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Great to see Morrowind on HN, just sharing my personal story; I was in highschool living in a trailer park with my mother. My ma ended up getting a pay out fro

Great to see Morrowind on HN, just sharing my personal story; I was in highschool living in a trailer park with my mother. My ma ended up getting a pay out from the government for a work related injury. She bought me a PC and we set it up in the caravan and I was able to run Morrowind. It was a great escape from the conditions at the time and I kept learning programming when I wasn't hunting Daedra's.

gnulinux 6y ago
Morrowind looks fun but every time I try playing, it feels like doing Sunday chores. 90% of my game experience thus far has been walking. What am I doing wrong?
- taurath 6y ago
  It’s one of those games that it feels best to not really know what type of game it is at first going in. It felt like the ultimate “lots and lots under the surface” game when it came out, but now so many features have been coopted what seemed really clever before now feels like a waste of time since you are more intimately familiar with the mechanics. It’s a “what’s over there?” game.
- codezero 6y ago
  For me the novelty of Morrowind doesn't quite last, you could just play Skyrim imho. Morrowind had a world that was so expansive at the time it was awe inspiring. I think that was the main thing that made it so wild. It lacked a lot of quality of life features that make it hard to play today, and I remember routinely taking a break then forgetting which five month long plot I had been playing before going on vacation for a week. Just not the kind of game you can pick up in a weekend.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Most quality of life features just make games a bit boring though, like WoW-style waypoint markers where you don’t even read the quests or talk to people anymore because the game tells you where to go. Skyrim is especially bad imo because it all takes place in the same biome with no sense of “wtf is going on here?” My advice to people here: Get OpenMW and start playing Morrowind with a notepad open that you can alt-tab into for notes. I never beat the game until last year. If the pace is too slow, fine, just open up the console and find the command to double or triple your walking speed. It’s a game best enjoyed slow otherwise, as you unfold the mysteries of the world. I think it definitely holds up to 2021.
    - kevinmchugh 6y ago
      It's painful but the walking speed is intentional. You're supposed to trudge through the world for a couple levels so that you feel so much faster by level 5, and really fast by level 10 or 15. The hardest part of morrowind these days is those first five levels, when in addition to learning the game's systems, you have to get past the game intentionally being harsh. With the low speed, the bad rolls, and the crappy fatigue, it takes a toll.
      - muatraa 6y ago
        One fun way to deal with the speed issue is the "boots of blinding speed." They're easy to get, and they let your character run extremely quickly. But they also completely blind you - the screen goes black when you put them on. You can get them by escorting or killing a traveler on a road near near Caldera. They promise you a great treasure if you walk them to a nearby town, but the boots are pretty useless if you don't have a way to resist magic. Personally, I liked the game's sense of humor.
      - Bancakes 6y ago
        I can't believe so many people got filtered by the bandit in the cave near seyda neen, me included. Years later I got filtered by dark souls, and now it's total war. I went back and replayed them all with a new mindset based on learning, and it's a totally novel experience.
    - simion314 6y ago
      It depends on your free time , what I was a child I could waste hours trying to parse some instructions like "take a right after the big rock then a left after the curved tree" , the issue I had is that this is ambiguous, "is this rock the big rock or that one there", "did I waled to much and missed the path", "is this the path or is just some clearing" . I finished Gothic and Gothic2 with no internet for help but today I don't have the time to play similar games - but maybe is not the time but maybe I changed, the most hours I spent in last years were in Minecraft and Skyrim(not playing the vanilla main quest), Funny enough I played again Morrowind a year back(managed to hack the openmw engine to make it read the text for me) and I stopped after I got lost trying to find a location to complete some quest, at least a general area on the map would be helpful.
- pjm331 6y ago
  Haha yeah that sounds right. I think it’s time has passed as we have become accustomed to some of the nice quality of life improvements in modern games. My most vivid memories of Morrowind involve trying to use the paper map that shipped with the game to interpret vague quest directions and find the place I was supposed to be going. Lots of wandering around lost in the Ashlands
- 98codes 6y ago
  It's a hard game to pick up now if you don't have experience playing when it was new. There have been so many things about RPGs that have come to be expected: evenly distributed fast travel, objective indicators, a compass, a quest menu, favorite item hotkeys, etc. To pick it up now, the early levels are such a slog: constant stamina drain, slow leveling, etc that unless you really want to dig in, you'll never get to the "good part".
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  Give Oblivion a try if you haven't. It has less flavour than Morrowind, but it's a great combination of the older style of game writing with more modern mechanics. I still have vivid memories of the Assassin's guild storyline and all the Sheogorath stuff..
- teeray 6y ago
  I made a mod on PC back in the day which was modeled off of The Matrix Reloaded’s hallway of doors to address this very problem. “Welcome to Balmora, Mr. Anderson...”
