Man why do people like Morrowind so much

[DraQ]

And I'm not referring to the fact that your Location is unpronounceable.

 

[dibens]

The key to understanding Morrowind:
"It will just be a short trip outside of town, they said, find some herbs come back, they said, now I'm cold, wet, bruised, and I'm trapped in the ancestral tomb on some swampy island in the middle of nowhere, with pissed cliffracers waiting for me outside and angry undead banging against interior door, wondering when did my life go so horribly wrong".

This. Exactly fucking this.

 

[JarlFrank]

You have issues.

Yes, he has. Which is why, if I ever get the chance to make some of my dream RPGs, I'd hire DraQ to check the equipment and clothing of NPCs as well as the architectural styles of residences for consistency.

 

[DraQ]

You have issues.

Yes, he has. Which is why, if I ever get the chance to make some of my dream RPGs, I'd hire DraQ to check the equipment and clothing of NPCs as well as the architectural styles of residences for consistency.

Oh, come one, I'm not even particularly sperging on that topic, it's just that I have an eye for details.

 

[JarlFrank]

Which is precisely why I would hire you as a consistency-controller. That post wasn't meant to be ironic or sarcastic in any way. Concerning my own setting that I'd place my perfect RPGs (TM) in, I'm sperging even harder.

 

[DraQ]

Well, who doesn't have issues here?


Anyway, Carrion, as for character's garb - why should what characters wear be subject to different rules than what they build?

If a mushroom tower in the middle of Balmora would be fucking out of place, then why not a gardener or unafilliated mage wearing this kind of robe in the middle of Dagon Fel?

This robe is worn exclusively by members of Morag Tong in vanilla.

If an ashlander yurt would look ridiculous in the middle of some imperial settlement, then why not an imperial dude happily strolling around looking like her?

This robe is typically Ashlander as indicated by primitive craftsmanship. It's typically seen on mabrigash, wise womena and such, and while it's quite ornate and likely to indicate status among ashlanders, an imperial noble (and I think that guy was a noble) wouldn't find it as impressive.

It's like fucking having a modern corporate exec wearing penis sheath (but a really ornate one) instead of stupidly expensive suit!
How can you fucking say it doesn't clash with anything to you!
FFS!


You know what's cool in Morrowind?
That you have an easteregg bosmer dude fall from the sky near start of the game, you read his journal and he mentions "them" ridiculing his theories and that the new spell he developed will let him jump higher than the tips of their towers without getting levitation sickness or desorientation.

About ten or twenty hours of playing later (if you aren't particularly adventurous and just stick to questlines and local exploration) you get to see "them" and their towers, as well as accumulate the knowledge to connect "them" and their towers with House Telvanni.

The kicker? Apart from stupid hat the guy who fell from the sky wore Telvanni robe.
He wasn't random lolmage who hasn't thought his experiment through.
He was probably a low to mid ranked Telvanni retainer who accidentally killed himself while trying to prove his worth to sceptical members of the house.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

That's a sound argument, and managed to convince me that NPC attire is important. A shame that the vanilla game contains few NPCs in each location so the "repetitive appearance" isn't an issue glaring enough that the developers felt the need to have more clothing pieces. So Starfire probably had to choose between a ton of clones or using all the equipment available.

You still need to tell Morrowind that maybe you both should start seeing other people, though. People are talking.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

You have issues.

Yes, he has. Which is why, if I ever get the chance to make some of my dream RPGs, I'd hire DraQ to check the equipment and clothing of NPCs as well as the architectural styles of residences for consistency.

Agreed. It's fascinating and slightly terrifying to see the amount of detail he can go into on the subject of TES fashion, but dammit, world consistency requires such sperglords with an eye for detail normal people don't consciously give a damn about. Even if you don't think about it, your brain notices. Atmosphere and immersion are tricky subjects for just that reason; our brains refuse to break them down into their basic components until we start studying stuff in detail, but they sure as hell know when those details don't add up to something whole. The DraQs of the world look at those little details all the time, even if they sometimes miss the bigger picture for worrying about them.

This is why Grimoire will change the world forever.

 

[DraQ]

That's a sound argument, and managed to convince me that NPC attire is important. A shame that the vanilla game contains few NPCs in each location so the "repetitive appearance" isn't an issue glaring enough that the developers felt the need to have more clothing pieces. So Starfire probably had to choose between a ton of clones or using all the equipment available.

