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:
@udh:
Yeah, sounds about right to me.
I definitely enjoyed Morrowind before I realized that I was creating stories and characters that were utterly self-pleasing and self-serving in nature, as it was impossible to share the experience with anyone else (bar posting LPs and such, something I’ve always detested, and never been able to do with any skill), and difficult to enjoy as a game for the same reason I find MMOs to be difficult to enjoy. Oblivion’s a lot more fun and relaxing to play, even if the “roleplay” elements aren’t as strong. As for my Roleplay fix…That’s what the magic of the internet is for.
@Alec Meer:
I’m very excited to see what your time in Morrowind will be like. A few (hopefully) helpful things:
Morrowind 2009
Morrowind 2009 is an excellent and popular guide to a kind of ‘baseline’ prettified version of the game, including some info on the Morrowind Graphics Extender, which I also can’t recommend enough for the infinite view distance, widescreen, possibility of bloom and HDR, etc.
You CAN see your character’s face again in the game. The key you have bound to toggle between first and third person? Hold it down and move the mouse to rotate the camera around your character. Combined with the ‘tm’ console command to toggle the HUD on and off (’tm’ for ‘toggle menus’), this works well for taking screenshots.
Just putting this out there; I almost wasn’t going to link this, but what the hell… There are a lot of Morrowind journals out there. I actually wrote one myself a while back – though it leans strongly towards serial fiction:
Frost in Morrowind
Yep. Morrowind fan-fiction. I am a huge dork.
Kinsley, that’s a great point about the missions getting dorked at the beginning of the game. It’s a good word of warning to people starting the GOTY edition: just follow the basic game path for a few hours, until you meet your contact Caius. If you go exploring too far you’ll trigger events that you can’t handle. I somehow triggered the Assassin attack right at the start of the game, when I had no health or skill. It was awful, and the only way I was able to finish was by glitching the assassins in stuck points in the environment. And yeah, people constantly prodding you to go to Solstheim was a glitch too, considering all the enemies on the island are leveled based on your character finishing the main quest. Does anyone remember the stupid fistfight with Glass Thor (whatever his name was) on Solstheim? You had to beat the guy to progress, but you had to have hand-to-hand combat up to 50 or something stupid to knock him down. WHo the hell went through the game fighting enemies bare-handed? I remember spending like two hours spamming hand combat just to pass that part. That has to be one of the worst moments ever in game scripting.
Really the best way to play Morrowind is to get the regular edition, and pick up the separate Bloodmoon expansion to play after completing the main quest. Tribunal was skippable garbage.
And MGE rocks, but it basically doubles (or triples) the hardware requirements.
Imagine staying up 44 hours straight, playing Morrowind for about 2/3 of the time, in part because you’re hooked on min/maxing your character. That was me, and I found a way to work around it:
Galsiah’s Character Development 1.08 (linked here at Telesphoros’ List o’Mods: http://www.mwmythicmods.com/telesphoros.htm#6)
GCD takes leveling out of your hands, so you can enjoy wandering, fighting, stealing, alchemicalizing, etc. all without thinking about when you should stop swinging that axe and switch to a dagger. Now I don’t have to keep a notepad on the desk.
Oh, also – briefly on the Morrowind vs Oblivion thing (sorry, but I think this is interesting):
I was fortunate enough to attend the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last year, and while there I sat in on a talk by Ken Rolston (Lead Designer on Morrowind and Oblivion) and Mark Nelson (Senior Designer on Morrowind and Oblivion, Lead Designer on Shivering Isles). They touched on this, saying that they thought going with the generic fantasy setting in Oblivion (as opposed to the more interesting ‘alien’ setting in Morrowind) had been the right decision, since Oblivion sold more copies than Morrowind. However – at the same time, artistically they hated themselves for it.
So there you go; (paraphrased) from the horse’s mouth, and all that.
“They touched on this, saying that they thought going with the generic fantasy setting in Oblivion (as opposed to the more interesting ‘alien’ setting in Morrowind) had been the right decision, since Oblivion sold more copies than Morrowind.”
