As cool as Morrowind is, the fun-o-meter is just much lower than Oblivion. I appreciate them both but damn if it isn't tough to play through ES3 these days.
As cool as Morrowind is, the fun-o-meter is just much lower than Oblivion. I appreciate them both but damn if it isn't tough to play through ES3 these days.
The fun meter is determined by the most stupid spell you can make that kills you in the process, be it nuclear explosion or launching yourself into space
Thank goodness for mods
Nah that's vanilla baby. The spell system is just bonkers.
I meant for Oblivion. I have played Morrowind and am familiar with the spell system.
As someone who loved Morrowind when it came out and revisited it a few years ago... yes. You gotta mod the ever living shit out of Morrowind to make it enjoyable for modern standards, and even then it still has tons of issues that make it more difficult to get into initially.
It's one of the reasons I hope the Skywind team can one day finish their project.
I played it pretty much vanilla via OpenMW just this year, and I think it holds up incredibly. There are a few glaring design issues as far as combat goes, but you can pretty easily and quickly break the game around it. I made a point to google almost nothing as well, so I can also honestly say that it’s very intuitive, give or take a couple inaccurate or inadequate quest descriptions.
After playing Oblivion and Skyrim i am now 100 hours into Morrowind, just finished main story and getting into the DLCs.
I followed a guide from /r/morrowind and installed just essential QoL mods.
I knew what i was getting myself into so my expectations weren't that high gameplay wise but the story was well worth it.
I did follow the wiki while trying to avoid as many spoilers as i could. I usually try to go for game completion but i skipped many side quests.
It was fun seeing what oblivion and skyrim evolved from. But after i finish the expansions i'm probably not gonna touch it again. The only person i would ever recommend this game to is someone who played both skyrim and oblivion and still feel like they need more of this universe.
Time to fire up Daggerfall!
Well said. I'll revisit it oneday when I am truly feeling like a glutton for punishment and am craving a tier-1 world with a great story.
I'd strongly prefer however for a fan mod project to finish making a refined version on another platform.
It can be as brutally and unforgivingly difficult, but modern games better understand what types of difficulty feel sane and fair.
What the world really needs is to bring skyrim to the morrowind engine
*Elder Scrolls Online to the Morrowind engine. And tell no players until the update pushes.
I speficifally remember forgetting to sleep to level for a while, having a decent time. And when I finally decided to sleep, I leveled like 10 levels in an instant, and because the whole world leveled with me, when I woke up, every god damn villager and bandit were running around in glass armor and shit. It completely spoiled the game for me.
Morrowinds world was completely independent from the PC which worked because how hand-crafted the world was. You actually had to go to the specific dungeon the unique glass-armor pieces were placed. I also thorougly prefer text-based dialog over voicecasting, but it was inevitable to move to voiced NPCs.
To clarify for anyone who hasn't played, in Morrowind npcs for the most part do not level up with you, the first part is referring to Oblivion where if you level up a lot, the random bandit robbing you for 10 gold has daedric armor. In Morrowind only a few thins were level dependent, like crypts.
As with all Bethesda games, mods fix this
I love the rpg elements, I just find the game is a bit too clunky.
I can't even play Oblivion. I fell in love with Skyrim, but had never played TES before. I tried Oblivion when I got it on a good sale and it just felt like going backwards plus I have no nostalgia to make me want to play it more. So I just never picked it back up after a single session. :(
That's what i said about Morrowind a few years ago. Now i'm 100 hours into it. Give it time.
See I have loads of nostalgia for Oblivion but whenever I get the urge to install it again I just remember how the last three times I did that I played until I escaped the prison and then realized I have done everything in that game and couldn't think of anything I wanted to do.
Yeah I’m also not great at replaying games. Skyrim I replayed because I did warewolf stormcloak the first time and the second time the vampire lord dlc was out so I did vampire lord imperial. Like there were some different paths to go down but as far as side quests went it wasn’t that exciting to play a second time. I keep getting the urge to play it again, but I think I would be like you and just realize I did everything I wanted to do.
