Morrowind's expansions have an inflated reputation thanks to the quality of the base game. Bloodmoon clocks in as the better of the two in my experience, but only barely. The terrible final dungeon does a lot to squander the good will it builds up over the course of the main quest.
The landscape of Solstheim is probably the most lackluster aspect of the experience. It feels hastily put together and lacks hardly any of the geographic diversity of Vvardenfell. There is little in the way of landmarks and the majority of the map is flat, open plains only really distinguishable by whether they're grassy or snowy.
This follows the Tribunal trend of vertical difficulty progression only cranked up even more extreme. The werewolves in Solstheim make the Sixth House look like a bunch of street punks and trash weapons found on goblin-like enemies rival some of the mid-high tier gear from the vanilla game. This can occasionally lead to interesting combat scenarios for your jacked out high level character, but mostly it just means things feel a bit spongy as you wander the barren countryside beating up lone boars.
Elements of Nord culture are explored reasonably well here, as much as you can expect for an expansion. Quest writing and design however feels stylistically different compared to those in Morrowind. Voice acting is used far more frequently. Both of these feel like a further prelude of things to come in Oblivion. It leaves the experience feeling very out of place among the rest of the content you did prior.
Once again the implementation here is awkward. We have more new textures overwriting original assets by mistake once again and now every single NPC is eager to tell you about Solstheim. At least it's not as remotely intrusive as Tribunal's assassins.
Not a bad time, but also not really worth playing more than once. It feels like they overextended themselves in trying to make a new, big landmass and having this as the gameplay conclusion to the game makes for an odd finale. Taking the two expansions as a whole it feels like resources would have been better spent focusing on a single, larger expansion that delivered more on the narrative elements of Tribunal and extrapolated them outward. But hindsight is 20/20 after all.
The landscape of Solstheim is probably the most lackluster aspect of the experience. It feels hastily put together and lacks hardly any of the geographic diversity of Vvardenfell. There is little in the way of landmarks and the majority of the map is flat, open plains only really distinguishable by whether they're grassy or snowy.
This follows the Tribunal trend of vertical difficulty progression only cranked up even more extreme. The werewolves in Solstheim make the Sixth House look like a bunch of street punks and trash weapons found on goblin-like enemies rival some of the mid-high tier gear from the vanilla game. This can occasionally lead to interesting combat scenarios for your jacked out high level character, but mostly it just means things feel a bit spongy as you wander the barren countryside beating up lone boars.
Elements of Nord culture are explored reasonably well here, as much as you can expect for an expansion. Quest writing and design however feels stylistically different compared to those in Morrowind. Voice acting is used far more frequently. Both of these feel like a further prelude of things to come in Oblivion. It leaves the experience feeling very out of place among the rest of the content you did prior.
Once again the implementation here is awkward. We have more new textures overwriting original assets by mistake once again and now every single NPC is eager to tell you about Solstheim. At least it's not as remotely intrusive as Tribunal's assassins.
Not a bad time, but also not really worth playing more than once. It feels like they overextended themselves in trying to make a new, big landmass and having this as the gameplay conclusion to the game makes for an odd finale. Taking the two expansions as a whole it feels like resources would have been better spent focusing on a single, larger expansion that delivered more on the narrative elements of Tribunal and extrapolated them outward. But hindsight is 20/20 after all.
2 Comments
@MagMrMad It's really bad yeah. I remembered how bad it was on a previous playthrough so prepped a levitation potion to cheese past them on my most recent run, but forgot that levitation is arbitrarily disabled in that area lol. It was not a fun time for my pure melee fighter. Was never so glad to be done with a section.
MagMrMad
3 months ago