I still call bullshit.

There are enough combinations of facial features, hairstyle, and even context appropriate clothing in game to support quite a bit bigger cast (at least by a factor of 2), especially given that a lot of clothes are not that specific.

And then some of your characters will wear various combinations of armour pieces.

It's just question of author not caring.
Well, I don't care for him either.
Or for his mod.

You still need to tell Morrowind that maybe you both should start seeing other people, though. People are talking.

I really liked Torment but while she's well read and relatively deep you can only have so much fun with her.

Wizardry is cool too, but a bit low brow. At least she doesn't take herself completely seriously without making a complete clown out of herself either.

 

[Carrion]

How can you fucking say it doesn't clash with anything to you!

Mostly because I usually don't notice it. There have been a few instances where even I have spotted a character that is clearly out of place, but in a game that is full of quirks and "features" that you just have to ignore and try to play along, stuff like a wrong kind of shirt or robe here and there is just another to add to the list. With mods you always know to expect that kind of shit, and that's why I very rarely install any mods on my first playthrough or even on later playthroughs unless the game really needs it. However, this time I especially wanted to spice up the game to make it feel fresh and different from my earlier playthroughs, and therefore I can tolerate a lot of that stuff.

Still, I can't disagree with you because you're absolutely right.

 

[DraQ]

How can you fucking say it doesn't clash with anything to you!

Mostly because I usually don't notice it. There have been a few instances where even I have spotted a character that is clearly out of place, but in a game that is full of quirks and "features" that you just have to ignore and try to play along, stuff like a wrong kind of shirt or robe here and there is just another to add to the list.

Well, no, because this breaks one of the things the game did awesomely right.

You know, those things that make you forgive half of the stuff being broken as fuck.

With mods you always know to expect that kind of shit

That's why I'm very, very picky when it comes to my mods.

 

[Carrion]

Well, no, because this breaks one of the things the game did awesomely right.

In this case it also fixes one thing that the game got wrong, the static game world where the PC is the only person who ever actually does anything while everyone else either stands in one place or walks the same small circle for an eternity. It's a tradeoff I can accept. If I see a noble wearing an Ashlander robe, my first reaction isn't "hey, he's wearing Ashlander robes", it's "that guy has a robe that kind of resembles Ashlander clothing, must be the colour", and that is if I stop and actually examine what he's wearing. It's something I can shrug off and be on my way, no different from an Imperial guard shitting on the Empire with the exact same words as a Dunmer commoner, or an Ordinator or a Temple head honcho talking about the Nerevarine like they were discussing the weather or something.

 

[DraQ]

Well, no, because this breaks one of the things the game did awesomely right.

In this case it also fixes one thing that the game got wrong, the static game world where the PC is the only person who ever actually does anything while everyone else either stands in one place or walks the same small circle for an eternity. It's a tradeoff I can accept.

Games are not made awesome by doing nothing horribly wrong. They are made awesome by doing something horribly right.

Ask a codexer about their favourite RPG and I can guarantee that no matter the answer, it will be a game containing some horribly broken shit.
But that's not important because it does something else superbly.
OTOH a game that is lukewarm all around is not going to be such a legend, even if on average it's of about the same quality.
It's like with adventuring party in an RPG - it's better to have int 18 str 6 mage and str 18 int 6 fighter than both mage and fighter with both stats at 12.

Fixing something wrong at the expense of stripping away something extremely right is inevitably a net loss. It fixes something you've already accepted and no longer care about by breaking something that has you playing in the first place.

and that is if I stop and actually examine what he's wearing.

I don't understand, are you walking around with your eyes closed?

Also, dialogue is filtered by many factors - race, region, faction, class. You won't really encounter anything as jarring. Besides, dialogue at least has to be initiated manually. Seeing NPCs doesn't.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It's something I can shrug off and be on my way, no different from an Imperial guard shitting on the Empire with the exact same words as a Dunmer commoner, or an Ordinator or a Temple head honcho talking about the Nerevarine like they were discussing the weather or something.

Or a dunmer ashlander greeting you with injun speak, then suddenly discoursing like a savant when asked about Vivec.

 

[Wyrmlord III]

About ten or twenty hours of playing later (if you aren't particularly adventurous and just stick to questlines and local exploration) you get to see "them" and their towers, as well as accumulate the knowledge to connect "them" and their towers with House Telvanni.

