Elder Scrolls Why Morrowind is a bad RPG

[samuraigaiden]

Morrowind is best enjoyed by not giving into completionist compulsions to "100%" the game. It has a wonderful main quest, some very decent side quests, many very mediocre side quests and a ton of stuff that is just there to create the illusion of a vast world you could explore, but that's not really worth exploring.

Where Morrowind is good, it's amazing. It is not, however, a good sandbox.

Maybe a lot of the hate directed at Morrowind in threads such as this is motivated by the fact it was for a long time described as a sandbox. A game where you can live in and do whatever. It may have been that in 2002, but that's certainly not what anyone should play it for in 2021.

 

[Thal]

Morrowind has enough space to pack 10 RPGs. And that's where its problem begin and end.

To very honest, Morrowind has the second worst combat system I've ever experienced in a game, only RtWP is worse

Dude, your portrait is from Arcanum

 

[V_K]

To be fair, I don't think there was anything particularly broken about Arcanum's combat system per se, it's more that enemies lacked AI and variety.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Morrowind was an ok book.

 

[JarlFrank]

i dunno where else to post this, but someone's been dumping screenshots of Michael Kirkbride being a fucking idiot online in his private cult leader facebook group and
laugh
my
fucking
ass
off.

[snip]

Yeah that explains why Morrowind's lore is so weird.

 

[Valdetiosi]

Morrowind has started to grow fond on me to the point I play it every now and then, and my introduction to TES was through Oblivion; now I just loathe that game.
The dungeons are more worthwhile to explore (no level scaling loot save in containers), the way skills were handled made damage more impactful, the spell diversity is at its strongest here and quests really beat out other TES games quests the way they were down to earth manner stuff.
Heck, the only downside I could have with the game is the low running speed and extreme hostility of every creature.

 

[Fargus]

Morrowind has started to grow fond on me to the point I play it every now and then, and my introduction to TES was through Oblivion; now I just loathe that game.
The dungeons are more worthwhile to explore (no level scaling loot save in containers), the way skills were handled made damage more impactful, the spell diversity is at its strongest here and quests really beat out other TES games quests the way they were down to earth manner stuff.

True chad. Not like those n'wahs out there.

Heck, the only downside I could have with the game is the low running speed and extreme hostility of every creature.

That can be fixed with better athletics\speed. But the critters are annoying. So.. Using mark\recall halves your travel routine as well as almsivi\divine intervention for certain occasions. Then there is levitation and waterwalking so the water trashmobs won't annoy you. There are boots of blinding speed artifact and you can bypass the blindness with a simple 1 sec resist blindness spell. So the only problem are cliffracers but even they will be no match for you, so you can just ignore everything and travel in peace at the super speed.

 

[Calthaer]

And I agree with Shadenuat about Morrowind's biggest issue is the amount of content it has. A lot of it is filler. Half the amount of content would have made Morrowind a much better experience, and even so it would have still dwarfed most RPGs at the time.

Yeah...there are some cool and epic quests and stories in Morrowind - the Last Dwemer, defeating the "gods", the ending of the main quest. They weren't made obvious and you had to dig to find them amidst a bunch of meaningless little fetch-quests and other little Mickey-Mouse silly things that the game throws in your face most of the time.

 

[Carrion]

anyone who pretends that morrowind was good for its dungeoneering or that it was any better than any other elder scrolls games is a morrowboomer with their head jammed up their ass.

The thing with Morrowind's dungeons is that most of them aren't really dungeons per se. A cave might just be a cave or somebody's home, furnished in the appropriate way. An ancenstral tomb isn't some gigantic, sprawling underground maze but a compact crypt that's big enough to store the remains of a particular family or house. A shrine can just be a simple place of worship. There are more complex dungeons, but they're usually in places where they make sense.

I don't think making all those small "dungeons" bigger would've necessarily improved Morrowind. Instead, I would've liked it if the game had made more use of its overworld locations, maybe replacing some of those nondescript caves with actual houses, encampments etc. and instead put some extra work on making the "actual" dungeons more distinctive and unique. My pet peeve with TES is that seemingly every quests has to be set in some cave or ruin somewhere, so that exploring them quickly becomes a repetitive routine rather than an exciting plunge into the unknown.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Yeah, many dwemer ruins and sixth house bases were pretty big, as so were some main quest dungeons (I fondly remember that big ashlander tomb filled with mummies, a very atmospheric and vertical dungeon), and that's ignoring that retarded Tribunal expansion with endless sewers and linear steampunk mazes.

