"Why Skyrim Forever Remains in the Shadow of Morrowind"

[felipepepe]

I appreciate someone standing up for the SKYRIM IZ ZE BEST narrative, but you can tell that's a proxy report - the author is just relaying other's impressions, and never once he manages to convey what actually makes Morrowind special.

 

[Spectacle]

Oblivion is "Tolkenian" now? IMO Morrowind has much more in common with Tolkien's world design than Oblivion does.

 

[felipepepe]

He probably means the movies.

 

[Zanzoken]

That article reads like the author knows nothing about Bethesda and has never played any of their games.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

So, as the article says, Morrowind is great and better than Skyrim because giant mushrooms. I'm wrong?

 

[GuiltyofBeingTrite]

The fundamental difference between Morrowind and the others that came/will come after is that it required the player to read. It seems simple but requires significantly more investment in the player to have to read books and conversations and jot down directions to find locations.

 

[DeepOcean]

Morrowind was the last game Bethesda did some effort to make good, the rest... Oblivion is pure crap and Skyrim is only playable with mods. The only luck Bethesda has is that they cornered the single player market of AAA land as the other publishers gone pedal to the metal on multiplayer so there isn't much in competition.

 

[NeoKino]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wujJnlsJh4

 

[sullynathan]

 

[Zanzoken]

Beth realized after Morrowind that casuals don't care about intricate game systems, creative writing, detailed world-building, or C&C. And all Zenimax cares about is $$, so if it doesn't add to the bottom line then why bother.

The popamolers just want graphics, VO, "epic" moments, and -- this is the big one -- a world that gives the illusion of being real and limitless. Key word there is illusion, because there is no actual depth it. Oblivion and Skyrim are like these big tapestries that seem impressive at first glance, but are actually paper thin.

The only people who give a shit about Morrowind are cRPG players. I would be surprised if more than 10% of the Skyrim player base actually played Morrowind first.

 

[sullynathan]

intricate game systems, creative writing, detailed world-building, or C&C. And all Zenimax cares about is $$, so if it doesn't add to the bottom line then why bother.

when did beth ever have that?

 

[Jaesun]

Daggerfall?

 

[Zanzoken]

intricate game systems, creative writing, detailed world-building, or C&C. And all Zenimax cares about is $$, so if it doesn't add to the bottom line then why bother.

when did beth ever have that?

Arguably never, but I think they used to at least attempt it.

 

[pippin]

The world changed when Todd realized it was fun to play Morrowind with an xbox controller.

 

[Fargus]

Try to imagine voiced Vivec. Bethesda-level voiced Vivec.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

In Vivec's defense, his levitating ab workout has mad gains.

 

[Grotesque]

"and perhaps most impressively has built Fallout, a niche series largely thought deceased at the turn of the millennium"

stopped reading right there.

Fallout, niche, the game that received rpg of the year... ahem.

 

[Infinitron]

Pretentious http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-praise-of-morrowind-a-game-about-game-design

Broken dragons: In praise of Morrowind, a game about game design
Vivec la difference.

The appeal of Morrowind for a first-time player today is surely that of getting lost. The game's once-breathtaking Gamebryo engine may creak with age, and its brittle, RNG-heavy combat may seem relentlessly archaic, but Morrowind's relative shortage of navigational aids now feels positively radical.

Most currently prospering open world RPGs are littered with waypoints and breadcrumb trails, their treasures and secrets tagged for consumption once you've accosted the relevant NPC. Approach somebody about a quest in Morrowind, by contrast, and you'll be handed a list of directions. There are no omni-visible floating diamond icons, no distance-to-arrival readouts - just a series of landmarks and turnings, scribbled down in your increasingly unwieldy journal. Returned to after a decade's worth of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, it's all rather terrifying, like sobering up in the middle of a busy motorway.

