Morrowind evaluation thread

[Macaco]

Okay, i just made this thread so people can condense all their "Omg morrowind sux" commentaries in a single place. I hope this will avoid people repeating themselves over and over, act as the one stop for discussing the bethesda games so they dont infect the other parts of this forum, ans also to act as a resource of tips for the developers, if they want to read it. Depending on the response on this, we could even create a topic to discuss the POSITIVE aspects of their game that we think could have some place in a fallout game.


So without further ado, here are my 2 cents:

-The dialog never involved you and made you feel like you were really talking to someone, felt more like you were always reading some book about the topic.

-Combat was unbelievably boring, usually boiled down to you standing in front of your enemy and mashing the mouse till the enemy dropped.

-Lots of generic npcs and quests, most of the choices you made didnt really have deep consequences, such as wich factions you joined usually not mattering to the other factions.

-The character development system was flawed and easily exploitable, you could gain a lot of levels simply by duct taping control and leaving your character behind someone in a bar.

 

[Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude]

Bah, i dont think morrowind was THAT bad. I actually enjoyed playing through the game and beating it. Although it was QUITE tedius, and most quests consisted of: take item from point a to point b, then find out that you cant get the item you came for unless you traveled back to point a and killed somthing, then travel back to point b and tell them what you did, and then recieve some incredibly useless item like expensive pants, or a piece of silverware even though you spent WAY more money on repair and transportation fees than 10x the price of the useless item even at its retail price...

 

[Darkwaters]

I've said this before at the Bethsoft forums, but I'll restate here in case you hadn't read all 100 pages of the ongoing Fallout thread.

The entire premise of the Morrowind game seems to be that any character can do anything. The game very rarely makes the player do something decisive that would affect their character's standing in the world. And every character can join every faction AND be its leader. Every class can do everything equally well with enough levels in that area.

Also, a huge problem I have with the game is that it does not allow for any NPC party members. If Bethesda makes Fallout w/o NPC party members...oh...there WILL be hell to pay. Dogmeat must return!

 

[AliasiSudonomo]

Also, a huge problem I have with the game is that it does not allow for any NPC party members. If Bethesda makes Fallout w/o NPC party members...oh...there WILL be hell to pay. Dogmeat must return!

Uhh.... what?

You can have companion NPCs in Morrowind. The capability was present in the basic game and further extended in the Tribunal expansion. There's also companion plug-ins that add some very complex NPCs with subquests, custom dialog, and all.

The real strength of Morrowind is the extensive modability of the game; there's the tools for the greatest RPG ever in the engine; the problem being that Bethesda was making an engine AND a game and the game suffered. Kind of like any id software product, come to think of it.

If they use modified Morrowind technology for a Fallout 3, then even if the game as-is sucks I expect the fan-made content will make it superb. I get excited by the very IDEA of moddable Fallout.

 

[Briosafreak]

then even if the game as-is sucks I expect the fan-made content will make it superb.

It`s their job to make a good game, not the fans. Then call it a construction kitt, but don`t call it Fallout3.

 

[Role-Player]

then even if the game as-is sucks I expect the fan-made content will make it superb.

It`s their job to make a good game, not the fans. Then call it a construction kitt, but don`t call it Fallout3.

Ditto. Lets not have another of those fiascos. We want content, not window dressing.

 

[AliasiSudonomo]

then even if the game as-is sucks I expect the fan-made content will make it superb.

It`s their job to make a good game, not the fans. Then call it a construction kitt, but don`t call it Fallout3.

That was an "if", and I expect any Bethesda Fallout to be quite a bit better than that worst-case scenario. Bethesda themselves acknowledge the problems with Morrowind, after all - the devs have never been afraid to say "what the hell were we THINKING?!" in regards to the game.

One of the good points of the expansions was to fix what they could, but the basic rules-system was pretty weak - there's better NPC interaction and such, but you can still get to ungodly levels by putting a rubber band on your keyboard or controller and standing in the right place.

I expect any BethFallout to have the good qualities of previous games while learning from their mistakes. I also expect a BethFallout to slaughter sacred cows left, right, and center but as long as it keeps the Fallout feel - and is, incidently, a good game - I don't really care.

I'm hoping it's more like the move from Master of Orion to MOO2 than MOO2 to MOO3, in other words.

 

[PhredBean]

I've said this before at the Bethsoft forums, but I'll restate here in case you hadn't read all 100 pages of the ongoing Fallout thread.

Hmmmm... can you get us a link to these forums? So they too can be flooded with seething, frothing masses of unwashed, rabid, fallout fanatics.

 

[Odin]

Hmmmm... can you get us a link to these forums? So they too can be flooded with seething, frothing masses of unwashed, rabid, fallout fanatics.

Bing, one warning to you.. We're not unwashed, rabid, Fallout fanatics...