Oblivion has a larger focus on different styles of game play imo. But they are both very dated. I'd rather play Breath of the Wild and love every minute of it
I really wanted to get into morrowind but the combat having attacks just miss randomly killed a lot of momentum for me. Maybe another time
I bounced off the game a couple times until I really learned to manage my fatigue. With a full bar and a weapon you're trained in, missing won't be much of a problem, which is why starting out as a Redguard warrior is so nice. They get +15 to long blade, so by then selecting it as a major skill, you can start out at skill level 50. Then, they also have the adrenaline rush ability, which boosts many close-combat relevant attributes by 50. After that, all you need to do is take it slow and let the enemies run to you.
Scumming Athletics to 100 also helps so that you can run everywhere without being penalized for it in combat
I used a console command to boost my speed to 200 base right off the boat because I'll be damned if I'm gonna spend entire minutes just to walk to the other side of town.
Yeah, they tried to use mechanics that work well in turn based or isometric RPGs in a first person one and it just didn't work well.
It definitely sucks to adjust to, but it also makes it satisfying to get to the point where you can consistently land good hits in combat. Once you get a few levels in a weapon it gets much less frustrating.
That's how I feel. If your character is built correctly it shouldn't be much of an issue beyond the first few levels.
Buy a bound weapon, they automatically have a fortify skill of that weapon on them and they weigh nothing because they're summoned in. They're sold in Balmora Mage Guild.
Even if you don't pick a race that's good for them, you can easily get around 40 in a weapon skill the moment you leave Customs and Excise if you just select the correct skills and specialisations.
Trust me, with the enemies that are around Seyda Neen, you really shouldn't be missing at all. Morrowind is not as hard as it's memed to be.
Get the “always hits” mod and the game becomes much more bearable
Don't cast a spell with your fatigue that low. That heavily affects your cast chance.
I haven’t laughed this hard in a while
Would playing Morrowind with mods that make the game a bit more accessible ruin the experience? Like if I mod the stamina for running thing off and got rid of the dice rolls on attacks, would that ruin the core experience?
The only mods i would recommend, besides those listed by r/Morrowind as essential, would be maybe increased movement speed. If you build your character skills properly and be patient for a couple of levels while you skill them up i don't think it should be a problem.
I made a wood elf (high agility), picked a 25 agility birthsign and had no problems missing with a bow after a couple of levels. Picked acrobatics and athletics as main skills and i was jumping around everywhere to increase my skills but it still felt painfully slow to move for a long time.
Everyone is different though. Some people have no problem modding games. I enjoy games as vanilla as possible.
does the core experience really matter if you're not having any fun?
Yes, it would ruin a lot of the mechanics. Those things like the stamina cost of running and the chance of failing to hit are pretty core to the game, and can't be ripped out without big consequences. If you can sprint everywhere all the time, combat is broken because you can now endlessly kite most enemies, whose speed is balanced around sprinting having a cost. If you hit all the time, that strips out mechanics from half of the skills, attributes, and spells in the game.
Trust me, it'll be much, much more satisfying to tough it out and live with a little bit of frustration in the early levels. Morrowind is a game that will teach you lessons (often by killing you), and if you're paying attention you'll learn how to overcome every single one of those frustrations, step by step, on your journey from punching bag to god. By the end of the game, you'll likely have infinite stamina and be immune to missing attacks, and you'll have done it with your own efforts.
I did my first playthrough heavily modded and I enjoyed it a lot. If you think some of the old mechanics sound unfun then get a mod for it. They old mechanics aren't crucial to enjoy the game.
Why there isn't a okbuddy subreddit about tes? I think it would be nice.
Have you checked out /r/TrueSTL?
Being born under the Tower I never had this problem. Lots of problems elsewhere but not with locks.
16-year-old me used the money from his first two paychecks to buy an OG Xbox. When I had enough cash, I high-tailed it to Walmart with my cousin and set out to make a purchase.
Thanks to my subscription of EGM and my perusing of GameFAQs, I knew that the must-have game to own was Halo. When we arrived at Walmart, I lined up a buy for the console, an extra controller (The smaller controller and not another one of these God-awful monstrosities), and a copy of Halo. While we were there, I noticed that the controller was cheap enough that I had some extra cash to get a second game. On my cousin's recommendation, I swiped a copy of Morrowind: GOTY Edition for $20.
