Review Morrowind reviewed by an EXPART

[Elwro]

Morrowind actually had the capability to use conversation tree-like effects in the dialogue, it was just rarely used, and if so limited to stuff like 1. Do X, 2. Do not do X.

Technically it is possible to make real dialogue "trees" using TESConstruction Set, but it's a bit incovenient.

 

[Volourn]

"More info will come soon"

While, it's not super hype; it most certainly is hype.. Nothing wrong with it either unless 6 months go by and no new info comes out.

I'm not bashing him. Just saying he opened a cam of worms. :shock:

 

[Sol Invictus]

Well Saint, concerning the animations I think it's safe to say that not many games bothered to add stuff like that back then. Even these days, there aren't many games with as much detail as we'd like. It wouldn't be totally fair to Morrowind to complain about the lack of sitting and drinking when not many other games had those things, either.

Of course, if Oblivion doesn't have it, it's gonna look pretty bad, because KOTOR has people who sit down (I think).

 

[Sol Invictus]

"More info will come soon"

While, it's not super hype; it most certainly is hype.. Nothing wrong with it either unless 6 months go by and no new info comes out.

I'm not bashing him. Just saying he opened a cam of worms. :shock:

More info will come soon. It has to, especially with magazines wanting exclusive previews and the like. It's not like he's lying about it.

I wouldn't call that hype. Hype is when Peter Molyneux opens his mouth and mentions something that may or may not be in Fable.

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

Point taken Volourn. But more info really IS coming soon.

I just can't talk very much about the game yet -- but I also didn't want to totally ignore Vault Dweller's question.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Hey, thanks, I appreciate your reply.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Yeah, the job boards thing for the guilds would have worked a HELL of a lot better than the system Morrowind had, which made all the guild quests linear as hell. Considering the nature of the guild quests, it's not like any of those quests couldn't have been randomly generated. They were pretty much all quests like Go to LOCATION and KILL MONSTER or Gather up ITEM STUFF and return them to LOCATION. The only variation in them was whether or not there was an NPC waiting for you at those locations or not to help with the assignments. If that's how the quests are, then they might as well be randomly generated to at least allow the player a little difference from one game to the next.

With a job board style set up, you could at least go up to the board and get a list of quests you'd want to do. You may have just gathered up a bushel of assberries from a bush outside Vivec and just not want to gather more things somewhere else to advance in the guild. You may want to take a delivery somewhere, or kill something, or any number of other assignments a job board could offer at any given time. The difficulty and annoyance of the quest itself could determine how many advancement of status points you get with the guild.

Then again, that's something I've said needed to be implimented in Morrowind since shortly after the release. Going to the Fighter Guild each time I wanted to try a new character and having to kill the same rats in the basement each time, or going to the Magey Guild and having to gather up four berries here, then four berries there.. Well, it blew chunks.

 

[Whipporowill]

I'll just have to bring this up: Ultima 6 had horses, sitting characters and people with scripted routines. When was that game released, again? Yeah. 19-fricking-90. I don't see how it can be to much to demand these kind of features in today's AAA titles? And if Pirahna Bytes can manage to get these things into Gothic with (I expect) a lot smaller team and (I expect again) a lot smaller budget, so can Bethesda. Right?

 

[Sol Invictus]

Yeah, well, Morrowind was lacklustre in a lot of ways, namely the graphics. It's no big surprise that there weren't any mounts given the ugly faces everybody had and the drab armor textures, though the modding community has managed to add mounts, new faces, and then some. There's no excuse, of course.

As for the suggestion on the job board, I would second that. Morrowind definitely needed a job board given the nature of most of the quests you had to take. Walking back and forth just to get new generic quests was a complete pain in the ass. Even World of Warcraft (yes, an MMORPG) features a job board of sorts. You can do many quests in what ever order you prefer and select to do them all in one go. There's even a quest-share thing now that allows other people to grab quests from you (and likewise you from them) if you didn't pick it up from an NPC. Of course, you can't use that to skip any stages of a quest, so you have to be one stage behind the quest carrier. If he just started the quest you can grab it straight from him if you don't have it yet, for instance. Anyway, I digress - WoW doesn't have a mission board per se, but it's a lot better than what Morrowind had.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

I third that, specially considering I brought it up. Hey, no shame in agreeing with myself >_>

 

[Whipporowill]

I'd easily fourth that, if anyone cares. Daggerfall's random guild jobs wasn't that bad - it was the random dungeons that had me pull my hair out.