 

[Nyarlathotep]

While Morrowind's dialog system was one of the things responsible for it's sterility, I did enjoy the searchability. It's very userfriendly when it comes to looking up what was said about a certain subject. Much better than scrolling trough an endless log that chronologically recorded everything that was said. And hyperlinking between entries was good.

A real dialog system combined with this searchability would be bliss.

 

[tired007]

I actually enjoyed morrowind

I must confess enjoyed Morrowind. It did seem pretty empty but there was always something to do, very open ended. I also loved the fact that you could create your own items. I remember creating a flying ring so I could avoid all the random encounters on the ground. The only bad thing about it was that if I was careful, it's charge would run out and I would fall to my death. (Happened several times).
I actually wouldn't mind seeing something along those lines in Fallout 3. I know in fallout 1/2 you could go to the local traders and have a few items upgraded, but I would like to more upgradability to the items in future games. It would be interesting to see the diffrent kinds of weapons people can dream of, something like a combat shotgun with a bowie knife soldered on the end or a dagger you can attach explosives to. I know that these suggestions are kind of lame but I think you can understand where I'm coming from.
Anyway, that my two cents worth.

 

[PsychoSniper]

Ah, an invasion of bethesda fanbois.

Quick, someone call Rosh

 

[NgInE]

Morrowind was ok. not really my type of game. i've played first-person RPG's before (Might and Magic) but i still prefure isometric RPG's because you have a much greater overview of the world around you and allows more detail (since you're not ontop of things). plus turn-based combat in FPRPG's sucks ass. it just does. the nice thing of Fallout was, that with the action-point system and the grid, you could plan your actions out in alot of detail. with FP turn-based, it's more like guessing how close or far you can get to an enemy, before your turn is over. very frustrating. graphically submersive to isometric and also; dumb quests. i don't want to walk for hours, to dig up some paperclips in a cave, so i can get 1 GP, some XP and another quest involving finding stuff that dumb NPC's have misplaced (yeah, misplaced it a couple of miles away, in some bush placed in a forrest full of bushes with the exact same texture).

the worst quest ever, was finding some wierd ape-people in 'Betreal at Antara'. they were supposed to be in a cave along the shore. well guess what? there were DOZENS of caves, each going beneath the ground for miles!!! it sucked and i don' t like a scenario like that when i try to find a waterchip or an iguana-on-a-stick.

 

[Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude]

As i recall most "find the cave" quests in morrowind consisted of the npc giving you a VERY vague description of where to find it and there was normally 15 or more of such "caves" in the general area and most of them were VERY hard to find. Example: most of the imperial legions quests involve finding a cave or ruin and rescuing a person inside it, and these caves are usually right next to some other cave with obsurdly high level creatures which kill you in one hit.

 

[Bradylama]

Since everybody's already mentioned my issues with Morrowind I might as well say what I did like about it:

- Huge world.
The first person perspective combined with the massive size of the gameworld gave the legitimate impression of exploration. The last frontier on the earth is at the bottom of the sea, and until we can get there Morrowind satiated the desire for adventure.

- Skill based ruleset.
Any break from the usual XP crunchers is a welcome one. Though the system was exploitable, and the means of levelling weren't properly explained in the manual, it felt more realistic.

-The First Person view itself.
In my experience its much more immersive to see a humanoid crocodile that can easily tear your avatar to shreds when you see it from your avatar's eyes instead of from the ceiling.


Factions needed a lot of work. The only ones you joined that affected the others were the Fighter's Guild quests, Thieve's Guild quests, and the Great Houses. Dialog was linear, which made the intimidation function absolutely useless.

And cut that "Morrerwind fanboys durhur" shit. Its not very becoming.

 

[Macaco]

- Huge world.
The first person perspective combined with the massive size of the gameworld gave the legitimate impression of exploration. The last frontier on the earth is at the bottom of the sea, and until we can get there Morrowind satiated the desire for adventure.

I have to agree with that, it was by far the best thing in morrowind, i think i spent over half of my playtime just wandering around...

And cut that "Morrerwind fanboys durhur" shit. Its not very becoming.

They can be a little agressive towards us, but i wouldn't say that was totally unjustified. And, as far as fans go, the morrowind ones aren't the worst of the bunch.

 

[Claw]

I was quite impressed by MW on first sight. It was truly immersive to behold the beautiful world with the best water I had ever seen from the 1st person perspective.
And I kept enjoying it for quite a while.. I remember when I first crossed a bridge to the blight, and suddenly a sandstorm appeared out of nowhere.. it was quite scary actually, and I crouched close to an abadoned cart until it was over.
After a while though, the annoying details got through to me. There was some flaw in the stat system that made me want to distribute my skill useage evenly over two or three skills.. it had something to do with new attribute points you got at a new level based on how much experience you accumulated in some skills. I cannot recall the details but it was always at the back of my head, bugging me.
Another was how shallow the NPCs where... but unlike Fallout, you didn't know who was just some dumb statist and who was important. You could talk to some guy for ten minutes until you found out he knew something or was just another filler.

