Morrowind: Chose thy future

Morrowind: Chose thy future.

This game I must say is truly a great game and a really good improvement from the last one Daggerfall. First just to mention the differences if you have played Daggerfall and are thinking about this game, this retains all the great things about Daggerfall but improves on some of the more idiotic things, such as the dungeons that had terrible maps, and you could get teleported and had no way of back tracking.

Anyways on to Morrowind:

Plot: The plot is very in depth and is constantly maturing. At first you arrive on a slave ship with no weapons, at the port of Seyda Neen on the huge island that you will be on for the rest of the game (don’t worry the entire island takes maybe 2 hours of real time to cross, either way). So you get off and go to this office where you talk to a person and it brings up a menu where you select your name, race, sex, birth sign, and skill configuration. I will go into how you do that later. But after that you leave and are basically free to do what ever you want which is the beauty of this game, there is many different things you can do such as climbing the ranks of the fighters club, there is a main quest which you can follow if you want, and eventually probably will, where you will find out after you go to Balmora, which for most people is the 1st town they go to after the starting one, and you will be told where to go and who to meet.

Game Play:

Character Creation and Leveling.
This is one of the best things about the game how you level and what ever else. First off about designing your character, there are three ways of doing it, answering 10 questions, choosing from one of the preset characters, or completely custom designing them. I find doing it completely custom to be the best way of doing it, but you should read the manual before you take that route. But the game gives you a good amount of freedom as you can create a wizard that wears heavy armor. Also for the most part you can change what your guy is over time, as long as you don’t pick modifiers that make it to hard to go to a fighter from a mage or vice versa. After you get going there are different ways of gaining skills and stats, for skills they can go up after you use the certain skill for a while, like running around everywhere will eventually move that up, or using a ax will improve that over time. Gaining stats are a whole different thing, they require you to level up which after you gain a level you must sleep than you gain stats. Now the stats that you gain you get 3 points to distribute to your stats and you can’t put more than one point on a stat per level, which effect different things like how many hit points you have or gain per level, how much damage you do. One more thing about stats is stats get multipliers, per level, for every 2 skill point up to 10 they gain 1 point multiplier, so say you gain 10 jumping skill points you can get up to 5 points on your strength stat points. This is the only way to gain stat points, how ever skill points along with working on them you can train them for a price, how ever you can’t have skill points go higher than the stat that they depend on (like jumping depends on strength so you can’t train 50 jumping with only 40 strength) or above the trainers skill level.

Traveling around the Cities and doing missions:
This is one of the huge parts of this game and very few games are like this, most are very linear, meaning they want you to do specific things and have missions that just lead you through the game. This game doesn’t do that as much or almost at all. There are about 15 cities with about 6 that have fighter, mage, and or thieves clubs in them, where if you sign up you can start doing missions for them like killing people or stealing things, note that once you join the fighters guild that you will be in all fighters guild in the world, though the head people will offer different missions at each city, also to move up you need certain stats and to have done a certain amount of missions for them. Along with that you can run into people on the streets between the towns that will ask you to do things for them. But there is a main quest that takes you through the plot, however you can do it one mission at a time and doesn’t have to do it all at once.

*Note: There are a few ways of traveling around the world, now you can get to every place you need to go just by walking, but for 1 if you don’t know where you need to go you can get lost, and 2 some places take 30 minutes of walking at least. One of the most common ways of traveling are silk riders, which are big bug looking things that will fly you to any connecting city, so you might have to take it 2-3 times to get to a specific city, also the city must have a port for them which not all have. Another way is a lot like it where you just need a port and you take a ship rather than a giant bug. The last good way is they have the ability to teleport you at a mage’s guild to another mage’s guild, any town with a mage’s guild you can get teleported from one to another, All three of these ways cost money.

Controls:
Basically controlled with the ability to jump, duck, run and walk. Not much more complicated than that, as well is combat is for the most part very easy and uncomplicated. If you have a sword selected you will see it out and you merely click the mouse and it swings it, or if you select a spell you just point the dot in the middle of the screen at the enemy (if it is an offensive spell) and it shoots it at them. As for navigated the screens it is very easy as you can just hit a button and see what you have in your backpack and what you have equipped. Which with the invention of click and drag makes this very easy.

*Note: the towns are designed more of medieval era, such as there you use swords and crossbows and nothing more advance than that, also towns are drawn with stone roads, and stone houses. Plus there are lots of hilly areas, like traveling by foot in the Appalachians, some farm lands but generally pretty sparse area.

Graphics:
These graphics are very good, beautiful designs on the trees, leaves, fog, and dust storms are very well worked, such as if there is a dust storm the people of the city will put there arm up to shield their face. Nice drawing on swords and armor, such as shimmering. Along with good job making cities and how they look, as well as caves, water, caverns all are drawn well.

Sounds: There are voices for most of the characters that you run into and they are done very nicely, the accent they display for their race is illustrated very well, also there is background music which is also done well and changes depending on where you are, such as if you are in a certain town it will generally have its own song.

Problems:
I honestly didn’t find that many problems with this game, there are several glitches where you will either get stuck in the ground or just fall through forever. Also it will occasionally crash, along with the fighting can be a bit overly simple, besides that though nothing else bad.

Overall: I absolutely love this game, it also comes with a ability to set the difficulty in game while your playing from 𤩔 to 100 which can help a lot if you are in a hard situation that you can’t beat. I have beaten this game a couple different times and I’m doing it again on the hardest setting and I’m still having a lot of fun with it.

One of the best games ever. If you love Action Games/RPG/First Person Shooter this is for you, I highly recommend trying it.