The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

"A Good Game, But Not Great"

Background:
Morrowind takes place on the ''small'' island of Morrowind in a world called Tamriel. The player character has an ambiguous past and the game plops you off at the port city of Seyda Neen, giving you only a scant few clues as to why you're being whisked away to the xenophobic island of Morrowind. From there, your unceremonious journey starts, basking you in a lush, vibrant world (with many many angry things).

Graphics: 10/10
Morrowind's giant world is beautifully complemented by its graphics engine. Objects and buildings are liberally constructed with polygons and the textures are crisp and well used. The water ripples beautifully with pixel shaders and it is absolutely entrancing to watch the water shimmer in the rain. The sky is filled with stars in the night and bleeds into beautiful orange and red hues during the sunrise and sunset. One of the joys of Morrowind is to just explore the world. Its wilderness, ruined fortresses, and landscape dazzle the eyes. Sometimes I wish I could just put Morrowind on a flat-panel plasma TV and pretend I'm looking into a window. My only reservations about the graphics engine is how taxing it can be. The game renders the furthest objects first so that everything in the player's viewing radius, even objects hidden by walls and buildings, are rendered (turn on the wire-frame console option to see it in action.) In towns, its enough to bring most systems stumble into the teens and single digits in frame rates.

Sound Effects: 9/10
Bethesda has done a competent job with the sound effects. The voice acting, for the most part, is convincing, with slurred speech for the Kha'jits, raspy Argonian voices, and the usual human-like voices. Weapons and spells sound normal and the world's creatures all have their own sounds. Also, the first time it rains, be sure to turn down the volume because that first crash of thunder is pretty spooky. Unfortunately, Morrowind suffers from a bit of repetition in its sounds. The high-pitched whirl of a healing spell is used for restoration spells, skill enforcement spells, drinking a potion, and the sound of charging some combat spells. Your footsteps sound the same on pavement as they do on rocks, grassy hills, dirt roads, wood, and any other solid surface that you can think of. Still, Bethesda's work complements the game fairly well and doesn't dampen the experience.

Music: 8/10
Jeremy Soule does a good job composing the music for Morrowind. The music is fully instrumental, with horns and the orchestra blending soft tunes with quickly paced battle music. The main theme to Morrowind is an mp3 that I still listen to. The main problem with Morrowind's music is that it's too short. 45 minutes of music is not enough for a player who will probably spend several days of in-game time on Morrowind. Still, the quality of the tracks that we are given is indisputably good. I can only wish that there were more tracks for the game.

Interface: 8/10
The options and windows in the game are fairly intuitive. You can rearrange most windows to your preference and the window translucency option helps make the windows less obstructive. Hot keys help to streamline combat and make your inventory items more accessible as you're strolling along the world. For the most part, the interface is friendly to players. However, Morrowind's journal system is an organizational nightmare. It is effectively just a book that places all your quest and quest updates in chronological order. There are no categories that separate completed quests those that are still active and you can't group updates to quests into their respective groups. Unless a player undertakes a handful of quests outside the main quest, the player's journal only needs a few Tamrielean days to become one disorganized morass of notes. For an RPG, it becomes a true pain to track the progress of individual quests, and for a game with a scope as large as Morrowind's, it is very easy to drop the game's many side quests. Bethesda only addresses this problem in its expansion, Tribunal, by separating completed quests from active quests.

Gameplay: 4/10
Personally, I thought Morrowind lost lots of points on dialogue, NPC interaction, and character impact and interactivity. While the game dazzles the senses, it quickly becomes repetition after a week or two of gameplay. Combat is unimpressing, with melee combat being reduced to constant hacking and slashing. Ranged combat is not any better. Spells offer some variety, but the game doesn't over very many exotic spells, and the most effective way to solve a belligerent enemy is usually to arm your most deadly combat spell rather than something more creative, such as ''dominate creature'' or ''charm person.'' The game features many quests, but few NPCs acknowledge the work you've done outside of the main quest. The AI does not contribute to the game either. It is fairly to exploit the poor pathfinding skills of the enemy as they occasionally fail to notice the stairs to your perching spot as you pluck them off with arrows and spells. Pleasantly enough, the same pathfinding applies to any NPCs that you may be escorting on a quest. Morrowind's gameplay seems one-dimensional, lacking sophistication in both its combat, dialogue, and NPCs. As a result, most quests seem trivial after a while, with no significance to their resolution(although they'll certainly talk as though its something big).

