I mentioned Morrowind the other day in a piece I wrote about linearity in games. I think I also made a passing reference to it in a review of Crysis that I posted. And I may have tried to strike up a conversation with the girl who served me in Iceland the last week about whether she preferred Sunder or Keening (she was a Keening girl, so the relationship was doomed from there).
It would not, I think it fair to say, take a great deal of knowledge of the more intricate workings of the human psyche to conclude that I have Morrowind on the brain. Fearing that I cannot otherwise capture the scope and majesty of the game, I'll be producing one article for every hour I played the game. So...
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Part 1 of 492
Many critics lament Morrowind's wooden characters. 'Look at them' they say, 'standing their, rigid, watching the world pass by, time flowing over their motionless and quite emotionless (what a difference an 'e' makes) forms like so much custard over ham.' These same critics, then, must've been positively spunking themselves with joy when Oblivion's Radiant AI system smashed through the wall, had sex with their wives, and gave us such gems as:
NPC 1: I wonder what happened to my brother? I haven't seen him in several days now, since he went to slay that colony of ogres in Certaindeath Cave.
NPC 2: Good day. Any news from the provinces?
NPC 1: YOU KILLED MY BROTHER! FIEND! I SHALL END YOU!
NPC 2: I hear Fa'Saar has a bad case of the shits at the moment. Perhaps he's been eating too many of Ventraal the kitten breeders dodgy kebabs. Some brave adventurer should investigate what he puts in those...
NPC 1: I don't have time to talk to you right now. I have to go stand in my house.
NPC 2: Good day.
NPC 1: MURDERER! Good day.
I think we can agree that not all of the advancements between TES III and TES IV were necessarily forward advances. Would we rather have a system which encourages/demands a bit of imagination on the part of the player, or a system that provides the most achingly stilted exchanges since my 'friends' invited my ex-girlfriend and the man she left me for to come sit next to us at the pub last Thursday? I know which I'd choose (but I guess I have a vested interest with my choice of metaphor).
We can say without any degree of 'Hardcore gamer' snobbery that Morrowind, as a game, requires rather more of the player than Oblivion. If Oblivion were your mother it would make sure you had some shoes on before you went outside. If Morrowind were your mum it would fill your shoes with broken glass and scorpions and THEN make sure you had your shoes on before you went outside. In a way, Morrowind is the better parent. Little Johnny Morrowind will know how to look after himself in the playground: li'l Jimmy Oblivion will be dangling from a coathook by his underpants somewhere. Looking after yourself is key in Morrowind.
The first time I went off for a stroll in Morrowind was an eye-opener. It was also an eye-closer, because I found myself rapidly dead, floating in a swamp with a rat nibbling my buoyant corpse. 'Fuck' I thought. Not fuck anything in particular, just a general sense of...having got something wrong. Being punished.
So next time I take a bit more care in the preparations- I do some odd jobs, steal some forks, vases, whatnot, and sell them, perform some...services for some sailors. My character is soon the proud owner of a nicely bump-mapped silver sword, a rusty but solid looking shield and a pair of greaves which I can only hope are made out of rat skin (psychological warfare). I stride off to meet my destiny. My destiny kills me with it's sharp little rat teeth. 'Fuck' I thought, then I continued the thought: 'Fuck this for a laugh.' Xbox off. Terrible mistake buying this.
Clearly I returned to the game at some point. These fond memories must have come from somewhere. I do recall a great sense of foreboding at putting that disc back in, listening to that title music (stirring enough to make the most resolutely heartless of geese pimpley), and loading up my twice perished avatar. I discovered that you need to adjust things to Morrowind's pace, and fully expect that, if you get ahead of yourself, someone would bludgeon you to death for stealing a pen. 'Slow down' Morrowind intoned. Even the name is evocative of it's attitude: 'Morrowind'- it sounds like an ancient, moss covered statue, standing forgotten on a cliff as the waves play on the rocks below. What's 'Oblivion'? It's a car with racing stripes and flames on. It's the end of a trailer to a summer blockbuster: 'Welcome... to 'OBLIVION!' It's got a pun in the bloody name (obl-IV-ion). Inauspicious stuff.
