By Alec Meer on June 22nd, 2009 at 11:54 pm.
Alright – let’s make this precious. Upon my first introduction to my impending Morrowind diary series, the resulting slew of comments threw up two important mistakes on my part. Number one, the Giants mod is a really, really bad idea. Number two, I’d totally overlooked the vitally important (in the beauty stakes, at least) Morrowind Graphics Extender. After a hard day of farting about with ESM files, I’ve finally got what – I hope – is the ideal Morrowind build for my planned journey of cheerful incompetence. Beneath the cut, a more or less complete list of the frightening number of mods I’m now running, and a fairly stunning before and after comparison. Without a doubt, the goodly men’n'well-let’s-be-honest-it’s-pretty-much-all-men [oops, apparently there's a ton of female Morrowind modders, and now it appears some people hate me. Sigh.] of the Morrowind modding community have done jawdropping things to this olden RPG.
From the first attempt at this, the following remain:
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.
Real Signposts – Crisp signpost textures get me hard.
Added to that is this little lot:
Slartibartfast’s Texture fix – gets rid of the jarring seams between textures, making for a far more organic-looking world.
Better Beasts – doing for our four-legged friends what Better Bodies does for the bipeds of Vvardenfell.
Better Clothes – yeah, guess. Means cloth bends to the new joints of Better Bodies, mostly.
Enhanced Sky – surprisingly, this actually renders realistic foreskins on all male Khajit. Or maybe it enhances the sky textures. I forget.
Ren’s Oblivion hair – ooh, wavy.
Vality’s Mods – add most of these and you’ll end up with a frightening amount of vegetation (forests evolve from skeletal shrubs to towering glades) and a capital city that looks like it’s part of the landscape it’s set within, as opposed to a smidgen of aesthetic discordance from the out-of-the-box version.
Where are all the birds going? and Water life – incidental wildlife for the skies and seas of Morrowind. Surprisingly evocative, plus it meant I stabbed a duckling to death within my first five minutes of play.
The unofficial Morrowind patch and the unofficial Morrowind code patch. These fix things I don’t realistically expect to ever notice, but hey, they sound important.
The jewel in the crown is the Morrowind Graphics Extender. This ongoing project overhauls the visuals significantly, from draw distance to anisotropic filtering. I wasted something in the region of four hours today trying to get the latest version to work, but eventually had to settle for two iterations back. Sounds like I’m missing out on quite a bit of goodness – including HDR and animated grass – but at least I now get widescreen resolutions and anti-aliasing.
As well as that, I’m running the Morrowind FPS Optimizer. Not to optimize my framerate, as frankly it’s beyond redemption after all that stuff I’ve piled into the game (I seem to have stabilised it at somewhere just shy of 60FPS by being brutal in the MGE settings, but the epic view distances are sadly denied to me), but for the field of vision option. Without it, I end up zoomed weirdly close into my conversation partners; with it, I crackle with widescreen power. On my 1920×1200 monitor, I set the FOV to 100.389. You’ll need to turn off Novice mode to set the FOV, incidentally.
Net result – some visual wierdness, but all-told a far better-looking game. You want proof? You can’t handle it. Oh, alright:
From this
To this
(Click for big’uns).
Clearly, it’s a major aesthetic change as well as a technological one, and that’s often something I’m resistant to. In this case, my feeling is Morrowind is so obviously graphically fudging it out of the box that the new look isn’t sacrificing much of what was intended, but I’m quite sure others will feel differently. I feel a lot more inclined to explore this new world than the original, certainly.
23/06/2009 at 00:05 Sajmn says:
And to think I’ve never even played Morrowind, which seems a shame considering how much attention it has gathered. But then it can be hard to get oneself to play such an old game without nostalgic glorification.
23/06/2009 at 00:12 Serondal says:
Okay that top picture , the face of the dark elf, is NOT in the game as it comes from the box :P So you went from slightly modded to fully modded, not from normal vanilla up.
Also even with all the mods it still looks like crap, I’ll stick with my Oblivion thanks :)
Someone told me there is a mod for morrowind that adds Oblivion’s combat , might look into that.
23/06/2009 at 00:17 Samuel Bass says:
That’s one tiny cow. Did you add the “Minibeasts” mod?
23/06/2009 at 00:28 Adventurous Putty says:
Whatever mod added the sheep I’d get rid of. Other than that, you’ve picked ones that seem to maintain the aesthetic feel of the original game while “upgrading” it somewhat.
Good job!
23/06/2009 at 00:31 sinister agent says:
Why are you apparently being mugged in both shots? Is there a Moss Side mod?
23/06/2009 at 00:32 Kadayi says:
Looks pretty good. I recall that a guy who did some of the character modelling for one of the Unreal games did make some updated face textures. I’m not sure if they are in that big old face pack you’ve already gotten, but they might be worth checking out.
Found a link:-
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=2034
There was also a rather funky mod that added the ability to keep track of where you’d visited on the map and make notes, which was quite invaluable. I believe this is it:-
http://www.morrowind-oblivion.com/interactive_map.php
Its been a while since I played MW. I’m not sure whether its Vista compatible etc. Give a go though.