The kicker? Apart from stupid hat the guy who fell from the sky wore Telvanni robe.
He wasn't random lolmage who hasn't thought his experiment through.
He was probably a low to mid ranked Telvanni retainer who accidentally killed himself while trying to prove his worth to sceptical members of the house.

Oh. My. God. Do you realize you just blew my mind?

It sounds like the most obvious thing now that you mention it, and yet I never ever considered it.

Not to sound like a sycophant, but this is why you are probably the best poster in this forum. It's happened with a lot of other games that I feel like I only knew very little about them, once I find you on the forum nitpicking on these details.

Years ago, I blew the minds of a couple of posters, including the venerable Jasede(!), by telling them that they could resurrect all their companions in Torment's final area through tricking TTO into leaving and searching for his Shadows - and it just required you to find an inconspicuous object to give you the hint. I was surprised that the most dedicated Torment fans knew so little of Torment, and did not even mouse around a little to find hidden objects. Yet, here you are, several steps even farther ahead of me, making me feel as dumbfounded when directed to an obvious detail in Morrowind as a couple other posters were when I pointed them to an obvious detail in Torment.

 

[Carrion]

Games are not made awesome by doing nothing horribly wrong. They are made awesome by doing something horribly right.

You don't need to tell me why Morrowind is one of my favorite games.

Fixing something wrong at the expense of stripping away something extremely right is inevitably a net loss. It fixes something you've already accepted and no longer care about by breaking something that has you playing in the first place.

And that's why I wouldn't recommend the mod for someone who's playing the game for the first time.

 

[deuxhero]

Snip

Huh, I have clocked hundreds of hours in MW and never noticed that about the Morag Tong robes (I did notice the Ashlander clothing and how there are only two instances of the blue robe with a spider on it in game).

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Maybe we could have a thread like that one about Arcanum's easter eggs, but about Morrowind's mindexplosion.gif details instead. DraQ and Septic Sceptic would be the hosts.


free picture hosting

 

[JarlFrank]

Also, I can totally understand DraQ's eye for detail (or obsession with, if you wish to call it that). I'm a history student who also dabbles in archaeology and we history freaks are just as fucking spergy when it comes to details. THIS STATUE HAS SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT CLOTH FOLDS TO THIS OTHER ONE SO THAT MEANS IT IS STYLE Y INSTEAD OF STYLE X

I guess this is also why I like Morrowind so much. That world was probably designed by people who are into history and archaeology, too. Distinct architectural styles and clothing styles that belong to certain cultural and social groups; lots of books on Morrowindian history that often have conflicting views; that fucking game is just made for people with the mindset of a nitpicking historian who just loves to lose himself in ancient books and can spend hours marvelling over the details of an ancient statue.

Morrowind is pretty much the only game that allows you to explore it as a historian. And it never gives you any definite answers.

Fuck. Now I just realized what it specifically is that makes me like Morrowind so much.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

I'm a history student who also dabbles in archaeology and we history freaks are just as fucking spergy when it comes to details.

Duh, I'm a history student as well, and everyone in my group loves Mass Effect; only one of them admits it's really shallow. I'm probably branded as hater with my "weird tastes".

Decline of civilization.

 

[DraQ]

About ten or twenty hours of playing later (if you aren't particularly adventurous and just stick to questlines and local exploration) you get to see "them" and their towers, as well as accumulate the knowledge to connect "them" and their towers with House Telvanni.

The kicker? Apart from stupid hat the guy who fell from the sky wore Telvanni robe.
He wasn't random lolmage who hasn't thought his experiment through.
He was probably a low to mid ranked Telvanni retainer who accidentally killed himself while trying to prove his worth to sceptical members of the house.

Oh. My. God. Do you realize you just blew my mind?

It sounds like the most obvious thing now that you mention it, and yet I never ever considered it.

Because it *is* an obvious thing, except most of us, especially RPG crowd, are hopelessly conditioned to see stuff in video games as tokens, not actual things.

How a character, location person, garment, weapon or piece of armour looks like is usually just for the sake of identification and setting the mood or looking cool. It means nothing. It does nothing. It isn't supposed to make any sense. Just because it is meaningless to the engine, we are conditioned to see it as something akin to an icon in GUI and just parse out anything that isn't explicitly presented as text or, preferably, as numbers in stat screen.