The problem was that they were all mixed up with too many tombs, shrines, mines and caves of more realistic proportions, there was no easy way to identify worth playing stuff from copypasted garbage.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

People also forget that Daggerfall actually has smaller two-room dungeons. It's just sort of lost in the shuffle.

 

[corvus]

 

[samuraigaiden]

The way stamina impacts literally everything in Morrowind is fucking beautiful.

 

[Brujoloco]

ok coming in late on this thread, but wow, you all are so wrong!

Morrowind is THE BEST Bethesda Game ever ever everrrr made!

I mean, literally everything about morrowind that you guys are griping on about can be fixed these days with MWSE and some of the best QoL Mods you can get in a pinch off the nexus.

Personally if you all hating on Morrowind please be aware there are many modern solutions to make the game be something else entirely, from the combat system to the way you level which is usually the main gripe with it.

For example, just by installing this mod : https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48110 Morrowind becomes much better. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Dont hate on this beautiful gem for things that are easily modded out in 5 mins, hate on things that are impossible to fix

But then again, I am a Morrowind Fanboi through and through :D

 

[Brujoloco]

You can even add depth to cliffracers with this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48626 for an even more pure and modern take on them

 

[Zer0wing]

ok coming in late on this thread, but wow, you all are so wrong!

Morrowind is THE BEST Bethesda Game ever ever everrrr made!

I mean, literally everything about morrowind that you guys are griping on about can be fixed these days with MWSE and some of the best QoL Mods you can get in a pinch off the nexus.

Personally if you all hating on Morrowind please be aware there are many modern solutions to make the game be something else entirely, from the combat system to the way you level which is usually the main gripe with it.

For example, just by installing this mod : https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48110 Morrowind becomes much better. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Dont hate on this beautiful gem for things that are easily modded out in 5 mins, hate on things that are impossible to fix

But then again, I am a Morrowind Fanboi through and through

Like with the most popular polish games, you can't simply fix the writing and quest design with mods in Morrowind, which the topicstarter extensively adresses. While you can join the EnclaveMain antagonist with certain sixth house resotration mod, you have to learn another language to be really able to(and it's super glitchy), the choice part of roleplaying remains at simulationist aspects or whether you want to skip a quest or not and is lost on TES3's actual quest writing and design.

 

[Brujoloco]

ok coming in late on this thread, but wow, you all are so wrong!

Like with the most popular polish games, you can't simply fix the writing and quest design with mods in Morrowind, which the topicstarter extensively adresses. While you can join the EnclaveMain antagonist with certain sixth house resotration mod, you have to learn another language to be really able to, the choice part of roleplaying remains at simulationist aspects or whether you want to skip a quest or not and is lost on TES3's quest writing and design.

That is something I can agree with you on, but then again this has never bothered me as I mostly play Morrowind to immerse myself in the game and leave the Main quest behind as I set up my tent, light a fire and watch the stars pass by alongside my trusty guar pets

I think the last time I finished the Main quest if at all, was back in 2004. Every single time I go back to MW (about every 1 or 2 years) I load up on the latest mods and do anything BUT the main quest and game quests.

Like you I literally roleplay in there as an explorer using these maps which I created for the game from original or community assets (no real game map at all in the UI, so much more easy to get lost) and completely lose myself in the game and dont bother much to even visit cities.

I invite you if you are daring to do the same :D , alongside CCCP which I posted earlier please try my friend RandomPal set of mods which aim to make the game better here


Morrowind then becomes something else but the Nerevarine Prophecy and that is how I play it

 

[eli]

One can either be a morrowind fan, or an rpg fan. Not both.

 

[RNGsus]

Tribunal and Bloodmoon were cancer.

 

[Hag]

I had bad memories of my first play of Tribunal eons ago. During my last Morrowind binge, I decided to give it another go. And I found it captured perfectly the feeling of going to the big town coming from the country :
- You spend your time running everywhere and there is no landscape to rest your eyes.
- All is big and boring.
- Lot of money, lot of new equipment, money, money everywhere.
- You go around doing errands for everybody and it doesn't feel fulfilling.