23/06/2009 at 00:33 Svenska says:
Cow? Thought it was a sheep.
So, I assume that my old lappy wouldn’t be able to run all of the mods that you are? If not, what would the important ones be?
23/06/2009 at 00:42 Paul B says:
If you look at the bigger picture, it’s got an udder and two horns, so I therefore pronounce it a cow. Good, let’s get the important questions out of the way first ;)
23/06/2009 at 00:42 undead dolphin hacker says:
Finding and installing mods for Morrowind is arguably part of the game.
23/06/2009 at 00:48 fdsgdshdhsdh says:
The Graphics extender Doesnt work with the steam vversion which is kinda lame
23/06/2009 at 00:48 Svenska says:
K, it’s a cow.
23/06/2009 at 00:53 Finalfrog says:
My piece of advice is save every 5 minutes, and I’m not talking quicksaves. I’m talking keeping a rotating stack of 30 or so saves which you rotate through in case something crops up and you don’t notice for half an hour. Someone built an awesome tool for just such purpose which functions entirely automatically…for Oblivion. There is no such tool currently for Morrowind due to the fact that you can’t save a game by script. I made a little reminder script which might help save your saves.
Link- http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6915
Hope that helps.
23/06/2009 at 00:57 Serondal says:
Save the game every 5 minutes? That’s pretty cowardly. I bet you save the game every time you fight something slightly dangerous just to make sure you don’t die, and save the game just before you go into situations where you’re extremly likely to die (I.E. never since in morrowind your character is a god very quickly)
23/06/2009 at 01:03 solipsistnation says:
Is there someplace to download a giant pack of pre-installed mods, from somebody who has already sorted out the weird interactions between textures and stuff? I set up a bunch of mods the other day, and while it’s playable, there are some odd errors on startup and I think pieces are missing… I did find mention of a massive morrowind mod pack from some somethingawful goons, but I can’t get to the link and couldn’t find it linked in elsewhere…
23/06/2009 at 01:10 PatriotMan says:
Morrowind is likely my favorite PC game of all time. Downloading mods was probably my favorite part of the game. I also enjoyed that someone as arguably retarded as myself could customize it quite easily with the editor.
Was it the Morrowind Framerate Optimizer which allowed you to turn on infinite view distance?
23/06/2009 at 01:12 undead dolphin hacker says:
@Serondal
You save the game every five minutes so when it crashes unceremoniously due to all the mods you have installed, you have a very close backup.
@solipsistnation
I downloaded it, it’s fully functional but really bad. Almost every square inch has some new poorly designed dungeon or town full of insanely overpowered items.
The modpack is more a proof of concept to try and cram as many mods into Morrowind without causing any conflicts. Quality of the mods is not considered in the least.
Still, if, like me, found guilty pleasure in those crappy fan-made Quake 2/Tribes maps of yesteryear that were so ridiculously unbalanced and crazily overambitious and overdesigned, it might be worth a look.
23/06/2009 at 01:12 undead dolphin hacker says:
“It” being the Something Awful pack.
23/06/2009 at 01:16 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
This is certainly not a frightening amount of mods, least not for an Elder Scrolls game.
23/06/2009 at 01:18 Vinraith says:
I have to agree with Dorian. The last time I ran a Morrowind game it was with a load of 40, and even THAT is light by the standards of some aficionados.
23/06/2009 at 01:18 Tyraa Rane says:
The Morrowind Code Patch he mentioned basically negates any need to save like an OCD hypochondriac. Without it, a heavily modded MW was pretty unstable, mostly due to local reference conflicts. (Google it if you like. The explanation’s pretty complicated.) The MCP more or less sorts said conflicts, which puts a stop to a lot of CTDs.
That said, I’d still save often; even with the MCP, Morrowind still likes to throw up all over itself every now and then. (Either the engine bugs out or a mod does.) Every five minutes is excessive, though, IMHO. I tend to go more like every half-hour/45 minutes, if that.
23/06/2009 at 01:18 FRIENDLYUNIT says:
Blerg. Doesn’t look like Morrowind.
It IS a large aesthetic change. People seemed to freak out at the alien starkness and try and add lushness and coweep (or is that sheecows?) and wolves and things, but, like, it’s meant to look like that. You are meant to have those weird dog things and grubs attacking you instead of standard fantasy staple. Leave your comfort zone people! Be challenged!
I’d seriously consider the cliff runner removal mod though. Those things just got boring really fast.
23/06/2009 at 01:37 Feintlocke says:
Nice little mod list. I got a lot of mileage out of Oblivion but for some reason I started a million and one characters in Morrowind and rarely got past the starting village. I may join you in this little endeavour.
23/06/2009 at 01:43 IvanHoeHo says:
Actually, could you also put up a picture of the ecm load order, so that us lowly peasents could hope to follow your footsteps one day? thanks.
Oh, and one thing that broke the deal for me for Morrowind (and others) was the lack of fidality of the fights. It was fine when I was observing the action from the sky, but it’s just too jarring from first person perspective. Hope this changes my mind!
