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Morrowind, looking back, is at best a 4/10 game.

Outlander

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It's weird, for me it gets better as the years go by. Must be because we didn't have Oblivion and Fallout 3 back in 2002.
 

Dalek

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I liked Morrowind, but these claims about "such exploration, much wow" are about as ridiculous as "Gothic is worse than unmoded Oblivion".
The exploration/world is it's only saving grace. The character system is atrocious. Combat is mediocre at best.
Exploration was good, but I also loved the character system. Starting as a useless random stranger, then grinding your way up, abusing the hell out of alchemy/enchantment, and ending stronger than god. Because the first time you play, you don't know how laughably broken all these custom things are.
Also, guild quest were pretty good, especially mages guild ones.
 

DraQ

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I liked Morrowind, but these claims about "such exploration, much wow" are about as ridiculous as "Gothic is worse than unmoded Oblivion".
The exploration/world is it's only saving grace. The character system is atrocious. Combat is mediocre at best.
It's not as much atrocious as broken.

It's soundly designed overall, which is more than could be said of most systems out there. However it's full of obvious unpatched exploits and loopholes (alchemy, speechcraft, the way learning system doesn't account for task's difficulty), buggy and further encumbered by a few ill-thought-out design decisions (armor skills should never have been skills, instead armors should offer different advantages and disadvantages in regards to protection VS stealth/mobility tradeoff; athletics and acrobatics should never have been separate skills, the whole HP-gain mechanics, etc.) and by being married to bad AI, lack of good encounter design and lackluster combat.

And yeah, playing blind is the best as you are not aware of all the loopholes and lack out of character knowledge.
 

Agame

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...abusing the hell out of alchemy/enchantment, and ending stronger than god.
This is why the character system is atrocious.

And because of this attitude we now have the Fallout 4 system (no skills allowed) that has finally squeezed all the life out of an already frail Bethesda character skill system, or the alternative Swayerist model of just make everything equal (and boring and bland).

You know whats scary, I used to make characters in Morrowind without alchemy or enchantment... and it was fun designing a theme and then picking skills to fit my ideas, and not worrying about the internet telling me to abuse the system to make the "OP/game breaking character", and it was FUN for me to do this!

But what am I saying, having fun?? I mean seriously why should I be allowed to have FUN in a single player game? No, the holy hammer of balance and justice that we have inherited from our degenerate inbred cousin the MMO must now smite down upon the singleplayer rpgs so we can all be the same and balanced and no one is different and everyone is happy......
 

JarlFrank

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Yeah, creating crazy overpowered characters, or uselessly underpowered characters was fun in Morrowind. Just to see how ridiculously powerful you can get, or how hilariously useless.

Back when I played Morrowind, I'd discuss it with a couple of friends who were also fans of it. One friend came up with the concept of the Argonian pearl diver, a character who only had useless skills and specialized in diving for pearls. Swimming, athletics, acrobatics, speechcraft, mercantile as major skills so he could be good at diving for pearls and selling them. But he wasn't good at anything else. The fun came from trying to survive with a character like this until reaching a sufficiently high level. That same friend also challenged himself by going to Solstheim at level 1 and doing other ridiculous shit.

Morrowind was a fun game because it let you do ridiculous shit if you wanted to. Simplifying the systems in order to make them more balanced and to remove overpowered or useless stuff prevents that kind of fun. You can try out less stuff because the devs had the funny idea that some of the toys they used to give you were bad, and you're better off without these toys.

No, fuck this shit. All the horrible decisions of post-Morrowind Bethesda were a result of that mentality. "Shit's overpowered, we have to change things to make them more balanced". Less equipment slots (Daggerfall and Morrowind had so many different armour pieces and clothes to wear, and if you enchant all of them you can have so many different magic items on you... but lol because that's overpowered it got toned down heavily), less weapon types because some weapons weren't used by the majority of players (again, a dumb fucking argument - just because most people don't use something doesn't mean it doesn't add anything), quest compass because people got lost and didn't find their objectives, all this fucking bullshit that ruined what made Morrowind fun were implemented because people claimed that the things that make it fun didn't actually make it fun.
 

Mastermind

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I liked Morrowind, but these claims about "such exploration, much wow" are about as ridiculous as "Gothic is worse than unmoded Oblivion".
The exploration/world is it's only saving grace. The character system is atrocious. Combat is mediocre at best.
It's not as much atrocious as broken.

It's soundly designed overall,

No, it's not. A system's features should not be fighting with each other and Morrowind's are ineptly designed to do just that. At chargen you choose a number of skills you are good and which you will presumably want to use. They encourage you to use them by basing gaining levels (and thus attributes) on them. But then if you want to optimize attribute gain you have to avoid using some of the skills in your build, lest you level up too soon. You also probably want a variety of skills you might otherwise not bother with so you can get max modifiers for every attribute. This encourages degenerate gameplay where you avoid doing things your character should and would do otherwise because you don't want to level before you have the bonuses you want. There are some minor problem with implementation of specific features (like endurance health bonus not being retroactive) but the core system is shit too.

