Does Morrowind hold up?

[Wayneguard]

Morrowind definitely has more to offer than just a nostalgia trip. I still play Vanilla morrowind to this day. I still prefer it to Skyrim/Oblivion; I could go on all day about little nitpicky things that brought me to that decision. Skyrim and Oblivion are still great though. I do love me some Bethesda

 

[majes]

Morrowind holds up well IMO. Only problem is, it doesn't really click for most new players. But that isn't indicative of nostalgia, just that unless you have a solid grasp of the (somewhat lackluster) mechanics it was really hard to do basically anything, but if you do a little research and get some advice you can get a viable build that will help you explore one the most weirdly beautiful and intricate games to ever exist. The island of Vvardenfell is every bit as layered and exotic as the Dunmer who live there and the setting is a million times better than Oblivion, even though it isn't as accessible to a modern audience. Also, modding goes a long way toward fixing many of the gameplay issues.

 

[Continuity]

Morrowind was the sort of game where you could forget what the hell you were supposed to be doing and then wander round for 30 hours trying to find out again, an RPG really ought to be more engaging than that IMO.

I know it's not what you meant, but that sounds pretty damn engaging. I mean, that's exactly the reason why I loved it. If you can get distracted for 30 hours from the thing you were supposed to be doing, then the game is doing something right!

Also +1 for the random dice-roll combat system. Sure, it sucks at first, but when you actually feel your skill rising, it beats Oblivion's combat into dust.

You misunderstand me, I wasnt distracted for 30 hours, I was distracted for 2-3 hours and lost the thread of the main plot... and never found it again, at least not until my next play though.

Thats the opposite of engaging, where you have to actively hunt down the story and even then to fail to actually find it!

 

[Weslebear]

It had an interesting world and the story wasn't bad and that was the only things it had going for it unfortunately.

The game play without mods is incredibly dull and really isn't worth trudging through at all, with Oblivion and Skyrim I can't wait to get back in there but despite some interesting environments Morrowind just made me want to turn the game off.

It's purely nostalgia unfortunately, watching a let's play is more fun than dealing with game itself, all of the story and world without the awful game play.

 

[NLS]

I don't know what everyone else is playing , but I found morrowind fucking awful, to the point where it was unplayable to me after about 30 minutes. And believe me, I tried.

The last straw came when my sword and shield fighter lost to the pack of rats from the first thieves guild mision. A nord fighter. axe and shield. losing to rats.

Yeah it's a bit of a tough game like that. You kind of have to do some exploring around the first town or run along the eastern coast to get some levels and gear. I remember dying to rats in Balmora as well.

Skyrim is basically a better game all around. Not that Morrowind is bad, really. The island it's set on is really imaginative, the dungeons are pretty cool and the leveling scaling/system is better than Oblivion. For it's time it was pretty revolutionary but of course it's a bit outdated these days.

don't get me wrong, I like a hard game. But I just found morrowind bordered on artificially hard. If it were some bandits, yeah, I could see it. If it was some goblins, alright, I know in D&D and such a low-level warrior can be killed by goblins fairly easily, but rats? I was just too insulted to continue

Theres starting from the bottom, and there is having to dig your way up through the earth

Well, it was a mission for the FIGHTERS guild, not the PUSSY guild (Sorry about that one). Oblivion scales and levels your enemies with your own level, so most creatures and enemies are as "difficult" or "easy" to tackle at level 1 as level 13. Morrowind doesn't do that, it sets a static level for all creatures, and then it's up to you and your own levels and skills to defeat it. Found out those rats were too hard? Come back later after earning some levels. But yeah, it can be hard to get into the game, especially after what the last 10 years of games have been like and the streamlining of Oblivion.

 

[theriddlen]

I don't think that Morrowind ever held up. I tried it, and I just could not immerse myself in the experience. I couldn't see any overarching goal, any interesting quest, and every NPC was so generic and badly characterized I just could not enjoy it.