23/06/2009 at 01:54 unclebulgaria says:
Anything that gets rid of Cliff Racers will do the job. Seriously. Try it without. Thank me later.
23/06/2009 at 02:19 sinister agent says:
There’s no need to nuke cliff racers if you get a mod that makes them spawn less/act passive unless disturbed. One of the first mods I’d install with Obliv or Morrowind would be one to stop the 100% creature suicide rate.
23/06/2009 at 02:19 Noc says:
More like Morrowlost amirite?
. . . sorry.
23/06/2009 at 02:25 Kobzon the Dunmer Potion Factory says:
Start playing already!
…and ditch the pink anime wigs. Better Heads comes with nice hair, no need for anything else.
23/06/2009 at 02:26 Taillefer says:
You link to Vality’s mods, but your screenshots don’t show you using the grass mod. It’s amazingly well done.
The Ambient Sound Effects mod is also great. I use that and turn the music off, for extra immersion.
23/06/2009 at 02:40 Wisq says:
For games where I’m worried about long-term savefile corruption and retention (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), I use the source-code control tool “git”, turning my entire savefile directory into a version-controlled tree. Then I just run a script that commits everything (assuming there are any changes) every minute or so. git is pretty good about handling binary changes in a space- and time-efficient manner.
It doesn’t solve the problem of actually remembering to save frequently, but it does solve the problem of rotating save slots. You only need one, since any prior savegame is accessible.
(Granted, I don’t know how easily accessible they are, since I’ve never had to go back to an old save. It’s been more for insurance thus far.)
(And yes, I know DF has a seasonal backup system, but sometimes I want more frequent than that. Plus, seasonal autosaves overwrite your last manual save. Yes, even though they end up in a different directory, they overwrite-then-copy, rather than saving direct.)
23/06/2009 at 03:31 solipsistnation says:
@Wisq: I bow to your nerdity. That’s a pretty cool solution. I hope perl is involved somewhere, or python.
23/06/2009 at 04:38 malkav11 says:
Oh lord. Morrowind is hardly “so old” – it’s what, a 2001 game? That’s practically a baby. And the unique aesthetics handily make up for any incidental oldness of the 3D (which is, at any rate, past the “never looked good to begin with” stage of 3D tech). No nostalgia required.
23/06/2009 at 04:38 hoobastank says:
Never play Oblivion. Cyrodiil was meant to be a crazy jungle filled with roman soldiers stomping through aztec architecture and they turned it into consolized mix and match euro-fantasy trash. its visuals, while technically capable, are bland bullshit. Lavaland, deciduousforestland, and snow mountains. How anyone could think it looks more interesting than morrowind is beyond me. also axes are blunt weapons and spears dont exist. &c.
23/06/2009 at 05:06 Larington says:
I tried to play the game yesterday, for the first time, using the set of mods listed previously, really struggling to get into it. Quest support is extremely basic as best I can tell, and the inventory system with regards to shopping is awful, having to mouse over every item to check if it’s light/medium/heavy armour and so on is terrible, wish there was some more sorting options aside from weapons, clothing, bla bla bla.
23/06/2009 at 05:07 Larington says:
Also I think I might have been spoiled by the graphical spangliness of Oblivion, even with the better bodies/heads mods for morrowind.
23/06/2009 at 05:39 Pantsman says:
I don’t understand the love of Morrowind over Oblivion. I played the former after the latter. Yes, the environments were more creative and the gameplay (slightly) more complex. But the world made up (or perhaps down) for its visual panache by being far more lifeless (or is that less lively?) than Oblivion’s. All I could really hope to find in the wastes were some more encyclopedia NPCs or a bunch more cliff-racers, whose calls will forever be inscribed in my brain. The faction quest lines I played were also much less interesting – apparently in Morrowind, all you have to do to become the highest-ranking mage in the land is to work as the guild’s mailboy for a little while. In Oblivion, I had to resolve a terrible threat to the land entirely seperate from that of the main quest.
Both games struck me as being just pretty good, competent and enjoyable titles, without any spark to make them really memorable.
23/06/2009 at 05:45 Antistar says:
@Alec:
Morrowind Graphics Extender is a royal pain to set up (especially the first time, when trying to figure out how it works). I remember it taking ages to find an HDR shader (or combination of shaders) that I liked, and that worked decently. A quick look at my own Morrowind install shows that I settled on this HDR shader:
DX9 HLSL HDR 6
And you’re approaching 60 frames per second? That’s monstrously high! I usually have 25-30 (or something – I don’t know; I don’t really notice anything higher than that).
Oh – I mentioned after the first article on this, but you can see your character’s face outside the tutorial: hold down the third-person-view button and move the mouse. I did forget to say, though, that you can of course see your character’s face in the inventory screen too.
23/06/2009 at 06:26 ChampionHyena says:
GRAWK GRAWK GRAWK ELDER SCROLLS MUST FIND TIME TO BASH OBLIVION
What-EVS. Christ a-mighty, give it a rest.
