This review contains spoilers
I wrote this review 5 years ago for a different site... it's a bit longer than I'd normally post here, but whatever.
Morrowind launched as I was finishing my Freshman year of high school. Being a huge fan of RPGs, I'd followed Morrowind's development for a full year before it launched. In that time, I played and replayed the Daggerfall demo many times since my parents wouldn't allow me to buy a game with nudity in it (lmao). To say that I was hyped would be an understatement. It's the one and only game I've ever pre-ordered, and I even spent the summer saving for a new computer since I was only able to hit 10-15 FPS with the clunker I had when it released. I spent hundreds of hours exploring and trying out different types of characters in the early 2000s.
I returned to the game in 2007 and 2012 (after playing Oblivion and Skyrim), but just couldn't get properly invested and quit about 10-15 hours in each time. I finally came back for another round this month, and finished a 50ish hour playthrough, including the Main Quest, 5 guilds (Thieves, Mages, Morag Tong, Imperial Cult, House Hlaalu), and the main storylines of both expansions. This was my first time actually completing the main quest and Bloodmoon, though I'd made it a fair ways into both in the past. Here are my thoughts:
Story:
You're (possibly) a reincarnated ancient general recruited by a (sort of) Goddess/Demon to fulfill a prophesy and bring the end of a Tribunal of (formerly) mortal (sort of) Gods who usurped divine power from the heart of the (kind of) god responsible for the creation of Nirn and (big maybe) killed you in a previous life. Also, there's another dude who was with the Tribunal at the time and was totally corrupted into some sort of seductive vampire thing that's weaseling his way into people's dreams and making their faces fall off to make room for face tentacles. It's cool and trippy as heck. That said, it doesn't really provide much room for emotional involvement, which puts it behind a lot of its contemporary JRPGs and some CRPGs like Baldur's Gate 2 in my eyes. Still, though, rad stuff.
The Guild stories are mostly just, even for the time, boring fetch quests, and the vast majority of the miscellaneous quests around the world are a bit too simplistic to really get invested in.
Tribunal has some really neat concepts in the story, but it's one of the few games that I just can't accept the actions I'm forced to take. I don't want to help the dude that's clearly sending assassins after me or the very clearly crazy (former) goddess, dammit. I wanna help the guy who makes mecha dinosaurs.
Bloodmoon has a neat story, even if it's a bit frustrating to actually play. I like Norse mythology and re-enacting legendary deeds, so I was all on board there.
World:
It's an open-world game, so the quality of the world is pretty darn important. Luckily, Morrowind delivers some bombshells in this department. The cities are excellent in concept, ranging from pseudo-middle eastern architecture, to giant mushroom towers, to crabshell megastructures, to a series of big ol' floating cookie cutter buildings. Dungeons were also neat, especially the creepy and alien daedric dungeons, and the almost-steampunk dwemer ruins.
There's a lot of background everywhere you look, which really fleshes out this alien world you become a part of. Despite being fairly uninteresting, the guilds do give you a feeling of actually being a part of a fictional group and having to work your way to the top. Frankly, in 2001 or now, it was only the bizarre world and lore, along with the freedom, that really kept me in the game.
All of that said, the World would have been WAY better aesthetically if it weren't so damn gray and muddy looking in almost every region. The Ancestral Tombs and various caves were all way too similar to one another. More importantly, the NPCs were, by and large, very flat and uninteresting. Only a few NPCs were given any amount of back story, and far less were written with a unique voice to their dialogue. Despite all of the really cool concepts, the actual human aspect just wasn't there, generally speaking. I think the one liners common in JRPGs of the era did more to add character to the towns than most of the NPCs in Morrowind.
The books were amazing and weird and I love Michael Kirkbride.
Music:
Freaking Jeremy Soule put out some major bangers. I still get a bit of chill when I hear the drums and flutes at the beginning of the main theme. The epic scope of the main theme really gets you ready to go on an adventure, and the battle music perfectly builds tension. One of the all time greats, in my humble opinion, and I usually prefer stuff more in the range of Nier/Automata or FFXIII-2. Or I guess Devil May Cry to be compare it to something more contemporary.
Gameplay:
2002: Ugh, I guess I can live with this.
2019: Yikes.
Seriously, it's bad. No, a "dice roll" system does not make it feel like I'm playing a D&D campaign. Not even a little bit. It just feels bad. I literally remember wishing the gameplay was either Baldur's Gate style RTWP or properly action back in the day. The movement and animations are stiff as all hell, even for the time, creating a very clunky game feel. On top of that enemies mostly just walk straight at you and get stuck in the environment at some point or another, even with mods to improve combat AI.