Also, the same year Gothic 2 came out, crushing all the competition on the market - you always had a clear, important purpose, sidequests were always creative and fresh, the world was large and had a great variety, the graphics while not brilliant were colorful and pleasant to look at, and NPC were amazing, to say the least. Up to this day, only Mass Effect 2 teammates and a couple of auxiliary characters were this well made.

 

[LadyTiamat]

Morrowind holds up for depth,story (much better than oblivion- its very lovecraftian in a way),and the amount of freedom you have (almost too much at times). Play if you want a game to sink over 100 hours into. and also the art direction was perfect!

However it has flaws compared to oblivion, namely the quests are boring....very boring. Either deliver/talk to someone, kill someone, find someone/artifact and return to quest giver. At least in oblivion there was some dynamic crafting cause of the increased graphical engine like that one dark brotherhood quest where you get placed in a house with 5 other people, my fave quest. Also it is hard to find where you need to go, a npc could say go west from here and you end up wanderinh cause the cave you need to go to is hidden behind some rocks you over looked. I almost say that there is too much content even cause i never got round to playing the vampire quests, some of the guilds, and various spare quests.

Morrowind is good if you are patient and willing to look past some desgin flaws but other than that it is solid.

 

[stefman]

No. Speaking as someone who only ever tried to get into it for the first time recently as something to do pre-skyrim, it simply isn't worth the time. The world is great, the graphics are fine, but the gameplay is just thoroughly not fun. And that's with it modded to hell, base game even less so...

exactly what happened to me. One of the biggest complaints i have is when you are swiping at an enemy you should be hitting, but the game keeps making you miss.

 

[Itsthefuzz]

Oops double post.

 

[Itsthefuzz]

It takes a lot of patience. I played it when I was much younger and just did whatever because I was small and didn't think very much... and had a lot of fun. It was cool to explore and fight things and do all these quests. Today I CAN NOT get into it, only because it's very slow to start up and I don't have the persistence I did as a kid to just keep playing until it gets really good. It's a good game but you have to invest.

Edit: didn't mean to quote!

 

[epikAXE]

It depends, its an old school RPG where the amount of freedom you're given at the start is ironically nearly crippling.

I played Oblivion at a friend's house a while ago and when I got out of the sewer I was just like "omg what do I do"

It's worse with Morrowind. In Oblivion, you saw the Emperor get assassinated, and right before he told you to go do something. In Morrowind, you get off a prison boat and go through customs, then get a paper telling you to talk to some dude in a town.

There isnt even a compass or anything. You have to ask the people in town for clues to where you are supposed to go next. You have a journal to refer to important things people have said (directions to places, important people ect.) At times its overwhelming, and at times it feels more like a puzzle game than an RPG, but when you finally get the right shit done you feel amazing.

Its much more rewarding than just following a mark on a compass and walking in a straight direction until shit happens, but it is alot more effort. If your not into that kind of thing stay clear, youll just get frustrated quickly.

Gameplay sadly is one of the only things that hasn't held up. Dont get me wrong, the leveling sytem is fantastic, and the conversations (while appearing as incoherent walls of text at times) are engaging, but the combat is sticky and a bit annoying, not to mention repetitive. But its easy to look past that because of my next point...

The atmosphere of the land of Morrowind has yet to be surpassed by any game I have played. Seriously. Its fantastic. But ill not give too much away in case you wish to play it

And one more thing before I go... FUCKING CLIFF RACERS!

 

[Manji187]

Morrowind made you work...HARD.

Made an incoherent character in terms of specialization and skills? Don't know how to level properly? Sucks to be you. Try harder. My first 3 custom characters (Altmer mage, Nord fighter, Dunmer archer) were utter fails too. Moved like a snail, couldn't hit shit; the standard story.

Getting good at the game was challenging because of the learning curve. You couldn't just venture out into the wild right off the bat. You had to take it slow.

Basically, you had to invest considerable effort before you could actually start enjoying the game...but once you did, man it was great. It felt like a real achievement.

Plenty of contemporary gamers today want instant gratification, without any real effort. Plug & play, screw the manual. Less number crunching, more "Press A to win". That kind of stuff.

