As i have never played an Elder Scrolls game before, and RPG's aren't my type of game. I randomly plunged into this one day. Plagued by it's horrible graphics and overall old style movement and jankiness. I downloaded a mod and saved all of that. But the reading, the READING. Holy. Most lines are just copy and pasted for multiple characters over and over and over. NPC's aren't original, If i sat reading everything people said, I'd have over 3000 hours on this game. Personally I don't think it's aged well and I will gather that this game was a gem back when it first came out. But not for me. Maybe Skyrim will be better. 5/10

The Elder Scrolls series is constantly praised for its rich lore and players' freedom of character development and choices. Each entry has its strengths and weaknesses but put simply there is a reason people hold this series with such regard.

Morrowind seems to be the gold standard among longtime fans and is regarded as a cult classic.

The modding community has kept it alive all these years but for newcomers, it's hard to discern between the praise coming from the strengths of Morrowind and the praise from nostalgia. I'm one of the newcomers who like to discover old gems and I haven't played it before so nostalgia won't cloud my thoughts.

Morrowind's legitimate veins of gold and the parts that stand the test of time:

• The biggest strength of Morrowind is its world remains completely distinct. The most common setting for books, RPGs, movies and TV series is that fantasy world heavily inspired by medieval Europe - European-style castles, flourishing forests, nobility, dragons, etc. Examples: Robin Hood, King Arthur, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Dragon Age, Oblivion, etc. etc. It's a great setting but not very creative at this point. Morrowind is where classic fantasy meets surrealism. All the different flora and fauna are bizarre in this world. The architecture and the culture are rich and complex, like a mix of H. P. Lovecraft and H. R. Giger. Can't think of another game world that's so filled with originality.

• "Freedom" has become a buzzword in video games. Many games let you do what you want and go where you want but most never bother to test it. In truth, many games don't recognise many of your actions. Newer Bethesda titles suffer from the same thing. Most of the time is to prevent you from breaking a quest. In Morrowind, the game doesn't stop you from killing any NPC or doing whatever you want to do. It will only warn you that this action might break the game.

• There are no lengthy tutorials or narrative intro. The developers assumed the player is going to take the story in its direction. You arrive, build your character and go. It's easy to forget there is a main quest. There are so many other things to do and choices are so much meaningful.

• Stats and skills matter. They are the only thing that can stop you or change your story. In other games, you can have a wrong build or simply unlock everything and be praised by every guild simultaneously (cough Skyrim cough). In Morrowind, your skills determine which guild you can join or can stop you from getting a promotion once in a guild. When your skills pay off to your unique build, there is nothing more rewarding in an RPG and adds even more replay value.

The parts that do not hold up and might be hard for newcomers to tolerate or enjoy:

• Morrowind didn't age well. The combat is so clunky that it makes me appreciate Fallout 3 and the New Vegas combat system.

• Limited fast travel system might be off-putting to a lot of players. I like fast travel limitations but I understand how tedious sometimes this can be.

• There is A LOT of reading in Morrowind. There is almost no spoken dialogue which can be a big problem in a potentially hundred+ hour game. Conversations are long, sometimes several pages of text and if you don't read it - you won't know what to do and where to go. There are no quest markers. It's the other extreme of modern titles. I'm definitely against games holding your hands or putting a giant floating marker to follow. Games should make you think to progress, it also helps to get immersed. Developers should try to find a middle ground where they don't hold your hands but should make you read pages of text.

After replaying Morrowind in full for the first time since I was like 12, I think a couple things have been reaffirmed to me- things I had forgotten in the last decade since I actually played through it from start to "finish". I'm planning on going back to tidy up loose ends and play the expansions once I've gotten through another game or two, but even though I don't know if I'm ever gonna write a complete and comprehensive "review" of Morrowind, I wanna write down the stuff that came to mind while I was playing it:

So firstly, I think I sort of forgot how profoundly this game influenced my taste and defined what I like in video games. There's something about Morrowind's approach to crafting a rich, unfamiliar world and making the player slowly piece together its mysteries that stuck with me, and even now I feel that in some of the games that I've come to love in the past few years- Pathologic, Caves of Qud, Oleander Garden's Hexcraft games (please play Harlequin Fair), and even Kenshi (which I'm playing now specifically because I'd heard it took heavy inspiration from Morrowind and I wanted to see how it felt diving straight into after finishing this) all hit this note for me, and I think that it's this part of Morrowind that sticks out to people most. Its world is imaginative and alienating, extremely detailed and storied, and you're arriving to it as an outsider. Everything is overwhelming when you first step in, and there are mysteries to be solved both in terms of the history of this world and the mechanics that will help you survive it. When people talk about Morrowind, this is what they remember- that sense of scope that actually drives the player to read the in-game literature and mess around with its mechanics until they feel at home in its swamps and deserts of ash.

