I wonder what that is.
People who fancy Morrowind usually have several personal stories they fondly recollect, like people usually do from roguelikes or P&P games.
The thing is that despite it's brokenness Morrowind is flexible.
Apart from any enjoyment you may derive from lore, exploration and atmosphere it's either you embracing this flexibility and playing with it, or (ab)using the glitches, broken stuff and metagame to cut straight through it without even noticing.
In case of the former you will have fun, if it's the later - you won't.
Turn off your exploitative thinking, you won't need it in this game (apart from maybe fine-tuning custom spells). Don't grind, don't camp at traders, don't make a beeline for powerful artefacts based on wiki/previous experience, don't do training binges, etc.
Come up with a character idea along with accompanying gameplay style, create this character and roll with it.
I feel I have the same from Baldur's Gate; you can get two non-evil characters and two evil characters early on and if you wait for too long before going to Nashkel they begin to quarrel and eventually come to blows. It was not a unique event, but since my knowledge of Bioware games came from NWN and KOTOR before Baldur's Gate I did not see it coming and my reaction to the event remains incredibly memorable to me.
Yeah, that was a really good thing in BG. Unfortunately about the only good thing.
However, as much as I have played Morrowind I can't recall any interesting things happening. Just couldn't shake how empty the world felt and how poor the RPG system was, and the incessant running around, nothing made the world feel emptier than going outside the cities
Don't be impatient, don't expect instant gratification. Try to get into your exploration mood, notice small details, make speculations. Don't expect legendary unique locations and items to be behind every corner - they are in this game, but finding them takes some effort, time and ingenuity - it's more fun than if the game was saturated with them, if everything is interesting, nothing is, if everything is epic, nothing is and so on.
For starters:
You read a book mentioning funeral of powerful sorcerer from forgotten era - do you think you can actually find his tomb in-game? Are there any clues?
You see something faintly resembling a remains of a road underwater - does it lead anywhere? Where?
You heard a woman prattling about her drunken relative allegedly seeing a city underwater - what did he see and where?
You meet an old Nord in the tavern - buy him a drink.
You are in a dungeon you think you have explored thoroughly - have you? What about under that cask? How about that ledge above you? Is it there only for the looks? Are those mummified corpses mere decoration? Don't people tend to bury their dead with riches?
And so on.
they are pandering skinner box worlds generating a false sense of achievement
How so?
Powergaming Morrowind is hollow and unrewarding.
It doesn't have diablo-like loot game either.
Nor does it have the awesome button.
You are not expected to pull the lever over and over again, for epic rewards, quite the contrary - you have to play this game your own style, while focusing on the game itself and its world, not the dispensed awesome.
I would say the problem isn't Morrowind being Skinner box - it's you treating it as if it was, then claiming it's a very shitty skinner box, because you pump the lever like a pro and get showered with turds instead of morsels.
You won't get much from Morrowind if you don't even stay for breakfast.
like Minecraft or an MMO.
Most MMOs are skinner boxes, but how is Minecraft one? It's an open sandbox game, not a Diablo II clone.
Largely, the quest design of Morrowind was detrimental to its RPG system. If you hit a rough patch and have to detour about to get stronger before tackling the next quest that is quite fine.
Lvl1 character has its major skills in 30-50 range - between one third and half way towards perfection. Isn't that more than adequate for a complete n00b?
(Also, MCP is a necessity in Morrowind, pickpocket, for example, is broken in the base game.)
Morrowind gives you a bunch of information but no story, there is a story but it is merely a cold exposition of transpiring events. Emotions, desires and motivations take no part. Morrowind lacks a narrative, a commonplace issue with video game storytelling
And why *should* a wide-open sandbox have a pre-set narrative?
Morrowind makes almost no assumptions and doesn't try to shoehorn your character into situations where they may not fit (unlike, say, Oblivious). The only assumptions are - you were incarcerated (rightfully or not - this makes a nice common point for pretty much all character backgrounds you may come up with) and you are not a native (even if you are a Dunmer you haven't grown up or lived in Morrowind - this helps unify player and character cluelessness). That's it.
