Yet Another Morrowind Thread

[Sigourn]

If the modded had any lick of sense, he would have added pay orders and stuff to help you manage.

He didn't. Because I personally don't use enchanters in this playthrough, I'm more than happy with the trade off.

Now put anisotropic back on (if anything it helps make the game as sharp as DDK as it allows excessive smearing of textures when seeing them at oblique angles), remove the vignette filter, up the resolution a bit and we're talking.

Anisotropic filtering is on. I'm not sure why the game looked like that, I'm guessing it's the low resolution (but at higher resolution my FPS is crippled). The vignette I'm on the fence about, on one hand it makes a lot of my pictures look nicer to me, but on the other hand it is very "artificial" and doesn't fit a fantasy game. Now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing the vignette in-game.

• Equipment now has stat requirements. Depending on what mode you use, you suffer penalties when using equipment above your skills, or you cannot equip those items at all.

Apart from incredibly few exceptions that's actually pure retardo.

I personally find vanilla Morrowind pure retardo when it comes to balance. You go through the trouble of killing a Bull Netch and get an ingredient only worth 2 gold, for instance. Finding strong weapons is awesome, but the game has some serious lack of progression when it comes to equipment: most of it is available right from the start, and because everything is so poorly priced, you walk out of Seyda Neen wearing the second best light armor in the game (excluding DLC).

I understand it's not for everyone, and rightly so. But I personally find more satisfaction in actually earning my equipment than stumbling upon it and breaking the game. Breaking the game in Morrowind means the game gets trivially easy, which isn't particularly fun...

 

[Sigourn]

I will stick to no vignetting, this pic seems much nicer without it.

EDIT:

1080p Skies .iv Balmora:

1080p Vanilla skies Balmora:

The good thing of playing at 720p is that because the game is "smaller", you don't get so obviously blurred pictures (for instance, vanilla night sky looks somewhat blurry, but at 720p it looks nicely sharp). You also gain much more performance. The downside is the more annoying aliasing.

 

[Sigourn]

DraQ The gold weight mod is indeed fairly clunky, so now I've instead modifying a GMST that reduces the encumbrace multiplier from five times your Strength to four times your Strength. I reckon that is a much better solution, as it encourages managing your inventory as opposed to managing your gold.

Because money is made selling stuff as opposed to finding gold, this has the advantage of reducing the speed at which the player makes money (as you can't loot that many stuff at once).

 

[octavius]

I remember using a coin weight mod since I like the idea, Morrwind being too easy as it is, but it was so buggy that I uninstalled it.

 

[Sigourn]

I remember using a coin weight mod since I like the idea, Morrwind being too easy as it is, but it was so buggy that I uninstalled it.

I used abot's mod to a successful degree. It only requires that the player opens his inventory after any picking up/dropping of gold to refresh. But still doesn't fix the problem that Morrowind's prices are off the chart. There's also a reason we have bills as opposed to going on around carrying all our cash in cents.

New Vegas is perfectly suited to weighted bottlecaps mods because 1) the prices aren't that retarded to begin with, and 2) you don't stop on your tracks when you are overencumbered.

 

[Sigourn]

Another great mod finally sees the light of day: Weapon Sheathing.

• Equipped weapons will now be shown on a character's hip or back when not drawn.
• Bows and Crossbows use visible quivers to display the their equipped ammunation.
• Shields can optionally be moved to the character's back when not being used.
• Includes a comprehensive set of quiver and scabbard assets for the vanilla weapons.
• Features work for both the player and all other compatible NPCs/creatures.
• All weapons are supported, including those from other mods. Custom sheath assets are optional.*
• Includes an in-game mod configuration menu where you can tweak settings for compatibility.
• Pluginless and purely event-based. A clean implementation that doesn't consume equipment slots!

 

[RNGsus]

That last point is what's impressive. Somebody actually put in the work to rig this together right...15 years later.

 

[Sigourn]

That last point is what's impressive. Somebody actually put in the work to rig this together right...15 years later.

lua magic is making a lot of great mods possible. It's ridiculous.

 

[RNGsus]

Yeah, Warscape is in lua.