Just to throw in my entirely unwarranted two cents (or
0.0122609 GBP, as the case may be), I’ve never been too keen on warping an Elder Scrolls game’s basic makeup. No mods to kill Oblivion’s autoleveling world or to add new races or make the facial models look better… I always played with the unofficial patches to iron out the kinks and a DarNified UI to make dealing with menus and inventory a little easier for the mouse-and-keyboard set.
Now that Morrowind is on Steam and I can finally play it again after my discs scattered themselves to the four corners of the immaterium, I imagined taking largely the same tack. Unofficial patches, the code patch, et cetera. I gotta admit, though, them screenies shore iz pretty. I’m fearful of screwing with Morrowind’s (admittedly dated) visuals for fear of losing tha flava, but my interest is piqued now. I think I may end up toying with a few of the listed mods.
23/06/2009 at 07:15 CakeAddict says:
“stabbed a duckling to death within my first five minutes of play.”
Looking even more forward to the diary.
And I have to agree with undead dolphin hacker, finding mods and installing them is for me around 30% of the game if not more.
Most of the time I start with only a few graphical mods like this but when I’ve finished the game I have at least around 50 mods installed not all activated though that would mess thing up even more.
And yeah that’s only hell of a ugly cow and I find the textures on the trees look like rock but that might just be me.
Also.. get a mod that removes cliff racers (or at least the re spawning ones) unless you want to spend half the game killing them of course, whatever floats your boat I guess.
23/06/2009 at 07:16 Mr.President says:
Never understood the Internet’s acute hatred for cliff racers. Never even thought there was anything special about them until I read a Morrowind discussion on some gaming forum months later.
Although that may have something to do with the fact that I always played as an archer – I can imagine trying to hit one of those things with a short sword being a little tricky…
23/06/2009 at 07:28 CakeAddict says:
@ Mr.President.
I found them VERY annoying every few seconds you would hear one coming at you.. with their petrifying screams.
Every time I play morrowind I expect to hear it.. but thanks to mods no more! yay!
And yeah If you don’t play a archer or a mage it’s even more annoying. (why you would waste arrows on those putrid things is beyond me.)
23/06/2009 at 07:44 Howard says:
All looking rather tasty. Am downloading swathes of moddy goodness as I type.
One question. The MGE seems pretty bloody useless to me apart from fixing wide-screen issues. AA and AF have been controllable through your cards control panel for some time as far as I can see (in Morrowind I mean, not in general) and I have simply never been able to make its shader usage work. Anyone got any guides for doing this?
Also the infinite view distance is fun but as all the building still render in at the same distance they used to it looks as if you are playing on an utterly deserted plain with its inhabitants and structures magically warping in at about 20 feet distance. Is there a way to resolve this yet so that everything renders correctly?
23/06/2009 at 07:45 Howard says:
(EDIT to the above) Wait up. Seems I was using a vastly outdated version of MGE… Am now tinkering with the new one… doh!
23/06/2009 at 07:49 Howard says:
(Edit to the EDIT) Sigh… except none of the newer versions are able to run under Vista. Epic fail…
23/06/2009 at 08:38 jarvoll says:
Yeah, as a very enthusiastic Oblivion modder (that is, I use them, not make them), 40 is *tiny*. I believe I’m hovering around the 160-mod mark at the moment, and certainly over 100 seems to be status quo from what I’ve seen of the online community.
While modding is definitely part of the game’s fun, I’ve experienced a couple of times that it takes me 3 full days to install the game, install all the DLC, patch it up (both official and unofficial), find my list of mods, download their latest versions, install all the helper programs (Wrye Bash, OMM), get FCOM installed and working, get the rest installed, figure out AGAIN how to get Darnified to work as I like it… by the time I actually get into the game, I’m sick of it, and I move on to something else. I’ve never actually got beyond level 10, due to this and never being able to decide among combat, magic, and stealth (and so playing 1 character of each, simultaneously). But, in the end of year holidays, I’ve committed to a full proper playthrough (after having bought a processor that can get me better framerates – with all these mods it’s *certainly* the bottleneck), so hopefully I’ll be able to properly enjoy all the work I’ve done to get an awesome mod set-up. I can’t wait!
23/06/2009 at 09:25 Tei says:
IMHO:
The second screenshot don’t look better. Sure, the character face and boy looks more highpoly, but looks more generic… lilke a indian. There are no Apaches in morrowind, but this screenshot show one.
I will not comment the cow, nothing against it.
But new trees look like worst than the new ones from this screenshot.
Anyway is just a screenshot, that means *nothing*. Probably the game looks beatiful now.
Also, I share your pain. Setting tons of mods to work togueter in morrowind can be a pain.
23/06/2009 at 09:26 AyeKay says:
I remember playing Morrowind four PCs ago and setting the gfx options to minimal and still suffering groaning and juddering. I gave up when I got to Vivec because with all those buildings! and people! it became unplayable. After an upgrade I loaded up Vivec in the rain and it looked so good that I played it into the small hours without eating.
In the intervening years without anyone changing anything it’s somehow gone from looking
so good to looking like the dull, muddy placeholder art in Alec’s first screenshot.