What happened to the rest of Morrowind then? Since Morrowind makes up a fairly large part of mainland Tamriel it seems odd they'd all make their way to Skyrim, it may be close but a point is made in Skyrim of the dark elves being generally disliked. Cyrodil is about as close and probably easier to get to. Maybe they are disliked all over, I wouldn't know, racism is everywhere and nowhere in TES games.
Vvardenfell got nuked by The Ministry of Truth, as prophesied in 36 Lessons of Vivec triggering Red Mountain going Krakatoa and fucking up mainland Morrowind, then Argonians invaded from the south determined to spear as many smokeskins as they could through the sack as a "thank you" for centuries of slave raids and other neighbourly unpleasantries.
Of course, it's also an unbalanced mess with most characters being "mighty gods of all trades" in late game, banalizing most problem-solving situations... I guess I forgave that because the gameworld is an interesting place to explore.
Also there is this issue that it takes almost seventy levels to max everything out, and you are likely to retire your character long before that happens.
You can outrun an enemy with superior Speed, but how often did this happen?
If you have this superior speed it can happen all the time.
If you are a spear user with light gear and focus on mobility you will even use it all the time *in combat*.
You can disable with a custom spell, but what kind of disable? To add 'custom spell' is itself a flattering addition, since a custom spell was still drawn from the list of normal spells and only very few custom combinations were useful. There were of course several disables, Silence could be called a disable, so could Paralyze, but what about Calm, Sound, Demoralize, Command or Frenzy? You can disable with a custom spell, but how often did you, and under what circumstance? The schools the disabling and debuffing spells belong to could be integrated into most set of skills, but in the end you are doing the same thing with each type: making an enemy not fight you for a certain period of time.
In the right circumstances you can even disable with stuff like waterwalk.
As for custom combinations, drain willpower and silence/paralysis is powerful, damage strength (preceded with weakness to magicka for more economy) roots melee attackers in place, damage intelligence disables casters, right combination of drain fatigue, strength, willpower, endurance and agility will semi-permanently disable pretty much everything - it's also good for magic assisted muggings.
You need an Acrobatics of above 60 for it to start being useful, and even then, how often was it used during quests? In the wild it had the same function of high Speed and Athletics, it shaved time off of running around.
Acrobatics helps navigate difficult terrain and gives humongous advantage in combat in such terrain, especially for spear users.
You never stealth your way to safety
Why not? If you have high enough sneak, you can use it even in combat and to various ends. While travelling you can use it to not be bothered by wildlife.In dungeons you can bypass enemies who don't have anything worthwhile or set yourself up for a crit.
Again, you're playing the game in mindless "take DDK and kill everything" manner, then accuse it of not giving you opportunities.
The three scripted solutions, apparently we are now depending on scripted solutions like Morrowind was not supposed to (according to you yourself), are poorly done and implemented.
*One* scripted solution - the one involving dialogue, and even it relies on generic persuasion system and bribes, rather than scripted one shot interaction.
The rest is in no way specified via scripting, the game merely checks for whether you have the key you can give to Habasi and then checks if Ondres or Sovor have been killed when evaluating response.
If you want you can pickpocket the key off either of two Dunmer, kill them for it in any way you desire, including commanding them out and drowning in the river, or knock them out physically OR magically and then pickpocket the key unmolested (you will have to calm them while knocked out if you don't have MCP, as mugging got broken in one of the patches).
Game doesn't care *how* you obtain the key, only if you have it and if the NPCs in question are alive when you hand it over - you get Habasi won't be as happy if you kill Sovor and will be very displeased if you kill Ondres.
Only one of them has a consequence: killing Ondres results in Habasi getting uppity, but all she does is give you lip and then nothing happens. The quest reward you loose is negligible and the quest line continues as if nothing happened, Habasi getting temporarily uppity can not count as a consequence.
So what should happen? Ministry of Truth should fall on your head or maybe the whole questline should terminate?
Bribing and taunting both require the speecraft skill and are countered by the targets speechcraft skill (I think, not sure anyone knows for certain). Sovor prides himself in his speechraft, he is even a trainer. I tried taunting and bribing with my 85 personality Imperial and it was as hard as admiring
Personality is one thing but how high was your Speechcraft?
