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.