Written by Jeff Buckland, 5/25/2002
Played on:
Windows
Bethesda Softworks has spent a long time developing Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, the third installment in their series of expansive single-player RPGs. Morrowind was released with a decent amount of hype and fanfare, and it easily lives up to most of what everyone has heard about the game. It comes at a price in bugs and imbalances, but that thankfully they don't even come close to ruining the experience.
You play only as yourself in a first-person view as an "outlander" to the expansive island of Vvardenfell. Everything is done in real-time, and there are many ways to get through to the end of the game's main quest - if you don't spend weeks doing the many hundreds of things Morrowind offers in addition to it.
Morrowind's game engine is an absolutely stunning affair, with quick (but sometimes often) load times and some pretty sharp special effects to back up the scenery. The game can bog down easily on even today's fastest computers, but it is mainly because Bethesda's artists and world designers have pushed this engine past the cutting edge.
Morrowind does have a bit of a limited number of graphics tweaks and features to mess with, as the only easy ways to increase performance on lower-end systems are to change to lower resolution video modes or reduce drawing distance. The game will only run in 32-bit color, with absolutely no choice to run in faster (and uglier) 16-bit color video modes. The main side effect of this is that the game is simply incapable of running all older 3Dfx cards, with the exception of the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 chipsets.
Morrowind's game interface is fairly intuitive, and since the game is a bit of a hybrid of RPG and action games, the interface pretty much has to be slick. You can hotkey most spells and items you have onto the number keys, although some items wouldn't work in there. You can instantly switch items and weapons as much as you want, since bringing up the game's main menu screen (which includes the inventory, map, and "paper doll") automatically pauses the game.
The game's dialogue interface works great, and allows players to talk to almost any non-player character about many different topics. Depending on who you're talking to and how much that NPC likes you, many responses from them will be very different.
Morrowind is simply the best-looking game I've ever played. The style of art, architecture, and terrain are all unique, and the landscapes are breathtaking. This is one of those games that makes you want to upgrade just after looking at it for a minute or two. Characters are fully animated and lifelike, while the high-level weapons and armor are extremely menacing to look at. It's very satisfying to scrape together a whole set of some of the armor, just to see how cool it looks.
Just about every visual aspect of the game was taken into careful consideration. Books strewn about in a wizard's tower, a ransacked room in a building lost to blight creatures, and the first few steps into the game's many cities - all of these things are worth appreciating, just for the amount of time Bethesda spent getting it right.
But the main thing about Morrowind that looks so great is how it's all brought together in one cohesive form. Just about everything looks unique and precisely placed, no matter how far off the beaten path the main character is. It is this alone that makes Morrowind's graphics better than the sum of its parts.
In most RPG titles, character creation is a laborious affair of rolling imaginary dice over and over or adjusting stats to a minute detail. Morrowind, however, walks the player through character creation over a period of roughly ten minutes, teaching him or her the basic controls and other simple things about it along the way.
Character creation itself allows plenty of options, where you can just answer questions to shape your class, pick a specific class you want out of a list, or if you feel like getting technical, create a custom class with each skill specifically. These options give the player some of the most character creation freedom in almost any RPG.
While Morrowind's combat is done in real-time, making it somewhat of an action game, it'll really capture the RPG players' hearts. The game's story (especially in the main quest) is compelling and it motivates the player very well through the whole thing. There are also generally multiple solutions to most of the game's quests, which will allow the player his or her own style of play. Some of the quests, like being sent to raid a tomb, are of the simple combat variety, but many require you to get an item from an NPC. To get that item, you can steal it, kill the NPC for it, or talk him into handing it over.
Morrowind has literally hundreds of quests, some of which are menial, while others are sprawling and can take quite a while to finish. There's something for everyone here, and a character of almost any build can finish most of the game's quests - as long as they are of a high enough level to be appropriate for any specific one. NPC's will sometimes assess your power as well, especially during the main quest, so you will know ahead of time whether you need to go and level up elsewhere first. The sheer number of things to do, along with the many ways to complete some quests, make this game so hugely open-ended and non-linear that it's pretty much revolutionary. I hope more developers can learn from what Bethesda has done with Morrowind's non-linear nature.
Some of Morrowind's most interesting fun can be had in stealing items. This game has one of the most elaborate sneaking and thieving systems I've ever seen, where you can use several strategies to walk out of a shop with all kinds of loot that you didn't pay for. This didn't seem like a very fun idea when I first heard about it, but I'll say now - some of the game's most fun moments come when trying to steal the game's best items right out from under NPC's noses.