Arriving home, I hastily set up the console and loaded up Halo. Spent a good hour or two playing the main story with my cousin. After a few levels in, he suggested I load into Morrowind and give it a whirl, even though it was single player.
As soon as I set foot in Seyda Neen, I was immediately hooked. I had never played such an open-world RPG like this and instantly fell in love. What proceeded to follow for the next several years was me pouring literally THOUSANDS of hours into Morrowind. I liked it so much, it's ultimately led to me building my first custom PC so I could play it with better performance and modding support.
It wasn't anywhere close to perfect, (especially with how downright broken a lot of stuff was and how annoying certain elements could be in the game), but I loved it nonetheless. It was the first time I really OBSESSED over a video game.
I often times make it a point to go back and play it occasionally. Nowadays, there are tons of mods you can install to fix game issues and improve specific systems. Certain facets of the gameplay are direly in need of overhaul (Looking at a Stamina-based combat system tied to how much current stamina you have), but the lore and the surrounding cities and settings are among some of the best designed in any video game.
It was truly a ground-breaking experience and I'm sad more people didn't experience it when it was fresh. I have a very powerful nostalgia for that game as it saw me through some tough times. It may be a mess mechanically, but I will never stop loving that game.
... how is it snowing underwater tho...
This is the hibernation episode where they were trapped inside Sandy’s Tree Dome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9BdL4A6oY
Ah the good ol’ days when I didn’t know what rng was. 🥴
im sorry but how in the alabama fuck do you lock pick a steering wheel?
I will defend Morrowind to the death, and I still think it’s the best Elder Scrolls game to date.
That being said, there are a LOT of elements in it that have either aged poorly or were terrible even at the time. The spell system is definitely one of those elements
Having spell/attack success dependent on your current stamina level was a brutal design choice when running costs stamina
Yeah, not their best idea
It's realistic though. You try swinging a sword after running until you're winded. But yeah, realism doesn't belong in every game.
It would also be realistic that when you are hit by a sword your cut gets infected and you die of dysentery over the course of the next week.
Somebody hire this man!
Funny you mention it because that was very much in the game. Some mobs give you diseases on attacks, and you had to have disease healing potions of the right high-level spell to remove it.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Diseases
Some mobs. It's not like every scrape or eaten piece of meat has the chance to give you a debilitating disease. MW also doesn't make you constantly eat and sleep in order to not die. The point is that pretty much every game makes concessions to make the game fun.
No I get your point, I just thought it was funny you used that as an example when diseases were such a big part of the game. In fact the main plot of the whole game was about the Corpsus disease and how to cleanse the world from it. There were large parts of the world you couldn't really travel through if you didn't have proper ways to deal with diseases.
Eating and sleeping were pretty cleverly implemented IMO. You didn't have to do it "realistically", you ate/drank for buffs and sleeping to heal/level, which made it not tedious.
I have mixed feelings on the disease system. Some of them were interesting in that they required you to address them or be inconvenienced in some way, and there were multiple ways of curing them. The Corprus disease was a fun part of the main quest. However, some diseases just fucked you. I distinctly remember getting debuffed by a disease so hard when I went to a high level area early in the game, I was overencumbered at 0/0 and had to load an earlier save.
Yeah, in morrowind when stats are damaged they remain that way until you cure them with a specific spell/potion/temple visit. It's most annoying when fighting bonewalkers since they damage your strength, and as you know getting strength damaged to 0 is practically a softlock.
For the ultimate realism, they should make the protagonist a peasant farmer who just works in the mud all day every day for their entire life and then dies without ever leaving their immediate area or doing anything interesting with their life.
Oh please, it's not a digestive issue. You'd also be likely to die of sepsis or gangrene.
Tbf that's basically Fallout 4's survival difficulty.
"put it in reverse, 'Terry"
Kingdom Come: Deliverance has entered the chat
We're talking about realism in a game of fantastic beasts and magic?
Not just running. Even walking at a glacial pace drains stamina over time. Walking, running, jumping, attacking, etc. Basically everything uses stamina.