- huonib 6y ago
  Mark/recall helps a lot.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  So I actually went back to it after Oblivion, and found it really engaging. Though it was on PC. Part of these recommendations assume PC, but some are true regardless - First, mod it. It looks old; make it prettier. The walking doesn't feel as bad when the scenery is nicer. Second, either consider a travel mod, OR start focusing on what fast travel the game presents you. There are boats and stilt striders, and then the mages guild can teleport you between different mages guilds. The Intervention spells take you back to the nearest Tribunal temple/Imperial cult shrine. Taken together, this means a spell gets you 'out' of whatever wilderness bit you're in, to a civilized place, and then you have methods (albeit ones you have to learn) to travel between civilized places. Once I learned these well enough, it was actually pretty easy to get around. Not Oblivion/Skyrim level easy, with fast travel, but not painfully so, and having to actually walk through the wilderness each time, following roads, etc, meant I felt a greater feeling of exploration than I did in those other games. But, if that feels too daunting, no shame in modding it.
  - account42 6y ago
    > Second, either consider a travel mod, OR start focusing on what fast travel the game presents you. There are boats and stilt striders, and then the mages guild can teleport you between different mages guilds. The Intervention spells take you back to the nearest Tribunal temple/Imperial cult shrine. You missed the two: - One of the official plugin that adds teleportation between any Dwemer ruin and the Caldera mages guild. - The Mark and Recall spells.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      The former isn't really helpful early on; the latter you're right. I was thinking "Well, that's not going to help you navigate" so dismissed it, but in tandem with an intervention it becomes a great way to fast travel back to town for supplies/etc, then get back to where you were.
- ArchReaper 6y ago
  For anyone else who is interested in reliving the nostalgia of Morrowind, but is turned off by how outdated it feels now, I highly recommend Morroblivion. https://morroblivion.com/ https://morroblivion.com/
  - 1MachineElf 6y ago
    Looks amazing, thank you for sharing.
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    There's also Morrowind in Skyrim. https://tesrskywind.com/ https://tesrskywind.com/
- Noumenon72 6y ago
  I could not tolerate the game at walking speed. I downloaded a "full stamina" mod so I could at least run everywhere. Faster movement was one of the main rewards in the game for me, from flying shrines to Jump items to teleportation.
- Zazezizozuzy 6y ago
  Morrowind was the first and only game I had on my Xbox for the first couple years I owned it. Definite bias and rose-tinting due to that, but here's what I would suggest: The magic of Morrowind is in the discovery of the world. Modern RPGs like Skyrim might give you an arrow to follow that points directly to where you need to go for a current quest. Leading the player to ignore most things outside of that objective arrow. Morrowind instead says "Go Northeast of the village to find this cave". By doing this, the player organically stumbles onto things and events that build out the world. A good example of this is the early mission to travel from the starting village (Seyda Need) and head to Balmora. One option you have is to walk there, which takes a bit of time and offers multiple encounters along the way. One that quite literally falls into your lap. When it happens, the game doesn't explain anything. You have to piece it together. That discovery is part of the intrigue. Even if you're not interested in the characters or culture, the game offers a lot. You could alternatively delve into the empty steam-driven ruins to find who built them and why they are empty. Perhaps instead you see an unknown cluster of plants to pick and practice your alchemy. Maybe you stumble onto a wrecked ship full of pillows and want to track down the owner listed on the shipment invoice. If you feel like you're walking from point A to B to C, you may be following too close to that arrow. Trying to find what you're pointed to without seeing what else is happening around you. Stop and look around every once in a while. There's probably something or someone nearby. Anything that catches your interest should be investigated. What may seem like minor events often become the most memorable moments.
  - buttercraft 6y ago
    I probably have on rose-tinted glasses, too, but I still remember the sense of exploration on discovery in Morrowind. The vast, ash-blown landscape was fun. Oblivion felt like a slog because of the auto-scaling, but I finished it. Skyrim felt exactly like Oblivion but with more rails and even fewer voice actors, even though there might have actually been more voice actors. I have only made it a few hours each time I try to get into it. The voice acting alone ruins the immersion. Everyone looks and sounds the same!
    - DubiousPusher 6y ago
- grawprog 6y ago
  My problem with every single.elder scroll game kind of ends up boiling down to, why am I doing any of this. Skyrim was the worst of this for me. Every dungeon followed the same pattern and featured a convenient shortcut back to the beginning at the end and inevitably nothing you ever find is worth it. Oblivion's level scaling made nothing you found or did worth it at all. Morrowind was very large and pretty and fairly amazing for its time, but its world is empty and pointless. I dunno, somewhere along the way, developers seem to forget, sure we could add every single random real world item to every random house and sure it's realistic, but it's not fun. Finding piles of dishes and foodstuffs, exploring random building after random building to find.essentially nothing that adds to the game, go through lousy generic quests that add essentially nothing to the game and basically... I dunno, last time I played oblivion I played as a naked punching cat, because why not nothing you do matters anyway. And sure enough, the gameplay experience was about the same as when I actually tried playing the game properly.