The directions aren't even universally reliable, or exact. Sometimes you have little to go on beyond the name of a region - there's a mission to locate somebody near Red Mountain that plays out like a Hunter Thompson rewrite of Christ roaming the wilderness, in which you fend off screeching winged vermin while combing the dunes for your quarry. Due to be remastered this summer as an expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online, Morrowind isn't a particularly large or impenetrable world - its roads well-signposted, its towns clustered close together - but having to actually look for the place you're looking for is invigorating, a show of faith in both the player's patience and the environment's intelligibility. And my, what an environment to get lost in - with its balding purple hills that reveal themselves to be enormous toadstools on closer inspection, its Dunmer citadels that evoke the stepped sandstone mounds of Angkor Wat.

You might read all that back and conclude that Morrowind feels more "real", or at least, more "grounded" than many of its peers and successors - a world shorn of those gamey contrivances and conveniences that can't help but expose the simulation for a sham, even as they help you explore. The truth is a little more complex, not to say mercilessly arcane. Morrowind has plenty of implausible UI elements, for starters - an ever-present minimap, the ability to pause inches from death in order to scoff down 20 Kwama eggs in one go - but more importantly, it's one of those games that knows it's a fantasy, commenting on its own artifice throughout.

Games that know they're games can, of course, be incredibly tiresome - see also, the hilarious scriptwriter's gambit of having characters moan about fetch-quest design in the middle of a fetch-quest - and there are shades of this kind of humour in your first meeting with Vivec, Morrowind's gangly Yoda of a god-king. Like many an RPG ruler before, he calls on you to save the realm from an otherworldly menace, but as the scene unfolds his address grows almost mocking, labouring the options with a care that borders on parody. "You may accept the gift, then do with it as you will," Vivec comments. "You will receive the responsibility as an oath. You may give your oath, then keep it or break it as you like." It's almost as though he's taking the piss out of your essential detachment, pointing to the fact that, much as NPCs may waffle about destiny and duty, an RPG player is quite capable of indulging some impulse for hours on end while the universe teeters on the brink of ruin.

The writers' agenda goes beyond poking fun, however. I should probably offer the caveat at this point that where Elder Scrolls lore is concerned I am but an apprentice, weaned on the fields of Skyrim and only recently acquainted with Vvardenfell. I am almost certainly going to get something horribly wrong. I do, however, know somebody who has a firmer grasp of the lore - the interactive fiction designer Kateri, who has dig into the fine detail there, but suffice to say Vivec's books of (often barely legible) sermons are littered with references to the tics and quirks of game design - the practice of a modding toolset is alluded to in a text on the "provisional house", for example. Michael Kirkbride's habit of posting under Vivec's name to explain some facet of the lore is, of course, a bit of a clue as to his role within the fiction.

It's this, for me, that makes Morrowind worth revisiting, much as the game's clumsy and unintuitive combat may frustrate. It's part of that rare pantheon of games that apply themselves imaginatively to what other designers might term the limitations of design, technology or production - a game that sees the apparatus of, say, saving your game not as an artificial structure that must be ignored, explained away or guiltily made fun of, but as a means of continuing the fantasy.

I was reminded of Morrowind while playing Sophia Park's recent browser story Forgotten, which you should absolutely try before reading anything else about it. Crafted over a week with the aid of artist Arielle Grimes, it poses an old-school DOS game world in which gods and monsters have achieved some measure of sentience in the player's absence, erecting a new reality after deleting their game's "help" file, only to fetch up against their computer's memory limitations. In asking questions of these sad, confused abominations, dumping queries into what precious bytes of memory remain, you are literally using up their capacity to think. It's a brief, beautiful tragedy that, again, treats the apparatus of design and hardware as an extension of the drama.

There are other reasons to return to Morrowind. The island of Vvardenfell is a more unusual setting than either Oblivion's stately Cyrodiil or the Conan-esque wilds of Skyrim, and the game's spell-making, enchanting and crafting systems are knottier than those of its relatively mass-market-friendly successors. But it's that sense of whimsical yet studied unreality, that ability to actively capitalise on the fact that this is all illusion, which perhaps elevates Morrowind above any other Elder Scrolls title, before or since.

 

[Luckmann]

What the fuck is this? Something from Vice that isn't objectively horrible and/or wrong? Did I fall through some parallel fucking universe?

Morrowind (all of TES actually) is overrated.

Overrated? Yes. I can agree with that. But it's still an amazing, if dated, game.