Well that’s sad. I wonder if they considered that Oblivion sold better because people were remembering Morrowind, and expected that from Oblivion? Or that the 360 ran Oblivion so much better than the Xbox ran Morrowind, and Morrowind wasn’t available on PS2? By their logic each successive version of TES will be more generic and bland and will sell better and better…I hope they realize trends don’t continue indefinitely.
@Rinox: I was…*does some basic arithmetic*…Holy Jesus, I was something like eight or nine when I got my hands on Daggerfall, in late ‘96 or early ‘97, and I’m pretty sure everything between then and age ten was occupied by my becoming inordinately, (vaguely creepily) obsessed with and attached to my characters, personalising them extensively and mourning their subsequent, sometimes tragicomic, often horrible deaths.
From memory, a great many of them died horrible deaths, although I did once nearly complete the main quest with a bad-ass Assassin who lost all his guild status on being turned into a vampire (not that I cared, I thought being turned into a vampire was so damn cool).
I also thought the character generator was brilliance incarnate, and in retrospect (considering the number of character-deaths involved), Daggerfall was my NetHack, since I never managed to get into ASCII games successfully (thus, Roguelikes were off-limits through sheer disdain).
It wasn’t strictly procedural, from memory, but there was a fair element of randomisation that sufficed when it came to achieving an equivalent air of living in a personalised universe. Ambition, baby, Bethesda was doing it right, even in ‘96.
Daggerfall, a short lull, and then Deus Ex. Christ. I woke up sometime in 2003 and discovered I was 15, and wept.
A tangent: I sometimes wonder if the attention span of a child, when it comes to video games, is actually only capable of being either:
A) Mind-bogglingly short.
OR
B) Nigh-eternal.
Either you throw the controller/keyboard/virtual reality headset down in disgust within four minutes, or you forget to eat or sleep or come out of your room and your parents, in turn, forget they ever had a child, since it’s been six months since they last saw your scrawny bowl-cut-adorned hide out in the open.
arrrrgh, i just got oblivion on steam but i didn’t see the deluxe edition with all the DLC. even if it’s mostly rubbish, it’s 3 dollars extra and not having it is killing me!
No children because you could kill them if you wanted and thats bad apparently. fallout 2 was the worst damn invisible kids stealing my stuff thank god for the patch that put them in.
I second the comments by Rei and others that while some mods that include more critters make for a more varied gaming experience, they also removed some of the unique flavor of the game.
The original Morrowind critters felt integrated in the world and it’s ecology. Even small animals had lots or lore around them… appearing the children’s tales, in history books, in texts of religious sermons, etc. The dark elves had societies named after them, and items made from their teeth and bones, and even houses constructed from giant shells, and so on.
But then some of the mods just plopped generic D&D style dragons in there, with no history and explanation other than “Kill them and get their treasure hoards”. Fresh.
Is there a good mod for the conversation system in Morrowind?
I don’t think I could ever go back and use that existing one again, where every NPC has the reams and reams of the same pointless text and converation topics that you have to try and find the pertinent ones from.
@ Martin K
Don’t weep over all those hours man – see it as the formative years. ;-) And yeah, those differences in attention span between then and now are pretty much enormous. If I had Fallout 3 when I was a kid, I would have literally played the disk to death. Sure of that. Which is pretty much what I did with the first Fallouts, anyway.
I hear ya on creating the most insane/cool and, thanks to the ungodly character creation, unique characters. One of my favorite characters was a completely useless character with all sorts of critical weaknesses and forbidden weapons/clothing, but he had one thing going for him: his luck was maxed out. He’d catch these insanse lucky breaks of finding a daedric daikatana on some random street thug’s corpse, or opening the lock of the finest armor shop of the Daggerfall capital with a non-existing lockpicking skill.
Oh and being a vampire was pretty cool indeed. Did you know that you could glitch yourself back to the top of any guild or temple after losing your affiliations in vampire death? Because the game reset your ranks with the guild but not your ‘rep’, you could just re-join a guild, perform a task/quest, travel for two weeks, come back in and get immediately promoted. Rinse and repeat all the way to Archmage, Patriarch or Spymaster.