That said: oh my God does the ever-present combat make exploring that beautiful and alien world a chore, and in a world that's as genuinely vast as this anything that's going to deter you from exploring it feels like a huge flaw. For a game that's remembered for and finds its identity- at least retroactively in 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓘𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓖𝓪𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓗𝓸𝓫𝓫𝔂- in its harsh and unforgiving world and the joys of conquering it, it's kind of sad how much of the game is turned into a trivial but time-consuming annoyance once you realize that the primary obstacle to overcome is its combat. It's absolutely everywhere- the game is silly with things to stab, and doing so becomes as dull as unflavored oatmeal once you have a large enough health pool and offensive skills to basically steamroll everything in your path. And yet, it still takes just enough time and effort to kill things that it doesn't stop being a thing you have to account for while adventuring. I've heard a lot of people talk about how rewarding it is to get strong enough and understand its systems enough to solve the puzzle of how to get infinite stamina, craft artifacts and spells that let you run with infinite speed across its terrain and fly over mountains, and become permanently invisible to enemies while still retaining the ability to chop them to death as they repeatedly scream their race's possible surrender barks. And that's true! All of that is rewarding, but it's mostly for the reason that it lets you bypass the parts of the game where you have to kill your 8 hundredth cliff racer or Dremora Lord or smuggler who begins a fight by screaming "It's about time... I HAVE SOME FUN!" before dying in two hits. Morrowind's terrain and world is lush with ancient ruins and mysterious caves, and your reward for delving into them is the most boring swordplay in the world. Fighting a woman whose body is made of gold in an ancient place of forbidden worship somehow manages to become rote and routine. Vvardenfell stops feeling threatening. If I'm placed in an unfamiliar situation I can be confident that I have something in my spell list or some weapon in my inventory that can totally nullify whatever's waiting for me.

And I think the most tragic part of this is that the combat kinda needs to be there- not even just from a gameplay perspective, but from a thematic one. The world of Morrowind is a violent and hostile and alien place, one where the wildlife really will rip you apart, one where there are incredibly powerful Slavery Wizards who have dedicated their lives to insane quests for power- one where a volcano at the very center of the world spews a disease that twists people's flesh and drives them to murder. The game has humor and triumph and comfortable, cozy locales outside the wilderness, but even then it's hard to shake the darker, more threatening elements of Vvardenfell. The world of Morrowind needs to be filled with danger to feel real, and it's a shame to me that the danger present in it becomes nullified way too early and way too easily, especially if you already have a knowledge of the game's systems. That, to me, is its biggest shortcoming.

And yet, in spite of that, I really, really cannot bring myself to not love Morrowind. For all my problems with it, there's so much passion here, so much effort to make a world that's not just expansive and has a complex history, but that's genuinely beautiful to behold. I sometimes wondered why this game always looks so much less appealing to me with community-made patches that add more realistic textures, with mods that dramatically change the lighting or saturate the colors to make the game more "vibrant", and like, after my most recent playthrough I think I put my finger on it. Morrowind's world is designed to feel ancient and alien, and its color palette reflects that- the title screen is clearly trying to evoke an ancient, weathered parchment; the skill icons look like eons-old folk art, simple and abstract. Most of the brightest colors are reserved for UI elements that need to stand out like the Health, Magicka and Stamina bars, while the actual world tends to use more muted colors. The simplicity of the textures, the murkiness of a lot of the game's visuals- I genuinely feel like these things slap so fucking hard. I'm definitely far from the first person to notice this, too. If you're looking for a genuinely excellent visual mod, I need to recommend Morrowind Watercolored v2. The mod is excellent and has a complete understanding of the appeal of Morrowind's visuals- all the textures are based off the originals and none of them try to add extra detail; instead, it makes some subtle changes to make the game's textures appear even more like a moving painting in a way that you really won't even notice unless you're looking for it. Morrowind is not meant to be a place you could potentially inhabit. You are stepping into a dark fantasy world that's long been lost.