  - meristohm 6y ago
    When I was into Morrowind I already had about ten years of practice escaping into fantasy worlds via books and games. After listening to The Blindboy Podcast (after art and history, one theme is mental health) since mid-2020 and practicing cognitive behavior therapy to make more time to act between stimulus and (too-often-harmful) response, I no longer feel compelled to escape into games. Perhaps all those hours I spent exploring imaginary spaces helped in some way (I am much more grateful to authors of books, because they helped me develop visualization) and I try not to sink into regret. Having a child was a major contributor to growing up, too, perhaps the top; now I’m more adult and I get to freely enjoy childhood activities again with less risk of dependence. My point is: it’s okay to grow out of things and move on.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      I do get that and I find my ability to escape into fantasy has dwindled in recent years, but I played morrowind at the time when I still read plenty of long winded fantasy books and the other games actually helped lead to my decline in enjoying fantasy. To counter that. I recently for the first time played dark souls and a couple years back played hollow Knight. I was able to immerse myself into both games because, every single thing you do and find has a point. Nothing really wastes your time. There's a reason for doing everything in those games. The things you find are worth it and rewarding. Exploring is worth it and rewarding. I never once really got that feeling from the elder scrolls games, or open world games in general. They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying. I prefer games with less things, but each thing feels worthwhile and meaningful. I'd rather find one awesome cool thing that changes the way I play the game or gives me something cool and new for my player over 20 Rusty forks and some apples any day.
- cjhveal 6y ago
  You're honestly not doing anything wrong. Morrowind is a really unsatisfying game for a lot of reasons. The RNG based combat mechanics feel off in a game that lets you aim your strikes. The quests are difficult to follow, offering vague and often incorrect directions for long cross-country treks where you're constantly attacked by annoying flying creatures. Getting the most out of character advancement encourages you to play in a restrictive way. Morrowind really shines when you're able to work past all that immerse yourself in the world anyway. Without spoiling too much, you're released from prison without much skill or equipment into a fractured society, full of political and racial tension. It's up to you to explore and navigate your way through things and the world is rich enough to (usually) support your investigation. The story leans into typical tropes about the "chosen one" and power creep in a way that makes it compatible with using a little meta-gaming knowledge and min-maxing while roleplaying. After a little artifact hunting and enchanting you're soon able to breathe underwater, levitate at will, instantly kill everything in a 50 foot radius, or jump vast distances across the continent and land gracefully. All of which would feel pretty cheesy if it weren't set on an island ruled by three individuals who have amassed enough arcane power to be called gods. Speaking for myself personally, Morrowind is one of those games played as much in the theater of one's mind as it is on the computer screen. As others mentioned, mods help a lot to make the game more visually immersive and iron out some of its rough edges. But ultimately what appealed to me about Morrowind is weaving my own story into the setting, climbing that power curve from nearly powerless to god-like.
  - m12k 6y ago
    About min-maxing: Teenage-me made the mistake of discovering that the vendor economy in Morrowind is fundamentally broken. Basically, the base price that vendors will buy and sell something for goes down when they like you more and up when they like you less. There's also a spread affected by this too, which should compensate for that, but if you max out the mercantile skill, then that spread is narrowed enough that you can buy something for cheap, make the vendor like you less, and then sell back the same thing at a profit due to the now increased base price. Luckily, making a highball sell offer offends the vendor in a way that will make them dislike you, but only for as long as the current conversation lasts. This means if you first bribe vendors to max out their affection toward you, then after that it's possible to buy their whole stock for cheap, temporarily offend them to increase their prices, then sell them everything back at a profit, end the conversation, then rinse and repeat. This way you can farm the vendors for all their gold. You have to wait a while for the vendors' inventory and gold reserves to reset - luckily one thing you can use all that gold for is paying trainers to improve your skills, after which you'll be able to level up if you sleep (handily resetting the vendors). With the right trainers, it's possible to always improve enough major and minor skills together before sleeping, that you power level, gaining the maximum stats per level. The first real city you get to, Balmora, has trainers that cover every single skill I cared about (maybe all of them?) and enough vendors to supply you with plenty of gold to pay the trainers. I made a "circuit" of the city, where I would run around farming vendors and paying trainers, then sleeping to level up. After doing this for a couple hours, I'd already leveled up more than the game expected me to do at all - enemies didn't seem to scale all the way up there that well, and because I'd consistently powerleveled, my stats were super high too. I still completed the game, but it wasn't all that challenging, felt more like a sandbox to play god in.
- trashface 6y ago
  Its a product of its time. Back in the day it was amazing. But by today's standards it is not very engaging. I spent hours and hours on it, and yet, I can't even play for an hour today. Too bad really, as it is truly unique.
- brundolf 6y ago
  The Elder Scrolls games are polarizing because they're not fun in the traditional sense (they got better on this axis over time, but were never great) The fun of an Elder Scroll's game, for me, is the sense of aimlessness in a world that doesn't feel structured like a quest-checklist, but like a world. Something I can poke and prod and truly make my own goals and activities in. You could almost call it "meta-fun". The individual actions aren't fun - some in Morrowind are almost painful - but the big picture is enthralling for someone like me. But not everybody's like that; and not everybody likes them
  - fighterpilot 6y ago
    What are some modern equivalents of this type of game RPGs like the Baldurs Gate sequel are very structured
    - belorn 6y ago
      Many mmorpg can be played like this. You go out and explore, and basically ignore the main plot. Crafting games can be somewhat similar, where the main objective is more of a theme in the background. Baldurs Gate is to my memory a game that focus fairly strong on the main story, and so I find the experience quite far away from Morrowind. In that game you did not look out and see a big mountain with wonders of what might be lurking there.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Pillars of Eterntity 2 is incredibly open world. The main plot is there, but it's the exploration and faction quests that are what you actually spend time doing.
