My dad received a copy of this game with some computer thing he bought when I was about nine years old. Unsure what it was about, he passed it off to me, and I henceforth spent probably over a week of cumulative game time exploring the world of Morrowind. Let me be honest. A lot of my opinions on this game are softened by nostalgia. The graphics are awful. The sound design is lacking. There's one voice actor per race/gender combination, and some of them are quite mediocre. The NPCs speak like walking encyclopedias and are never quite as immersive as Oblivion's or Skyrim's, and that's saying something as even those are quite shallow in comparison to Bioware NPCs. Criticism aside, let me say that the world design is phenomenal. There is nothing like Morrowind except Morrowind. Imagine a marriage of Dune and medieval fantasy with some anthropomorphic lizard and cat people thrown in, as well as a beautiful slurry of conflicting mythology, philosophy, surrealism, Roman Imperial influences, and some hands-down fantastic worldbuilding. Unlike Oblivion and Skyrim, which both go to great lengths to protect you from your own stupidity, Morrowind chucks all that and lets you do what you want. Want to charge into a late game area at level one and get slaughtered? Go ahead, nothing will stop you. Nothing scales to your level here. Want to murder a vital main quest NPC? Sure. Never touch the Main Quest? Go ahead. Go on a killing spree and reduce Balmora to a population of one? Hell yeah! The storytelling is fantastic. The dialogue is shit, yeah, but the plot makes up for it. You're presented with a story that allows you to have your own impressions and opinions. Are you the Chosen One? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you know that you aren't but you're saying you are anyway. You are handed a neatly deconstructed pile of tropes and told to create something for yourself out of them. If you're the kind of nerd who likes reading lots of fictional documents, then welcome home, outlander.
I will never be able to overstate how much I love Neverwinter Nights. I stole it from my dad when I was in middle school and loved it. Soon afterwards, my parents bought me the Diamond Edition, and I fell head-over-heels. I have to be honest; I've never finished the OC, and I've only played through the underwhelming (but still good!) Shadows of Undrentide once. However, I've played Hordes of the Underdark about twelve times, and it will forever be my benchmark for other RPGs. (Needless to say, very few pass that test.) HotU has everything: fantastic characters, beautiful music that still makes me cry to this day, and amazing design (despite dated/limited graphics), to name a few. However, the real highlight of HotU is its diverse settings. Each chapter is in a totally different world and is utterly captivating. There are so many secrets to discover. Besides HotU, the other winning trademark of NWN is the toolset. The scripting language is surprisingly easy to learn and you can find tons of resources online to help you learn it to make your own mods and adventures. (The Aurora Script Generator is particularly useful.) There used to be quite a thriving modding community, as well as an active couple of multiplayer servers, but since IGN took down the NWN Vault I'm not sure how that's going. Anyway. This is an incredible game. If you enjoy Dragon Age, you should snatch this up and see where it all began. (IMHO, though, don't waste your time on NWN2. There's probably good stuff there but it's too clunky.)