There's also a very real sense that this game was made by humans in a way I don't get out of Oblivion or Skyrim. The fingerprints of Morrowind's developers and designers are left all over the world- in the imaginative writing and lore, in the fact that some of the most powerful enchanted items in the game were made to commemorate forum users who died during the development of the game whose ashes you can find, and even in the extremely self-indulgent multi-part quest where you can enter a loving and passionate friends with benefits arrangement with a Khajiit thief. Morrowind is an extremely flawed game that also is absolutely teeming with soul- it feels like the sort of game that would be way, way rarer in the AAA space today. In Morrowind every Easter Egg is a reference to some forum poster or in-joke or an environmental designer's favorite Monty Python sketch; in Skyrim you climb to the top of the world to find a tribute to Notch Minecraft, serving as a subtle assurance that, even if Bethesda's legal department had a problem with him, Skyrim's developers certainly don't :) It's hard to put into words, but I get the impression Morrowind was made by individuals who cared and had ideas in a way a game like it simply wouldn't today.

Final note: the main quest's approach to prophecy and myth and how it's used to shape the narratives and attitudes of entire cultures is really cool. Surprisingly clever and more well thought-through than I noticed as a tot.

Impulse bought this during the summer steam sale even though in theory I already have it on CD Rom somewhereᶧ, just for a hit of nostalgia. And it delivered that immediately. The world is beautiful and (more importantly) still feels unique 20 years later, there's a sense of endless possibilities as soon as you're given your release papers (it's mostly a false sense, but that's totally expected), and the soundtrack is one of the goats.

But I'm only level 4 and I'm already realizing why I never got super far into this game back in the day. I feel like if any one of the following problems were addressed this game would be incredible:
• Uninteresting and completely un-tactile combat, which to my memory really doesn't get more interesting as it gets more difficult.
• Glacially slow pacing, figuratively and literally. Boosting my Athletics to 100 might fix the literal pacing issue but not the more fundamental design one.
• Embarassingly lore-heavy writing with nowhere near enough character to spare for all its quest-giving NPCs, making every dialog window feel like a chore.

As it stands, though, the game is definitely not incredible (any historical significance aside). I'm gonna keep poking around in it here and there, because the nostalgia is pure and is still hitting. But that has limits too--as good as that music is, you hear the same tracks a LOT.

ᶧ(Scratch that, I definitely have it on CD Rom because I just found it. 😬 At least now I have all the DLC, I guess, although there's a fat chance I'll actually get to any of that content before the nostalgia fueling my playthrough is exhausted.)

Easily one of my favorite games of all time. Never have I seen a game with this unparalleled level of immersion, where it's so incredibly easy to completely lose yourself in its world, which is accomplished due to a mixture of a sublime sense of progression and pacing, rewarding exploration, inventive lore, a great soundtrack, absorbing mechanics that make you pay attention to dialogue and use your wits to traverse the map and complete your objectives instead of mindlessly following a quest marker, and beautifully creative alien landscapes and architecture that give the game a unique identity and atmosphere.

The game has a fascinatingly weird world, and it does a superb job of fleshing out the lore, politics, conflicts, and culture of the Dunmer people. It is by far the best game in the series in terms of worldbuilding, and it has the best main questline in any TES game. Everything about its universe is very experimental, surreal, and "out-there", and it's a shame that Bethesda abandoned this philosophy in later titles, since this is one of the best things about the game, and all of it really helps to immerse the player in the amazingly interesting and strange place that is Morrowind.

The game can be quite unforgiving and doesn't do a lot of hand-holding, but that's part of what makes it so special. Its mechanics have a lot of depth to them, and allow for a lot of experimentation and player freedom (I think this video does a great job of exemplifying this). I absolutely love the RPG elements, which I think are the perfect balance between complexity/depth and not being too unwieldy like Daggerfall when it comes to the stats, skills, attributes and so on, alongside the layered clothing system, which all make building and progressing your character one of the most engaging things about the game. I also love the amazing systems in place with almost infinite possibilities like Enchanting and Spellmaking, as overpowered as those can be.