‘Twas a good thing, because I hated loitering outside the guilds until they opened in the morning. As Archmage you could come and go when you went, heh.
Don’t use Giants, it’s one of the worst mods. Sure, at first it looks good, as it introduces a huge amount of likeable creatures, but in reality, most of them are very poorly done. There are better mods, although their names don’t spring to mind right now. Giants also completely destroyed one of my playthroughs, as I entered a cave filled with liches, who drained all my strength away (it went into negative), leaving me standing still, without being able to move, even without all my items. There was something bugged about an earlier save, so I couldn’t reload either.
I agree completely with undead dolphin hacker. I dropped Morrowind after maybe 6 hours play…. I like me my RPG’s, but I much prefer gameplay factors over immersion factors.
I still play, mod for and love Morrowind, much more than I did with Oblivion. The atmosphere of the world felt really beautiful, unique and alien compared to Oblivion, which was boring fantasy generica.
I always played as a magic-user because of how liberating many of the spells made travelling around the islands. Being able to fly with levitate, walk on water and teleport at will to the closest temple, imperial cult shrine or to a previously marked location made travel around Vvardenfell much more quick and painless.
The only mods I bother with are the various unofficial patch mods, better bodies and Tamriel Rebuilt… I dislike having anything that messes with the (very deep and awesome) lore of the gameworld.
Is there a good mod for the conversation system in Morrowind?
LGNPC is a conversation overhaul project. I don’t know how complete it is or if the quality holds up, but the one that inspired all the rest (Seyda Neen, by a different modder) is excellent.
Regarding Children in Morrowind, there is at least one mod I’ve read about that adds them. 330 of them apparently.
I’m so tempted to reinstall it, but to start a new quest, or find my old “beaten-everything-and-all-powerful” saves?
I wonder, whats the difference between “Morrowind Visual Pack” and “Morrowind Graphics Extender”? Can I use them both at once?
Please for the love of god, read through this rtuly excellent modding guide to bring Morrowind into 2009 kicking and screaming.
It’s a crystal clear thorugh description of how to take vanilla Morrowind and turn it into something altogether more fantastic. Well illustrated with screenshots, and lots of handy tips for extra mods, all linked to download sources.
http://morrowind2009.wordpress.com/
It would appear the Graphics Extender does not work with the Steam version of Morrowind. I’ve had it work fine with the CD version in the past.
it pains me greatly that for years now i’ve been unable to get daggerfall to run with any stability within win xp.
@ dhex: Have you tried reading up on it? I seem to remember that at one point I found a patch to make it work under XP, but I can’t recall where.
But here are a few guides that may be helpful:
http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=479044
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Running_under_Windows
You could even try setting up a virtual machine for it.
“It’s a crystal clear thorugh description of how to take vanilla Morrowind and turn it into something altogether more fantastic. Well illustrated with screenshots, and lots of handy tips for extra mods, all linked to download sources. ”
He says the guide is not for use with ATI cards – does that mean the main points will still work, but ATI card owners need to figure out the exact steps, or that the various mods he recommends are not compatible with ATI cards?
P.
spenot: yeah, that first link you posted almost gets me out of the starting dungeon.
almost.
it’s just a very crashtastic experience under dosbox, sadly.
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?
The pundits on the steampowered.com forum seem to reckon that a lot of mods don’t work with the Steam release.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=898428
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=897879
If anyone still wants a moddable Morrowind GOTY cheaper than the Steam price, Amazon to the rescue!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Morrowind-Elder-Scrolls-Game-Year/dp/B0000WZQDE/
Something of a correction to my previous comment: I can get an older version (303) of the Graphics Extender to work on the Steam version, but custom shaders seem to have problems. All the HDRI and bloom effects I’ve tried just show a washed out white screen.
Realsignpost gives an error on loading but seems to otherwise work fine (if you pick “Yes, continue”).
No problems with other mods so far (BookJackets, Better Heads/Bodies, The Lighting Mod, plugin manager)
It’s interesting hearing people criticise Oblivion for being generic fantasy stuff. It’s true, but the key thing is, it’s generic fantasy stuff, but with good controls, lots to do, some fun items and sometimes good combat. That immediately elevates it above the other ninety billion RPGs that are generic fantasy stuff with horrible everything.
