With Morrowind's GOTY Edition selling for $20 and the game itself now six years old, I'd say it qualifies.
Open-world was not a new genre in 2002. Besides Morrowind's own predecessor Daggerfall, the Grand Theft Auto series had made its full leap into open-world glory in 2001 with Grand Theft Auto III. Still, there had yet to be a credible RPG that truly let the player have full freedom in the environment and managed to successfully pull that freedom off in a tight, coherent package until Bethesda Softworks, newly financially secure thanks to the ZeniMax Media buyout, released its third entry into The Elder Scrolls series with Morrowind. Two expansion packs later the definitive Game of the Year Edition was released and it is on this that I'm going to focus.
The game starts you off as a prisoner from the Imperial City sent via ship to the province of Morrowind, specifically the island state of Vvardenfell. It is in that initial sequence of getting released and gaining freedom that the player is allowed to create their name, race, and starting class, and it is here where the game first begins to show what it's got in store. You can choose to be a mage or barbarian or thief, but if you really want to make the character your own you will choose the major and minor skills that best suit your play style and work from there. Your character created, it's time to get to the adventuring.
The plot itself is western fantasy boilerplate. The world is in peril because an ancient demon is awakening, having stirred beneath a volcano where he was sealed by the gods. You, the player, must travel the world fulfilling a prophecy that says that a great hero will be reborn to cast this evil permanently into the abyss once and for all. You'll cover the length and breadth of Vvardenfell island, fulfill all the steps of the prophecy, learn the secrets of a lost civilization, go Charles Atlas-style from a 98-pound weakling to Chuck Norris levels of badass, then whack the Big Bad, save the world, and...keep playing, because the nonlinear parts of the game are still there and there's hundreds of hours of gameplay apart from the main quest.
The ability to wander far afield from the game's objectives and even ignore and actively subvert them is the game's greatest strength. You can kill anything or anyone in the game, and going the evil route and whacking a quest-critical character is part of the fun. If you want to take a linear walk through the game you can, since your journal always tells you where to go next, but if you want to ditch your orders in a hollow tree stump and just hack and slash in dungeons or even in towns you can do that too. Sure, there are Imperial Guards all over the place to enforce the law, but there's nothing to stop you from fighting your way out of an arrest and looting the corpse of the guard for a weapon-and-armor boost.
Keep in mind, however, that all this freedom is not without consequence; besides the possibility of getting yourself killed by a guard, you can also break the main quest (and not just by tossing orders in trash bins). Kill the wrong NPC and you make the game unwinnable; thankfully, the game itself tells you that you've just broken the world but gives you the choice of whether you like it just fine that way. It would be irritating if the game withheld that information from you, but the option to reload makes it quite acceptable and even enhances immersion and fun factor. On the subject of immersion, no game in the series mastered immersion quite like Morrowind; there's a living, breathing world here and the game quite thankfully refrains from the "you are a special chosen one" attitude whenever that attitude isn't strictly necessary to advance the plot.
The graphics are astounding by 2002 standards and still pretty nice in 2008, especially if you're using the Morrowind Graphics Enhancer mod. It's hard to review old games through new game eyes, but Morrowind's look holds up amazingly well for a game its age. The game pushed computers to the hilt back when it was released and the system requirements were the equivalent of what Oblivion did to computers in 2006 or what Crysis did to them in 2007. The debate may rage on about whether graphics should be futureproofed, but what is harder to dispute is how good those old games look once the computers catch up to them.
Many people have maligned Morrowind's combat as being "click mouse and view animation of die roll". While that is certainly a very apt way to describe the combat and it can be downright puzzling to see your character whiff on a sword blow, Morrowind is not a first-person shooter. The combat is tabletop gaming brought into the computer sphere and stays very faithful to the formula. The net result is that there are actual good reasons to upgrade your skills. Long Blade skill isn't just an auto-hit with a damage modifier; it's an overall ability with big honking swords. It doesn't become immediately evident to the new player until a few fights have been completed, but the tabletop mechanic provides a very real sense of progress in the player's abilities. A high-level character feels experienced in ways that low-level ones do not.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the mod community; the greatest strength of The Elder Scrolls has always been its user-created content. I use Chad Steele's list [http://btb2.free.fr/morrowind.html] myself, but the mod suggestions at UESP.net or TESNexus are quite good as well. Vanilla Morrowind is a good game; modded Morrowind is dozens of times better. If you're getting the XBox version, simply ignore this paragraph or use the computer you're reading this review with to play the PC version. Unless your computer is old by 2002 standards, Morrowind will run just fine.
As a final thought, remember that Morrowind crashes a LOT; frequent use of the quicksave button will alleviate the game's annoying tendency to break at the drop of a hat. Since unlike Oblivion Morrowind doesn't autosave, you might find a long gameplay session wiped out by a random crashbug, especially if you're using integrated sound on your motherboard, which the game hates. Even fully patched the game is still very twitchy; keep this in mind as you play.
BOTTOM LINE: Morrowind is a classic, and if you like Western RPGs or you've played Oblivion and liked it, there is no excuse for this game not to be in your collection. It's twenty bucks and is still manufactured new so you don't have to go floating around eBay to find it.