IF they absolutely have to use a "learn by doing" system they should have gone all the way and just have attributes grow automatically as you use their related skills (with luck very slowly growing with all skills) instead of attaching them to a different mechanic (gaining levels).
 

Mastermind

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It's called accessibility.

No, Todd just can't do char system design. He doesn't understand the philosophy behind attributes or how to implement them. He became scared to death of people abusing this or that tool so he removed stuff like levitation because God forbid someone fly over one of his cleverly placed traps. "Accessibility" is just a fig leaf RPG developers hide behind when they don't know what they're doing (even the dumbest, easiest arpgs usually have attributes, for example).
 

Archibald

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Sometimes solution is to remove shit from the game. Granted, he mostly took good things out and left shit in it.
 

Metro

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Am I wrong? People act like the only alternative to shitty systems that are easily abused is dumbed down/'accessible ones.' Pretty terrible defense, imo. It's possible to make better systems but developers are too lazy. That they choose not to does not mean Morrowind has a good system. It means Morrowind has a terrible systems and the subsequent ones are even worse.
 

Curious_Tongue

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I agree that without meta-gaming, Morrowind would probably be unplayable for me.

That's why I don't consider its systems to be flawed, because they allowed me to play the way I wanted.
 
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Some experiences are more "repeatable" than others. Morrowind is about exploration and giving a sense of wonder. There are diminishing returns on this after 400 hours. It works only when you know there can be a mystery at every turn. Once you have the vast majority of the game is in your mind it isn't engaging anymore.
 

Outlander

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I wanted to add that I played Morrowind for the first time right after finishing Gothic 1. Big fucking mistake: I was immediatly put off by the simplistic combat, lack of spoken dialogue, loading screens when entering the smallest hut, static NPCs without schedules and uninspired worldbuilding.

It was only years later that I found, somewhere under all that shit, that Morrowind was actually a 'good for what it is' game and the only (well, maybe Daggerfall too) highlight in Bethesda's catalog.
 

DalekFlay

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Am I wrong? People act like the only alternative to shitty systems that are easily abused is dumbed down/'accessible ones.' Pretty terrible defense, imo. It's possible to make better systems but developers are too lazy. That they choose not to does not mean Morrowind has a good system. It means Morrowind has a terrible systems and the subsequent ones are even worse.

It depends on when and how you can abuse them. If you have to do some stupid meta-gaming shit no one would do unless they were trying to break the game then IMO that's on you being a dumbass. Also if the balance isn't broken until like hour 80, and you're a limited character until then, then who gives a shit? One of my biggest Codex pet peeves is all the people who act like end-game godliness breaks the 100 hours that came before. It doesn't.

I love that Morrowind is designed so that you can literally finish it in 20 minutes or spend 200 hours on it, depending on what you're into. I love that it can be hard or easy depending on the path you want to walk. I think there is merit there. I mean which is a better "hard mode," bumping up enemy HP and damage without much thought or making a wizard class that is hard as fuck to play and master, but infinitely rewarding if you do?

I dunno I'm rambling. Point is I think there's a happy medium between Sawyer's magical perfect balance and Morrowind's free-for-all, but if those are my only two options I probably prefer the latter.
 

Sjukob

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I can't understand how people are still arguing about Morrowind . It was never a good game , but a miserable castration of previous games . Morrowind is like a big zit that can't be poped , instead of getting rid of it , people allowed it to spread , now game industry reaps the results of it. When people speak about Oblivion/Skyrim simplification/dumbing down and praise Morrowind , they miss something , Morrowind was as much of dumbing down as Oblivion/Skyrim was . I bet codexers here know that before Morrowind release Bethesda was poor company and if Morrowind wasn't successful they would go bankrupt , so they were in need to make a game that a large group of people would accept , do you realise that they were aiming for the majority of people ? The idea behind that is simplify things so more people can accept them , I think it wouldn't be too bad if they didn't allow fucktards like Howard to lead the project . TES now acts like a plague , it catches more and more people and it brings nothing positive with it .
 

Sjukob

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Back to Morrowind , it didn't solve any of the problems that were in previous games , for example balance and dialogues , but brought a bunch of new with it . Censorship , of course they couldn't allow kids to see tits or profanity , think about their mothers , they won't be happy to know about it . The world the randomly generated world in Daggerfall feels better than handcrafted wastes in Morrowind , how did they even managed to do that ? The character creation system , I don't even need to comment on that , skills were cut off , no biography and advantages/disadvantages , no opportunity to distribute stats in the beggining . I don't want to go on already , I hope you get my point , Morrowind was bad , aiming for wide auditory just to raise money and allow Bethesda to make more unworthy games , it is the same story as it was with Oblivion or Skyrim . I hope whoever here purchased the copy of Morrowind back in the 2002 are happy with their actions .
 

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