Gaming diaries: all the rage, eh? Buoyed by the splendidosity of the likes of Roburky’s Sims 3 chronicles and Tom Francis’ Galactic Civilizations II bible, I’m embarking on something I’ve had brewing for a while – a diary of my (mis)adventures in Morrowind. I’ve always maintained it’s a far better game than its sequel Oblivion (which was also pretty good), and now’s my chance to prove it. I’ll commence with the diaries proper in a few days, but ahead of that I thought I’d share the setup.
I’m running the Morrowind: Game of the Year edition, which includes the two expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon. This means I should bump into a werewolf at some point, excitingly. On top of that, I’ve installed a bunch of mods, mostly for the sake of prettiness – I don’t want to change the eventual experience too much, but I have zero problems with messing with the lore.
They are:
Better Bodies – which, primarily, adds joints to the game’s otherwise rigid torsos, and some nicer textures for people whose clothes you’ve nicked. There’s a choice of whether to leave them totally nude or with some tasteful underwear. I’ve gone for the latter, because I’m afraid of sex.
Better Heads – Those blurry porridge-faces get a bit of sprucing up. Also applies to the player models, not that you get to see your own face outside of the tutorial (I don’t think?)
Morrowind Comes Alive – This is a good’un. It throws in a crapton of wandering NPCs into the world, so it’s not the underpopulated robo-land it is out of the box.
The Wilderness Mod – Similar to the above, but with angry animals. This means I’m probably going to get attacked by a tiger eventually.
Giants Ultimate – Introduces a load of mythic-esque foes to Morrowind, including dragons, golems and, er, mechanical wasps. More stuff to hit, basically.
Real Signposts – Crisp signpost textures get me hard.
And the Morrowind Visual Pack, an omni-mod of high resolution textures that smarten things up no end. I remember trying this (or something like it) a few years ago, and my poor PC fell over in panic. It’s entirely untroubled now, bless it.
So, before I get going on this in earnest, any others you lot reckon are a must-have?
Oh, and my character is a Water Nymph (a new race one of the mods seems to have thrown in) with, for some reason, the face of a flea. He is called Loaf, and is stabby and a bit thiefy. He can also walk on water.
Related Stories:
http://www.gamesover.com/baldur2/Baldurs%20gate%202.htm
Do a page search for the word toilet.
@ Vinraith
You may be right about NW2, altough it may have one in the castle.
@Azradesh
So there’s one in the whole game? OK, I’ll concede I didn’t notice that. I think if anything that furthers my original point, which is that toilets are exceedingly rare in games with fantasy settings. Presumably everyone is either going outside or magicking their excrement away…
*Alec (damnit)
-Oblivion’s combat is responsive and satisfying. Morrowind’s combat makes you think there’s a clipping problem (until you realize that your weapon passing through an enemy doesn’t necessarily mean you hit it).
-Oblivion holds your hand too much. Morrowind doesn’t hold your hand enough. What a godawful journal system, even after Tribunal, or whichever one “overhauled” it.
-Morrowind has an alien setting and wikipedia NPCs. Oblivion has a generic fantasy setting and NPCs that at least have a little character.
-Magic sucks in both games (outside of utility spells) unless you really know the ins and outs of exploiting the system.
-The leveling system sucks and makes no sense in both games. You basically have to choose skills that are the exact opposite of what you want your character to do if you don’t want to be horribly gimped a few levels into the game.
-Leveled monsters and encounters in Oblivion were a terrible, terrible idea. Bandits in full Daedric, lawl. In Morrowind, you had no f-ing clue how difficult something was going to be until you fought the thing 5-10 times. Hope you bound quicksave to move forward.
-Fallout 3 is better than Oblivion and Morrowind, largely because most of Bethesda’s bad design habits were negated due to having to stick to a different ruleset.
Every single time I intend on playing just one of Bethsda’s latest RPG’s, I stumble upon the exactly same horrible problem: The vanilla version is basically awful load of crap, and in order to make it good to play, I have to install a ton of mods. After I’m done with that, I notice I took me about half the day to get them all working, and there’s still the occasional crash due to incompatibility, and very soon I realize I’ve become frustrated and won’t touch the game in about six months.
undead dolphin: I don’t understand your criticism of the levelling system.
Haha I just had the weirdest bug of all: the Stats menu disappeared. I loaded an old save and it just wasn’t there. Had to edit the ini file to make it show up. That’s Morrowind for you.