Have you ever stood quite still and watched water? My overriding memory of Morrowind is walking along a long road. It 's getting dark, and storm clouds are assembling themselves above my my rat-gnawed head. There are lights up ahead: a small fishing village, barely anything on the map (Ah! The map. Later, later...) but all one could ask for at that moment. I break into a jog just as the raindrops begin hurtling earthward, taking shelter under the porch of an inn. And I watch the water. It is, I think, the calmest I've ever felt. And I'm not talking about the calmest my character has ever felt in his existence, brief and oft-terminated by rats as it was. That affected me, sitting in front of a TV, dunking a custard cream in some tea. By the time I came to, my custard cream was quite ruined, and the tea full of biscuit gunk. The water in Morrowind, you see, was the first time I'd seen water in a computer game and thought 'wow, that looks wet.' It didn't reflect much, not in a real-time sense anyway. But real water doesn't normally reflect all that much unless it's almost completely still. Morrowind wet stuff rippled when you walked through it, swam in it, shot an arrow into it, but most notably it rippled when the rain fell. To sit there, watching the rain patter onto the waves, listening to the precipitation pattering on the roof above you, temporarily in sanctuary from a world full of deadly rodents: that still brings me back to my happy place.
But it's not all quiet awe and grandeur, because Morrowind is, and let no-one ever tell you otherwise, a deeply silly game. You could fix a bead on a particularly disagreeable looking Wood Elf (actually they were all pretty fugly), whip out your bow, take careful aim, and then shoot with just a tap of the trigger: the arrow would leave the bow at about three miles an hour and arc inexorably toward it's target, bearing down on them like a steamroller on a bowl of soup. Provided you had the appropriate speed statistics, maybe a specific pair of magic shoes, you could easily run alongside the arrow as it inched toward it's destination. The elf, having seen the arrow coming for about twenty seconds now, would eventually be struck, receiving about one hit-point of damage but suddenly full of murderous rage directed at you. Fortunately they'd never be able to catch you because you were so fast that, when you ran and switched to the external view, you looked like a cartoon character who's just run off a cliff, legs a blur of movement. It looked ridiculous, but it was indicative of Morrowind's casual and absolute lack of regard for the rules.
I followed the development of Oblivion quite keenly and, trawling the Bethesda forums, found that the two most common complaints were:
1.WAT???! NO REEL TIME SH4DOWZ? (long story, quite boring by coincidence)
2.WAT???! NO LEVEETATION?
Morrowind, fabulously, had a quite readily available spell that had the rough effect of turning on the 'fly' command found in most First Person Shooters. Put on 100% Chameleon enchantments, Boots of Absurd Speed and a levitation spell and you would have an invisible, flying, lightning fast character hurtling across the countryside like a vengeful thunderbolt. Morrowind may have a slower pace of life than Oblivion in many ways, but it also let the player's imagination go fucking crazy with it. It's like a well-to-do city trader visiting his second home in the country and finding out that, while he's not there, all the servants have the most spectacular and gratuitous orgies in every room of the house. It is, in short, not so dry and dull as we may initially assume.
So many other things I'd want to write about: breaking into a family vault and finding it stacked with diamonds, rubies, priceless weapons and armour, you find yourself thinking 'God, I can't carry all this stuff'. You have to choose, knowing that returning for more will almost certainly lead to a sword being rammed into your eye-socket. Or the time that, poring over that fabulous paper map that came with the game, you notice a lonely ruin on the coast. Traveling there you find little of note, but glancing at the sea, you see something under the waves. Casting a spell to allow you to breathe underwater you swim down, and find that the ruin on the map is all that has survived of a sunken, much larger ruin. You see a statue's head, lying on the sea-bed and, on interacting with it, it speaks to you, bidding you perform a quest...I''ll stop there, but clearly, few computer games evoke so much in such large quantities.
Of course, you take the good with the bad. Morrowind is riddled with absurdities: steal a loaf of bread in the wilderness and every fucker in the world will know instantaneouly of your sin. Guards will chase you over mountains and across oceans to enforce the law and render your internal organs rather more external. Combat is the embodiment of clunkiness, often bordering on farce. The economy is as balanced as a one-legged tripod. A fully equipped character, bedecked in non-colour coordinating magical helms and robes, looks like a tramp who's been through the bins at the back of Oxfam. Two big questions then: would I go back and start a new game, right now? Probably not. But, given half a chance, would I quite happily go live in that little fishing village and watch the rain meet the sea? Almost certainly.