        account42 6y ago
        I think it's more that they coln't decide if they wanted to make a follow-a-god-around-and-skype-with-some-other-gods-but-but-not-impact-the-story-yourself game or a pirates-versus-companies-versus-natives-faction-builder game so they just made both and released them as one. The exploration it has is not really the same as a TES game.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  The true greatness of the game is how text based it is. Because it didn't have VO, the text could be far more abundant. It meant there could be truly interesting dynamics around information. You needed to find the right questions to ask or the right level of friendliness or intimidation to for example unlock the secret of a murder. The characters would also give you long explanations of how to find places. Finding places became something you could become good at. Sometimes the directions were wrong which might leave you stuck on a mission for some time. The later game in the series have traded in some of this but the limited options necessitated by VO just mean they cannot be as robust. The newer games have a very paint by numbers sameness to every mission. Obviously this is to streamline the games for a wider audience. Though they are still incredible achievements.
- MrMember 6y ago
  It's 20 years old, open world games tend to age poorly. I loved Morrowind when it came out but I tried playing it again a few years ago and it wasn't great.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Morrowind is a hell of a grind. It didn’t detract when that was more common and when I was a kid with all kinds of free time. I tried it again but didn’t have time for the grind so it just didn’t work for me anymore :/ That said it’s one of my favorite games for what it was when I had time for that.
- the8472 6y ago
  If being slow annoys you then the game gives you ways to improve that. You can train attributes to get faster, craft spells that make you fly and move faster, collect items that boost your speed. And you can also memorize the fast travel options which unlike other games aren't just clicking on a map but using restricted teleportation spells, items or talking to NPCs and employing their services. They form a sort of transportation network. It's also totally unbalanced, if you want to lookup a guide you can figure out how to become the flash in a short time and leap over mountains. The game gives you a lot of freedom.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  Morrowind has a wide spectrum of difficulty but in the end it's like Dark Souls. Don't charge head-on, run around and find good items first. Specifically soul gems and high-value amulets/rings. How to win at Morrowind? Enchantments. Get the Fortify Skill spell from Mournhold and imbue an expensive ring with xxx pts of Fortify Enchant for 1 second. Cast the effect and instantly open your inventory. Now you can practically become Exodia. Open lock 100pts? Fire, frost, and shock damage 100pts at the same time? Paralyse for 30 seconds? My favorite is resist magicka 100pts for 1 second, enough to slip on the boots of blinding speed without being blinded. Buying these enchantments from a mage would cost you hundreds of thousands. You only need to kill 1-2 dark brotherhood dudes and sell their gear to pay for your initial boost and have enough GP left for fast travel forever. Spellmaking and enchantments are in a different league from Oblivion and Skyrim. A lot of people mention RNG and such but you just need to train some stats. Don't forget to Admire the trainer to 90-100pts to get huge discounts. You can get easy money from soul trapping monsters in stolen gems and selling them, selling nice NPC gear, or raiding Vivec vaults. You only need ~10k to max out a skill with a trainer. Your greatest difficulties in Morrowind will be where to sell this 500K's worth of NPC gear you got from killing a few dudes at a plantation.
- shultays 6y ago
  I find it unplayable without a speed/stamina mod tbh. Morrowind's 'fast travel' system feels like a drawback since it makes you skip the content/world. I generally start using stuff like silt striders after taking the walking road a couple times perhaps
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  I think Morrowind wasn't as much of a masterpiece as people claim it to be sometimes, but it has a lot of nostalgia because it was one of the first 3D open world RPGs people were exposed to. In Central/Eastern Europe Gothic 1 and 2 have the same spot, being a cult classic, overshadowing Morrowind.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  Create a spell that increases your speed, strength and jump to 100 for 1 second. Have the spell Slow Fall ready. Take a running start, cast the spell and jump immediately. Boom, instant travel.
- mgreenleaf 6y ago
  I dealt with that accidentally by finding "Boots of Blinding Speed" off of Pemenie in the western swamps; then later finding the Cuirass of the Savior's hide in Tel Fyr. It increases run speed a ton, and it works with levitate, so if you have the levitate spell you can speed around the map. [1] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Pemenie_and_the_Boots_of_Blinding_Speed https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Pemenie_and_the_Boots_of_... [2] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Cuirass_of_the_Savior%27s_Hide https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Cuirass_of_the_Savior%27s...
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    I found some extreme jump spells at the start of the game, which let you travell a huge distance, then you crash to your death. They were more a joke than a real spell. I found I could save, jump, look around, die, load, jump again, use the gained knowledge to end in the water or against a tall building or on someone's head or whatever, and live.
- slothtrop 6y ago
  It seems like the kind of game you can only enjoy with the patience of a teenager. Like most rpgs far as I'm concerned.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  I remember thinking that the game felt like the fanciest database client I've ever seen. Still fun though
- disambiguation 6y ago
  rpgs are kind of chore simulators the other comments have a lot of good points, but one thing i see left out -- the biggest difference between skyrim and morrowind is their growth curves. Skyrim is logarithmic while morrowind is sigmoid -- very flat and punishing in the early game. but once you hit that first inflection point it gets a lot more fun. you enter a feedback loop of getting missions -> winning combat -> getting paid -> getting stronger -> repeat but you definitely have to have a mindset for taking it slow and appreciate exploring a hand crafted world piece by piece.