The lousy combat was another thing. I played a mage, had some fun with self-made spells, especially the vampiric sort. Nice particle effects and all, but the spell creation system felt so sterile and I was discouraged as I noticed how spells I could aquire ingame were superior to my self-made ones.

At some point, I very suddenly lost all interest. One reason was how much time I had to invest to get anywhere, too.
Oh, and the German language version. My fault really, but it also helped to highlight how sloppy many mods were made. I wanted mods to spice up the game yet felt threatened by the mods at the same time.
Oh, and once I had to correct a bug in a script manually because an NPC thought I had already completed the game or something, and I needed the conversation to end correctly to continue the main quest. FFS.
In the end, I was dissatisfied by the original game, had issues with the mods, and got bored as other games came out that didn't force me to edit them so they are actually engaging.


Oh yeah, and the "mobs" weren't area-dependant but level-dependant. That hurt so bad. First the land was empty, and at later levels all sorts of creatures attacked you every few steps, even on the main travel routes. Bloody annoying cr*p.

Bing, one warning to you.. We're not unwashed, rabid, Fallout fanatics...

I take it you have scrubbed yourself thoroughly recently.

 

[Jabbapop]

per the leveling.

You get one point towards a level for each increase to every major or minor skill you upgrade. When you reach 10 points, you level. As to the stat upgrades per level: Depending on what core stat class the skill was of (personality, speed, agility, etc), you get an extra point modifier point. For example, if short blade and acrobatics account for 5 of your points toward the level, both of which are Speed skills, you can upgrade 5 points in your speed at the time of the levelling.


I felt while playing morrowind that there isn't really any type of freedom when it comes to completing the quests. There's only one way to complete the quests, and none of the npcs other than the quest giver really seem to care or think differently about you after the quest is completed. I liked how, for example, if you joined the slavers guild in FO2 other npcs will think differently of you. Or in FO1, you could decide to help out an opposing faction such as gizmo instead of killian. In morrowind, the only real 'karma' rating is your bounty level when you commit a crime, which can be easily reset back to 0 with a few thousand coins.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

- Huge world.
The first person perspective combined with the massive size of the gameworld gave the legitimate impression of exploration. The last frontier on the earth is at the bottom of the sea, and until we can get there Morrowind satiated the desire for adventure.

This is really the only thing I liked about Morrowind as well... Until the pointless walking sinks in, then it starts to get annoying as hell. If Morrowind had one blessing, it's that, but then you just get tired of it.

- Skill based ruleset.
Any break from the usual XP crunchers is a welcome one. Though the system was exploitable, and the means of levelling weren't properly explained in the manual, it felt more realistic.

Prelude to Darkness did it MUCH better. In Prelude, you'd get skill points for doing quests, but also the use of skills advanced them a bit. So, you not only had usage advancement, but also you'd get a few skill points every so often so you could hone one that way as well.

That said, I hated how attributes advanced on a level up. Depending on what you did through the course of that level up, you might get an attribitrary amount of attribute points you could use to raise only those attributes that were used during that time. Even then, sometimes you'd question what choices you were given. I've been beating on things with a large axe, where's my Strength field in what I can pour some points in to? That and the "I got 5 points last time, why am I only getting 3 points this time?" thing bugged me.

I'm sure realism is the goal, but I can't say it was that great in reality.

-The First Person view itself.
In my experience its much more immersive to see a humanoid crocodile that can easily tear your avatar to shreds when you see it from your avatar's eyes instead of from the ceiling.

I don't normally wear a blinder box on my head, so it didn't remind me of looking through my eyes at all. What I did notice was that I had cliff racers attacking me and it took me a while to spin my little first person view point around to tell where the damned things were coming from, thus making me remember that I'm way too limited to too small a field of view in first person and also that I'm fighting with the controls of the game to figure out what I should easily be figuring out if the perspective wasn't so damned limiting. In times like that, you're not thinking, "I'm a cool Nord knight ridding the world of another pest!", you're thinking, "Which damned way do I need to move my mouse to see this fucking thing so I can click on that left mouse button."

Meanwhile, this would never be a problem in isometric view.

Factions needed a lot of work. The only ones you joined that affected the others were the Fighter's Guild quests, Thieve's Guild quests, and the Great Houses. Dialog was linear, which made the intimidation function absolutely useless.

Factions should have used randomly generated job boards. If not randomly generated, then job boards none-the-less, just with more missions. If I'd been able to pick and choose which jobs I wanted to do, and the difficulty of those jobs affected my status, then yeah, they wouldn't have been annoyingly linear.

Oh, and I used to join the mage guild just to access their teleporters.

And cut that "Morrerwind fanboys durhur" shit. Its not very becoming.

Durhur. I'm not going to say Morrowind completely sucked, but it really wasn't nearly as good as what people makde it out to be. Heck, it's only commercial competition that year was NWN, and it's campaign sucked rocks.

 

[Jebus]

You people are all forgetting the Cliff Racers. THE DAMN CLIFF RACERS!