating if you're a gamer on limited time. You can take silt striders to some locations along with a handful of boat rides, and there are two teleportation spells that take you to the nearest shrine/temple based on proximity. That's about it unless you download the master index DLC from Bethesda. If you decide to try out the vampire content you really get screwed as you can't use the silt striders or the boats, spells only. What ends up happening is you find yourself traversing the same paths over and over quite a bit, which often leads to tedious encounters with my friends the cliff racers. They're not particularly difficult to handle after the first few levels, but they do become a complete nuisance anytime you want to go somewhere. I ended up increasing the respawn time in game because after those initial levels the constant cliff racers provided nothing beneficial or engaging, just a meaningless time sink.
The questing didn't hold up quite as well as I remembered. It was still phenomenal for it's time, but based on later entries like Oblivion just four years later I feel like Morrowind doesn't hold up quite as well anymore. Most of the quests felt somewhat uninspired or disjointed, there's rarely a big overall arc tying things together like in later games. For instance, the Thieves Guild in Morrowind gives you a handful of quests almost all of which just involve you stealing random items from random people with little or no reason. The Thieves Guild in Oblivion includes an entire plot arc with the Grey Fox that concludes with stealing an Elder Scroll to break the curse. The Thieves Guild in Skyrim is no different in it's overall quest arc behind Mercer and his conspiracy against the Nightingales. It's the same deal with the Morag Tong in Morrowind: "Go kill this guy, get paid. Kill next guy, get paid." Oblivion and Skyrim's Dark Brotherhood quests are more inspired involving corruption arcs, memorable deaths in the guild, deception, just more interesting plots. That's not to say the Morrowind questlines were necessarily boring, and they were still great for the time mind you, but just 4 years later Bethesda would definitely improve on the formula. Morrowind still has a great main story I think, but the other quest lines feel a bit lacking now when you take the nostalgia glasses off. Dagoth Ur doesn't exactly stand at the top among Elder Scrolls primary antagonists though, he needed more exposure and maybe sprinkle in some appearances outside of the final battle.
The music is still great, it's hard to beat that classic Elder Scrolls feel. The voice acting was ahead of it's time even if it was still early as far as video games go. The landscape is still beautiful today even without enhancements, although increasing your sight distance by removing some of the "fog" does make it easier to appreciate that beauty. I didn't remember much of the DLCs back in the day, but Tribunal and Bloodmoon were better than I remembered. There were some more entertaining quests in both compared to the main game, some one off quests that just made you chuckle. That said, being a Werewolf in Morrowind sucks pretty bad, especially if you have an end game build or fancy yourself a Mage. The dungeons are pretty simple and short which is nice if you don't have all night to do a crawl. Stealth is kind of broken (In a bad way) which I didn't remember. Unless you're trying to steal from a blind man, no matter what your Sneak skill level is the chances are you'll fail without a Chameleon spell (I found a good mod to balance out both). Escort quests are a real pain in the ass, NPCs typically move painfully slow and often bug out on pathing...and they typically don't teleport with you so you have to go the long way to most destinations which may turn into 20+ minutes of frustration. The ash storms and Red Mountain is a GREAT end game setting in my opinion, I always dreaded going inside.
All said, Morrowind is still a great game, and it was ahead of it's time. It doesn't hold up quite as well today without nostalgia I think, but it was groundbreaking and still a joy to play. I think the one thing I really would have liked to have from the later games is the Perk system that Skyrim stole from the Fallout franchise, they're just fun . I've loved the idea of Perks since Fallout 1 in '97, only because you rarely otherwise see any tangible benefits to leveling a skill in an RPG unless you make large jumps. Going from 10-20 in a skill involves a lot of work typically and you see no benefit, not till you maybe jump 25 points. A perk can bring a tangible bonus to an otherwise boring or underused skill that makes it actually more meaningful.
I picked up a bunch of games in the recent Steam Winter sale. I play on checking out Dispatch next based on a recommendation from
@greyhammer90 I believe.
Space is fuckin' huge in that game! As far as I know they've added a lot more to it since I last played, I need to check it out again.
