You'll be calling your family 'outlanders' within a week..

Morrowind, oh my, how do I even begin? This game... is huge. If you have a life, you might as well just take a vacation month or two away from it, because after playing this game you’ll cease to exist.

Overview/Story
Morrowind is an open-ended, single player RPG. There’s a storyline, however... you start off on a prison ship where you choose your name, race (Dark Elf, Wood Elf, Imperial, Breton, Redguard, Nord, High Elf, Argonian, and Khajiit), constellation and then alter the appearance to your liking. You leave the ship and choose to play as pre-made class, or you can even make your own. After you leave the building the game basically tells you “you’re on your own, have fun!” Oh, and have fun you will.

The big pull with the game is that you can do whatever your heart desires. Did someone make you angry? Why not just kill them in cold blood? However, doing so will get you in trouble with the law, so be careful. If the bounty on your head gets high enough, the guards will stab first and ask questions later.

There are several guilds to choose from (Mages’, Fighters’, Temple, etc) or you can even choose to join one of the three Great Houses. Each one is optimized for a certain class (Stealth, Melee, and Magic) and once you join one, you’re stuck with them for the rest of the game. So choose wisely.

Other than the guild and house tasks, you can also take quests from random NPCs. Sometimes these quests will even cause your fame rating to rise, and influence others in the same city/guild to like you more. That’s about as deep as the ‘things you do effect what people think of you’ deal goes. The Mage’s guild and Great House Telvanni hate each other, but you won’t get in trouble for being a part of both of them. However, what house you join does affect how certain people like you. Don’t expect slaves to be all a twitter to speak with you if you belong to House Telvanni.

If you don’t feel like making your path, you can choose to take on the story line (you are never once forced to do this, however). If you do so, you will follow the path of your little character’s strain through Morrowind. You’ll also earn the contempt of the Temple. In fact, later on in the story you will be dropped from the Temple (if you had joined it) all together.

Regardless of what you choose to do, your travels on the isle of Vvardenfell will quickly show you the blandness of the NPCs. They have little to no personality. The ones that do have some ounce of personality are part of the main storyline. For the rest, be prepared to hear a lot of the same old thing. Tired of them calling you ‘Outlander’? Tough. Even after you beat the main story line... they still call you that! Better get used to it.

Keeping on this track, everyone has lines that are actually said aloud when you walk up/near/past them. Some of them can be amusing, while others are annoying. The lines differ according to how the person likes you and their race. So if you’re skulking past a Khajiit that isn’t exactly your friend, don’t be surprised to hear “The prrrrey apprrrroaches.”

Sound
Along with the voice overs, there are various scores of music. The music is amazing. My jaw dropped several times while I was exploring and my ears were met with a delightful sound of instruments stringing together beautifully in musical harmony.

There are also the sound effects, which are a little odd. The clanging noises don’t really seem to make the right noise. Also, the footsteps you hear when you (or an NPC) is wearing heavy armor sounds like tapping heels and less like ‘clank, clankity, clank’.

The voice overs aren’t of bad quality, and each race’s ‘accents’ are carried through very nicely. Sure, the same person basically does the entire race’s voices, but still. We’re talking consistency here, how often do you see that these days?

Graphics
Okay, now this is where you might turn running. The graphics are... well... you can really tell their age. The character models are blocky, and the faces you can choose from are absolutely frightening. Thankfully, Morrowind for the PC allows you to upload MODs that other people (or you) made with the Construction Set included with the game. Graphical MODs are glorious, and if you can find Redd’s Heads, you’ll be in heaven.

The environments are pretty, especially if you have a nice graphic card. The sky changes, the cloud moves, and the sun’s different phases cast beautiful colors against the clouds. At night you can look up and pick out the constellations from the game. The rest of the game follows the same suit, and it’s rare that you’ll find bland textures. I’m not saying that they’re not there, they definitely are. They just don’t stick out as much. Plus you get cool reflective water (if you have a nice graphic card).

The largest graphical draw is the different architecture the game uses. Each Great House runs a part of Vvardenfell, and you can easily tell whose territory you’re on by the designs. House Redoran likes to live in crab shells, while House Telvanni favors large mushroom towers. House Hlaalu has buildings that look like they’re taken from Star Wars. The Imperials have the most normal looking architecture scheme; the buildings simply look like those from Medieval Europe. Then there’s Vivec, which is composed of several large pyramid-like structures connected by bridges and canals. Yes, it’s a travesty to navigate, but interesting.

Gameplay/Interface
The gameplay mechanics of Morrowind are fairly simple. You press a key to draw your weapon, or ready your wigglin’ fingers, then press the mouse button to swing or cast your spell. You have to keep hitting the button to continue swinging and casting spells. You can also move your mouse across the screen in the process of swinging to use different ‘attacks’, though I just set my options to auto select the best method for the chosen weapon.

Morrowind utilizes the WASD for movement and you use your mouse to navigate which way you go. This works well in first person, but if you like to play in third person, you may be a little disappointed.

Aside from all this moving, swinging, and casting you have a lot of interface windows. Don’t be frightened, they won’t hurt you. You’ve got your basic equipment window with everything you carry (with a nifty sort function too, yay), a status window with a lot of stats (health and such, factions you are a part of, bounty, etc) and then your skills/magic window. In order to use a skill or magic spell, you must first select it. You’ll see it in the little window at the bottom of your screen. Whenever you cast a spell, you use that spell. It’s the same thing with weapons. There’s also an easy-to-use cycle function for both, though, so that’s good.

You also have a nifty little window that shows a map. It shows both the entire world map, and the current area map. It will color in the places you’ve visited on the world map, and the places you haven’t visited on the area map will be in a black fog. Get used to the map; you’re going to learn to love it.

Aside from all this technical stuff, the gameplay also allows you to create things. You can enchant weapons and armor with spells you learned or create potions using the flora you find along your journey. This does require some skill to do, however, and quite a bit of money. You can also exploit the game in a very major way using both these methods. Then again, if they had limited it, it wouldn’t be ‘do what you want’ now would it?

The game is good. It’s definitely worth your money. The storyline is good, there are plenty of things to do, and they also have expansions out to ‘expand’ your gaming experience. The game does have its flaws with bland NPCs, glitches, bad character graphics, and easy exploits... but they don’t take much away from the value.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
* Windows ME/98 128 MB RAM
* Windows XP/2000 256 MB RAM
* 500 MHz Intel Pentium III, Celeron, or AMD Athlon processor
* 8x CD/DVD-ROM Drive
* 1 GB free hard disk space
* Windows swapfile
* DirectX 8.1 (included)
* 32MB Direct3D compatible video card with 32-bit color support and
DirectX 8.1 compatible driver
* DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
* Keyboard, Mouse

RECOMMENDED:
* 800 MHz or faster Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor
* 256 MB RAM
* NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, or ATI Radeon 7500 or faster video card.

SUPPORTED VIDEO CARD CHIPSETS:
* NVIDIA GeForce4
* NVIDIA GeForce3
* NVIDIA GeForce2
* NVIDIA GeForce 256
* NVIDIA TNT2
* ATI Radeon 8500
* ATI Radeon 7500
* ATI Radeon 7200
* ATI Radeon
* ATI Rage 128
* Matrox G550
* Matrox G450
* Matrox G400