Almost every RPG I’ve ever played is a horrible unplayable mess AND utterly generic tolkien-ripping crap. Obliv and Morrowind are just exceptions to each one respectively. Given the choice, I prefer Obliv’s playable generic guff to Morrowind’s original, but unplayable guff. However, I think a good diary of a game would suit Morrowind far more than Obliv simply because the game world is more interesting.
Don’t forget the official plugins:
http://www.elderscrolls.com/downloads/updates_plugins.htm
I have tried to build a “morrowind 2009″, but is way hard, and I only have the cd’s for morrowind and tribunal, bloodmoon is nowhere, damn cd’s. Installing and uninstalling mods is a pain, even these that are just a single file, … probably something to do once, and not touch again to avoid breaking it. And what make really angry the game, is to remove mods, the savegames end on a half-broken state. Also all these enhancements (like best bodies) seems uncompatible with my spanish unofficial total traduction. Ugh. I think I stay with my basic and ugly old morrowind :-/
tl:dr version:
man, this thing is hard.
Cannot wait for this diary. And you’ve also made me want to play this game again. I know what i’m going to do after my last exam tomorrow. MORROWIND!
I really think Beth could make a ton of quick cash but upgarding Morrowind to play in Oblivion. Everything they need is already there. The story the scripts ect everything is the same in the world builder it wouldn’t take THAT long to make morrowind’s world to work in Oblivion compared to making a totally new game. I think a lot of people would like to be able to visit Morrowind FROM Oblivion’s main world.
It wouldn’t even have to have the quests from the origonal game, just be visitable and maybe have some of the generic side quests to complete or maybe even totally new quests for the hero from Oblivion to complete that are related to the character from Morrowind leaving. Release it as an expansion to Oblivon and boom tons of money to turn around and make TES V :P
I know Bethesda get a lot of hate around here, and they can’t animate to save their lives (playing Fallout 3 and switched to 3rd person to admire some new armour and nearly lost my shit when I started sidestepping) but every single RPG they’ve ever made has had something good about it.
Daggerfall was the first truly epic RPG world, IMO. The randomly generated dungeons and giant empire to explore might not have been for everyone I suppose but they worked for me. Then Morrowind, which was the game that made me go “yep, I’m living in the future and it’s pretty damn cool” and with mods is still my favourite non-Torment RPG ever. Oblivion’s a great game, although RPG-lite in many ways, but the Dark Brotherhood quests are as good as any I’ve played.
And then Fallout 3, which is just grand. Level caps, though. Grr.
Looking forward to this diary loads – so many memories of Morrowind, will be fascinating to see what Alec gets up to that I didn’t.
Doesn’t forget Red guard a very good action RPG which Morrowind’s engine is based off of.
Er, don’t O.o Jesus I’m tired. I can’t wait for father’s day! I get treated better on father’s day then I do on Christmas.
I’m a bit surprised by the people who found this a hard game to play. Aside from general bugginess, it’s easy enough if you get off to a good start. Some tips:
1) That trade house place you start the game in — apart from the first room, it’s completely empty. Rob those suckers blind and sell the loot in town. Not only will that get you enough money to get you some kit, it will also get you your first weapon (a dagger) and your first lock-pick.
2) Do some levelling up before you start in earnest. You can just hang out in the swamp around Seyda Neyn for a bit — there’s plenty of low level beasties to kill (mudcrabs, kwamas, slaughterfish) and a couple of missions you can stumble across. When I’m starting a new character, I get to level 2 before I head off to Balmora.
3) Forget about min-maxing and all that crap about smart levelling. By the time you get to level 20, you’ll be powerful enough to do anything, regardless of how you got there.
4) Keep away from Red Mountain and out of caverns at the start of the game. You’re not yet powerful enough to deal what you’ll find there. If you go someplace where you’re being instantly cut down by the baddies, instead of getting all frustrated and stuff, just leave and come back later when you’ve levelled up a bit.
5) Keep out of tombs until you’ve got silver or magic weapons. Ordinary weapons will just pass straight through the ghosts.