Causality1 6y ago
Just an FYI, but Morrowind runs great on Android using OpenMW.

gnulinux 6y ago

Morrowind looks fun but every time I try playing, it feels like doing Sunday chores. 90% of my game experience thus far has been walking. What am I doing wrong?

taurath 6y ago
It’s one of those games that it feels best to not really know what type of game it is at first going in. It felt like the ultimate “lots and lots under the surface” game when it came out, but now so many features have been coopted what seemed really clever before now feels like a waste of time since you are more intimately familiar with the mechanics. It’s a “what’s over there?” game.
codezero 6y ago
For me the novelty of Morrowind doesn't quite last, you could just play Skyrim imho. Morrowind had a world that was so expansive at the time it was awe inspiring. I think that was the main thing that made it so wild. It lacked a lot of quality of life features that make it hard to play today, and I remember routinely taking a break then forgetting which five month long plot I had been playing before going on vacation for a week. Just not the kind of game you can pick up in a weekend.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Most quality of life features just make games a bit boring though, like WoW-style waypoint markers where you don’t even read the quests or talk to people anymore because the game tells you where to go. Skyrim is especially bad imo because it all takes place in the same biome with no sense of “wtf is going on here?” My advice to people here: Get OpenMW and start playing Morrowind with a notepad open that you can alt-tab into for notes. I never beat the game until last year. If the pace is too slow, fine, just open up the console and find the command to double or triple your walking speed. It’s a game best enjoyed slow otherwise, as you unfold the mysteries of the world. I think it definitely holds up to 2021.
  - kevinmchugh 6y ago
    It's painful but the walking speed is intentional. You're supposed to trudge through the world for a couple levels so that you feel so much faster by level 5, and really fast by level 10 or 15. The hardest part of morrowind these days is those first five levels, when in addition to learning the game's systems, you have to get past the game intentionally being harsh. With the low speed, the bad rolls, and the crappy fatigue, it takes a toll.
    - muatraa 6y ago
      One fun way to deal with the speed issue is the "boots of blinding speed." They're easy to get, and they let your character run extremely quickly. But they also completely blind you - the screen goes black when you put them on. You can get them by escorting or killing a traveler on a road near near Caldera. They promise you a great treasure if you walk them to a nearby town, but the boots are pretty useless if you don't have a way to resist magic. Personally, I liked the game's sense of humor.
    - Bancakes 6y ago
      I can't believe so many people got filtered by the bandit in the cave near seyda neen, me included. Years later I got filtered by dark souls, and now it's total war. I went back and replayed them all with a new mindset based on learning, and it's a totally novel experience.
  - simion314 6y ago
    It depends on your free time , what I was a child I could waste hours trying to parse some instructions like "take a right after the big rock then a left after the curved tree" , the issue I had is that this is ambiguous, "is this rock the big rock or that one there", "did I waled to much and missed the path", "is this the path or is just some clearing" . I finished Gothic and Gothic2 with no internet for help but today I don't have the time to play similar games - but maybe is not the time but maybe I changed, the most hours I spent in last years were in Minecraft and Skyrim(not playing the vanilla main quest), Funny enough I played again Morrowind a year back(managed to hack the openmw engine to make it read the text for me) and I stopped after I got lost trying to find a location to complete some quest, at least a general area on the map would be helpful.
pjm331 6y ago
Haha yeah that sounds right. I think it’s time has passed as we have become accustomed to some of the nice quality of life improvements in modern games. My most vivid memories of Morrowind involve trying to use the paper map that shipped with the game to interpret vague quest directions and find the place I was supposed to be going. Lots of wandering around lost in the Ashlands
98codes 6y ago
It's a hard game to pick up now if you don't have experience playing when it was new. There have been so many things about RPGs that have come to be expected: evenly distributed fast travel, objective indicators, a compass, a quest menu, favorite item hotkeys, etc. To pick it up now, the early levels are such a slog: constant stamina drain, slow leveling, etc that unless you really want to dig in, you'll never get to the "good part".
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
Give Oblivion a try if you haven't. It has less flavour than Morrowind, but it's a great combination of the older style of game writing with more modern mechanics. I still have vivid memories of the Assassin's guild storyline and all the Sheogorath stuff..
teeray 6y ago
I made a mod on PC back in the day which was modeled off of The Matrix Reloaded’s hallway of doors to address this very problem. “Welcome to Balmora, Mr. Anderson...”
huonib 6y ago
Mark/recall helps a lot.
lostcolony 6y ago
So I actually went back to it after Oblivion, and found it really engaging. Though it was on PC. Part of these recommendations assume PC, but some are true regardless - First, mod it. It looks old; make it prettier. The walking doesn't feel as bad when the scenery is nicer. Second, either consider a travel mod, OR start focusing on what fast travel the game presents you. There are boats and stilt striders, and then the mages guild can teleport you between different mages guilds. The Intervention spells take you back to the nearest Tribunal temple/Imperial cult shrine. Taken together, this means a spell gets you 'out' of whatever wilderness bit you're in, to a civilized place, and then you have methods (albeit ones you have to learn) to travel between civilized places. Once I learned these well enough, it was actually pretty easy to get around. Not Oblivion/Skyrim level easy, with fast travel, but not painfully so, and having to actually walk through the wilderness each time, following roads, etc, meant I felt a greater feeling of exploration than I did in those other games. But, if that feels too daunting, no shame in modding it.
