Thus, when my brother plays BGII, he has to solo the game to feel challenged and to feel powerful. While I can't countenance playing the game without Minsc and with less than a full party.
Playing party based games solo might be worthwhile as a one time challenge, but it makes them so much poorer even in terms of gameplay alone that I have a hard time understanding someone who would play this way by default.
So yeah, power gamers (and power-gaming is perfectly legit) have plenty of reasons to hate Morrowind... It's not a game for them.
I don't agree that game being not for you is a legitimate grounds for hate (unless it's Sims or something, that is
).
If the game is a sequel of a game that was for you or if it deceived you into thinking that it's your type of game - sure - but TES series has never been viable grounds for powergaming.
It's like going into an ethnic restaurant and loudly bitching how much you hate the sort of food it serves.
Those two approaches not being mutually exclusive doesn't mean that a game may not succeed at one but fail miserably at the other.
The amount of rampant shitposting in this thread unbearable, is this normal for RPGcodex?
Only in threads with shitty OP.
For the record we've been having pretty much the same thread over and over roughly once a year.
Anyway, I think you
deserve need a more to-the-point reply from me, after all, so lets get started.
Blah blah. This is a problem.
It is. No one is deluded enough to claim Morrowind of all games is flawless.
but with Morrowind there isn't a whole lot to explore.
As opposed to?
Because I don't think I recall a single cRPG with nearly as much to explore.
Enemy variety is mediocre at best
Ok, what enemies does it miss?
Because the best way to judge completeness of something is asking what does it miss, not what does it have.
And the only thing Morrowind's bestiary doesn't have are all the kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, xvarts, gnolls and assorted shit that has no reason to exist in the gameworld other than providing player with loot and XP.
Good fucking riddance.
and dungeon layout isn't any better.
Depends on the dungeon. Small ones are meh, large ones tend to be pretty good.
Overall they tend to lack diverse dungeon sections, but make up for this with use of z-axis.
90% of dungeons have utter garbage loot
Just like you can't make effective scares by making monsters pop out of every closet or vent, you can't make effective exploration by placing phat lewt in every corner of every dungeon.
Also, phat lewt, by very definition must be rare, otherwise it's no longer phat lewt but baseline garbage.
Which ones have no purpose?
Dunmer ancestral tombs have a clearly defined one. Daedric ruins were centers of daedra worship in the past and still serve secret daedric cults. Dunmer strongholds date back to at least First Council and have been occupied by various groups after their abandonment. Dwemer ruins are badly collapsed but still functioning sections of Dwemer underground cities. Caves are caves, also occupied by whomever found them handy. Old Velothi towers are another relics of ancient times, usually sought out and occupied by rogue Telvanni. Mines are mines. Eggmines are kwama colonies exploited for eggs.
Everything I see has its clearly defined place in the gameworld.
Don't get me started on the dialogue. Most NPCs have no reason to exist, because they all spout the same damn lines.
You have it ass backwards. Their perfectly sufficient reason to exist is that they are part of the gameworld.
You just might not have much of a specific reason to talk to them.
Bethesda should have just made the NPCs like regular CRPG villagers: they'll say a prerecorded line of dialogue, and that's it.
Preferably without names which just a step away from giving questgivers nice shiny
"!" floating over their heads, so why not go all the way through, am I right?
Anyway this is the way they went in SR (it seems to be a better choice if a game is supposed to be fully voiced for whatever reason) but it has an important caveat - you can't approach a random joe on the street and ask him how to get to South Wall Cornerclub or what the fuck is a foyada the locals seem to be mentioning all the time. In Morrowind you can.
Morrowind's approach is superior, even though it isn't exactly the kind of RPG where you talk to all the NPCs because they tell interesting stories about their emotional lifes. Morrowind just isn't character-centric, you have PS:T for that.
Another ridiculous issue I've run into is the fact that I can join any faction in the game, even if they hate each other, just by bribing the individuals that I have to talk to. FFS I can be a member of the mages guild AND Telvani, two factions that are huge rivals, just because I have money.
Bribing and speechcraft are OP and borderline broken. If they weren't faction relationships matrix would have had much greater impact.
Still, given that there *are* hard limitations in place for great houses and that there are some explicitly written interactions in some quests while member of mutually hostile factions (FG-TG, TG-Hlaalu, MG-Telvanni) - for example you can show that Dwemer Animunculi book to Edwinna if and only if on a Telvanni quest and a member of MG - I'd say that the level of mutual exclusivity is intentional. Hell, the MQ makes it almost obligatory to become hortator of all the houses.
Well this game is semi-playable I guess, unlike modern Beth RPGs. I'd much rather play Planescape Torment, Fallout 1/2, or other CRPG any other day of the week...
But would you rather take PS:T or Morrowind with you to desert island? Because you can play Morrowind over and over multiple times, while PS:T doesn't really support more than a few different playthroughs.
Anyway, back to Morrowind.
Morrowind is probably the only game I've been keeping judging higher and higher as the time passed (this must be how that nostalgia you NTs keep talking about feels like).
The reason is simple. On the surface Morrowind is just broken mess. But whereas most games have just the stuff on the surface they communicate explicitly to the player or maybe a single hidden layer, Morrowind has only small fraction of stuff explicitly telegraphed to the player. I fully expect an average player to miss 90% of information laying in plain sight in places they visited and explored in Morrowind, partially because of how computer games are conditioning us to think:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...do-people-like-morrowind-so-much.76548/page-7
And again we've all discussed this and I have explained it to various clueless individuals more than once - I have no obligation *not* to shitpost if someone fails to use search.