You know, if you're a warrior, without thieving skills, nor diplomacy, then maybe you shouldn't actually be in TG?
and killing Sovor outright, without taunting, is not possible at that level due to the bar patrons joining in.
Well, when I was playing a wizard I silently nuked the entire council club with spells designed just for this occasion (not that they didn't come in handy in generic circumstances later on, but they were optimized for silently nuking the council club) after doing some recon there (that was for bad people quest, but I did get the key while looting the bodies), because I decided that CT allied barman was an acceptable collateral damage.
I've read of some guy just leading Sovor outside and drowning him in the river using command spell* - alternatively you could just fight or KO him away from the city and take the key.
Another option would be frenzying Sovor if you're an illusionist.
Opportunities are there, you just don't know how to use it.
*) Actually, I think he drowned the blacksmith for yet another quest, but the principle is the same.
Secondly, in response to a comment about custom spells (specifically calm) and their limited range of useful effect vs pointless to ever enchant with effects it should be noted that a weapon enchanted with calm kept any enemy from fighting back as they would be calmed with each new strike and, if memory serves, it was in fact more cost effective than paralyze.
There were many interesting effect combinations, both for enchants and spellcasting. Heavy weapon (hammer or battleaxe) enchanted with drain agility was awesome because of its knockdown potential, weapon with bound weapon on strike could be cheap and lightweight equivalent to getting daedric gear, AoE dispel might be nice against summoners.
For spellcasting I intend to test some summon + AoE debuff + small AoE shielding for those summons to make them rape everything in their path, summons + AoE absorb attribute can be much better than straight fortify attribute, then you have stuff like semipermanent KO and other shenanigans.
The purpose here isn't to nitpick any small issue but to point out that experimentation often yielded interesting and very useful results in morrowind and that the game did in fact have a wide range of possible solutions, as unapparant as they often were. It's impossible to argue that simply stacking damage on everything and only selling to creeper wasn't easiest way to play or that many quests only boiled down to combat or speech but even many of those could benefit from a stealth approach or magic assistance. You don't have to charge in dedric daikatana swinging and kill everything moving, it's just the easiest and most apparent way to solve problems.
This.
In Skyrim was once dueled by Mage, stroke him by my sword and He yelled You Cheat! Wanted to say I know go whine to Howard you cunt.
Isn't such reaction actually quite neat?
It would be easy to fix in Skyrim - just make it master level (dual cast only) concentration spell (meaning you need to keep casting to stay aloft). Problem? Soleved.
In MW I'd just make it work like invisibility - any potentially hostile action dispels it. Result? No more bombers.
bunch of skills such as medium armor and ability of messing up my game.
Actually I'd cut all the armour skills and give armour types advantages and disadvantages impacting certain playstyles more (for example if you are focused on avoidance and acrobatics you don't want heavy armour, even though it's most protective).
Considering that nearly anything that had to do with magic, alchemy or enchant was ruthlessly unbalanced in Morrowind, there was no good reason to use anything other than long swords (maybe short swords to more quickly apply more enchant damages, or spears to unflatteringly exploit the terrain)
Or blunt weapons because they have a lot of variety, many artifacts and you can exploit weight of heavy hammers to knock enemies down. Or axes to deliver damage in nice 80HP chunks with DBA (+enchants) - oops, we've just ran out of weapon types.
And magic is really nice as long as you avoid obvious exploits, such as soultrap glitch or drain intelligence on self glitch.
Can it be overpowered? Perhaps, but you won't tell me that charging in with DDK and maxed out long blade is terribly challenging, especially if you have read one of over 9000 available internet guides and enchanted this DDK with absorb health. With magic at least you have to work around reflection and resistances.
and that Medium Armor was a joke
Well, yeah, but at low levels medium armour has a lot of nice sets and if you're in the Temple you can get godlike Ebony Mail later on.
And Beth was definitely ambitious once, look at Daggerfall, or stuff like trying to automate NPC reactions via reputation system in DF and MW.
Expect the Alchemy to be removed in TES VI... Amputation is the one and only cure Beth uses.
I wish Beth cured Todd's head.