There’s a ton of things you can exploit as well, but those are best discovered on your own.
The problem with Daggerfall, as far as I’m concerned, is that while it had a few good ideas that were jettisoned in later Elder Scrolls games (character creation, for example), and certainly grand ambition, the incredibly cookie-cutter random generation of the world meant that it was entirely soulless and bland. There may have been many many miles of game world to explore, but there was no reason whatsoever to explore it. And little game balance, either – the random generation didn’t really seem to care if you could handle things.
Morrowind is less sprawling (though still huge), but it rewards every side trip, every poke through the bushes, or seems like it does anyway. Oblivion was a step back in that regard, along with others.
I hope Shivering Isles represents the future trend of Elder Scrolls titles better than Oblivion’s Cyrodiil.
I logged hundreds of hours in Morrowind, going so far as to reclaim and furnish the old Dwemer ruins in the volcanic caldera on Dagon Fel (the ones occupied by the strangely high-level band of orcs). One mod gave me a furniture store in Balmora; another provided various hire-able, upgradable vendors who I had to escort there through a dozen monotonous boat rides and clipping errors. It was worth it to have a SECRET VOLCANO LAIR with all the amenities of a city. What else was I going to do with all that gold?
I’m going to agree with everyone so far who says that GIANTS is a terrible mod. The monsters it adds are tremendously overlevelled and water down the game’s interesting cosmology (so rare in fantasy games!) with generic fantasy tripe and models ripped from games with different art styles.
Seriously, man, don’t use Giants.
If your into your game diarys you may want to check this website out
http://www.sekritforum.com/storybook/
Oh hey. There’s a mod so you can play Ludo in Morrowind.
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7575
How exciting.
Ludo in Morrowind?! There is no
GodVivec.Holy crap, I just reinstalled Morrowind for the first time in 4 years and MANOMAN is it a trip to come back! I’m really looking forward to this diary, Mr. Meer!
What I loved most about Morrowind was the lore of the game, with the books and all the detail that was put into building the world. The best parts of it felt alien, from the architecture to the monsters and the overall design of the world. What I want to get at, if you use mods that add monsters and things (like Giants, Wilderness, etc) you will make the game a lot less interesting, and definitely loose some of what made it unique in the first place. Meeting a dragon would make for a fun diary entry for us to read, but you would be playing something else, not Morrowind…
Is shocking how litte information, articles, etc.. are made about Morrowind. It seems people only talk about morrowind in Oblivium threads (we know that discussion, and how boring is). Is like Oblivium is a popular sport (like soccer), so TV dedicated half the programation to it. While Morrowind is something like a secret book that only a small handful of people has red, and rarely comment about it.
I think Morrowind is a bit of a puzzler, if you pick the game up now knowing what to expect and don’t have the patience to figure it out, you might throw the game down in defiance and say “No! Bad game! Bad!”. But spend some time in it and peel back the layers and you see despite the tragic combat in the game, its got a lot going for it and the mods just add to it. I recently found a mod that made the second city you visit, Balmora, into a HUGE city rather than the small city your used to. Whilst not adding anything plotwise, it just makes the city seem more important and more alive.
I think the reason people love Morrowind so much is that modding behind it, people take what Bethesda created and expand on it, correct what they feel are errors and make the whole greater than the sum of it parts.
Oh wow, this brings me back to the days of the dreaded Fargoth, heh, heh. I have wanted to go back and play Morrowind for a while with all the visual enhancing mods and Combat Enhanced. A mod that introduces bloody combat and combos that I “remember” being superior to Oblivion’s combat. I’m definitely going to check in later and see how this goes Alec!
Looking forward to this! But please go easy on the mods. Monster mods are unnecessary, and they’re generally intended for high-level characters who won’t find the vanilla monsters challenging. However, if you’re playing a magic user or other unarmoured character, you might want some of these:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~dleijen/morrowind.html
I’m sure mods can enhance the Morrowind experience immeasurably, and yet I for one don’t love it because of the mods – I never used any when I played the game – I love it because it’s an awesome feat of world construction.
It’s probably been said, but really,
“Why walk when you can ride, outlander?”