It would not, I think it fair to say, take a great deal of knowledge of the more intricate workings of the human psyche to conclude that I have Morrowind on the brain. Fearing that I cannot otherwise capture the scope and majesty of the game, I'll be producing one article for every hour I played the game. So...
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Part 1 of 492
Many critics lament Morrowind's wooden characters. 'Look at them' they say, 'standing their, rigid, watching the world pass by, time flowing over their motionless and quite emotionless (what a difference an 'e' makes) forms like so much custard over ham.' These same critics, then, must've been positively spunking themselves with joy when Oblivion's Radiant AI system smashed through the wall, had sex with their wives, and gave us such gems as:
NPC 1: I wonder what happened to my brother? I haven't seen him in several days now, since he went to slay that colony of ogres in Certaindeath Cave.
NPC 2: Good day. Any news from the provinces?
NPC 1: YOU KILLED MY BROTHER! FIEND! I SHALL END YOU!
NPC 2: I hear Fa'Saar has a bad case of the shits at the moment. Perhaps he's been eating too many of Ventraal the kitten breeders dodgy kebabs. Some brave adventurer should investigate what he puts in those...
NPC 1: I don't have time to talk to you right now. I have to go stand in my house.
NPC 2: Good day.
NPC 1: MURDERER! Good day.
I think we can agree that not all of the advancements between TES III and TES IV were necessarily forward advances. Would we rather have a system which encourages/demands a bit of imagination on the part of the player, or a system that provides the most achingly stilted exchanges since my 'friends' invited my ex-girlfriend and the man she left me for to come sit next to us at the pub last Thursday? I know which I'd choose (but I guess I have a vested interest with my choice of metaphor).
We can say without any degree of 'Hardcore gamer' snobbery that Morrowind, as a game, requires rather more of the player than Oblivion. If Oblivion were your mother it would make sure you had some shoes on before you went outside. If Morrowind were your mum it would fill your shoes with broken glass and scorpions and THEN make sure you had your shoes on before you went outside. In a way, Morrowind is the better parent. Little Johnny Morrowind will know how to look after himself in the playground: li'l Jimmy Oblivion will be dangling from a coathook by his underpants somewhere. Looking after yourself is key in Morrowind.
The first time I went off for a stroll in Morrowind was an eye-opener. It was also an eye-closer, because I found myself rapidly dead, floating in a swamp with a rat nibbling my buoyant corpse. 'Fuck' I thought. Not fuck anything in particular, just a general sense of...having got something wrong. Being punished.
So next time I take a bit more care in the preparations- I do some odd jobs, steal some forks, vases, whatnot, and sell them, perform some...services for some sailors. My character is soon the proud owner of a nicely bump-mapped silver sword, a rusty but solid looking shield and a pair of greaves which I can only hope are made out of rat skin (psychological warfare). I stride off to meet my destiny. My destiny kills me with it's sharp little rat teeth. 'Fuck' I thought, then I continued the thought: 'Fuck this for a laugh.' Xbox off. Terrible mistake buying this.
Clearly I returned to the game at some point. These fond memories must have come from somewhere. I do recall a great sense of foreboding at putting that disc back in, listening to that title music (stirring enough to make the most resolutely heartless of geese pimpley), and loading up my twice perished avatar. I discovered that you need to adjust things to Morrowind's pace, and fully expect that, if you get ahead of yourself, someone would bludgeon you to death for stealing a pen. 'Slow down' Morrowind intoned. Even the name is evocative of it's attitude: 'Morrowind'- it sounds like an ancient, moss covered statue, standing forgotten on a cliff as the waves play on the rocks below. What's 'Oblivion'? It's a car with racing stripes and flames on. It's the end of a trailer to a summer blockbuster: 'Welcome... to 'OBLIVION!' It's got a pun in the bloody name (obl-IV-ion). Inauspicious stuff.