I would kill for a remake that updates graphics, controls and core UI aspects, but keeps everything else, and adds Perks (which, frankly, was the only remotely interesting addition Skyrim made; in no way worth the trade-offs).

I just don't trust Bethesda to make one, and Skywind and similar shit projects are unable to fix engine/character issues.

 

[GrainWetski]

What the fuck is this? Something from Vice that isn't objectively horrible and/or wrong? Did I fall through some parallel fucking universe?

It's just the usual cycle journos go through with Bethesda. Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout 3&4 are the best things ever until Bethesda doesn't need them to be any more.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

I hope I'm not the only one who briefly found themselves confused and wondering what "Skyrim Forever" was

 

[anvi]

Morrowind is waaaay over rated, especially on codex, but it is still the only Elder Scrolls game I enjoyed. At least it had combat that resembled an RPG, at least there were spells that had a variety of effects, and the mage guild questline and main questline was pretty interesting and had some tough battles. None of that is true of the sequels. Skyrim is incredibly dumb and shallow. In other words, Morrowind was their peak, and it is so sad that their peak was so fucking low.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Morrowind is still my favorite TES game, although I also love (yes, love) Oblivion and quite like Skyrim.

Morrowind does a lot of things right. A lot of those things aren't done in RPGs much anymore. Things like building the island with a dangerous, higher level area in the middle. It's an area you could visit whenever you'd like, but you'll likely die. Yet it's there, looming the entire time. You travel past the Ghostfence, which is a huge marvel, you explore the rooms in the Ghostfence itself (which gives a sense of scale and importance to this area. Rather than just a simple fenced-off area, this place is crawling with people and lore, thus adding a ton of atmosphere and even more mystery to the whole thing.).

Similarly, there are dangerous areas, ruins and general places where if you go, you will die. You won't die because the game spawned a level 5 creature when you were level 4. You will die because the game had a level 20 creature there and you were level 4. So you could make a mental note to come back later and explore the area, which is more rewarding in the long run (at the expense of short-term gratification).

So, compare that to the modern open-world trend of "go anywhere, at any time!". While this seems fun on paper, it also comes with the simple fact that by being allowed to go anywhere whenever you want in the world, all danger is essentially reduced to zero. There are no real "danger areas" like Red Mountain, or even Daedric ruins. Rather the whole world lets you frolic freely about, never really worrying about what you're going to run into.

Look at Gothic 1 & 2 in comparison. They place a highly deadly forest full of killer wolves RIGHT NEXT TO THE STARTING AREA! I mean, what game would do that nowadays? They even put a few NPCs there that you actually have to talk to and listen to, telling you not to go in there. If you still try, you will die with the quickness. Yet you know when you get a little stronger you can explore the forest and see what mysteries it holds. THAT is brilliant RPG world design, IMO.

I could write more, and maybe I'll pen a quick article on this.

 

[Lord Azlan]

I don't think so.

I don't suppose Skyrim officials are on suicide watch, a desperate bunch on the edge of success where Skyrim was only half of good as Morrowind. For what it was, I suppose Skyrim was a complete success.

Each Elder Scrolls is almost a completely different game.

In Arena I remember trying to run from one town to another - just to see how long it would take. I gave up after an hour or something.

Daggerfall dungeons. You knew if you entered one of those you might never see daylight again. Both awesome and fear in one package.

Morrowind. At my height I remember creating a character and then going for the admantium blade, some gloves and the cuirass of resist magic in the first ten minutes or so. I found Vivec a bit of a mess to be truthful. Teleport and Levitation.

Oblivion. The gates. The Knight of the Nine quest. The enchantments and spells.

Skyrim. Oh, let me try and talk to this giant...

I tried to play Morrowind again just recently and the slow character movement and diabolic combat really pissed me off.

How quickly the brain forgets! Just shows how adaptable we are.

 

[Mustawd]

This guy can't into logic. It seriously hurts my brain.

Paraphrasing: "The idea the Todd Howard is dumbing down TES games to make megabucks is completely ridiculous. Bethesda games make tons of money no matter if they are good or bad"