 

[octavius]

lua?

 

[RNGsus]

I think so. Its just a file format. I don't know how that works for gamebryo.

 

[TreeInAForestFire]

Need some advice on modding morrowind. Thing is I don't really want to dig into the modding community just yet on fear of encountering some kind of mudcrab porn mod and being tempted. Trying to stay as close to the original as possible on this attempt so I'm thinking of just taking the code patch. Not sure if I want to take the MPP or that Purist patch because they both seem to add things and I don't know enough about them to be sure. Should I take them and if so, which one is more pure? Oh and is there some kind of a clearly superior mod manager or something? Or anything else I might be missing?

 

[Sigourn]

Need some advice on modding morrowind. Thing is I don't really want to dig into the modding community just yet on fear of encountering some kind of mudcrab porn mod and being tempted. Trying to stay as close to the original as possible on this attempt so I'm thinking of just taking the code patch. Not sure if I want to take the MPP or that Purist patch because they both seem to add things and I don't know enough about them to be sure. Should I take them and if so, which one is more pure? Oh and is there some kind of a clearly superior mod manager or something? Or anything else I might be missing?

First came the Morrowind Patch Project.

Recently we got Patch for Purists. I'll let you be the one to figure out which one you should use, but just in case:

Spoiler

Patch for Purists is the one that you should use. MPP made a lot of balance tweaks for no reason. Remember that Morrowind Code Patch is a separate patch you should also install.

Regarding mod managers, there's only two I can recommend. One is Mod Organizer 2, which is what I use and what I'm used to. The other is Wrye Mash. I never used it, but people swear by it.

 

[luj1]

Need some advice on modding morrowind.

Be picky. Be veeeery picky.

Spoiler

MGE XE + MCP + P4P is pretty much all you need

Spoiler

plus maybe some of those new Lua mods if you want

 

[Sigourn]

Bloodmoon is such a piece of shit, goddamn. The only good thing about this expansion is the lore and the pretty landscapes, because everything else thus far has been awful.

1. Solstheim is a desert with nothing to see except copypasted caves and Nord tombs.
2. Many of the caves are unnecessarily long, which is a dramatic contrast with Vvardenfell's caves, which were very compact and full of stuff.
3. You get thrown hundreds upon hundreds of magical items, which you can't sell because no one has that many gold (unless you pull cheap tactics), and that aren't particularly useful either.
4. Quests send you all over the island, which wouldn't be a problem if they weren't all fetch quests for the most part.
5. The island is cluttered with enemies.
6. And unlike in Gothic, enemies all gangbang on you, which leads to retarded scenarios where you are being hit by a Spriggan, a bear, a wolf, and a naked Nord. Ugh.
7. There's no fast travel of any kind. Solstheim in particular needs it, because travelling through the island is a slog for the aforementioned reasons.
8. Enemies are damage sponges, vastly overpowered because Bethesda can't into balance. I had to download Bloodmoon Rebalance to nerf these enemies, and still my equipment degrades fairly quickly.

At least the new equipment looks nice I guess.

 

[octavius]

Bloodmoon is unplayable without some mod that mods the wildlife.
But it has excellent atmosphere, especially those winter nights when it's snowing.

If I ever play Morrowind again, I'll install Tribunal only because it's required for many mods. But I won't play it; the main quest is just too retarded. You know pretty much right away that Almalaxia is a scheming, lying bitch, but you are forced to travel the rail road until the bitter end.

 

[MWaser]

Tribunal is the "free assassins for free money from the get go" cheat mod. Pretty much.

 

[abnaxus]

I still laugh remembering that phagget at the end of the East Empire Company quest line attacking your character out of nowhere with a stahlrim warhammer.

 

[DraQ]

The expansions are quite a bit crap, mainly due to lack of attention to detail that was of paramount importance in the base game - you have bookshelves populated by blocks of copies of the same book, shamelessly copypasted dungeon interiors, characters missing less noticeable clothing articles, more homogeneous environments, almost all the combat handled by blanket treatment using heavy handed use of levelled lists, unpickable locks to prevent the need for robust scripting, etc.
Then you have stupid balance issues like commonly available fortify skill spells or those damn assassins.