Old ass thread but fortify stamina spells go a looooong way
I will die on this hill. The spell system was awesome.
Getting around by casting a magnitude 100 Feather + Fortify Athletics = Hulk jumping across the continent.
The magic crafting system has so many possibilities!
It’s hella fun when you’ve figured out how to break it. But from a complete newcomer it’s cumbersome and difficult to figure out. And for a game this old, accessibility becomes critical because a frustrated new player will just play something else
Morrowind was true to its DND tabletop rpg roots. Modern RPGs are mostly just action-adventure games set in fantasy settings.
Which is fine by me, those are much more fun to actually play. If I wanted tabletop I'd go play tabletop, where the imagination helps cover a lot of the dice rolling shortcomings.
Exactly. People forget that table top games are designed to have a human control everything so that things remain balanced and fun. Trying to transfer that 1 to 1 into a game means that you have to try and predict how people are going to play the game.
I keep trying my hardest to get into Morrowind, but goddamn is it hard. Like I just installed it the other day, I got off the boat and went to the town and bought a silver long sword from a broker since it was the weapon I was most proficient in, it broke on the second enemy and died to a worm
Silver weapons have low durability but are effective against ghosts and other monsters. Try an iron or steel sword. Also watch your stamina to make sure it hasn’t depleted when fighting. GL
I couldn't find one in the entire town, maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough. I checked the merchant and the fighter's guild but no one had a long sword other than one that was like 10000 gold
Try the Razor Hole (?); weapons shop with decent selection. Could also try the pawn shop or Ra’virrs place. In Seyda Neen, Arrile’s Tradehouse might have something.
In Balmora in the top floor of one of the guard towers, there is a sword sitting on top of a wardrobe. In order to take it without being detected by the guard who is standing RIGHT next to it, you'll need to hide behind a pillar in the middle of the room and use some form of telekinesis. Check the Alchemist shop in town, she might have one in stock I don't remember off the top of my head.
Hint: in the swamp just outside of the first town, you'll be able to find a corpse with an enchanted longsword. It's always the very first thing I do when I start a new game. You'll also pick up a scrolls which have a rather interesting effect.
But, yeah, the start of the game is brutal. Sometimes a bug will just paralyse you and there's nothing you can do until you die. That gets better as you go along, but there are some of the mechanics (particularly around fatigue) that are always just a bit annoying.
Right near seyda neen there will be a book on the ground and a man named Tarheel plummeting to the earth. He dies on Impact and has an iron sparksword on him that is very handy to sword characters. It's not far away from the town, very little risk.
He also has a scroll that makes you jump like 1000' in the air. Good shit lol
There are two mods that I absolutely require for any playthroughs on my PC: Graphic Herbalism & Speed andStamina. The first bypasses the plant sub menu (now when you click a plant you either pick it or fail.) The second increases base movement speed, and stamina does not decrease while running. Too me, these are necessary QoL improvements.
The speed issue is pretty easy to cheese in vanilla morrowind. There's an item called the boots of blinding speed that fortifies speed by 200 points but blinds you, and you can get it at the very start of the game. You just need to cast a spell of resist magic 100% for 1 second before you put them on, and it won't blind you. Then you can run like the flash for the rest of your playthrough.
If you want a character that's really, really good at winning combat dice rolls without cheating in any way, try:
You'll start with 50 Longblade, 60 Strength, 50 Agility, and 40 Luck plus an innate +10 attack. The accuracy formula* will give you a 92.5% chance to hit before enemy evasion right out of the gate, or 102.5% when you use your racial ability. You'll also have enough Strength to make each hit do pretty significant damage.
*Accuracy in % = [relevant weaponskill level] + Agility/5 + Luck/10 + Attack, all multiplied by a fatigue modifier ranging from 75% at 0 to 125% at max.
Last time I played, a met a woman only 5 minutes into the game, who wanted to tell me a secret for 50 gold. I said no, she said fuck you die.
It is definitely a game best enjoyed with certain quality of life mods. Getting the “never miss” mod is almost a necessity unless you want to use console commands to really boost your combat skills.
The game is great because of its complex story and the depth of the lore, the combat itself is at best mediocre
It's crazy how hard it was for the RPG genre to move past its dice-based roots.