As a game, Morrowind holds up. But the audience has changed.

 

[Darkmantle]

I don't know what everyone else is playing , but I found morrowind fucking awful, to the point where it was unplayable to me after about 30 minutes. And believe me, I tried.

The last straw came when my sword and shield fighter lost to the pack of rats from the first thieves guild mision. A nord fighter. axe and shield. losing to rats.

Yeah it's a bit of a tough game like that. You kind of have to do some exploring around the first town or run along the eastern coast to get some levels and gear. I remember dying to rats in Balmora as well.

Skyrim is basically a better game all around. Not that Morrowind is bad, really. The island it's set on is really imaginative, the dungeons are pretty cool and the leveling scaling/system is better than Oblivion. For it's time it was pretty revolutionary but of course it's a bit outdated these days.

don't get me wrong, I like a hard game. But I just found morrowind bordered on artificially hard. If it were some bandits, yeah, I could see it. If it was some goblins, alright, I know in D&D and such a low-level warrior can be killed by goblins fairly easily, but rats? I was just too insulted to continue

Theres starting from the bottom, and there is having to dig your way up through the earth

Well, it was a mission for the FIGHTERS guild, not the PUSSY guild (Sorry about that one). Oblivion scales and levels your enemies with your own level, so most creatures and enemies are as "difficult" or "easy" to tackle at level 1 as level 13. Morrowind doesn't do that, it sets a static level for all creatures, and then it's up to you and your own levels and skills to defeat it. Found out those rats were too hard? Come back later after earning some levels. But yeah, it can be hard to get into the game, especially after what the last 10 years of games have been like and the streamlining of Oblivion.

what do you propose I kill? Grass? small weeds? rabbits? there is nothing lower on the scale than rats. and if there is, there is something terribly terribly wrong

 

[HoradricNoob]

I shall always have a place in my heart for Fargoth.
Oh, to be back atop the Seyda Neen lighthouse.

 

[Emperor Nat]

I love Morrowind to death and I still play it. Whereas Oblivion for me (Haven't yet played Skyrim) was mainly about BLARRRRCOMBATBLAAAAARRRR, Morrowind's combat mechanics are more hit-and-miss (literally).

Instead however, you get a better roleplaying experience. At least in my opinion. Oblivion is fun, but the way that you get forced into the main quest makes it hard to roleplay anything but the stalwart hero of the land. You can't run around pretending to be a guard or a shopkeeper, because you've got an active quest saying you need to save the world.

In contrast Morrowind lets you do the tutorial (which takes 5 minutes, max) to give you the basic controls and then allows you to go nuts. You can literally use a top-secret imperial package as part of bartering for a knife, then go mug someone for their house-key and live there while they're out. Also, the fact that there isn't any voice-acting on 90% of the Dialogue actually helps avoid the whole Oblivion everyone-sounds-the-same thing. Sure, their combat grunts are the same, but that's not the point.
It also helps in terms of mods, due to the fact that adding in a new mod (apart from possible spelling or grammatical errors) doesn't change conversation much. It's still just text, rather than being blank-sound lip-sync.

...Actually, after typing all that, I want to go play it some more. WHERE'S MAH GOTY DISK!?

 

[Starke]

You're not wrong, i'm just saying its possible for an RPG to be great even with poor combat, because regardless of how much time you spend doing it combat is not the focus of the RPG genre. Look at the witcher for example, fantastic RPG and great game, one of the best I've played...

awful combat...

but that just doesn't matter as much as many people make out (in the context of RPG), to hear some people going on about the flaws of RPGs you'd be forgiven for thinking the RPG genre was some sort of action combat game if you didn't know better.

Criticising combat in an RPG is like criticising the story in an FPS, these things complement the game but they are not the focus (there are exceptions of course but then genres aren't really all that clear cut in many cases).

Honestly, I was being facetious.

But, seriously, a game like The Witcher, or Planescape Torment, or even Morrowind does offer something beyond simply combat, which offsets that weakness. Saying that's an innate ability for all RPGs may be missing the point, just like saying an FPS doesn't need a solid story.