What’s all this talk about toilets? Bathrooms in medieval times were a thing of luxury, people were crappin everywhere and then flinging it at each other.
And people gotta lay off them cliff racers. They’re just flying ingredient sacks, how can a scrubby alchemist make a levitation potion early in the game? Combine some coda flower with fuckin racer feathers that’s how.
Can’t wait for Alec’s diary, bet it’ll start with “I stole the plate”.
“Every single time I intend on playing just one of Bethsda’s latest RPG’s, I stumble upon the exactly same horrible problem: The vanilla version is basically awful load of crap, and in order to make it good to play, I have to install a ton of mods.
I know the feeling, thoough I maintain that the complete blandness of Oblivion makes it unmoddable to any decent standard. Morrowind on the other hand modded was a good time back in the day.
@Funky Badger: The leveled mobs in Oblivion made the levelling system annoying. If you focused on your main path you would level too quickly and be surrounded by monstrous enemies. You had to game the levelling system a bit to have it work out right. But once you figure that out you will quickly be overpowered.
I like it when parts of the map are just more dangerous than other parts instead.
By the time I had a computer that could run Morrowind, I realized that the disc I had bought was bad and that it was scratched up too bad to play.
I don’t know how this mod will work with all the mods you have on top:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=1187
And this one:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=1297
But I made these years ago so that the potions and scrolls would have unique icons. They were well liked at the time, I hope they help!
:3
Oh please don’t play it with added monsters and whatnot. I love the diary articles and I love Morrowind, but please do vanilla Morrowind!
The mods that improve graphics are fine but I think if you start adding mods with different creatures and lore then your not really playing Morrowind.
That was what made the game so amazing to me personally, a crazy-weird world to explore. Changing the world changes the game, you’ve effectively removed why Morrowind was more interesting than Oblivion IMO.
I always played it with Redds Heads, and another couple of mods which replaced all of the textures for potions and scrolls. They made flicking through the inventory so much easier.
@Vinraith
“So there’s one in the whole game? OK, I’ll concede I didn’t notice that. I think if anything that furthers my original point, which is that toilets are exceedingly rare in games with fantasy settings. Presumably everyone is either going outside or magicking their excrement away…”
lol Must be. That was just the only refence to a toilet on the net I could find, I’m pretty sure there were more though, just like a whole cut in some wood or stone over a pit. There weren’t many though.
People wee up against walls in Gothic.
So few toilets, yet so many sewers! Odd.
And Thief has toilets.
Now I’m off to look for mods and play Morrowind, grr.
I played Oblivion a lot longer than Morrowind but latter has had a greater effect on me. Maybe it’s because of Morrowind unique setting or the fact that it was one of the first PC game I played but it always inspires a sense of wanderlust in me; something that Oblivion, whilst good in my opinion, never achieved.
@Quinnbeast: Sigh, I miss Consolvania, was really into there forums. Shame they basically self destructed in series 3…
Anyone who plays with Better Bodies and Better Clothes should also make sure to get the Better Beast Bodies mod: without it, there are lots of clipping issues with Argonian/Khajiit bodies and the better clothes.
Someone at Something Awful made a 1.5 GB pack that features a truckload of mods that are configured to not conflict. I’m not sure if I can direct link to it, but if you have access to Something Awful and to the archive the topic is here – http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2867558&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
Here is a list of the mods included – http://esfiesta.sa.kikaimegami.com/MMMMList.txt
Fucking cliff racers. Yes, they’re handy. But the bastards have funny hit-boxes, so they occasionally sunk into rocks, taking with them both whatever bolts I’d fired AND the plumes, the ONLY reason I’d shoot them apart from hatred.
Morrowind… That takes me back. I stopped playing it due to so many horrible crashes. And the fact that a quest-centric NPC never turned up in the Vivec Arena so I could fight him. And the fact that, every time I loaded the game, I’d find myself ankle-deep in a swamp, miles away from the nearest habitation, with no idea what I was doing there and no clue what quests I had remaining. Seriously, the game needs a better quest log. Oblivion’s was nice, though the auto-guidance was vaguely annoying.
I enjoyed Morrowind much more than Oblivion. This is because, in Morrowind, I could play an Assassin with a moderate Short Blade skill and an exceptional Marksman skill, whereas Oblivion punished you for not having a Blade skill above 50%. Oh, and even if you did, the enemies had levelled in the meantime and were ready to pound your body into the ground before you could say “AAAAARGH, DAEDRA!”
