The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition

The game is best described with "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle." Level-up-talk-kill-go describes most of the game. It's a constant fetch-quest galore. First of all, it is not an RPG. The constellation and the race bonuses are the only ones you cannot replicate by simply leveling. 99% of any significant problems are solved by leveling up. In other words, your starting class is meaningless as you can easily level up everything in a short time by using exercising or simply buying them from level 100 trainers. In fact the only good thing to use your money on is training skills. Money you can get infinitely by dumping valueables that most traders won't buy to either the imp or the talking crab to get the full value regardless of the merchantile skill. Besides leveling, your significant playtime activities are restricted to fighting, talking and looting. You can pay your way out of troubles. You are pretty much a omni-class terminator in this game. Except for magic because items generally have better spells than what you can cast anyway and they even auto-recharge. Contrary to what most the obviously paid reviews say ( e.g. the guy using phrases such as "role-playing game pantheon"), this game's content such as dungeons are obviously rushed. After a couple dungeons, you are not even taking a look at the environment at all because it is built from only a couple room variations that are lego'd together to build the environment. There is no design touch anywhere because the game clearly got rushed and hastily put together. There is no custom landmarks to separate most of the many dungeons. It is clearly filler, to the point that at one point the makers started to name rooms after Pokemon (Kabuto) and famous references (Sargon being a name of a person AND a completely irrevelant cave). The game clearly wanted to be more. The crucial quest action happens in the dialogue box, because the makers failed to build a character animation system. It's a sad compromise.

I tried. Really hard - because everyone raves about it and all say it's the most mature Scrolls title in terms of story, and the biggest in terms of world space. I got the GOTY dvd. It installed on Win7 ok, but boy was it old and ugly looking, even to fan of games as old (Medieval Total War) and older (Combat Mission Beyond Overlord, Red Baron 3D, etc). I spent hours researching and carefully following the latest Nexus modding guide for all the code extender, enhancement overhaul and essential graphics improvements. Then spent another half a day figuring out where some that info was flawed or incomplete (still had to disable some supposedly better grass that kept crashing the game)... And ta da! - oh, is that it? Is that all? I mean, ok, it's somewhat better than vanilla, with nicer water too - but, gee, no wow factor. It still looks quite mediocre. As a game of older games, looks don't bother me that much, but the controls and how you move and interact with your environment are still very, very clunky, fairly non-intuitive and seem like an early 1990s game, not a 2002 one! I gave up trying to figure out a lockpick (or pretty much anything else really), conversation menus are like from a 1980s text-only game and not all that logically written either. Menus are cumbersome, and don't flow or always make much sense. And on my very first exploration of the start town I eventually managed to jump over a knee-high wall to take in the scenery - and got literally stuck solid in some grassy slope. Tried another couple of character new-game starts but soon gave up. Shame. I hear the community are rebuilding Morrow and Oblivion using the Skyrim engine - unless Bethesda steps in and makes a "Classic" Morrow edition, that's the only way I'll ever bother again. If you like 1990s-style games with poorly written & designed 1980s-style text, and want to spend two days getting to look at least like an early noughties game should look, then go ahead - and keep taking the pills.

First off I gotta say this game is incredible, well, it was when I played it on the original xbox (1st) and that was without Expansion Packs (DLC)... Sure the graphics have aged, but it's still playable for me. The Soundtrack is crazy good, no other TES game can match it, although they have tried. I don't have to much a problem with the dice roll combat. The organic quest system is okay, meaning, not having quest markers to basically hold your hand through through the quest. But Note: Some instructions via quest givers is plain bad or inaccurate. The reason for my one star rating is because; Base game red/black mountain is overrun with cliffracers, not in some cool challenging way, in a painstakingly annoying way that needs to be fixed officially. Also with Expansion packs (DLC) the game (Mainly Solthesiem) is riddled with scripting bugs and crashes. This is not what we deserve from a AAA game development studio. When I play a game the is drenched in lore and gameplay decisions, I'd like it to be as stable and cleaned as possible, I don't want to waste time I a game that has preventable flaws. Even in todays re-releasing, I mean what gives? I expect better from Bethesda, OFFICIAL FIX PLEASE?

At the end of the loading process the loading stops and displays this message "Music Error: Can not play file. Date File/Special/morrowind title.mp3" You can click on Yes or No, it makes no difference, you are stalled out looking at the above message. The is NO Support! There are things you can do that lead nowhere, but waste your time and encourage you to give up. So, Beware!

I guess one must be a fan of fantasy to appreciate this and other titles like it. I've played Morrowind for 3-4 hours and find it tedious and hard to read the tiny text even when a low resolution is set to make the visuals larger. And on my PC (11th gen Core i5) it crashes without warning. Clearly the game is highly detailed for fans of this genre who enjoy spending dozens or hundreds of hours roaming around and taking on missions. But, it's just not for me. I've given RPGs a shot and it's back to Far Cry.