Have you ever stood quite still and watched water? My overriding memory of Morrowind is walking along a long road. It 's getting dark, and storm clouds are assembling themselves above my my rat-gnawed head. There are lights up ahead: a small fishing village, barely anything on the map (Ah! The map. Later, later...) but all one could ask for at that moment. I break into a jog just as the raindrops begin hurtling earthward, taking shelter under the porch of an inn. And I watch the water. It is, I think, the calmest I've ever felt. And I'm not talking about the calmest my character has ever felt in his existence, brief and oft-terminated by rats as it was. That affected me, sitting in front of a TV, dunking a custard cream in some tea. By the time I came to, my custard cream was quite ruined, and the tea full of biscuit gunk. The water in Morrowind, you see, was the first time I'd seen water in a computer game and thought 'wow, that looks wet.' It didn't reflect much, not in a real-time sense anyway. But real water doesn't normally reflect all that much unless it's almost completely still. Morrowind wet stuff rippled when you walked through it, swam in it, shot an arrow into it, but most notably it rippled when the rain fell. To sit there, watching the rain patter onto the waves, listening to the precipitation pattering on the roof above you, temporarily in sanctuary from a world full of deadly rodents: that still brings me back to my happy place.
But it's not all quiet awe and grandeur, because Morrowind is, and let no-one ever tell you otherwise, a deeply silly game. You could fix a bead on a particularly disagreeable looking Wood Elf (actually they were all pretty fugly), whip out your bow, take careful aim, and then shoot with just a tap of the trigger: the arrow would leave the bow at about three miles an hour and arc inexorably toward it's target, bearing down on them like a steamroller on a bowl of soup. Provided you had the appropriate speed statistics, maybe a specific pair of magic shoes, you could easily run alongside the arrow as it inched toward it's destination. The elf, having seen the arrow coming for about twenty seconds now, would eventually be struck, receiving about one hit-point of damage but suddenly full of murderous rage directed at you. Fortunately they'd never be able to catch you because you were so fast that, when you ran and switched to the external view, you looked like a cartoon character who's just run off a cliff, legs a blur of movement. It looked ridiculous, but it was indicative of Morrowind's casual and absolute lack of regard for the rules.
I followed the development of Oblivion quite keenly and, trawling the Bethesda forums, found that the two most common complaints were:
1.WAT???! NO REEL TIME SH4DOWZ? (long story, quite boring by coincidence)
2.WAT???! NO LEVEETATION?
Morrowind, fabulously, had a quite readily available spell that had the rough effect of turning on the 'fly' command found in most First Person Shooters. Put on 100% Chameleon enchantments, Boots of Absurd Speed and a levitation spell and you would have an invisible, flying, lightning fast character hurtling across the countryside like a vengeful thunderbolt. Morrowind may have a slower pace of life than Oblivion in many ways, but it also let the player's imagination go fucking crazy with it. It's like a well-to-do city trader visiting his second home in the country and finding out that, while he's not there, all the servants have the most spectacular and gratuitous orgies in every room of the house. It is, in short, not so dry and dull as we may initially assume.
So many other things I'd want to write about: breaking into a family vault and finding it stacked with diamonds, rubies, priceless weapons and armour, you find yourself thinking 'God, I can't carry all this stuff'. You have to choose, knowing that returning for more will almost certainly lead to a sword being rammed into your eye-socket. Or the time that, poring over that fabulous paper map that came with the game, you notice a lonely ruin on the coast. Traveling there you find little of note, but glancing at the sea, you see something under the waves. Casting a spell to allow you to breathe underwater you swim down, and find that the ruin on the map is all that has survived of a sunken, much larger ruin. You see a statue's head, lying on the sea-bed and, on interacting with it, it speaks to you, bidding you perform a quest...I''ll stop there, but clearly, few computer games evoke so much in such large quantities.
Of course, you take the good with the bad. Morrowind is riddled with absurdities: steal a loaf of bread in the wilderness and every fucker in the world will know instantaneouly of your sin. Guards will chase you over mountains and across oceans to enforce the law and render your internal organs rather more external. Combat is the embodiment of clunkiness, often bordering on farce. The economy is as balanced as a one-legged tripod. A fully equipped character, bedecked in non-colour coordinating magical helms and robes, looks like a tramp who's been through the bins at the back of Oxfam. Two big questions then: would I go back and start a new game, right now? Probably not. But, given half a chance, would I quite happily go live in that little fishing village and watch the rain meet the sea? Almost certainly.