Well surfuckingprise - MW shits all over our expectations here, at least when it comes to fluff, not the mechanics.

Want more mind blownage?

Ever seen those robes?

They are pretty much Temple exclusive. Ever dismissed the squigglies on those yellow strands as just cool looking gibberish? They can be read and actually mean something - 'Faith is only law' (lower) and 'Learn by serving' (upper) respectively.

Colouring of Temple/Indoril armour and garb - blue and yellow? Ok, this is mere conjecture on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was an explicit reference to the gold of the old Temple (chimers golden skin tone) and blue of new one (dunmer blueish ash colouration).

Trioliths (tribunal altars) having triangular cross-section? Trinity of Dunmer living gods (Almsivi).

Those flags hanging from bridges in Vivec? They tend to quote dunmer religious texts.

Red stone brooch on Morag Tong shirt?

Says "I am your death" if you look closely. In daedric glyphs.

Ashlander garbs? Some are tribe-specific and reflect the lifestyle of the wearers rather closely. Ahemmusa common clothes tend to be insulated with bundles of plant fibres laced together (grazelands). Erabenimsun (ashlands) tend to be made of animal skins.

Moreso, outcast ashlanders, despite not being part of any of four major tribes will generally wear the same type of garb as their immediate non-outcast neighbours.

Commoner clothes? At least two shirts (one for Redoran, one for Hlaalu) and one robe (Hlaalu) display house heraldry, in addition to specific colour patterns.
House clothes tend to follow more relaxed rules in general, possibly reflecting either trade (especially clothes worn by common people) or active interest in fashion (as seen in wardrobes of some nobles), but the pattern is still obvious.

Glass weapon to analogous iron/steel weapon weight ratio? Decent approximate of density ratio between RL glass and iron.

Coded messages looking like gibberish?

SSF ZAFL
DVWDTQDVFQE TYLSE
BSQ FOF
TZSFHK TOY PCJEK NSZUVWBSR
EAL DVFQE GX
SWSHL LCLQS
XKH ZQG
LGSBFY GXS PAXWC RSXINOFSP
IDV AWD
FGEF PAXWC
BOK DWKB
SUGZD PCJEK

Nope, actual ciphertext that can be broken if you know a bit about cryptography. This one here uses Vigenère cipher with key being "SKOOMA". It's additionally obfuscated but lists locations of Camonna Tong hideouts and amount of contraband stored in each.

Additionally, in case of sealed letters, you can attempt to reseal them via security skill roll.

Then you have stuff like inferring location of Mordrin Hanin's tomb from Hanin's Wake and the paper map, or location of Mudan Outpost by following barely identifable remains of a road on the seafloor near Ebonheart.

Several dialogues also have small dialogue trees with various stat checks, too bad they are rendered irrelevant by the power of ADMIREBRIBEBRIBEDONE - damn you NWN, damn you to hell!

JarlFrank , and I'm not even a history, clothing, or culture sperg. My forte is natural sciences, especially biology. It's just that I am generally obsessed with non-arbitrary patterns and details that can be linked to some context.

 

[SCO]

Go home dirty n'wah

 

[Bruma Hobo]

stuff

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Nope, actual ciphertext that can be broken if you know a bit about cryptography. This one here uses Vigenère cipher with key being "SKOOMA". It's additionally obfuscated but lists locations of Camonna Tong hideouts and amount of contraband stored in each.

Additionally, in case of sealed letters, you can attempt to reseal them via security skill roll.

Then you have stuff like inferring location of Mordrin Hanin's tomb from Hanin's Wake and the paper map, or location of Mudan Outpost by following barely identifable remains of a road on the seafloor near Ebonheart.

Fuck, how much I'd like to see that stuff in Skyrim or other games lke that.

 

[Carrion]

Well, what the hell, I got rid of the NPC mod. It was partly because of the reasons I mentioned earlier, and partly because DraQ does make a pretty damn convincing point. He kind of ruined my mood for a while since I started to notice stuff I hadn't even thought of before but which now kind of really pissed me off. Also, even though at the start I wanted to get a different experience than on my earlier playthroughs, the more I play the game the more I really want to go back to vanilla.

So, fuck you DraQ, and thank you, I guess. Just don't get too smug about this.