It's kind of strange. I actually enjoyed most of the playthrough. Even sewers and underground parts were better than recalled. Quests were ok and the main one was quite interesting. But at the end, I felt the way my character should have : burned out, distrustful, sad to have been used like an idiot and angry that nobody could believe what I had done to save their asses. So I may have overreacted. This wasn't a very strong king anyway.
Boy, wasn't I glad to come back to Vvardenfel after all that shit.

 

[Tweed]

I thought Tribunal was okay. I liked how it carried on the lore and provided a bit of insight into what happened after Daggerfall. Helseth managed to work his way into a puppet ruler position with the full intention of making it a real position of power, but then I liked all the politics that went on in Daggerfall as well.

 

[Atrachasis]

I thought Tribunal was okay. I liked how it carried on the lore and provided a bit of insight into what happened after Daggerfall. Helseth managed to work his way into a puppet ruler position with the full intention of making it a real position of power, but then I liked all the politics that went on in Daggerfall as well.

True, but this is also where Tribunal overreached. The main quest had you acting as a bit of a double agent serving both Almalexia and Helseth for a while, which was all fine. Up until that quest where Alma tasked you with retrieving that "Mazed Band" - a quest that had warning signs and good reasons not to comply written all over it in neon letters - and yet there was no way to progress other than by doing precisely what she had requested. Not even a way to snitch to Helseth. That disappointment is, in retrospect, the one memory that stands out most of Tribunal.

Oddly, though, in contrast with some others here in this thread, I remember the dungeon bits (especially Old Mournhold, not so much the Dwemer ruins or the sewers) quite fondly.

 

[RNGsus]

Tribunal is a dungeon crawl, and Morrowind's strength is open world exploration. That's why I never liked it. The sewers and old city aren't any fun. The Helseth stuff is an afterthought. I was really let down by the clockwork city.

Not to mention combat sucks.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

The thing that makes Morrowind the best in the series and still an unique game among even the best RPGs, is it incredible dedication to player liberty and worldbuilding.
Such is it's commitment to these two aspects that often the devs are willing to sacrifice traditional game design in order not to compromise them.
Because of this Morrowind ends up being a "World" first and a videogame second.
And it's so nuanced in the construction of it's space that it IMHO made it one of the few works of fiction that I think someone can completely suspend their disbelief and consider the setting to be "independent" from the game.
How else could people still after 20 years discuss it so excitedly even despite the disappointment of the sequels.

That's why I don't see the "bad" content being truly bad design but simply a reflecetion of these atitudes.

Truly, Morrowind makes playing other RPG's and even other open-world games a very strange experience in comparison, because there's really not any game like this both before and after it came out.

 

[Vic]

guys, why nobody is mentioning why elder scrolls are really so popular? It's a casino simulator! Think, morrowind was popular among kids and teens on the xbox, how to get kids hooked? With gambling of course! See that dungeon? Wonder what loot is in there. See that barrel? Wonder how item is in there. The whole elder scrolls series is a giant casino with all those lootable objects. If you really wanna play the game you have autistically open every crate, barrel, chest etc. in the game or, gasp, you might miss something. This creates addictive behavior.

What people here write regarding morrowind blows my mind, slow initial starting speed? What are you, 12? just chose the right class/sign and you can start with like 70 speed at the beginning of the game. Also, the gambling element is even in the dialogue! How many times do you have to click on rumours etc. to hope for some new dialogue that triggers a quest?

Elder scrolls games are based on gambling and make you addicted with the looting system. All the lore and world building is just added to it and funded by exploiting what is basically a gambling addiction.

And then this:

Breaking Morrowind involves quite intentional and repetitive grinding like

honed your skills by cheesing Mudcrabs, Scribs, and feeble tavern patrons standing near a dimly lit candle

based around doing same actions over and over again like an autist, like grinding alchemy or leaving the game to run for multiple hours or casting same spells 2000 times.

this was posted on the very first page and I haven't read all responses but I haven't seen anybody debunking this crap. Repetitive grinding? YOu do know that there is a trainer for every skill in the game that lets you easily improve that skill to 100, all you have to figure out is how to make a lot of money in the game, which by the way is laughably easy as there is a vendor in Caldera with 5000 gold that buys and sells everything at full value! So not only is the economy fucked but you can literally become a god but not even doing anything and just getting all those skills from trainers.

It seems like people here played morrowind when they were 12 and then come here years later and talk out of their infantile experience. Morrowind is a broken, ugly casino simulator. The only reason the series is so popular is because people are stupid and don't know they are being fucked in the ass while playing this shit. (also they are kids)