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Features

• Type: Single player
• Developer: Bethesda Softworks
• Publisher: Bethesda, in Europe Ubisoft
• Third game in the groundbreaking Elder Scrolls series
• 9 races, countless classes, with the added ability to make your own custom class
• Gargantuan hand-made world to discover: shipwrecks, dwarven ruins, daedric shrines, you name it

Requirements

Minimum
• Windows ME/98
• 128 MB RAM for ME/98, 256 for Windows XP/2000
• 500 MHz Pentium, Celeron or AMD Athlon processor
• 8x CD-ROM Drive
• 1 GB free hard drive space
• 32 MB Direct3d compatible video card

Recommended
• 256 MB RAM for ME/98, 512 for XP/2000
• 800 MHz Pentium, Celeron or AMD Athlon processor
• Geforce 2 GTS, or ATI Radeon 7500 or faster video cards

Review

Just like in its predecessor Daggerfall, the start of the game sees you arriving to a new land by ship. For unknown reasons you have been captured and shipped to the island of Morrowind by orders of the Emperor himself. Within 10 seconds, a fellow prisoner on the boat asks for your name, a dialogue box pops up, letting you type it in, which marks the start of character generation. It has been cleverly woven in with the bureaucratic handling of your release, as well as the very brief tutorial. A guard asks you to follow him, and soon another dialogue box pops up, telling you how to move. Eventually you end up outside the Census and Excise office in the quiet village of Seyda Neen, with nothing but a package that you’re supposed to deliver to a person in the nearby city of Balmora. From that moment the tutorial ends, and it is time for the player to try his wings in the complete freedom of Morrowind. You can do virtually anything you like, chat with the townspeople, hang around and try to work out a few quests in town, try to kill all the townspeople, explore the marshes surrounding the city, or simply doing what you’ve been told, to deliver the package to this person in Balmora. But of course noone is making you do that. From this point on you are free to do whatever you want in Morrowind. It is perfectly alright to just drop that package on the ground and take off to do something more interesting.

This freedom is what Morrowind, just like Daggerfall, is all about. The entire world has been designed by hand, which may sound obvious, but for those who tried Daggerfall’s generic and randomly generated world, this is a huge step forward. The sheer size of the world is almost intimidating at first. Much of the first 10 hours of playing are spent just looking around the scenery. Morrowind does a great job of appearing larger than it really is: travelling between two cities can take 3 minutes, which makes little sense, but by cleverly arranging roads and scenery, an illusion of size is given so that you actually feel as if you have travelled a great distance. Much credit for this goes to the way Morrowind is divided into regions, each one with its own type of nature, specific monsters, and even climate. In the city of Maar Gan, located in the desertlike Ashlands region, ash storms plague the city more than once per day, while the coastal city of Sadrith Mora gets quite a lot of rain. There are also several architectural styles for the cities, ranging from the traditional medieval feel of Seyda Neen to the quirky mushroom-like wizard houses of Tel Mora. All these things make for an atmosphere that is simply breathtaking. It’s surprising how fast you adjust to it. Soon you catch yourself deciding to hang around in town for a little longer before heading out, just making sure that ash storm ends. You’ll find yourself knowing your way around most towns very soon: where to get a good deal on your loot, where you can get rid of that stash of local narcotic Moon Sugar; most merchants will not want anything to do with it.

Freedom also applies to the character type you play. Make no mistake: Morrowind involves a lot of axe wielding and demon slaying, so playing the game as a High Elf bard will always be more difficult than playing it as an Orc warrior. In that sense Morrowind is not a balanced game, something that there has been much complaining about, though not from gamers finding bards too difficult to play, but rather from people finding the game much too easy as a fighter or a fighter/mage combination. The game remains challenging for most people up until about level 20. After that point the game doesn’t seem to add any new, more dangerous opponents. Instead you get attacked by the exact same opponents at level 25 as on level 20, and by level 30, battle becomes a one strike deal, where you find yourself killing a Dremora Lord as if it was an annoying mosquito. Fortunately Bethesda are aware of this problem: the 1.1 patch introduced a Difficulty Slider to the Options menu. Increasing the slider will reduce the damage you do to enemies, and increase the damage the enemy does to you.

The slider seems to have helped most difficulty problems, even though the lack of extremely high level opponents make the game a little repetitive beyond a certain point, where you just won’t meet any new kinds of monsters. The slider won’t compensate for a more serious design flaw in Morrowind though: extremely powerful armor and weapons are much too easy to find. There are lots of weapon and armor types available in morrowind, but unfortunately all that variation is ruined when it’s so easy to find the best stuff as early as level 10.

This along with complaints about the main quest being too easy makes for a sad conclusion: it seems as if Bethesda have decided to gear this game towards the ”average” computer gamer, who will spend so and so many hours with a game before completing it and moving on to new games. The thought in itself is fine: it is how most games are designed, but Bethesda’s audience with the previous TES games was never the ”average” gamer. The Elder Scrolls universe has always been about getting completely lost in a fantastic, neverending world… Morrowind delivers on that account, except for the ”neverending” part. What’s the point in getting completely buried in a game if it becomes bland as soon as you feel that you’re starting to get somewhere? You spend a long time building your character up, fine tuning him or her to perfection through the great skill and leveling system, only to find that once you’re done, there is nothing to do with that perfect character that will be anywhere near a challenge. The same kind of ”what now” feeling plagues other parts of Morrowind: you will spend much of your time doing quests for the 10+ factions that you can join. In each one of them, the highest position you can reach is similar to Guildmaster, but reaching that point becomes anticlimatic when you realize that you get no real reward for it (if you don’t count the way all guild members will call you Master when they greet you), no power, and, frankly, not a single thing to do in that guild anymore. A similar thing happens when you finish the main quest. Of course every game has to end somewhere, except morrowind doesn’t. Finishing the main quest does change the game world a bit, but you are free to keep playing as long as you like. Maybe that’s the reason why you end up feeling a little bit empty once you’ve completed the main quest, you never get the kind of closure you get in other games, which effectively makes you keep playing until you get bored with it.