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When you look at the design history of most things, you realize that people getting things right the first try are monumentally rare.
Those never miss mods literally ruin the game lol so much of the game’s balance is based around that system. It is not hard to create a character from the start that has a decent enough weapon skill to hit most of the time as long as you’re managing your stamina.
It’s not hard if you’ve played the game already. For new players the game’s mechanics are way outdated and frustrating
People can play these games however they want but I just want to put it out there that installing one of those mods nearly voids any need to level weapon skills and will ruin the normal character progression. You’re supposed to be weak starting out in MW. Tough it out and train your character’s skills and by the end of the game you’ll be steamrolling through dungeons, all with the satisfaction of having started from nothing.
Yeah!
puts rubber band on controller and sneaks in the corner for 4 hours
None of that changes the fact that swinging your sword at an enemy, seeing it clearly hit them, and then being told it missed is a terrible user experience.
The whole point of dice rolls and stats in TTRPGs was to replace player skill with character skill. A DM isn't going to tell a player to pull out a rubber sword and try to hit a moving skeleton puppet they made (although that would be awesome), so dice rolls were necessary to simulate challenge.
When you start to add player skill challenges back into RPGs, it can be really hard to balance them with existing character skill features. Morrowind was one of the first games to try it, and by extension failed as much as it succeeded. The current consensus seems to be that character skill should make player skill challenges easier or harder, but never impossible. A game can make your health lower, stamina lower, attack rate slower, damage lower, etc. because all of those things are still possible to overcome. If the game straight-up tell you "I know it looks like you hit that enemy, but your character is really weak so you actually missed", they might as well go back to point-and-click.
There's a reason why even the most role playing focused ARPGs released after Morrowind dropped the random miss mechanic.
100% this. The dice were never the point of TTRPGs, they are a means of extrapolating character performance from a series of stats and modifiers without having to either keep track of the most minute data points (what video games are good at) or relying completely on arbitrary rulings from a GM with nothing to reference.
A lot of newer popular systems have actually veered away from dependence on dice rolls. D&D 5E, for instance, requires a lot fewer dice rolls for things like spells and abilities to succeed compared to previous editions, and there are now a few passive skill checks that prevent the need to roll altogether, to the extent that players may not know a check is even being made.
One of the more difficult aspects of running a TTRPG game today is still with separating the concepts of player skill and character skill. It is fun and creative to create actual puzzles that a party can solve IRL to open a secret chamber in a dungeon, but how does a player who might easily know the answer roleplay that as his 8 INT Barbarian? Likewise, if a player has an 18 in CHA but the player themselves are a bit socially awkward, they shouldn't need to pass persuasion checks in the form of a real conversation, that is why a persuasion skill exists in the first place.
Games are the polar opposite, where stats exists to promote or inhibit what the player is actually capable of doing on their own. The gameplay in Skyrim is very basic, but it is nevertheless a significant improvement over Morrowind's.
I'm feeling personally attacked. I just wanted to play a cool sorcerer, I can't talk for shit (>_<)
That doesn't sound an iota of fun given basically everyone in this thread saying how dogshit the combat is.
It hasn't aged very well, frankly. The world and exploration are still fantastic, but it's wrapped up in gameplay that was already dated in 2002.
Watching a playthrough won't do the exploration justice, but it might be your best option if you find the game unpalatable.
These are the stories that you'll look back on fondly when you've sunk a little more time into the game and become a god. My experience like that was wandering into a cave near Seyda Need thinking "this is a beginner area what's the worst that could happen" and getting insta-murdered by the first person inside.
You just need to find your way to Balmora and start living as a member of the fighter/mages/thieves guild and go from there.
I played Morrowind after Skyrim and despite that I feel a weird sense of nostalgia towards the game even though I've never played it as a kid. Something about the world and the music just reminded me about early 2000's games in the best ways. So I can definitely see past its flaws.
The best music of the Elder Scrolls series, IMO.
Absolutely, personally I prefer Oblivion's soundtrack, Auriel's Ascension in particular but Morrowind's main theme is a close second.