When I was a boy all this were fields you know.
23/06/2009 at 09:53 BarkingDog says:
I played Morrowind back in 2001 for 6 months, finished, and never went back. Admittedly my memories may be somewhat hazy but I still recall the graphics etc being perfectly adequate without any need for messing around with mods. Solid (mad) storyline- the expansions were great- there’s just a fuckton of stuff to do. But the travel time! Fucking hell. Even with an acrobatics score made cheat-high.
Wasn’t too fussed by cliff racers because I could always jump faster than they could fly. Cheat-high acrobatics= <3
You can see your own face by either not touching anything for a while, in which case the game does this "since-you're-afk-the-camera-will-swing-around-your-body-for-a-bit" thing, or by pressing a mouselook button (I forget which).
23/06/2009 at 09:55 BarkingDog says:
Oh also slightly disappointed by how the combat wasn’t challenging or fun once you acquired decent gear and understood how to do things. The main joy for me was looting, doing interesting quests, looting, exploring- and, of course, looting.
23/06/2009 at 09:58 Wulf says:
And these pictures…
I realise why my whimperings about art-direction fall on deaf ears now, and I thought Alec would have known better. All you need is a basic grasp of visual cohesion, elements that fit, and how to put those elements together.
For example, in the first shot, thoe trees are correct, they’re a little barren but they’re swamp trees, and Seyda Neen is in a swampy area (lots of swamp in Morrowind in general)!
Look at this: http://www.wildnetga.org/albums/photos_1046/2007cnp_PIC00006.jpg
The trees in Morrowind look a little barren by coomparison, but they still look like a very basic representation of the right kind of trees for that swampy atmosphere. They could do with a bit of fluffing up and prettying, but they are swamp trees. Bethesda is shit at some things, but they understand visual cohesion.
The latter shot…
It makes me want to whine and whimper, it really does. I mean, if I’m not mistaken, aren’t those the kinds of trees one finds in temperate ones? I may be stupid, and I’m sorry if I am… but it just doesn’t look like it fits at all.
And and and… the end result is that we have an image that looks like it’s filled with oak trees… oak trees with vines hanging between them.
fffffffffffffffffffffffffff
Doesn’t anyone else see that? The trunks are too wide.
I go on a lot of rampages about visual cohesion, most of you have probably seen one or two — such as how I twitch and cower at the lack thereof in Diablo III — and I don’t do it just for the fun of it. I’m hoping I’ll open eyes, here.
Look at he first shot too…
I may just be a fool here, but that really doesn’t right to me, comparing the width of the character with the width of the trees to get a sense of relativity, it becomes obvious. Now, if you want to turn Morrowind into a temperate zone, that’s fine… but with those wide-trunked-yet-short temperate zone trees there, having the fog and the vines accompanying that looks… silly.
I had this problem with the modding community too, not so much with the modders but with those who used the mods, who’d present a horrible mish-mash of visual inconsistencies and egotistically say it was better than Bethesda could do.
The thing is… some of them were right.
There were people who could put together a visually cohesive package and it would look incredible, because they’d have a good eye for what fits and what didn’t. It’s like cooking and having a decent palette, and if someone threw sliced bananas onto a cooked dinner, most people would react badly.
And temperate zone trees in a swamp is sliced bananas on a cooked dinner.
The only part I find galling though is that it’s presented as if it’s better than the original. Example: “Net result – some visual wierdness, but all-told a far better-looking game.” If Alex had just said that he wanted to go in a new direction and threw stuff together, fine… but to say it looks better…
So we go from ‘this’, which looks ancient but at least has a sense of visual consistency, to ‘this’, which is so jarring it actually makes me twitch.
Ideally I’d say to keep the bananas out of the cooked dinner, but people won’t do that because they like throwing random junk together and without any sense of taste (and even Wassily Kandinsky had a better sense of style than most gamers, it seems), but at least have the good taste to not present it as better than the original.
Because as long as the original that presents something cohesive and fitting the environment, and the upgrade doesn’t, then the original will be better because stylistically it looks more believable.
Drop the trees though and you miiight just have something there.
Unless you chose to animal farms and brick fortresses in the middle of swampland (even the Holy Grail made fun of that!), which is another instance of ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.
This’ll probably be seen as a troll, but it’s not, it’s really not. The original Morrowind had a antastic look to it, and a brilliant atmosphere, and it’s so easy to break that. What I’d love to see is modders take what Bethesda did and upgrade it visually, rather than taking it in a whole new direction.
Because usually that whole new direction sucks.
Love the mods that don’t mess with the graphics, though.
Also: Lush, bright green grass around marshlands… ffffffffffff
23/06/2009 at 10:14 mister_d says:
Good points Wulf. I think these kind of mods diverge too far from the original art direction, and it tends to end up looking a bit hodge-podge.
But hey, to each his own. If people want to pile tons of ‘stuff’ into their mods, then so be it.
