The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition

But playing without mods is pointless. - MGE XE - MCP - MWSE - Morrowind Rebirth - Next Generation Combat with 100% hit accuracy - Passive HP, MP, SP replenish over time - Replaced Combat and Movement Sounds - Muted Game Music (from the Settings, not a mod) Purism... more like blind fanaticism of some basement dwelling zealots ... just go outside and touch the grass.

It's a great game. Back in the day, it was the pinnacle of this sort of RPG, and a shining example of a great AAA game. It's hard to say anything particularly negative about it, at least in the context of the 2000s. 20 years doesn't somehow detract from it being an objectively awesome acomplishment, or how enjoyable it was to play back then. That said, it seems fantastically disingenuine to say that most people will find this accessable or playable enough to be worth $20, the price of a *current* great, AAA RPG on sale. Especially not when other games you could say similar things about are available here for $8. I have a little trouble believing anyone could really argue that the game has aged well enough to some how be that much more exceptional than other exceptional games from the same era. I know it comes with the first two TES games as well, but it's worth pointing out that so do other old games that Bethesda now owns the rights to. Most of them are not pegged at $20 either. Anyway, I'm prepared for the downvotes, but I just don't think it's worth it for someone who's never played the game before and is genuinely looking for a fantastic, revolutionary experience in 2020. It might have been that for me, two decades ago, but it's a true classic now - more for retrospective appreciation than regular use.

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.