Heelllll NAH. Spell system in morrowind kicked ass. It was obtuse, but it was the most fun in terms of the unlimited options and freedom it allowed, just like actual dnd style games.
the thing is there are so many ways as you progress to completely break the magic system in a good way and basically become a god... which you technically sort of are.
I feel like each elder scrolls game has strayed further from what made Morrowind so great while improving the actual gameplay.
I have fond memories and rose tinted glasses for it too. I have to say though, I definitely had far more fun with Skyrim. A Morrowind remake would be welcome, but I doubt that will ever be on the cards since it's apparently taken 10 years to make ES6, or 14 years if rumours are believed on the expected launch date.
It was my first open world game, I loved it to death and never really even got into the story. I was just amazed that I could run around to anyone, punch them to death, and steal literally everything from them.
I've tried to play that game so many times but have never continued a playthrough past like 5 hours. There was always an Incredible game visible beneath the horribly dated gameplay, few games manage to match the rich feeling the games world has. Someday I will finish a playthrough.
Get the mod that makes every attack hit, it makes the irritating combat much more bearable, which will make the rest of it easier to enjoy
I was a Morrowind holdout for a while until i realized that removing attack misses and spell failures makes the combat way more fun and it makes the game overall way more accessible.
Creating a levitation spell or wearing mach-speed boots is fun and it's annoying that the future games didn't have this, but I think Oblivion is the best experience imo. I may have been too old for Skyrim tho.
Also voice acting. Elder scrolls vo isn't great but it's often better/more immersive than reading.
I haven't played Morrowind, but I know a fair bit about it, and it seems to me that Morrowind was just a great world, with great stories, and it really let you influence that world and those stories.
Then Oblivion had worse stories, and a worse world (although I overwhelmingly prefer Cyrodiil over Vvardenfell and greater Morrowind), but better gameplay, and then Skyrim continued those trends. Except that the world and stories get worse than the gameplay improves with each game.
I'm so incredibly curious about TES VI. I wonder what they're going to do with the gameplay. Specifically the magic, which I find beyond annoying to manage in Skyrim. And of course, I wonder, especially after Fallout 4, how complex the dialogue will be.
After Fallout 76 and TES Blades, my hopes are not very high that modern Bethesda has what it takes to make something at least as good as Skyrim again, much less something as good as Morrowind
Yeah, I'm on the same page, really. There is still some hope, because Fallout 76 was an experiment, and TES Blades.. well, it's inexcusable, but it's still just yet another overly monetized cash grab of a big IP.
Disappointing, but not surprising.
But honestly, if TES VI takes place in High Rock, that would do a lot for me. And despite the many lessons we've learned about Bethesda, I still hope that they've learned too, from all the feedback they got from Fallout 4. And the response to FO76 made it very clear how attached people are to human NPCs. So maybe, just maybe, Bethesda will put some extra effort into that part.
At the expense of something else, obviously, since it is still Bethesda.
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As someone who's played a lot of oblivion and morrowind, I'm one of those people. Skyrim has broad appeal and it's easy for anyone to pick up and play, but for me personally the mechanics are way too shallow.
I know it's a meme at this point, but I also like how in Morrowind you don't get any map markers. I feel so immersed in the world when I actually need to check a note in my inventory to remember the name of the person I'm supposed to talk to and the route I need to take to get there, stopping to read road signs on the way to make sure I'm on the right path.
If I was a complete newcomer to RPGs and tried morrowind for the first time, I probably would just be frustrated.
I understand exactly how you feel. I did my damndest to enjoy Planescape Torment but its combat system is horrendous. And that’s with explicitly avoiding the magic system because I was warned it’s not noob- friendly. I could look past the very dated graphics and extremely dated cutscenes, but I could not endure the actual gameplay, which felt like a worse version of KOTOR.
Best I can advise for Morrowind is looking up the console commands to put all your combat skills at like, 40, so you can at least quickly finish combat and get back to the good parts of the game.
Dude I agree but I could never do anything in that game. I couldn't tell you how many times I was fighting something but died because I wasn't good enough at using a heavy melee weapon. Swing swing swing swing hit swing swing swing swing swing hit swing...... Screw that game... but also it's good