23/06/2009 at 10:20 Chis says:
This was posted in the previous take by someone else, but let me post it again as it is tremendously useful:
http://morrowind2009.wordpress.com/
FOLLOW THIS GUIDE INSTEAD
Personalising your experience is definitely recommended when it comes to Bethesda’s “games”, but to be honest Alec, MW2009 is where most should be going if they want to give Morrowind an overhaul.
23/06/2009 at 10:21 Heliocentricity says:
I was looking for an oblivion mod to make people less fugly, everyone ends up looking like anime. Still, the people with time to mod are either old men (mentally) who focus on the beardy bits like animals and LOD maps or anime teens.
23/06/2009 at 10:28 Rei Onryou says:
I’m just glad to have an excuse to finally play Morrowind. Yay.
23/06/2009 at 10:36 Chis says:
GET THE UNDERWORLD
Seriously guys, you’ve never played a better mod, and now it seems people have worked around the bugs in the sequel, it’s worth posting:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=5865
You will likely also need:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7423&id=6390
And possibly this:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6204
Get it now!
23/06/2009 at 10:39 oceanclub says:
I presume that you once you have modded Morrowind to your hearts content, you can simply burn a copy of the entire directory for future use? Does the program require any reg settings?
P.
23/06/2009 at 10:42 AndrewC says:
Oooooo, those ‘The Underground’ lady-clothes are classy!
23/06/2009 at 10:46 Chis says:
Gothic attractions aside (I’m neither a goth nor an emo, the closest I get is occasionally listening to The Cure), TU is a staggeringly huge mod, in fact it’s practically its own game.
I just hope that TU2 is completeable now, with BadCompany’s guide. The treetower sections looked utterly gorgeous but a bug with Synda not moving prevented me from going any further.
If you want a more “reliable” experience, go for the first one, but the second has lots lots more to see.
23/06/2009 at 10:53 jalf says:
No, the problem is not that it looks different (look at RPS’ love for Zeno Clash to see they don’t have a problem with that), but rather that Bethesda did not seem to have a decent artist when they made the game. They hired one or two for Oblivion (but even there, most of the visual look was defined by the programmers, it seems). And they still apparently don’t have a single animator.
There is absolutely no reason to attempt to preserve the “look” of a Bethesda game, any more than you need to preserve the look of Tetris. It’s functional, and that’s about the best you can say about it.
23/06/2009 at 11:22 MrBejeebus says:
whats with Chris advertising all these mods like a used car sales man?
I agree with Wulf about the cohesiveness, but it certainly doesnt make me twitch
23/06/2009 at 11:27 RuySan says:
I agree with Wulf. At the moment i’m playing Oblivion and it’s completely modded. But i never felt like Bethesda games really needed graphical overhauls. It’s one thing they have right. Specially Morrowind, with its very unique aesthetics. I prefer the first picture by a long way.
23/06/2009 at 11:45 Count Zero says:
@jalf
On the contrary, there is every reason to preserve the look of the game; Bethesda made a lot of mistakes when making Morrowind, but one thing they did right was the world building, mainly in the lore you find in the game’s many books and the overall world design. Most of it is meant to be outside fantasy stereotypes, a bold move on Bethesda’s part, and one that they choose not to make in Oblivion. By all means, fix the bugs, the draw distance, make the game use today’s video cards, but don’t just add content for content’s sake. What this will do is dilute the original identity of the game to almost nothing, and make a really interesting world into a generic fantasy playground. Sure it’s fun to add tigers, cows, rocket launchers or whatever to the game, but more is not always better. Ditch The Wilderness Mod, and all the stuff that adds random content at the expense of identity….
23/06/2009 at 12:08 oceanclub says:
“What this will do is dilute the original identity of the game to almost nothing, and make a really interesting world into a generic fantasy playground. ”
One of the most inexplicably popular mods for Oblivion is Martigen’s Monster Mod, which turns the game into a lurid, over-populated mess.
P.
23/06/2009 at 12:33 Chaz says:
Well I’m in agreement with quite a few others here, in that the “From this” picture looks better than the “To this” piccy.
The best mods, and most usefull mods I remember trying, are one that put a health bar over any enemies you were attacking, and another that changed the icons for spells and potions etc in your inventory to make it clearer to see what did what. But my personal favourite was a mod that added a usable boat to sail around the island in.
@Alec. You can look at your own face in the game by the way, in the same way that you can in Oblivion and Fallout 3. Just go to the third person view, and then I think you hold down Alt and use the mouse to free look around yourself and zoom in and out.
23/06/2009 at 12:55 Moonracer says:
Last Time I tried to play Morrowind again I got into the same mess of tweaking my mod list and reading up on the big new mods created since I last played, then never actually got far into playing the game. Not that I didn’t have a great time doing all that.
That said, I also recommend the Children of Morrowind mod for atmosphere (http://lovkullen.net/Emma/kids.htm). There’s even a Romance mod which adds to this mod allowing you to get pregnant and have kids (or father them with NPCs if you are male)! Incredible stuff.
23/06/2009 at 13:09 Metal_Circus says:
Just leave Alec alone and let him play some Morrowind, fer feck sakes.