- account42 6y ago
  > Second, either consider a travel mod, OR start focusing on what fast travel the game presents you. There are boats and stilt striders, and then the mages guild can teleport you between different mages guilds. The Intervention spells take you back to the nearest Tribunal temple/Imperial cult shrine. You missed the two: - One of the official plugin that adds teleportation between any Dwemer ruin and the Caldera mages guild. - The Mark and Recall spells.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    The former isn't really helpful early on; the latter you're right. I was thinking "Well, that's not going to help you navigate" so dismissed it, but in tandem with an intervention it becomes a great way to fast travel back to town for supplies/etc, then get back to where you were.
ArchReaper 6y ago
For anyone else who is interested in reliving the nostalgia of Morrowind, but is turned off by how outdated it feels now, I highly recommend Morroblivion. https://morroblivion.com/ https://morroblivion.com/
- 1MachineElf 6y ago
  Looks amazing, thank you for sharing.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  There's also Morrowind in Skyrim. https://tesrskywind.com/ https://tesrskywind.com/
Noumenon72 6y ago
I could not tolerate the game at walking speed. I downloaded a "full stamina" mod so I could at least run everywhere. Faster movement was one of the main rewards in the game for me, from flying shrines to Jump items to teleportation.
Zazezizozuzy 6y ago
Morrowind was the first and only game I had on my Xbox for the first couple years I owned it. Definite bias and rose-tinting due to that, but here's what I would suggest: The magic of Morrowind is in the discovery of the world. Modern RPGs like Skyrim might give you an arrow to follow that points directly to where you need to go for a current quest. Leading the player to ignore most things outside of that objective arrow. Morrowind instead says "Go Northeast of the village to find this cave". By doing this, the player organically stumbles onto things and events that build out the world. A good example of this is the early mission to travel from the starting village (Seyda Need) and head to Balmora. One option you have is to walk there, which takes a bit of time and offers multiple encounters along the way. One that quite literally falls into your lap. When it happens, the game doesn't explain anything. You have to piece it together. That discovery is part of the intrigue. Even if you're not interested in the characters or culture, the game offers a lot. You could alternatively delve into the empty steam-driven ruins to find who built them and why they are empty. Perhaps instead you see an unknown cluster of plants to pick and practice your alchemy. Maybe you stumble onto a wrecked ship full of pillows and want to track down the owner listed on the shipment invoice. If you feel like you're walking from point A to B to C, you may be following too close to that arrow. Trying to find what you're pointed to without seeing what else is happening around you. Stop and look around every once in a while. There's probably something or someone nearby. Anything that catches your interest should be investigated. What may seem like minor events often become the most memorable moments.
- buttercraft 6y ago
  I probably have on rose-tinted glasses, too, but I still remember the sense of exploration on discovery in Morrowind. The vast, ash-blown landscape was fun. Oblivion felt like a slog because of the auto-scaling, but I finished it. Skyrim felt exactly like Oblivion but with more rails and even fewer voice actors, even though there might have actually been more voice actors. I have only made it a few hours each time I try to get into it. The voice acting alone ruins the immersion. Everyone looks and sounds the same!
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
grawprog 6y ago
My problem with every single.elder scroll game kind of ends up boiling down to, why am I doing any of this. Skyrim was the worst of this for me. Every dungeon followed the same pattern and featured a convenient shortcut back to the beginning at the end and inevitably nothing you ever find is worth it. Oblivion's level scaling made nothing you found or did worth it at all. Morrowind was very large and pretty and fairly amazing for its time, but its world is empty and pointless. I dunno, somewhere along the way, developers seem to forget, sure we could add every single random real world item to every random house and sure it's realistic, but it's not fun. Finding piles of dishes and foodstuffs, exploring random building after random building to find.essentially nothing that adds to the game, go through lousy generic quests that add essentially nothing to the game and basically... I dunno, last time I played oblivion I played as a naked punching cat, because why not nothing you do matters anyway. And sure enough, the gameplay experience was about the same as when I actually tried playing the game properly.
- meristohm 6y ago
  When I was into Morrowind I already had about ten years of practice escaping into fantasy worlds via books and games. After listening to The Blindboy Podcast (after art and history, one theme is mental health) since mid-2020 and practicing cognitive behavior therapy to make more time to act between stimulus and (too-often-harmful) response, I no longer feel compelled to escape into games. Perhaps all those hours I spent exploring imaginary spaces helped in some way (I am much more grateful to authors of books, because they helped me develop visualization) and I try not to sink into regret. Having a child was a major contributor to growing up, too, perhaps the top; now I’m more adult and I get to freely enjoy childhood activities again with less risk of dependence. My point is: it’s okay to grow out of things and move on.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    I do get that and I find my ability to escape into fantasy has dwindled in recent years, but I played morrowind at the time when I still read plenty of long winded fantasy books and the other games actually helped lead to my decline in enjoying fantasy. To counter that. I recently for the first time played dark souls and a couple years back played hollow Knight. I was able to immerse myself into both games because, every single thing you do and find has a point. Nothing really wastes your time. There's a reason for doing everything in those games. The things you find are worth it and rewarding. Exploring is worth it and rewarding. I never once really got that feeling from the elder scrolls games, or open world games in general. They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying. I prefer games with less things, but each thing feels worthwhile and meaningful. I'd rather find one awesome cool thing that changes the way I play the game or gives me something cool and new for my player over 20 Rusty forks and some apples any day.
