The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition

PROS: + content: typical for Bethesda the game world is HUGE + does not hold your hand: before OBLIVION and even worse SKYRIM introduced quest markers and button prompts MORROWIND had none of that. Read you journal and figure out what to do and how to get there. Good luck millennials... + Freedom: no invincible NPCs. Kill to your dark heart's desire. CONS: - graphics are low polygon and look terrible, no matter how many mods you apply - controls are horrendous and overly complicated - combat relies on dice rolls. You can swing at enemies and your hits connect graphically but the dice say nay and you die in 3 hits because the enemy has loaded dice. Sucks to be you. - game world. Did not care for it. huge mushrooms and weird creatures are a bit too whacky - level scaling. Expect to invest heavily in endurance to maximize health or you will go down. Enemies seem to power-level up BOTTOM LINE: Old school if you like it and can overlook the short comings. I couldn't get into the graphics and controls and some design choices are really questionable. Pick up at a sale for $10 max.

And by that i mean if you are brave enough to criticize this game in any way, hordes of massive casuals will tear you apart. There are two major camps surrounding this game as of now: those who blindly praise it because they think this is what an rpg should be and those who believed the chants, tried it and found it not the best game ever they were promised. I can see why one would hold tes3 in their heart, but lets be honest: it's a dated, badly designed game with countless stupid decisions. It clearly has a defined ways to play, it clearly has good and bad builds, it is linear. I had the most fun with mw when i was stuck in the countryside with no internet and only morrowind as any 'entertainment'. Even then i spent more time tinkering with construction set than playing the game. So, typical bethesda rpg. Morrowinds undeniable pros are atmosphere, music, somewhat charming visuals and history of the wold. Cons are everything else. Quests are mostly fetches, combat has nothing to do with your own player skill, running around and casting magic is punishing, the map is empty and boring, your journal is a crime against humanity, addons were clearly not intended to be used with lvl1 character (hello assassins), you are expected to abuse at least some systems of the game (alchemy for example), persuasion makes no sense, for all its richness the world is not alive, it's a moon sugar fever someone had in their bathroom. If your expectations are low and you just like the idea of walking around between cities, interacting with npcs and raise your stats and you are not into decent mechanics, good dialogues or world at least somehow reacting to your decisions then morrowind will be a blast. You can steal, kill, pursue carreer in guilds, explore caves and ruins. You can make spells and potions that break the game. Visit various places. If this is enough for you, try it, but don't expect it to be the best game ever.

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?