So long as a piece of media offers you something interesting to work through, and it is more interesting than it's disadvantages, then it's worth consuming. Conversely that does not mean the game should be forgiven it's flaws simply because there's something worth getting through there. Saying Morrowind lacks solid combat is legitimate, just like saying The Witcher or Torment lacks solid combat. In cases such as Torment, you can legitimately say a person should overlook the combat because there's something else there, but saying the combat isn't relevant is a bit like saying an RPG cannot have good combat, which is flat out not true.

 

[octafish]

Morrowind was just too small for me. Like clastrophobic. In many ways Daggerfall is the best Elder Scrolls ever made (Haven't bothered with Skyrim yet). I think the more primitive graphics help it. With Morrowind you are getting into the uncanny valley, but with Daggerfall there is no valley in sight. Plus the second largest gameworld ever, only now being eclipsed by Minecraft. A bit better populated then Minecraft though.

 

[Continuity]

You're not wrong, i'm just saying its possible for an RPG to be great even with poor combat, because regardless of how much time you spend doing it combat is not the focus of the RPG genre. Look at the witcher for example, fantastic RPG and great game, one of the best I've played...

awful combat...

but that just doesn't matter as much as many people make out (in the context of RPG), to hear some people going on about the flaws of RPGs you'd be forgiven for thinking the RPG genre was some sort of action combat game if you didn't know better.

Criticising combat in an RPG is like criticising the story in an FPS, these things complement the game but they are not the focus (there are exceptions of course but then genres aren't really all that clear cut in many cases).

Honestly, I was being facetious.

But, seriously, a game like The Witcher, or Planescape Torment, or even Morrowind does offer something beyond simply combat, which offsets that weakness. Saying that's an innate ability for all RPGs may be missing the point, just like saying an FPS doesn't need a solid story.

So long as a piece of media offers you something interesting to work through, and it is more interesting than it's disadvantages, then it's worth consuming. Conversely that does not mean the game should be forgiven it's flaws simply because there's something worth getting through there. Saying Morrowind lacks solid combat is legitimate, just like saying The Witcher or Torment lacks solid combat. In cases such as Torment, you can legitimately say a person should overlook the combat because there's something else there, but saying the combat isn't relevant is a bit like saying an RPG cannot have good combat, which is flat out not true.

I'm not saying RPG doesnt need combat, or that FPS doesnt need story (though both are perfectly viable without those elements), all I'm trying to point out is that although these may be important elements of the game they are not the most important element, not the defining element in the context of the genre.

That isn't to say that combat is irrelevant to RPG, thats not what i'm trying to say at all, what i'm trying to say is that its not the most important aspect. That is something that many many gamers just plain don't get. Combat is part of the RPG experience but its not the part that is important, i.e. great combat does not make a great RPG, combat can only be incidental to how good the game is as an RPG, be it good or bad, combat makes not an ounce of difference to the quality of an RPG as an RPG (of course as a game it does make a difference but thats not my point).

We can say the witcher or Morrowind lack solid combat, and we would be right, but at the same time we would be slightly missing the point, just as if we were to say that counter strike lacks a solid story. Its true, it may even be worth observing, but its doesnt really change whether or not Morrowind is a good RPG or counter strike a good FPS.

 

[EzraPound]

I'm not talking about graphics as they don't matter too much to me, but is Morrowind so highly praised in a Deus Ex kinda way where it's mostly nostalgia holding it up, or a Painkiller kinda way where it actually is fun compared to modern games?

EDIT: OH GOD I'm not saying Deus Ex isn't fun!

You ruined your credibility for me when you said Deus Ex is propped up by nostalgia.

And yes, Morrowind is still Bethesda's best game.

 

[zama174]

Snip

It holds up. The gameplay is solid, the world is immerse, and its a blast to play.. Assuming you can find where the fuck you are suppose to go at the start of the game and dont just decide to screw all the quests and turn on god mode and just hack away at everything in sight...