The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

"Don't believe the hype!"

Morrowind is a well-recieved game that has massive faults. I bought it based on the rave reviews, however I quickly discovered that this game never lived up my expectations for a game that was so universally acclaimed, or even up to any of my standards as far as playing a game goes.


Graphics 6/10
This game is from an era when 3D was rather rudimentary and polygon count was low. I like to see 2D done well than 3D done poorly. As a general quality, the game is too dark, and there's a lot of fog, probably to decrease the draw distance. The game has low system requirements, which is nice, but even if you increase the resolution and texture quality of trash, it still just looks like trash.

The water is nice from afar. It has a shimmery particulate quality when it reflects light. This is the one thing that I enjoyed. Depending on your settings, it might look laughably zebra-striped up close. A minor gripe about the camera, when you're swimming, the third person camera is useless and won't show you anything because it's underwater. This sucks if you use the third person view like I do. (First person view gives me nausea and vertigo after a few minutes of playing, but I'm the only one I know who goes through that.)

Everyone is really ugly. I know that it's shallow, and I'm usually the last person to judge something for this kind of quality, but it really bothers me. Somehow, with the way they designed the faces, it just turns out that everyone is really ugly. It doesn't help that they try to get in your face when they talk to you. I've noticed that Oblivion (and also Fallout 3) has a high quantity of people who are really ugly, so Bethesda in general has some problems on that front.


Sound 6/10
The music is passable, even good at times. It's also a useful cue because if there are enemies that have noticed you, even if you haven't noticed them, the battle music will start playing and clue you in to what's going on. The voice acting is typical, if uninspired.

The sound effects are bad. The thing that sticks out most in my memory are those flappy flying enemies that look like stingrays. They make wharbly sounds, like the giant lizard that Obi-Wan rode in Episode III. The attack sounds are typical, the sort of "windy" sound for swinging a weapon and the "crunchy" sound for getting hit. I think enough time has passed that we don't have to take large portions of our games from Diablo I anymore. (Personally, I'd rather be playing Diablo I than this game, though.)


Gameplay 4/10

// Combat 0/10
The combat in Morrowind is laughable. Even if you have high skill, the chance that you'll hit something is pretty low. And there's not any real way that your actual skill at the game affects your combat ability. You just run up to an enemy and click a bunch of times. You can swing all you want, but you have no clue if you're landing any of the attacks, which makes the game frustrating. Magic doesn't have the same problems, which makes me contemplate the point of having physical attacks at all.

You can upgrade your stats by doing some action repeatedly. If you want to upgrade your athletic ability, you go somewhere safe, aim yourself into a wall, tape down the "forward" button and go live your life for a few hours. When you come back, you have more skill! Sadly, this game isn't worth the pennies that the electricity would cost to keep my computer on during those hours of my life.

// Exploration 8/10
Morrowind's sole redeeming feature, the thing that even makes the game worth mentioning, is the ability to just choose a direction and start walking. From the first town, the entire map is pretty much accessible. And it's not like areas are just empty filler content, the entire map has interesting stuff all over it, and it even has a bunch of caves, many of them huge, strewn about that increase dramatically the area to be explored.

One of the things that makes so many RPGs questionable is that there are random giant walls that you can't pass. In Morrowind, if you can see it, you can go there, even if there are giant walls. And they even give you a spell near the beginning of the game that allows you to randomly jump in another direction to expedite your process of going somewhere totally irrelevant to the main quest.

This game has almost the best exploration of any game I've ever played, probably just squeezing out Freelancer by a little bit. But the reason I give this section eight points and not the full ten, is that you are penalized for running. This is simply absurd in a game whose sole selling point is exploration, that it's going to penalize me for trying to explore faster. If you run around, especially if you jump, you drain your fatigue bar very quickly. That wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, except fatigue also determines whether or not you hit the enemy during combat. If you have low fatigue, your chances of hitting anything is pretty abysmal. It's incredibly annoying to be out of fatigue and then encounter two flying enemies and die to them just because you wanted to run instead of walk.

// Other 4/10
The game also has other avenues of play, albeit not really fun. You can join a guild and carry out typical guild tasks, depending on which guild you join (thieves, fighters, and obvious mission for those classes). You can play around with alchemy and gather a bunch of reagents to make potions with. Also, you can kill someone and use their house as your own, and keep your treasure (or alchemical reagents like me) in their baskets and stuff so you don't have to carry it around. You can be a thief and steal stuff from people, by sneaking so they don't catch you. This is relatively fun until you realize that there's no end goal to doing this. Basically, these extraneous features are amusing for a while but get old pretty quickly.


Storyline 3/10
As with any RPG, the story carries a lot of weight, and the story to Morrowind is simply ignorable. You start as a random guy on a boat and then you talk to various people who send you on various quests. There are also a bunch of random quests that other people will assign, and these quests might further develop the story or branch off into a side story (or, more often, serve no apparent purpose at all). I can't get into specifics about the storyline because I ignored it all. It was so, so boring. Each quest was essentially, "Go to 'town with funny name' give/receive this item to/from 'person with funny name'. He will instruct you further."

The storyline also does the immersion thing, where they have books with details of the game's background, as well as characters who talk about it. There are ruins to explore that are filled with artifacts of bygone civilizations, but I can't really think of an RPG that didn't have something analogous. Both of these things are boring. I didn't have the patience to read the books (I did have the patience to read the ones in Neverwinter Nights, but that game has an interesting storyline.) I give three points to this section simply because you can fully enjoy the game without actually caring about the storyline, thereby bypassing a major suckfest.


Conclusion 4/10
I know that many people give this game a high rating, but from what I've seen in my own life, the people who enjoy this game are people who don't play other RPGs, so they have no idea how many games there are in the genre that don't actually suck. You can get the GOTY edition, with both expansions for $20 or so. If you really like the style of play in Oblivion, then this game is a logical choice, but otherwise avoid it.


Note
Also, one of the only things that amuse me about this game, if you jump and you're going downhill, and the slope is around 45 degrees, you can sometimes glide along the surface in weird pseudofalling. I sort of like to surf mountains and see how long the game's engine thinks I'm in the air when I'm actually touching the ground. Warning: the game will think that you're in free-fall while you're doing this, and you will be damaged appropriately if you're in the "air" for long enough.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 05/19/09

Game Release: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (US, 05/02/02)