Since my copy is the Mastertronic copy, sans Bloodmoon and Tribunal, I think I’ll grab this off Steam while it’s cheap, and grab Plants vs Zombies at the same time.
And good luck, Alec. I’d have recommended a vanilla game, but it’s your call.
I agree with undead dolphin hacker. Both games were utter crap, but the right mods helped unlock the vast potential they so narrowly missed.
Damn, the edit function has gone again. Humph, I say. Humph!
Anyway, I suspect I’ll enjoy reading about someone playing morrowind a lot more than actually playing it. The idea of these games always seems more fun than the reality, so the extra bit of fun added by good narration will be welcome.
I played vanilla Morrowind (with expansions) more than any other game I’ve ever owned. It’s scary when you look at your save games file and see you’ve racked up a few hundred hours, and there’s still things to do and see.
Also, a fabulous world, one of the few fantasy settings that I love. Silt Striders, mushroom towers, hermaphroditic gods who write mystic babble. Some of the more fascinating stuff you had to go searching for in the books, but it was very much worth it.
ESSENTIAL: ANTI CLIFF RACER MOD.
I recall my friend getting a giants mod and a nude mod and installing them both at the same time. What results is him walking around near ghost gate when a giant comes after him. OF course the giant is nude and his big harry what you call it is hanging RIGHT in his face and in effect he kills the giant by hacking at it over and over again. Good example of mods interacting in whats not previously expected.
Pixelated textured wang BAD
Morrowind (vanilla) was crap from release up until just before its last expansion. After both expansions and all the intermittent patches it became a nice RPG but remained a rather bad game.
Oblivion (vanilla) was fun at release. Knights of the Nine was vapid and Shivering Isles had potential but ultimately unsatisfying. Something about it felt like Bethesda was pulling its punches… probably because it had to keep the Teen rating.
Oblivion was a worse RPG but a vastly better game than Morrowind. I never installed a single mod for Oblivion and enjoyed it.
Every year or so I install Morrowind and search out dozens of mods to make the game part better. No matter what I do, within an hour I’ve uninstalled and shelved it again. Wikipedia NPCs, colorschemes taken right out of Quake, bizarre unresponsive combat, and the absolutely terribad decision to have literally every player action in the game have something to do with Fatigue and Luck. Arguably the whole Fatigue fiasco is the worst thing about Morrowind and the major source of all my hate for it.
And the environment design sucks. Giant gray-green mushrooms? Giant gray crab shells? Giant gray-brown trees? Man, that’s alien alright! Alice in Grayscale Crustacean Wonderland.
So yeah sinister agent, I agree that Morrowind is utter crap. I can’t say the same about Oblivion, though I will say I think it’s overrated (though not nearly as embarrassingly as Morrowind is).
The diary sounds officially like fun. Yay!
Not enough love for The Underground here!
You sir, are a fool. But I believe this argument has been done a few times too many on the internets.
argh edit! I meant @undeaddolphin hacker
@undead dolphin hacker: Could you explain what you mean when you say it was a good “RPG” but a bad “Game”? I just find the statement a bit strange as RPG, of course, stands for Role Playing GAME. Thus a good RPG must be a good game an your distinction between the two is a tad redundant. It’s like saying “It was a good Horror movie but a bad film”, which just doesn’t make any sense.
Perhaps what you were trying to say was that you found the Role Playing mechanics of the game solid but that they got in the way of your enjoyment of the game? Not trolling, just wanted to clarify.
I’m a big fan of the mods (I’m sure there are more than one) which make cliff racers passive beasts. This makes it so they don’t attack you constantly, but you still see creatures in the sky and can always hunt them with a crossbow if you need their parts for alchemy.
I never modded Morrowind except for a tiny mod of my own design to make the scamp merchant (or whatever species of daedra that was) have a lot more money. Otherwise it was an enormous pain in the rear selling high end loot. I still had hundreds of hours of fun with it and never once felt it needed modding to be better. Oblivion has some very nice improvements, particularly with the engine, but be darned if it wasn’t less fun even with a slew of mods fixing most of the poor design decisions.
These days I confess to being curious how well a modded-to-the-gills Morrowind would play, but I have never had any idea what to add. I might go with the Something Awful modpack, but I’m usually leery of great big compilations like that because my experience is that mods are not always respectful of the existing experience and I don’t know what all the modpack creator liked.