RECOMMENDATION: Buy it. It won all those Game of the Year awards in 2002 for a reason.
Open-world was not a new genre in 2002. Besides Morrowind's own predecessor Daggerfall, the Grand Theft Auto series had made its full leap into open-world glory in 2001 with Grand Theft Auto III. Still, there had yet to be a credible RPG that truly let the player have full freedom in the environment and managed to successfully pull that freedom off in a tight, coherent package until Bethesda Softworks, newly financially secure thanks to the ZeniMax Media buyout, released its third entry into The Elder Scrolls series with Morrowind. Two expansion packs later the definitive Game of the Year Edition was released and it is on this that I'm going to focus.
The game starts you off as a prisoner from the Imperial City sent via ship to the province of Morrowind, specifically the island state of Vvardenfell. It is in that initial sequence of getting released and gaining freedom that the player is allowed to create their name, race, and starting class, and it is here where the game first begins to show what it's got in store. You can choose to be a mage or barbarian or thief, but if you really want to make the character your own you will choose the major and minor skills that best suit your play style and work from there. Your character created, it's time to get to the adventuring.
The plot itself is western fantasy boilerplate. The world is in peril because an ancient demon is awakening, having stirred beneath a volcano where he was sealed by the gods. You, the player, must travel the world fulfilling a prophecy that says that a great hero will be reborn to cast this evil permanently into the abyss once and for all. You'll cover the length and breadth of Vvardenfell island, fulfill all the steps of the prophecy, learn the secrets of a lost civilization, go Charles Atlas-style from a 98-pound weakling to Chuck Norris levels of badass, then whack the Big Bad, save the world, and...keep playing, because the nonlinear parts of the game are still there and there's hundreds of hours of gameplay apart from the main quest.
The ability to wander far afield from the game's objectives and even ignore and actively subvert them is the game's greatest strength. You can kill anything or anyone in the game, and going the evil route and whacking a quest-critical character is part of the fun. If you want to take a linear walk through the game you can, since your journal always tells you where to go next, but if you want to ditch your orders in a hollow tree stump and just hack and slash in dungeons or even in towns you can do that too. Sure, there are Imperial Guards all over the place to enforce the law, but there's nothing to stop you from fighting your way out of an arrest and looting the corpse of the guard for a weapon-and-armor boost.
Keep in mind, however, that all this freedom is not without consequence; besides the possibility of getting yourself killed by a guard, you can also break the main quest (and not just by tossing orders in trash bins). Kill the wrong NPC and you make the game unwinnable; thankfully, the game itself tells you that you've just broken the world but gives you the choice of whether you like it just fine that way. It would be irritating if the game withheld that information from you, but the option to reload makes it quite acceptable and even enhances immersion and fun factor. On the subject of immersion, no game in the series mastered immersion quite like Morrowind; there's a living, breathing world here and the game quite thankfully refrains from the "you are a special chosen one" attitude whenever that attitude isn't strictly necessary to advance the plot.
The graphics are astounding by 2002 standards and still pretty nice in 2008, especially if you're using the Morrowind Graphics Enhancer mod. It's hard to review old games through new game eyes, but Morrowind's look holds up amazingly well for a game its age. The game pushed computers to the hilt back when it was released and the system requirements were the equivalent of what Oblivion did to computers in 2006 or what Crysis did to them in 2007. The debate may rage on about whether graphics should be futureproofed, but what is harder to dispute is how good those old games look once the computers catch up to them.
Many people have maligned Morrowind's combat as being "click mouse and view animation of die roll". While that is certainly a very apt way to describe the combat and it can be downright puzzling to see your character whiff on a sword blow, Morrowind is not a first-person shooter. The combat is tabletop gaming brought into the computer sphere and stays very faithful to the formula. The net result is that there are actual good reasons to upgrade your skills. Long Blade skill isn't just an auto-hit with a damage modifier; it's an overall ability with big honking swords. It doesn't become immediately evident to the new player until a few fights have been completed, but the tabletop mechanic provides a very real sense of progress in the player's abilities. A high-level character feels experienced in ways that low-level ones do not.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the mod community; the greatest strength of The Elder Scrolls has always been its user-created content. I use Chad Steele's list [http://btb2.free.fr/morrowind.html] myself, but the mod suggestions at UESP.net or TESNexus are quite good as well. Vanilla Morrowind is a good game; modded Morrowind is dozens of times better. If you're getting the XBox version, simply ignore this paragraph or use the computer you're reading this review with to play the PC version. Unless your computer is old by 2002 standards, Morrowind will run just fine.
As a final thought, remember that Morrowind crashes a LOT; frequent use of the quicksave button will alleviate the game's annoying tendency to break at the drop of a hat. Since unlike Oblivion Morrowind doesn't autosave, you might find a long gameplay session wiped out by a random crashbug, especially if you're using integrated sound on your motherboard, which the game hates. Even fully patched the game is still very twitchy; keep this in mind as you play.
BOTTOM LINE: Morrowind is a classic, and if you like Western RPGs or you've played Oblivion and liked it, there is no excuse for this game not to be in your collection. It's twenty bucks and is still manufactured new so you don't have to go floating around eBay to find it.
RECOMMENDATION: Buy it. It won all those Game of the Year awards in 2002 for a reason.