Story and Execution: 7/10
I thought the plot was well done. It had a good premise and the threat was relatively well portrayed in the Sixth House strongholds. However, I thought that Bethesda could have done a better job of making Dagoth Ur seem like an imminent threat and adding more urgency to the main quest. Other than sleepers tapping your shoulder in the towns, or Ash Slaves atop of you after you woke up from slumber, the player never saw the threat encroaching on the towns, which made the main antagonist of the game seem detached from much of the world. I think the threat could have been a lot more pervasive if a town had been destroyed, or if there was a crumbling town on the island that was isolated and suffering from pervading attacks.

Overall: 7/10
Morrowind was an entertaining game, but as an RPG, it had too many moments that bring a player out of character and break the flow of the game.

Tamriel has lots of ethnic diversity. You can see some differentiation in the speech patterns with Argonians and Ka'jits, how their sentence structure is all inverted. So when you're having a conversation with them, they talk weirdly for their greetings and maybe a few other subjects, but hit a few other subjects, and bam, you get some canned response (i.e.: ''Oh, I hope they do something about the sickness. The other day, my neighbor ran out screaming madly and...'') that completely blows the NPC out of character. It's not a rarity either, and its rather odd to see daily other-side-of-the-island conversation with miners in Red Mountain, a supposed bastion of evil. In fact, the player character was more likely to run into a canned response rather than a unique response, which could have been somewhat alleviated if they at least canned responses logically (such as according to race, Ka'jits do not have good grammar....) The dialogue was inconsistent and not very engaging, so it was a bit hard to get into character.

NPCs also seemed a little static. They never seem to be doing anything. They just stand at a predesigned location, and walk along waypoints, waiting for one thing: You talking to them. It's one of those things that takes the player out of character in Morrowind. Also, on several occasions, I've ended up doing quests backwards (i.e.: an Ash Statue quest in Ald'ruhn) because the character can trigger the quest with an NPC in the middle of the quest, while the first NPC remains oblivious and never rewards you once the deed has been done. Also, the lack of party combat bummed me out. Traveling companions would have provided a good opportunity to become attached to one of the game's many eccentric characters It also could have provided another medium for developing the storyline, which had a pretty good premise to start out with. Unfortunately, the only companions that Morrowind ever saw were people who needed protection to a certain destination.

What probably nixed me the most was the lack of impact from the character's actions outside of the main storyline. As an RPG, Morrowind has a lot of responsibility to associate the player with the character. However, I felt little attachment to the player character. Prime examples would include rising to the leadership position of any of the three Great Houses, the Fighters' Guild, Mage Guild, Thieves' Guild, etc.... It's just a hollow, superficial title to be the leader of any of these groups. Other than the meager rewards that you receive, the NPCs of your group and rival groups respond to you, calling you an Outlander, and giving you canned ''good disposition'' responses. You don't get stuff cheaper and, at best, you get a little stronghold for continuing deep within one of the three Great Houses. You may be something special, but to them, you're just another person. I also thought that the ''Reputation'' stat was underused in the game. For the most part, its just added onto the disposition rating of each person you talk to, but you could always admire any NPC up to a better disposition with enough patience, so the bonus from the reputation statistic was not very significant. Fallout's karma meter determined things like... whether mobsters would attack you, ability to join certain clans, and having random bounty hunters come after you. Planescape had AD&D alignments that affected dialogue options, NPC behavior, and the ability to use items. KOTOR's alignment system determined character abilities (force power efficiencies). However, Morrowind's reputation system was easily trumped by your speech skill. And for all those emancipations of slaves, and cleansing of Daedra shrines, sometimes your reputation would go up, but NPCs in pertinent groups would not acknowledge your actions. I always found myself looking down the list of guilds I was in and asking myself, ''Why bother?''

With that all said, I thought Morrowind had a lot going for it. It had an immense scope and a beautiful graphics engine to back it up. The physical environment seemed vibrant and it was visually rapturing. Morrowind was an immense island with endless amounts of exploration and a weather system that could be just a bit spooky from time to time. On the surface, Morrowind looked like a real world and I wouldn't mind plastering a giant flat-panel of Morrowind on a wall and pretending it was a window. The game also aimed high, combining a landscape of cities with various distinct cultures, a large amount of wandering NPCs, and a very open ended game design. I had a lot of fun with Morrowind for a week or two.

However, in retrospect, I would not list Morrowind above several other RPGs. The game just seemed too repetitious and static. Other than pride of my in-game accomplishments, I felt no attachment for my character, much less any other NPCs. The main quest was the only thing that I felt like I was making a difference with, but the main quest alone did not set it apart from any other RPG I've played. I thought Fallout 1 and 2 had better dialogue, combat, and ambiance. Planescape had significantly better dialogue and storytelling. Deus Ex had a whole lot more ambiance (something about conspiracy theories), and Baldur's Gate had more interesting and interactive NPCs. Morrowind felt like a lot of untapped potential. To me, it was ''only a good game.''

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/13/04