Each and every mechanic is spectacular broken in some way. Why click "Bribe 10 Gold" 100 times when you can just make a "Charm 100 pts for 1 second" spell and bypass the whole ordeal. The unarmored skill didn't actually increase your armor like it showed (easily fixed with mods these days, of course). Hoo boy, alchemy was nuts with those fortify intelligence potions. 100% chameleon enchants so nothing ever sees you again? I shouldn't have to go grab some boots that turn your eyes off just to get around at a reasonable clip. Hyperlinking text Wikipedia-style is great for reading dry information, but not so much as a conversation system in a video game. The level up mechanics were bizarre and encouraged grinding misc skills just for stat points. The incentive to maximize endurance first was also obnoxious. While the text directions for quests were generally good enough, the 10% that weren't REALLY made wish there were quest markers. I can still get plenty immersed with a red dot on a map, but having to bring up a wiki because the game gives you outright incorrect instructions takes me right on out to frustration-ville.
Oh yeah, the spawn rate in Bloodmoon was crazy and felt like a bad mod.
With all of that said, the jump spell is awesome and one of my favorite ways to get around a game map ever. This may seem like a minor thing, but it was legitimately a major source of my enjoyment this playthrough.
Mods:
They're mostly necessary to fix the absolutely broken parts of the game. You can also make things look a lot prettier.
Unfortunately, I've never found any combination of mods that leads to me enjoying the actual gameplay. While some of the issues are able to be fixed with balancing mods, the overall game-feel just isn't good.
This time around, I played with Morrowind Rebirth (which actually fixed a lot of my issues with balance) and some mods to change the leveling system and such. I wanted to tackle at least some of Tamriel Rebuilt since a friend/former roommate of mine was an admin for the mod for over a decade. Unfortunately, I was running on fumes to just get through the main quest, and the expansions were already more content than I really wanted.
I think the mods for Oblivion and Skyrim are a lot more transformative, but each game had a 5-10x bigger playerbase than the previous, and obviously better technical assets to work with (even if the engine didn't change as much as people would have liked).
Final Thoughts:
Despite how big of a mess the game is, I managed to have fun with many playthroughs in the early 2000s, and it was great to get back to the game and FINALLY finish the main quest and expansion quests. I think I'm well and truly done playing the game at this point, since it took me 15 years to be ready for another go this time, but I will always love reading the bat-shit crazy lore.
Morrowind launched as I was finishing my Freshman year of high school. Being a huge fan of RPGs, I'd followed Morrowind's development for a full year before it launched. In that time, I played and replayed the Daggerfall demo many times since my parents wouldn't allow me to buy a game with nudity in it (lmao). To say that I was hyped would be an understatement. It's the one and only game I've ever pre-ordered, and I even spent the summer saving for a new computer since I was only able to hit 10-15 FPS with the clunker I had when it released. I spent hundreds of hours exploring and trying out different types of characters in the early 2000s.
I returned to the game in 2007 and 2012 (after playing Oblivion and Skyrim), but just couldn't get properly invested and quit about 10-15 hours in each time. I finally came back for another round this month, and finished a 50ish hour playthrough, including the Main Quest, 5 guilds (Thieves, Mages, Morag Tong, Imperial Cult, House Hlaalu), and the main storylines of both expansions. This was my first time actually completing the main quest and Bloodmoon, though I'd made it a fair ways into both in the past. Here are my thoughts:
Story:
You're (possibly) a reincarnated ancient general recruited by a (sort of) Goddess/Demon to fulfill a prophesy and bring the end of a Tribunal of (formerly) mortal (sort of) Gods who usurped divine power from the heart of the (kind of) god responsible for the creation of Nirn and (big maybe) killed you in a previous life. Also, there's another dude who was with the Tribunal at the time and was totally corrupted into some sort of seductive vampire thing that's weaseling his way into people's dreams and making their faces fall off to make room for face tentacles. It's cool and trippy as heck. That said, it doesn't really provide much room for emotional involvement, which puts it behind a lot of its contemporary JRPGs and some CRPGs like Baldur's Gate 2 in my eyes. Still, though, rad stuff.
The Guild stories are mostly just, even for the time, boring fetch quests, and the vast majority of the miscellaneous quests around the world are a bit too simplistic to really get invested in.
Tribunal has some really neat concepts in the story, but it's one of the few games that I just can't accept the actions I'm forced to take. I don't want to help the dude that's clearly sending assassins after me or the very clearly crazy (former) goddess, dammit. I wanna help the guy who makes mecha dinosaurs.
Bloodmoon has a neat story, even if it's a bit frustrating to actually play. I like Norse mythology and re-enacting legendary deeds, so I was all on board there.