In particular, I have my serious doubts about quest mods. I’ve tried a few for Oblivion and…-shudders, unable to speak-
I, too, bought Morrowind based on love for (modded, of course) Oblivion. I went through the tutorial, picked up a few quests, and… got pwned by a little rat. I swung and swung at that bloody thing with my short sword, thinking myself protected by my medium armour, but I was not, apparently. A check on the interwebs confirmed that it wan not just me: the combat system is mega-janky. Though I still have the game, I have not since returned to Vvardenfell.
Still, who knows? Perhaps this diary will convince me to give it another go.
Yes, the tying-the-world’s-level-to-your-character’s-level was STUPID for Oblivion; seemed like an Invisible-War-like dumbing down for console morons. Luckily, that (and almost everything else) is summarily fixed by a few of the 160 mods I currently have installed. I really love Bethesda for making games that, though pretty bad out of the box, at least have the spirit right, and can be modded to be AMAZING open-world experiences. I bought Fallout 3 on day 1 not because I have any particular love for FO1 or 2, but because I anticipated another Morroblivion. Turned out it was actually heaps better out of the box…. pleasant surprise.
I personally really REALLY REALLY LOVED Shivering Isles expansion pack. I was a little let down by the end but more so because it was over and not becasue it was bad, though I did kill the end boss in 3 hits O.o which was kind of lame.
I got a lot of play out of Giskard’s quest mods and also had a mod that made the Wizard’s keep have a dragon landing pad for my . . . dragon mod which gave me a F@##@ dragon to fly around on . . . Oblivion is awesome.
Love Morrowind so much. When I got it I played so hard it was unbelievable.
I had about four houses, all stuffed to the gills with swords, spears, armour, books, potions, and jewels. I had so many things that I lost Azura’s Star soul gem. Seriously, put it down somewhere and then forgot where it was.
Bethesda really ought to have remade Morrowind instead of Oblivion, but included horsies. I didn’t enjoy the levelling in Oblivion. I never felt as if I was any stronger. The Morrowind levelling though, that was aces. “Use a sword? Wow you’re better at it!” straight away.
One thing I didn’t like about either is that if a beastie spots you they keep on following you FOREVER. It was annoying in Morrowind with the Cliff Racers, but horrible in Oblivion when nearly everything that chased you would end up slaughtering you or your horse.
Do NOT use, Giants, it emphasizes quanitity over quality. Many of the models are uglier and more unattractive than those found in the original game, if you can believe it. Creatures is a much better alternative, search for it on PES.
If I purchase this game from Steam (as it is available in the GOTY edition for a cheap price), will I be able to install all of these mods?
Daggerfall was better than Morrowind or Oblivion.
Every Eldar Scrolls game Bethesda makes is one step back from the greatness that was Daggerfall.
Nothing compares to getting near the bottom of a dungeon and realising that the disease you contracted will kill you before you can get out of the dungeon and find a healer.
THE AGONY!
Daggerfall. Oh, God. I remember now. I remember it all. So that’s where my childhood went. Dawn to dusk, day in, day out, spent playing fucking Daggerfall.
So that’s where my childhood went.
Into one of Daggerfall’s endless randomly generated dungeons? ;-) Man, I felt like a God once I mastered the teleport spell…without that, you could quite literally die in a dungeon because you couldn’t find a way out anymore.
Daggerfall was so ambitious, perhaps a little bit too much for its time. But what an eye-opener it was, being able to loan from banks, deal in real estate, travel around several provinces, etc etc. One of the more impressive things about it was that it didn’t hold your hand.
At the Mages’ Guild of a big city there was a daedra summoner who would, at a price, summon a Daedra Prince provided you had rank with the guild and were summoning on the right date. Thing is, no one would tell you these dates. You had to go to the guild’s library or buy the book in a store and read up on the correct dates (which was a good idea since summoning cost a lot of money and could get you into trouble if performed on the wrong day).
Or how you would ‘wake up’ in a dungeon on a marble slab after succumbing to vampirism, having lost all your guild affiliations and rep. Loved the haunted dreams vid of the girl crying tears of blood too, which you’d see once you contracted the disease.
Anyway, I’ll stop now. Sleep defeats nostalgia.
The dungeons in Daggerfall became too much for me in the end. I came close, but never did get through the main quest.