cjhveal 6y ago
You're honestly not doing anything wrong. Morrowind is a really unsatisfying game for a lot of reasons. The RNG based combat mechanics feel off in a game that lets you aim your strikes. The quests are difficult to follow, offering vague and often incorrect directions for long cross-country treks where you're constantly attacked by annoying flying creatures. Getting the most out of character advancement encourages you to play in a restrictive way. Morrowind really shines when you're able to work past all that immerse yourself in the world anyway. Without spoiling too much, you're released from prison without much skill or equipment into a fractured society, full of political and racial tension. It's up to you to explore and navigate your way through things and the world is rich enough to (usually) support your investigation. The story leans into typical tropes about the "chosen one" and power creep in a way that makes it compatible with using a little meta-gaming knowledge and min-maxing while roleplaying. After a little artifact hunting and enchanting you're soon able to breathe underwater, levitate at will, instantly kill everything in a 50 foot radius, or jump vast distances across the continent and land gracefully. All of which would feel pretty cheesy if it weren't set on an island ruled by three individuals who have amassed enough arcane power to be called gods. Speaking for myself personally, Morrowind is one of those games played as much in the theater of one's mind as it is on the computer screen. As others mentioned, mods help a lot to make the game more visually immersive and iron out some of its rough edges. But ultimately what appealed to me about Morrowind is weaving my own story into the setting, climbing that power curve from nearly powerless to god-like.
- m12k 6y ago
  About min-maxing: Teenage-me made the mistake of discovering that the vendor economy in Morrowind is fundamentally broken. Basically, the base price that vendors will buy and sell something for goes down when they like you more and up when they like you less. There's also a spread affected by this too, which should compensate for that, but if you max out the mercantile skill, then that spread is narrowed enough that you can buy something for cheap, make the vendor like you less, and then sell back the same thing at a profit due to the now increased base price. Luckily, making a highball sell offer offends the vendor in a way that will make them dislike you, but only for as long as the current conversation lasts. This means if you first bribe vendors to max out their affection toward you, then after that it's possible to buy their whole stock for cheap, temporarily offend them to increase their prices, then sell them everything back at a profit, end the conversation, then rinse and repeat. This way you can farm the vendors for all their gold. You have to wait a while for the vendors' inventory and gold reserves to reset - luckily one thing you can use all that gold for is paying trainers to improve your skills, after which you'll be able to level up if you sleep (handily resetting the vendors). With the right trainers, it's possible to always improve enough major and minor skills together before sleeping, that you power level, gaining the maximum stats per level. The first real city you get to, Balmora, has trainers that cover every single skill I cared about (maybe all of them?) and enough vendors to supply you with plenty of gold to pay the trainers. I made a "circuit" of the city, where I would run around farming vendors and paying trainers, then sleeping to level up. After doing this for a couple hours, I'd already leveled up more than the game expected me to do at all - enemies didn't seem to scale all the way up there that well, and because I'd consistently powerleveled, my stats were super high too. I still completed the game, but it wasn't all that challenging, felt more like a sandbox to play god in.
trashface 6y ago
Its a product of its time. Back in the day it was amazing. But by today's standards it is not very engaging. I spent hours and hours on it, and yet, I can't even play for an hour today. Too bad really, as it is truly unique.
brundolf 6y ago
The Elder Scrolls games are polarizing because they're not fun in the traditional sense (they got better on this axis over time, but were never great) The fun of an Elder Scroll's game, for me, is the sense of aimlessness in a world that doesn't feel structured like a quest-checklist, but like a world. Something I can poke and prod and truly make my own goals and activities in. You could almost call it "meta-fun". The individual actions aren't fun - some in Morrowind are almost painful - but the big picture is enthralling for someone like me. But not everybody's like that; and not everybody likes them
- fighterpilot 6y ago
  What are some modern equivalents of this type of game RPGs like the Baldurs Gate sequel are very structured
  - belorn 6y ago
    Many mmorpg can be played like this. You go out and explore, and basically ignore the main plot. Crafting games can be somewhat similar, where the main objective is more of a theme in the background. Baldurs Gate is to my memory a game that focus fairly strong on the main story, and so I find the experience quite far away from Morrowind. In that game you did not look out and see a big mountain with wonders of what might be lurking there.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Pillars of Eterntity 2 is incredibly open world. The main plot is there, but it's the exploration and faction quests that are what you actually spend time doing.