World:
It's an open-world game, so the quality of the world is pretty darn important. Luckily, Morrowind delivers some bombshells in this department. The cities are excellent in concept, ranging from pseudo-middle eastern architecture, to giant mushroom towers, to crabshell megastructures, to a series of big ol' floating cookie cutter buildings. Dungeons were also neat, especially the creepy and alien daedric dungeons, and the almost-steampunk dwemer ruins.
There's a lot of background everywhere you look, which really fleshes out this alien world you become a part of. Despite being fairly uninteresting, the guilds do give you a feeling of actually being a part of a fictional group and having to work your way to the top. Frankly, in 2001 or now, it was only the bizarre world and lore, along with the freedom, that really kept me in the game.
All of that said, the World would have been WAY better aesthetically if it weren't so damn gray and muddy looking in almost every region. The Ancestral Tombs and various caves were all way too similar to one another. More importantly, the NPCs were, by and large, very flat and uninteresting. Only a few NPCs were given any amount of back story, and far less were written with a unique voice to their dialogue. Despite all of the really cool concepts, the actual human aspect just wasn't there, generally speaking. I think the one liners common in JRPGs of the era did more to add character to the towns than most of the NPCs in Morrowind.
The books were amazing and weird and I love Michael Kirkbride.
Music:
Freaking Jeremy Soule put out some major bangers. I still get a bit of chill when I hear the drums and flutes at the beginning of the main theme. The epic scope of the main theme really gets you ready to go on an adventure, and the battle music perfectly builds tension. One of the all time greats, in my humble opinion, and I usually prefer stuff more in the range of Nier/Automata or FFXIII-2. Or I guess Devil May Cry to be compare it to something more contemporary.
Gameplay:
2002: Ugh, I guess I can live with this.
2019: Yikes.
Seriously, it's bad. No, a "dice roll" system does not make it feel like I'm playing a D&D campaign. Not even a little bit. It just feels bad. I literally remember wishing the gameplay was either Baldur's Gate style RTWP or properly action back in the day. The movement and animations are stiff as all hell, even for the time, creating a very clunky game feel. On top of that enemies mostly just walk straight at you and get stuck in the environment at some point or another, even with mods to improve combat AI.
Each and every mechanic is spectacular broken in some way. Why click "Bribe 10 Gold" 100 times when you can just make a "Charm 100 pts for 1 second" spell and bypass the whole ordeal. The unarmored skill didn't actually increase your armor like it showed (easily fixed with mods these days, of course). Hoo boy, alchemy was nuts with those fortify intelligence potions. 100% chameleon enchants so nothing ever sees you again? I shouldn't have to go grab some boots that turn your eyes off just to get around at a reasonable clip. Hyperlinking text Wikipedia-style is great for reading dry information, but not so much as a conversation system in a video game. The level up mechanics were bizarre and encouraged grinding misc skills just for stat points. The incentive to maximize endurance first was also obnoxious. While the text directions for quests were generally good enough, the 10% that weren't REALLY made wish there were quest markers. I can still get plenty immersed with a red dot on a map, but having to bring up a wiki because the game gives you outright incorrect instructions takes me right on out to frustration-ville.
Oh yeah, the spawn rate in Bloodmoon was crazy and felt like a bad mod.
With all of that said, the jump spell is awesome and one of my favorite ways to get around a game map ever. This may seem like a minor thing, but it was legitimately a major source of my enjoyment this playthrough.
Mods:
They're mostly necessary to fix the absolutely broken parts of the game. You can also make things look a lot prettier.
Unfortunately, I've never found any combination of mods that leads to me enjoying the actual gameplay. While some of the issues are able to be fixed with balancing mods, the overall game-feel just isn't good.
This time around, I played with Morrowind Rebirth (which actually fixed a lot of my issues with balance) and some mods to change the leveling system and such. I wanted to tackle at least some of Tamriel Rebuilt since a friend/former roommate of mine was an admin for the mod for over a decade. Unfortunately, I was running on fumes to just get through the main quest, and the expansions were already more content than I really wanted.
I think the mods for Oblivion and Skyrim are a lot more transformative, but each game had a 5-10x bigger playerbase than the previous, and obviously better technical assets to work with (even if the engine didn't change as much as people would have liked).
Final Thoughts:
Despite how big of a mess the game is, I managed to have fun with many playthroughs in the early 2000s, and it was great to get back to the game and FINALLY finish the main quest and expansion quests. I think I'm well and truly done playing the game at this point, since it took me 15 years to be ready for another go this time, but I will always love reading the bat-shit crazy lore.