 

[Elwro]

I fifth that.

 

[Jebus]

Got room for a sixth?

*shows sixpack*

 

[Stark]

Yeah, well, Morrowind was lacklustre in a lot of ways, namely the graphics.

what? I actually thought the pretty graphics were one of its strong point (at its time). I thought the faces were okay. It's the overall scheme of colour (brown) that put people off.

You can do many quests in what ever order you prefer and select to do them all in one go.

but.. but... we won't be getting 100 hour game time if you can do multiple quests in one single trip!!!

a job board is nice. maybe they can lump all the caravan escort mission/debt collection/clean out my celler missions into job boards, but still retain quests of other types that are triggered only if you chance upon a npc/dialog. Some quests just do not make sense if posted on job board.

 

[Avin]

job boards is indeed a good thing.

i believe that most of CRPG players create their characters the same way I do: create what they want, do some quests to *feel* the game and then create a second or third character to really start to play.

when guild missions or starting quests are always the same (worst if there's no too much options to solve it) the act of starting the game for the second or third time is terribly painful.

if oblivion use job boards i'll have other reason to follow its development.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

i believe that most of CRPG players create their characters the same way I do: create what they want, do some quests to *feel* the game and then create a second or third character to really start to play.

That's pretty much what I do, only I start up multiple characters to try things out.

 

[Limorkil]

Morrowind Review

I'm a huge Morrowind fan. Despite that, I'd be the first to admit that it has many faults. I was smiling when I read this glowing review because I assumed it was written by some know-it-all kid who has no real clue about roleplaying and an obvious fanboy suck-up attitude to Bethesda. On reading the reviewer bio I was rather amazed to find that the guy is at least 30 year old. I'd rather see a negative review from someone who knows what they are on about than a positive review from a cretin.

For all his moronity, the reviewer did have one very good line, which was that Morrowind is like a single-player Everquest. That is very true, and it partly explains why some people like it and some do not. I like Morrowind because it has a large explorable world and the character isn't confined by a fixed script or story. The graphics are good enough to help the immersive feeling of the landscape and the game improves over time as official and unofficial mods are added. These are all features that I liked when I played MMORPGs and Morrowind did not have the one thing that always spoiled MMORPGs for me: other people! Yep, people suck in MMORPGs, in my experience. If you could somehow allow access only to people who will roleplay and not exploit then MMORPGs would be great. That is not likely to happen though.

Morrowind obviously did not appeal to everyone. Funnily enough, what annoyed most people were the same things that people dislike in MMORPGs:
- No real story to lead the player by the nose
- No NPC interaction of note
- NPCs do not 'do' anything, the world is empty
- Fairly pointless quests
- Mindless combat
- Broken economy
- Exploits galore

If there was one single mistake in the design of Morrowind it was basically the idea of taking the "do what the hell you like" idea from Daggerfall and then applying it to a condensed world. Daggerfall had a map so huge that it was obvious you were not meant to explore everywhere. It also had a main quest that matched the free-form design, in that the main quest had various arms that could be progressed and it had multiple endings. Daggerfall also had random quests and random dungeons. Morrowind tried to keep the same basic design principle, but the landscape was much smaller and no longer random. Nor were the quests, the dungeons or the NPCs random. You can forgive a game for having poor dialogue if the NPCs are random. You can forgive a game for having similar quests if they are random. You can forgive a game for having samey dungeons, if they are random. Throw in a very linear main quest and you have a game that doesn't quite sit well with many people, a game that tries to be vast and open ended while only providing limited options.

I'm not saying that Daggerfall had no flaws, only that the basic design worked better. Had Morrowind been like Daggerfall then many people would still have disliked it, but less people would have been confused by the concept.

From what I've heard about Oblivion, I am not sure whether it is going to repeat the same mistake. It could. My advice would be to take a look at Gothic 2, which managed to be both immersive and fairly open-ended.

 

[geminito]

Re: Morrowind Review

My advice would be to take a look at Gothic 2, which managed to be both immersive and fairly open-ended.

Oh please don't say that! Yes, Gothic 2 is a great game. But the controls are incredibly overwhelmingly bad! We don't want an ounce of that combat system to touch Elder Scrolls or Fallout!

And rest.