      - account42 6y ago
        I think it's more that they coln't decide if they wanted to make a follow-a-god-around-and-skype-with-some-other-gods-but-but-not-impact-the-story-yourself game or a pirates-versus-companies-versus-natives-faction-builder game so they just made both and released them as one. The exploration it has is not really the same as a TES game.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
The true greatness of the game is how text based it is. Because it didn't have VO, the text could be far more abundant. It meant there could be truly interesting dynamics around information. You needed to find the right questions to ask or the right level of friendliness or intimidation to for example unlock the secret of a murder. The characters would also give you long explanations of how to find places. Finding places became something you could become good at. Sometimes the directions were wrong which might leave you stuck on a mission for some time. The later game in the series have traded in some of this but the limited options necessitated by VO just mean they cannot be as robust. The newer games have a very paint by numbers sameness to every mission. Obviously this is to streamline the games for a wider audience. Though they are still incredible achievements.
MrMember 6y ago
It's 20 years old, open world games tend to age poorly. I loved Morrowind when it came out but I tried playing it again a few years ago and it wasn't great.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Morrowind is a hell of a grind. It didn’t detract when that was more common and when I was a kid with all kinds of free time. I tried it again but didn’t have time for the grind so it just didn’t work for me anymore :/ That said it’s one of my favorite games for what it was when I had time for that.
the8472 6y ago
If being slow annoys you then the game gives you ways to improve that. You can train attributes to get faster, craft spells that make you fly and move faster, collect items that boost your speed. And you can also memorize the fast travel options which unlike other games aren't just clicking on a map but using restricted teleportation spells, items or talking to NPCs and employing their services. They form a sort of transportation network. It's also totally unbalanced, if you want to lookup a guide you can figure out how to become the flash in a short time and leap over mountains. The game gives you a lot of freedom.
Bancakes 6y ago
Morrowind has a wide spectrum of difficulty but in the end it's like Dark Souls. Don't charge head-on, run around and find good items first. Specifically soul gems and high-value amulets/rings. How to win at Morrowind? Enchantments. Get the Fortify Skill spell from Mournhold and imbue an expensive ring with xxx pts of Fortify Enchant for 1 second. Cast the effect and instantly open your inventory. Now you can practically become Exodia. Open lock 100pts? Fire, frost, and shock damage 100pts at the same time? Paralyse for 30 seconds? My favorite is resist magicka 100pts for 1 second, enough to slip on the boots of blinding speed without being blinded. Buying these enchantments from a mage would cost you hundreds of thousands. You only need to kill 1-2 dark brotherhood dudes and sell their gear to pay for your initial boost and have enough GP left for fast travel forever. Spellmaking and enchantments are in a different league from Oblivion and Skyrim. A lot of people mention RNG and such but you just need to train some stats. Don't forget to Admire the trainer to 90-100pts to get huge discounts. You can get easy money from soul trapping monsters in stolen gems and selling them, selling nice NPC gear, or raiding Vivec vaults. You only need ~10k to max out a skill with a trainer. Your greatest difficulties in Morrowind will be where to sell this 500K's worth of NPC gear you got from killing a few dudes at a plantation.
shultays 6y ago
I find it unplayable without a speed/stamina mod tbh. Morrowind's 'fast travel' system feels like a drawback since it makes you skip the content/world. I generally start using stuff like silt striders after taking the walking road a couple times perhaps
skocznymroczny 6y ago
I think Morrowind wasn't as much of a masterpiece as people claim it to be sometimes, but it has a lot of nostalgia because it was one of the first 3D open world RPGs people were exposed to. In Central/Eastern Europe Gothic 1 and 2 have the same spot, being a cult classic, overshadowing Morrowind.
0-_-0 6y ago
Create a spell that increases your speed, strength and jump to 100 for 1 second. Have the spell Slow Fall ready. Take a running start, cast the spell and jump immediately. Boom, instant travel.
mgreenleaf 6y ago
I dealt with that accidentally by finding "Boots of Blinding Speed" off of Pemenie in the western swamps; then later finding the Cuirass of the Savior's hide in Tel Fyr. It increases run speed a ton, and it works with levitate, so if you have the levitate spell you can speed around the map. [1] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Pemenie_and_the_Boots_of_Blinding_Speed https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Pemenie_and_the_Boots_of_... [2] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Cuirass_of_the_Savior%27s_Hide https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Cuirass_of_the_Savior%27s...
- hyperman1 6y ago
  I found some extreme jump spells at the start of the game, which let you travell a huge distance, then you crash to your death. They were more a joke than a real spell. I found I could save, jump, look around, die, load, jump again, use the gained knowledge to end in the water or against a tall building or on someone's head or whatever, and live.
slothtrop 6y ago
It seems like the kind of game you can only enjoy with the patience of a teenager. Like most rpgs far as I'm concerned.
tomc1985 6y ago
I remember thinking that the game felt like the fanciest database client I've ever seen. Still fun though
disambiguation 6y ago
rpgs are kind of chore simulators the other comments have a lot of good points, but one thing i see left out -- the biggest difference between skyrim and morrowind is their growth curves. Skyrim is logarithmic while morrowind is sigmoid -- very flat and punishing in the early game. but once you hit that first inflection point it gets a lot more fun. you enter a feedback loop of getting missions -> winning combat -> getting paid -> getting stronger -> repeat but you definitely have to have a mindset for taking it slow and appreciate exploring a hand crafted world piece by piece.

Causality1 6y ago

Just an FYI, but Morrowind runs great on Android using OpenMW.