23/06/2009 at 13:23 Nisse says:
I tried the better heads mod, but removed it soon after. It is most certainly very well made and makes the game more aesthetically varied, but I felt it ultimatley sucked out Morrowind’s soul. Firstly I felt it distorted many of the main characters, secondly it seemed to make the character in general more ‘pretty’ and nice looking. I consider this a problem since it removed much of the harsh atmosphere that I liked, which fits the Island, and some of the feeling of being unwelcome in a unfriendly alien land. So while the mod is excellent, it comes at a price.
And I prefer the first screenshot to the second by far (what the hell is that cow doing there?), which looks like a budget version of Oblivion.
23/06/2009 at 13:47 Gwog says:
It warms the heart to see kindred spirits who appreciated Morrowind just as it was. I felt that the old girl was earth-shattering upon release.
23/06/2009 at 13:53 feighnt says:
sorry if it’s already been mentioned – and also sorry if i’m wrong! but…
the updated pic, that Dark Elf, his eyes are… not red? are *all* the dark elves in the updated version like that?
the only reason i bring this up is that the red eyes are part of the mythology of the dark elves which were brought up in the game (or, at least, i *think* it is – it’s been such a time since i last played Morrowind), due to whatever bad stuff they did a good long time ago their skin was turned ashen and their eyes were turned red (whereas previously they were supposed to look like Altmer). it’ll be odd to come up to whoever it was who told that story, explaining why all the Dark Elves’ eyes are red when they’re *not* red due to the mod :P
23/06/2009 at 14:03 Dr Gonzo says:
The mods make me lose interest, it’s not the Morrowind I remember, doesn’t really look like the same game.
23/06/2009 at 14:04 Gwog says:
Important to add that I’m very much looking forward to these playthrough diaries. Just don’t do it in character. Some, uh, ‘person that I know’ tried that and let me tell you… the shame lasts for a long time.
Possibly forever.
23/06/2009 at 14:11 Unlucky Irish says:
Pray tell, how have people found the “Morrowind Comes Alive” Mod, would you sggest installing it? While by no means being the perfect game the one thing that’s really bugging me about my current play through is the fact that, out with villages, the game world seems very barren; a problem a few extra NPC’s would ratify quite nicely.
Oh and for me the beauty of Morrowind is the beauty of a Panzer. It is by no means meant to be good looking but it end up being charming in it’s own way and it suited the strange frontier vibe of Vvardenfell. Oblivion, despite being top notch graphically, never sold me the idea that Cyrodiil
was meant to be the centre of a sprawling empire just because everything look so generic and provincial.
23/06/2009 at 15:15 Seth says:
Try not using the fps optimizer with the latest version of mge. I’m not sure that they really always play nice together.
23/06/2009 at 15:42 Bruut says:
There used to be a mod called “Darker Music” which was awesome. It got removed due to copyright issues but you may be able to find it somewhere. Highly recommended.
Also the ambient sound packs mentioned before
23/06/2009 at 15:54 Talorc says:
Did anyone else accidentally read one of the mods as “better Breasts”? :-)
23/06/2009 at 16:12 jarvoll says:
I don’t really think adding a bunch of new monsters really affects Oblivion for the worse at all: it’s already full of generic fantasy stuff, so adding more doesn’t really spoil whatever lore is present. Also, all the giant frost-minataur-like additions are 1) really rare, and 2) only to be found in very remote locations, so the overall experience of moving around daily-life cyrodill isn’t changed at all. On the other hand, I could totally see the problem with Morrowind, and so find myself in agreement with most people here.
23/06/2009 at 16:13 jsutcliffe says:
The sad thing is, as much as I would like to play MW again, I would think the “fully modded” picture was vanilla MW unless I had been told, which tells me I’d not dig another playthrough because I’m a graphics whore.
I’m surprised the mods that green up the desert areas and add trees haven’t been mentioned*, because wandering around a ruined landscape gets depressing about after 30 hours or so of trudging. Which is precisely why I didn’t like Fallout 3.
* Actually, so many mods have been mentioned I could easily have missed that.
23/06/2009 at 16:52 drewski says:
@ Talorc – I’m sure that mod exists.
@ Wulf – couldn’t agree more. Morrowind’s original content, it’s original aesthetic is precisely what makes it so compelling. Oak trees? In MY Morrowind? Eugh.
Still looking forward to the diary. I’ll just ignore the Middle Earth Generic Bore screenshots.
23/06/2009 at 17:06 Adventurous Putty says:
I hink the worst thing poor Alec could’ve done is ask uswhat mods to use.;-)
I actually don’t think Vality’s swamp mod makes it look all that different, just more swampy. The fucking cow-sheep is what irks me; creature mods (besides one that adds a rideable pack guar) WILL kill the mood.
And to the one guy who said the art direction doesn’t matter: seriously? Mushroom towers, megafauna bugs, ash storms and crabshell cities didn’t DEFINE your Morrowind? A sad person, one who can’t appreciate Morrowind’s one claim to genius.