Even without taking quantity into the account and just focusing on pure quality Skyrim offers much better experience (both TES and general) than MW expansions (and Skyrim's Dragonborn is a far more interesting take on Solstheim than Morrowind's Bloodmoon).

The upside of the expansions, apart from providing expanded scripting capabilities and better journal, is that they expand Morrowind. You have new quests, areas, items, architecture, opportunity to finally piece together a full suit of Daedric, and rather impressive feat in the form of accomplishing cursed weapon in a game without identification mechanics and transparent enchantment information.

 

[RNGsus]

Tribunal is the "free assassins for free money from the get go" cheat mod. Pretty much.

Tribunal is the lvl 9 assassins attack you at lvl 2 expansion. You have to rest near a legion fort and scale the walls quickly, so the assholes can't paralyze you with their daggers.

 

[Sigourn]

Even without taking quantity into the account and just focusing on pure quality Skyrim offers much better experience (both TES and general) than MW expansions (and Skyrim's Dragonborn is a far more interesting take on Solstheim than Morrowind's Bloodmoon)..

I haven't played Tribunal, but it's true as far as Bloodmoon/Dragonborn goes. Dragonborn certainly had a lot of love and work put into it compared to Bloodmoon. Of all Bethesda expansions I have played (Bloodmoon, FO3's, Skyrim's), Dragonborn is easily my favorite.

In Morrowind it seems you simply do a quest, return for more quests, do another quest, return for more quests. And that's simply because there are only three quest hubs, and only TWO questlines at a time.

 

[Sigourn]

I think I've nailed down what is arguably Morrowind's most overlooked weakness: quest rewards.

In other RPGs I've played, quest rewards are, well, rewarding. In the Infinity Engine games, these translate as massive experience gains. Some pretty cool item or at least a sizeable amount of gold. One quest reward in Bloodmoon, finding an airship and retrieving an amulet, earns me 2,000 drakes... yes, that's right. 2,000 drakes, when any barrow you can find has at least five times that amount in gear alone.

Morrowind's economy is even more broken when you install a mod that multiplies the amount of gold merchants have, because at that point you can sell anything you find and get absurdly rich in very little time. And this is all to blame on Bethesda. Ultimately, what people praise about Morrowind ("it rewards the player!") is something nothing to be praised at all, because:

1) It's simply false: you rack up items you don't need and cannot sell.
2) It's the wrong kind of reward: because you effectively do not gain anything out of these dungeon runs. Not even quests.

IN FACT, I'll go one step further and claim the only time I actually felt rewarded in Morrowind was in Seyda Neen, when I did the "find the taxman's murderer" quest. Why? Because you get 500 gold, which makes a massive difference that early in the game.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

and rather impressive feat in the form of accomplishing cursed weapon in a game without identification mechanics and transparent enchantment information.

Which one?

 

[MWaser]

Quests in Morrowind are just for faction reputation for the most part, the accumulation of which gets you the sufficient ranks to do more important quests and at the end of most faction questlines you get access to some really powerful artifacts. And the artifacts in Morrowind are by far the best of the entire series, REALLY powerful in both base stats and enchantments. That individual quests are less rewarding as such doesn't matter as much because you don't treat each quest individually.

Sure, that stupid barrow quest only rewarding 2000 gold is lame. Equipment you find is worth a lot, but really nobody actually bothers with the minor rewards as money is so easy to make anyway, so you mostly tend to do quests for either their unique rewards (like artifacts) or just for the interest of them.

Now if you actually do consider non-faction quests with their own interesting rewards (like the daedric quests or helping the lady with Boots of Blinding Speed), they are uniquely powerful in their own right, again moreso than in the other games.
But ultimately most of the miscellaenous quests are just fluff for the interest of it, less so for the rewards. So yes, you can claim that miscellaneous quests rewards do indeed suck. But not that quest rewards themselves suck because they lead to something.

 

[Wayward Son]

I'm thinking of starting a new playthrough of Morrowind. I don't want to just play a milquetoast high elf/Breton wizard, so I was looking for some interesting builds that aren't full magic.