 

[crufty]

I thought Morrowind had pretty good graphics. A lack of trees, perhaps, but I liked them (for the time). There was a lot I liked about Morrowind...exploring the ruins, boats, etc, diving for perls. Immersiveness == good. I had a lot of fun with Morrowind.

But then, there were things that reminded me I was just messing around with a finite state machine. I think adding schedules to NPC's would more than make up for stilted dialogues. That was my biggest beef. Also, the fact that it seemed like what you did didn't matter in the slightest. Free some slaves? Who cared. Slaughter an entire fighters guild? Nobody notices.

I am also not a big fan of Ninja Monkeys. Easy creatures should be easy, hard creatures should be hard. I also think that once I clear a wilderness area of baddies, it should stay empty of creatures that attack me on sight. I would have liked to see more foot traffic along major roads.

I would have liked to partcipate in some kind of massive assualt battle. I would have liked some kind of bezerk skill so an unarmored conan character concept could work better. And of course, rideable horses, carts, boats and rafts.

 

[dunduks]

Re: Morrowind Review

Oh please don't say that! Yes, Gothic 2 is a great game. But the controls are incredibly overwhelmingly bad! We don't want an ounce of that combat system to touch Elder Scrolls or Fallout!

Still Gothics combat was way more entertaining then Morrowinds, the only problem I had with Gothics combat was the collision system (weapons affected only the target e.g. swinging sword or axe around ignored enemies except selected target).

 

[Limorkil]

Re: Morrowind Review

My advice would be to take a look at Gothic 2, which managed to be both immersive and fairly open-ended.

Oh please don't say that! Yes, Gothic 2 is a great game. But the controls are incredibly overwhelmingly bad! We don't want an ounce of that combat system to touch Elder Scrolls or Fallout!

And rest.

I think the idea would be to focus on the things that made Gothic 2 "a great game" (in your words) and ignore the things that were less good about it. Had I said "What Bethesda should do is totally copy absolutely everything about Gothic 2 down to the tiniest detail" then your comment would be well-founded. I just think that Bethesda could learn something about how to make a game that is both limited in scale and fairly open-ended.

 

[Whipporowill]

And then there's some people like me (and Stark from what I remember of a recent conversation) that really likes the Gothic control and combat system - so it's not a case of white and0 black here. Morrowinds combat was easy to control, but just drab and felt clumsy compared to Gothic's ducking and weaving.

 

[Limorkil]

And then there's some people like me (and Stark from what I remember of a recent conversation) that really likes the Gothic control and combat system - so it's not a case of white and0 black here. Morrowinds combat was easy to control, but just drab and felt clumsy compared to Gothic's ducking and weaving.

I liked the idea of the combat system in Gothic 2 a lot more than the actual implementation. I think the controls were the main problem IIRC. Anyway, it was better than Morrowind, but then I can't think of an RPG with a worse combat system than Morrowind.

 

[Stark]

And then there's some people like me (and Stark from what I remember of a recent conversation) that really likes the Gothic control and combat system - so it's not a case of white and0 black here. Morrowinds combat was easy to control, but just drab and felt clumsy compared to Gothic's ducking and weaving.

yeah. I wanted to comment on geminito's post initially but i gather that it's really up to different people's opinion, so i just leave it at that. If every major reviewer site complained about the control scheme there must be something really wrong with the control scheme, right?

Personally the combat control in Gothic and Gothic 2 feels very intuitive to me, and easy to use. I do not think it's chunky or anything. As dunduks said, the combat is its high point though the collision system is abit off.

about the only low point is the inventory control. allowing use of a mouse would have helped, alot.

TES4 that's more like Gothic can only be a good thing. Despite very similar in camera angle, MW is almost the opposite of Gothic. Dull combat, lifeless NPC, lack of focus on main story, and dull dialog.

 

[Jung]

Yep, I am replaying G2 right now, and I have to say that it is one of the best games I have ever played. I enjoy the combat for the most part, though it could be refined along with several other things about the interface. The enemy AI really surprises sometimes, and you really have to use the environment and flaws in the AI to get an advantage. It really makes every battle a unique experience, even reloads. The environment is a marvel. You have a rather crude 2D map, so you use it to navigate to the point where something is supposed to be, but you don't see it. You then realize that it could be on a ledge around the mountain above you, or below at the base below you. It is a bit frustrating sometimes, but it is the best and most realistic use of 3D in a game. Morrowind was a real disapointment when I played it after Gothic 1.