23/06/2009 at 18:03 undead dolphin hacker says:
Honestly following that Morrowind 2009 guide takes at least a day’s worth of gaming time (unless you’re unemployed/a student, and even then it’s about 50%, which I’d know because I’m the latter, which is a socially acceptable way of saying “both”). And you get to sign up for Fileplanet and some odd TES-exclusive site and navigate fifty different mirrors from sites with “Last Updated: 7/14/2005″ proudly displayed on the front page looking for one that’s not dead at this point.
And the only result is a graphical representation of that adage pointing out the inverse correlation between number of chefs and quality of a soup, a game that’s still fundamentally broken as a game, and maybe 2-6 hours of “legit” playtime with a character whose movespeed makes Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump look like a Kenyan in the Olympics before you either run off and do the potion exploit to have fun being a god for a couple hours, flying from one end of the whole world in five minutes or so, being able to cast spells with mana costs in the 1000s which one-shot anything in a 50ft radius, or paralyze everything in a 50-ft radius for 120 seconds, or cause entire cities to go mad with raging bloodlust, and then quit + uninstall because the game is designed solely around frustration and you just relieved it all and now you can see the whole thing is hollow, or you just plain quit+uninstall and realize the whole thing is founded on frustration because Lieutenant Dan is beating you in a footrace to Pelgaid and it takes ten swings before your weapon connects with a mudcrab despite the model passing smack through it and you’re chugging Restore Fatigue potions like a fat chick at a frat party hoping to get laid whether she’s conscious for it or not.
Fuck Morrowind; don’t waste your time; thanks for reading.
23/06/2009 at 20:21 Jonathan says:
Paul B says:
“If you look at the bigger picture, it’s got an udder and two horns, so I therefore pronounce it a cow. Good, let’s get the important questions out of the way first ;)”
You can milk goats, you know, so this fiery goat vs. cow debate is far from over.
Howard says:
“One question. The MGE seems pretty bloody useless to me apart from fixing wide-screen issues. ”
The long draw distance and increased detail in cells does it for me. And the full water reflections in the latest version looks gorgeous. Earlier versions of MGE water looked terrible.
I also don’t like the second picture. The trees are all wrong, and when does a dark elf have greasy hippie hair? Who decided that was better???
23/06/2009 at 20:23 Jonathan says:
Larington says:
“I tried to play the game yesterday, for the first time, using the set of mods listed previously, really struggling to get into it.”
Morrowind is one of the toughest games to get into, because the initial trials are spaced so far apart and so dull. Give it 4-5 hours, and you’ll fall in love. Unfortunately there’s no fix for the obtuse shop menus.
Mr.President says:
“Never understood the Internet’s acute hatred for cliff racers. Never even thought there was anything special about them until I read a Morrowind discussion on some gaming forum months later.”
There’s something wrong with the hit detection with them. They can stab you with their tails from too far away, and very often dead-on strikes to their heads and bodies don’t register. Plus you’re always fighting them on unlevel ground, which makes it even more maddening. I more than once fell off a mountain or got stuck in a crack while looking up swinging at those damn things.
23/06/2009 at 20:39 drewski says:
The thing with cliff racers that you wouldn’t have felt the satisfaction of one hit killing them at later levels if they weren’t annoying as all get out at earlier levels.
24/06/2009 at 00:34 malkav11 says:
Cliff racers were annoying because they were the only flying creature in the entire game, there were zillions of them, and so my Dagoth Ur-slaying omnipotent godcharacter zooming through the air with a ring of levitation and the Boots of Blinding Speed on would have to stop periodically and attend to smacking around pointless pterodactyl things or be driven slowly mad. Everything else was safely on the ground and out of the way.
And, for the record, I never knew about or used any potion exploit or acrobatics or any of that. there were perfectly legitimate enchantment options that combined with artifacts were quite broken enough. The aforementioned Boots + (low power, constant effect) ring of levitate being my favorite way of getting around, and things like constant effect restore fatigue and health items mean most enemies are even less threat than they might otherwise be.
28/06/2009 at 19:41 Princess Stomper says:
“Without a doubt, the goodly men’n’well-let’s-be-honest-it’s-pretty-much-all-men of the Morrowind modding community have done jawdropping things to this olden RPG.”
Heh – I know you apologised, but it’s just funny considering about 50% of Morrowind modders are female including at least 8 from your list! :D
01/07/2009 at 12:40 Melupom says:
I bought Morrowind recenly for my PC, and decided to try these mods out. after many hours, and evntually having to start the game again, am still crashing randomly and when i try to exit game, or Ctrl+Alt+Del – a message says something about a driver called atikmdag…
08/07/2009 at 13:34 UK_John says:
I have MGE with grass and water and infinite view and everything. MGE doesn’t like the FPS optimizer, etc, and for me only works if I install Morrowind Script Extender and then switch off the internal script extender in MGE and then start the game with MSE. Also, if you go to the MGE forum you can find out how, using the macro section, how to get the game to save every x amount of minutes.
Here’s a couple Morrowind pics of my game, and you can also go to PES, go to the Morrowind POTD and put ‘Jaffah’ in as author to get my other Morrowind pics. You may be surprised…!
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/8509/mgescreenshot1.jpg
http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/4268/mgescreenshot55.jpg