My character eventually became a vampire. Utterly powerful, but no longer able to travel during the day. So I’d always arrive in towns at night, with all the shops closed. And had fun climbing on the buildings and leaping from roof to roof, using the awesome roof-apex-super-jump-bug.
@Chis
Thanks for the link to The Underground. Sounds intriguing.
This will be good. Morrowind is one of my favourite games, and I know it inside out.
I have one suggestion. The Bloodmoon and Tribunal addons interfere with the original game in ways that are a total pain in the bum (assassins attack you while you’re trying to sleep, and the only thing anyone wants to talk about is catching a boat in Khuul that will take you to Solstheim). I disable those two addons until I actually want to play them. But better heads and better bodies are definitely worth having, right from the start.
Does anyone have a non-SA link for the Merged Mega Modpack? I’d love to play Morrowind again, but the thought of tracking down and installing a bunch of individual mods that may or may not conflict and then messing around with load orders etc makes me want to forget the whole thing (I’ve wasted too many hours of my life doing that exact thing in the past).
I loved the insanity of the alchemy exploit in Morrowind. Briefly:
1. Smart people make better potions.
2. Potions can make you smarter.
3. Go to step 1.
Before you know it, you’re an insane superhuman who can do just about anything, anywhere, anytime. It’s effectively a cheat without the cheat code.
It’s also a bit annoying, because it’s a perfectly logical application of the abilities the game gives you, yet you really shouldn’t do it because it’s so totally game-breaking. The only illogic is why nobody in the fictional world has discovered this and started a potions arms race. ;)
I would also suggest doing an article about the Morrowind mod community in general — this would be at least as long, epic, and terrifying a journey as playing the game itself.
I mean REALLY. Someone made a mod where you can get it on with any of the NPC characters (long as you’re smooth enough), impregnate the female ones (visible pregnancy) and eventually HAVE A CHILD with them! Good God! Sheer fetishy creepiness aside, that’s quite a technical achievement to add pregnancy to a game! And did I mention creepy?
Nice, I stopped playing at around level 10 after I got tired of the precise leveling needed to get a good character.
I liked Oblivion.
I liked Morrowind.
I liked Invisible War.
Ok.
Sure.
Everything was set up for Morrowind to be super duper. On paper it looks great.
Wandering around aimlessly can be great. Designing a character can be great. Imagining a role, whether it’s your character’s motivations, the guilds/houses you choose to join, or just his/her combat style is great.
I guess the best way of putting this is, the Morrowind strategy guide is an incredible read. You get to see the intricate detail of the world. You get to see the guild setups, the politicking, the storyline. You get to see how the game won’t stop you from breaking the main storyline, and how, hidden in some miserable cave, you can fix it again.
But eventually it’s time to play the thing. And, unmodded, you quickly learn a few things:
-Your character idea is pointless because everyone eventually melts into a jack-2of-all-trades, unless you’re extremely careful. Plus you can join multiple guilds and be guild master of them all, so outside of the Houses, your character can only be unique by you as a player restricting yourself.
-For every cool dungeon there are twenty-five pointless three-room tombs with a skeleton and a ghost and some randomized loot, or caves with some kwamas and a rat, or underwater grottos with three slaughterfish. This does not add character or verisimilitude to the world. It makes it seem artificial and tiny. “Look, a secret grotto ten meters from the hidden tomb I just explored! And there’s a mysterious cave on that cliff over there!”
-Certain fundamentals of the game are anti-fun. Fatigue is the main culprit. The terrible journal is another.
-The world is full of pointless NPCs that all have literally the exact same thing to say as everyone else in their region. This doesn’t make the world feel alive. It makes it feel fake.
-Sooner or later you’re going to end up breaking the game, for better or for worse and whether you intend to or not. Typically if you’re not intending to, you’re gimping your character without even realizing it and will have a rough time of it later.
Essentially, if you “play” Morrowind as a world, and not a game, I can see where it’d be enjoyable. If you’re one of those people that has 20 days /played in World of Warcraft and are only level 44, then Morrowind’s your game.
Once the aimless wandering period comes to and end and you as a player decide to do quests or actually formulate a solid goal, the seams begin to show, and sooner or later they rip right out.
Morrowind is a great RPG because if you “play” it from your character’s perspective it turns into an immersive, rewarding experience.
Morrowind is a bad game because if you “play” it from your own perspective, you instantly see how fake everything is, how broken the mechanics are, how un-fun combat is, and how miserable attempting to actually follow a plot thread can be.