So far in this review, that amounts to difficulty problems, and a sometimes haunting feeling that all your hard work ends up being rewarded with nothing but a more courteous greeting from fellow guild members. Two of the three flaws of this game, number three being dialogue.

Daggerfall had arguably one of the worst dialogue systems ever in a computer game. Unique npc responses didn’t exist, nor did any possibility to roleplay your own character’s way of speaking. For some completely incomprehensible reason, Morrowind does very little to improve this dialogue system. In fact, Morrowind’s dialogue system comes off as an updated version of Daggerfall’s, when a better choice would have been to throw it out altogether. The way it works is something like this: when you choose to talk to a NPC, the person will greet you. The greeting is controlled by many factors, such as whether you carry a disease, which factions you’re in, your general reputation, or if you have a price on your head. So far so good. You are offered a menu to your right, which contains all subjects you can ask about, such as ”latest rumours”, a description of services that the city you’re in offers, an explanation of any guilds that the NPC is a member of, and so on. For most NPCs the options available are over 20, and if you then consider the fact that Morrowind consists of over 3000 NPCs, you begin to realize why everyone in one city will have the exact same thing to say about the latest rumours, for example. Or why there is only one response to the ”mages guild” topic, which is a generic explanation of what it is. Obviously it would have been impossible to give each character all unique dialogue, but that’s not really an excuse, when it’s in fact the dialogue system that is faulty. Crassius Curio, the incredibly perverted Council member of one of the Great House factions, is one of few shining exceptions to the fact that all NPCs more or less work as bulletin boards, or, if you will, search engines. You choose a search word, and they tell you all about it. This is the only thing that Morrowind hasn’t done remarkably better than its predecessor, and while the dialogue is generally well written, and not at all as bad as it sounds when described like this, it leaves much, much to be desired. It would have been better if less important NPCs where given just one thing to say, which would be unique, while giving more important npcs a few more things to tell you about, instead of doing this mediocre attempt at ”real” conversation. The other downside of this is that since you only click on the topic, Bethesda once again forgets all about roleplaying dialogue. In Daggerfall it could be forgiven, but since then Bioware have released two Baldur’s Gate games, and within those two really setting a hallmark for what should be expected in terms of NPC dialogue. There is just no reason why Morrowind should fall behind in such an important category to a roleplaying game as dialogue. The voice acting is usually top notch though.

These three things are wrong with morrowind, and so far in this review Morrowind sounds defect at best… however, those three things are the only serious problems in Morrowind. There are of course some minor things, but all nitpicking aside, Morrowind takes you somewhere no other computer RPG has ever come close to. No computer game will ever come close to the kind of intensity and flexibility of a well played pen and paper RPG, but Morrowind is closer than any game has ever been before. While most other computer RPGs from Final Fantasy and on have relied story, dialogue, and in many cases extensive cutscenes to drag the player into the game world, all those games, including Neverwinter Nights, suffer from the same problem: The game experience is enjoyable, but resembles a book more than a game. There’s one way to do things, and you can either get killed trying, and then retry, or succeed the first time. Anyone who has played a pen and paper game where the dungeon master takes that approach knows how tedious it can get. There is nothing wrong with being told a story, as long as you call it a story; it’s when you throw in a few monsters between the chapters and call it a game that you get a problem.

Morrowind does what Daggerfall fell just short of doing in that aspect; it breaks the computer RPG from its current path, and introduces just what you always wished for in a roleplaying game: the ability to make your own decisions. You can choose not to kill the Great Evil Enemy. You can choose to be a murderous assassin, or a valiant knight. It’s entirely up to you, and while other computer RPGs have claimed to do this by offering different classes and races, Morrowind lives up to those classes and races by making the game enjoyable for each and every class. The faction system, where you choose to join the factions that you think suits your character, ensures that not only will you get quests that are adepted to you strengths and weaknesses, you can also play the game all over again without having to do a single quest twice, if you ignore the main quest. This is possibly the best replay value ever offered in a computer RPG.

To sum it all up, this is not a game for everyone. Fans of the more traditional computer RPG will be unimpressed with the bad dialogue system and the way the storyline leaves you completely on your own at times. The game also takes some getting used to: you may have to restart with a new character a few times at first before you find a class and race that suits you, and many aspects and functions of the game are either very briefly or not at all explained in the manual that comes with the game. The storyline seems nonexistant at first, but like many other things in this game, making an effort to get into it really turns out to be worth it, with an interesting, long plot that sends you all over the island. Morrowind at its worst is an uninspiring game, filled with bland dialogue and a lack of real purpose. At its best it’s epic, revolutionary, beautiful, captivating, and highly addictive.

Screenshots

Daggerfall players will feel right at home with the interface	The menus, such as the alchemy menu on top, are smooth and user friendly	Just walking through the countryside is often breathtaking

Links

• The official website: www.morrowind.com
• Morrowind Summit www.rpgplanet.com/morrowind
• Destination Morrowind morrowind.ttlg.com
• Aldrien’s Chalice www.rpgplanet.com/morrowind/chalice/

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