Morrowind GOTY

[xedoc gpr]

MW is far from perfect, and the main quest, especially in Tribunal, is rather linear. But the moddability of MW makes up for that. For me moddability is important, and I never buy Beta version...sorry, I mean brand new games. Why play what is essentially a beta version when if you wait a year, you can get a Gold, Platinum or GOTY version with expansions and patches for 1/3 the price of the beta version and lots of free mods?
Poor console kiddies don't know what they are missing...

No question about it. My Morrowind is stacked up with mods, I can't imagine how people can still play the original.

But back to MW. MW is so much more than the main quest and is in my opinion the closest to a real role playing experience on a computer. Having said that I think it's not realistic to expect the designers to cover every eventuality when it comes to how your class, gender, race etc should affect dialogue choices. Again, the modders save the day.

That's true. But at the very least they can provide different choices you can make based on how you want your character to be. You should be able to accomplish quests in different ways according to this as well. And I definitely think the main quest should have had this, at least. And this is something that has already been done a long, long time ago in games like Fallout.

Personally I'd prefer fewer and more detailed named NPCs and let the rest be just generic peasants, farmers, workers (title instead of names).

Yep.

MW is about role playing you character, using restriction set by your self, *not' the game. There is no *need* to power play it.

I dunno, I think role-playing a character should mean that you be able to play the game, and quests, in a way that matches your character, and the game should react to those decisions. If you can't do that, what's the point? Deciding to join the Fighters Guild instead of the Mages guild doesn't really make much of a difference when you look at the big picture. I think I'm being too harsh on Morrowind because Oblivion was so bad from that perspective, but Morrowind was still a step down from Daggerfall, and it showed the kind of direction that led to Oblivion....However, it was still a much more interesting world to play in than Oblivion.

Regarding Oblivion, I have not played it yet. I actually bought a new dual-core computer to play it, but I decided to wait untill there was a Gold, Platinum or GOTY version with expansions available. There is no way I'm going to pay what amounts to about 80-100 dollars on a game where half the budget is used on fluff, like having kown actors voice acting every line in the game. What a bleeping waste of resources! Voice acting is great for one liners, like battle shouts and greetings, but for long dialogues written text is much easier and much *faster*.
Anyway, I decided to replay MW while waiting for Oblivion to hit the bargain bins, so I read the official MW forums a lot and was not impressed by what I heard about Oblivion. Sounds like a dumbed-down, smaller game for the console kiddies.

Pretty much. And with all the money spent on paying Patrick Stewart, every 4th NPC in the game has the same voice. I'd rather have written text any day....

I still dont understand why Bethesda would dumb down almost everything from Morrowind and make Oblivion for 'console kiddies'...coz Morrowind was released for Xbox after PC and as far as I know it wasnt a commercial failure even on that Platform...so WHY?!

Go and read the old threads from the XBox Morrowind thread one day. Every other thread is "I cant find caius cosades!!!", etc.[/quote]

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Morrowind is the finest game I have ever played. I love it.

The GOTY version is the only version worth getting. It includes both expansions, which add about 50 hours of content to the game including a new large city and an island about 1/4 the size of Vvardenfell. You get a few choices in the quest line in Bloodmoon, too. And most importantly, they sort out the quest journal, making it useable. And a very much welcome enemy health meter.

The quests may be linear but at least there's no handholding or walkthrough-style quest journal stages like there is in Oblivion. The character levelling up system is much more detailed with more skills as well as things being seperated into primary, minor and misc skills. There is a much greater variety in weapons and armour sets too. Basically, Oblivion sacrificed so much to try to dumb down to the casual masses. It's a shame really, because Morrowind had the skills and levelling up spot on.

The game world has much more variety and political intrigue. It seems more adult than Oblivion, some things are more complicated and draw real-world comparisons. And also, there are requirements to join and progress through guilds. Don't expect to be Archmage of the Mages Guild at level 1.

With mods (such as the Ultimate Texture Pack that I use) the graphics are given a little boost, and there are other little visual things like Book Jackets, Better Bodies, Better Heads and Real Signposts. There are some tweaks such as allowing travel to any port from any boat/silt strider and Join All Houses (you can only join 1 great house in the original game). I also use some content mods like Silgrad Tower and Tamriel Rebuilt. As an Elder Scrolls lore purist however I don't use any other landmass/quest mods except for Lokken Island, which is very fun to play through.

I'd give Morrowind GOTY without mods an 8/10. With mods, 9/10. No game is perfect (EXCEPT HALO 3 LOL!!!11111).

 

[galsiah]

Basically, Oblivion sacrificed so much to try to dumb down to the casual masses. It's a shame really, because Morrowind had the skills and levelling up spot on.

I can only assume that playing Oblivion has done horrible things to your mind. There are many ways to describe the skill+levelling system in Morrowind - "spot on" is not one of them. It's not a terrible starting point, but as a finished system it's badly balanced, rewards nonsensical behaviour, fails to differentiate characters meaningfully (or at all in the long run), and fails either to blend in to the background smoothly, or to be in-your-face-but-interesting (the only in-game choices you make are dull, and eventually meaningless).

For any player with a pragmatic bone in their body, the Morrowind levelling system is a train-wreck. For those who enjoy roleplaying colourful, non-pragmatic characters, it's merely a load of incoherent nonsense best ignored.

 

[Klaz]

Galsiah's Character Development, Madd Leveler, and Big Mod all correct that.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Galsiah's Character Development, Madd Leveler, and Big Mod all correct that.

How? I don't want to use any character development mod which gets rid of the whole TES 'skill increases as you use it' mode.

 

[Klaz]

Those mods don't change the leveling system, they correct it.

 

[Keldryn]

I really tried to get into Morrowind, but it just left me ... rather apathetic about the whole game, really.

I played Arena a bit when it first came out because it reminded me somewhat of Ultima Underworld, but I got bored with it fairly quickly. I bought Daggerfall when it came out, and probably put about 30 hours into it before I realized that I'd pretty much already played the entire game six times over by that point. I wouldn't be able to make the analogy until a couple of years later, after playing Ultima Online and the Everquest beta test, but both Arena and Daggerfall felt to me like playing an MMORPG by myself. The worlds were too big and sprawling, and everything felt random and repetitive, utterly devoid of any personality or uniqueness.

A lot of people think that Daggerfall is light years better than Morrowind, but I found that Morrowind was infinitely more appealing, simply because it was scaled down and didn't mostly depend on randomly-generated towns, dungeons, NPCs, and quests. Unfortunately, it still had much the same feeling as Daggerfall and Arena. The NPCs and quests weren't randomly generated, but they were still generic. There was still too much wandering (and very SLOW wandering at that, thanks to your stamina being depleted if you run) around areas devoid of anything interesting.

I still consider Ultima VII, Fallout, and Planescape: Torment to be superior in every conceivable way.

 

[MetalCraze]

Well, actually there was exploring in MW. And even in some places there was an athmosphere. I didn't use whatever-striders to jump quickly from town to town, but rather liked to walk on foot. But apart from exploring I found everything else boring.
Though now when comparing to it's sequel I can also add all-npcs-killable and no level scaling as pluses...