Now, despite all the great things about it, it's far from perfect. The game hasn't aged well, both graphically and gameplay wise. If you're coming from Skyrim or Oblivion, it's almost certain you're gonna have a hard time learning the game's ropes, especially the archaic combat system. The leveling system can be quite tedious and grindy if you're looking to min/max and build your character in the most optimal way. The game is REALLY unbalanced and some aspects of it can be really frustrating while others are far too easy, since there are many exploits that the player can abuse to break the game. Also, even though the soundtrack is one of the game's strongest aspects, it can sometimes be fairly repetitive due to a relatively small quantity of tracks.

Most NPCs in the game are fairly generic due to copy-pasted lines, and basically just serve as lore vending machines. The wiki-style dialogue system makes it nearly impossible to role-play your character through dialogue choices in the same way that you would in other RPGs, so you shouldn't go in looking for that experience. You play a game like Morrowind to feel completely immersed in it's rich fantasy world, learning about its history, exploring and adventuring, joining different guilds, building your character, experimenting with the mechanics, becoming more and more powerful, etc. Just like any of the other TES games, you shouldn't really go in looking for a story with lots of different moral choices and branching paths, since that's just not the point of the game.

Let me also just take a moment to give potential new players two important tips to avoid frustration. First, make sure to only use weapons that your character specializes in, in other words, don't try to use the crappy Iron Dagger that you get at the start if you didn't pick Short Blade as a skill when creating your character. Instead, do some quests in Seyda Neen to get some gold since they usually don't involve any combat, talk to Caius Cosades in Balmora to get some more starter money, and then use that cash to buy some decent gear that your character can actually use. Second, you need to keep in mind that, unlike Skyrim, Fatigue is an important mechanic in this game. If your Fatigue is low when you enter combat, your character is much more likely to miss their attacks, and running and jumping everywhere will quickly deplete it. So, try to carry some Restore Fatigue potions with you, and if you see an enemy ahead try to either start walking slowly to regenerate a bit, or just rest for an hour in-game, which will completely refill your bar.

I would also definitely recommend installing OpenMW and following this guide to enjoy an enhanced, stable, and mostly bug-free version of the vanilla game on modern systems.

With all of that said, Morrowind is a masterpiece, albeit a very flawed one. If you persevere through all of its problems, what awaits you is one of the most incredibly engrossing and rewarding experiences you will ever have in an RPG.

(review originalmente escrita em 01/02/23, eu só quis migrar ela pra fora da versão GOTY)

me tirou a coceira que eu tinha ganhado depois de ter ficado um mês longe de um pc que rodasse fallout new vegas e apesar de não ter atingido os pontos altos daquele jogo eu fico um tanto triste que não fazem mais jogos desse tipo hoje em dia, com esse nível de exploração sem quest marks e designs esquisitos inspirados em insetos. eu posso ter usado mais dos comandos de console na reta final do jogo do que eu geralmente uso, foi bom. eu gostei

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind™ is a fascinating story with multiple interesting themes and concepts, stuck in a game that just barely raises itself above the status of a pure point'n'click game. However, it should be said that most parts of Morrowind are direct improvement over the previous two games. The world no longer feels disjointed and unrefined, owing to the small size and handcrafted environments, always a plus. Similarly, the quests have more depth to them than "go dungeon, get thing", both the main and side ones. There are numerous characters that feel at least somewhat alive, and the guild structure allowes for easier mental cataloguing of various important NPCs.

Thematically, Morrowind has alot going on as well. The Nerevarine being an messiah-like figure in multiple cultures in-universe gets us some interesting examinations of differences in doctrine and tradition across cultures. There are depictions of cultist oppression, indoctrination and prejudice. Even though the core plot is largely formulaic, there are enough cool things happening on the side to almost make you forgive the game for shoving an entire lexicon down your throat everytime you want to do something.

Morrowind has some of the least intuitive UI I've ever encountered. The map screen and inventory are both horrendous to handle, the assault of text from all directions result in control over the setting being almost impossible to obtain. The combat is tedious, what else could it be. And did a snail program the walking speed in this? Any 90-year old could outrun the Nerevarine, it's ridiculous. Thank god the fast travel is so cool. In summary, Morrowind is a game that's way more interesting to read about than actually play, and it would've been better served as a lorebook for other games.