Thursday, February 19, 2015

Morrowind Sucks, aka, Morrowind is Overrated
















Like everyone else, I have fond, nostalgic memories of playing Morrowind back in the early 2000s, but I was never able to get into it properly. I put about 10-20 hours into it, then gave up and lost interest. And yet, every time I've seen screenshots or heard its music over the past decade, I've felt a desire to reinstall the game and relive the glory days that everyone always harkens back to when discussing Oblivion or Skyrim. And then, whenever I do, I'm soon reminded of why I was never able to appreciate Morrowind, even back in its prime.

It's a shame, really, because I think Morrowind truly is the best of the modern Elder Scrolls games. It has the most interesting world to explore with its completely unique fauna, wildlife, and architecture, and it has the deepest, most complex stats-based RPG mechanics of any modern Elder Scrolls game. There's a reason, after all, that Morrowind was such a popular hit in 2002. For many young gamers, it was their first experience diving into such a deeply rich, complex open-world; for me, I'd already been spoiled by Gothic and Gothic 2, which made it painfully obvious how soulless and mediocre Morrowind really was.


Leveling is flawed and unsatisfying

In Morrowind, you create a character by picking a race and gender, which determines your starting stats, innate skill bonuses, and unique special powers and abilities. Then, you select 10 skills from a list of 27 to be your "major" and "minor" skills, which determines your starting proficiency with those skills, as well as how quickly those skills can level up. You pick two "favored" attributes that start with a bonus, and select a birthsign, which grants another unique bonus. During gameplay, you improve your skills by using them -- cast a lot of healing spells, and your restoration skill will improve; hit enemies with a dagger, and your short blade skill will improve. Once you've gained 10 level-ups among any of your major/minor skills, you gain a character level, which improves your health and fatigue and allows you to improve three attributes of your choice.

I generally don't like it when I'm forced to spec-out a character before I've had a chance to even play the game. Different games all have different systems, with their own nuances and idiosyncrasies, and it's asking a lot of the player to make uninformed decisions about exactly how they'll be playing a game over the next 100+ hours, without offering them any context for what their decisions actually mean. When you're at the character creation screen in Morrowind for the first time, you have no idea how important a skill like speechcraft will actually be -- "Is this going to be like a Black Isle or BioWare game with dialogue options, that will enable a more diplomatic playstyle with deep character interaction?" You just don't know.


It's easily possible, as I'm sure most people who have played Morrowind will attest, to create a character and discover, after 10 hours of gameplay, that it's either completely broken, or flawed in some significant way, or just doesn't play the way you expected it to. With Morrowind's character creation and leveling system being the way that it is, you're permanently locked in with whatever ignorant decisions you made at the start of the game. Truthfully, it's impossible to completely "break" a character, since you can level each and every skill in the game up to maximum, even if you didn't choose to specialize in them, but it makes one of the core gameplay mechanisms a major pain in the ass.

If, for example, you choose to specialize in spears and then discover they're really not that good, you might find yourself relying on the greater availability and general utility of long blades. Since you didn't make long blade a major skill, it starts out at a much lower level, which means your accuracy will be absolutely horrendous, creating an unbearable catch-22; you can't level the skill up because you can't hit anything, and you can't hit anything because you can't level the skill up. Your only options, then, are to spend your life's fortune paying trainers to improve the skill (which you can't afford early on), or level it up the slow and painful way, or begrudgingly stick to spears, or else start a new character. If you do end up making long blades viable, then it won't make any progress towards character levels, anyway, since it's not a major/minor skill. You're screwed either way.

It's a rote, shallow system that encourages (and basically necessitates) repetitive grinding, doing the same basic stuff over and over again, like a mindless, time-wasting Korean MMORPG. If you want to improve your destruction skill so that you can actually succeed at being an offensive mage, instead of failing every single spell and wasting all of your mana and having to rely on melee weaponry, which will be just as ineffective since you set them up as minor secondary skills, then you have to spend a week's time (or more) in game casting destruction spells over and over again, and resting to do it all over again.


Unless you play the game as a hardcore min/maxing number-cruncher, there are no important decisions to make when leveling; everything happens automatically as a byproduct of playing the game. Really, your only decisions are which skills to use actively (and let's face it, you're going to be using your major/minors almost exclusively), and which attributes to increase when you level-up, but even this decision is basically made for you. Each of the 27 skills is tied to one of the eight attributes; if you level up more strength-related skills, then you can get a multiplier to increase your strength by 2, 3, 4, or 5, instead of just 1. Realistically, you're going to pick whatever attributes are most useful for your particular specialization, and whichever happen to give you the highest multipliers.

There's a fair amount of depth to be found in the leveling system if you're going out of your way to level efficiently, by ensuring that you're getting x5 multipliers on each of your three attributes with each level up, but this requires an awful lot of meta-gaming -- gaming the system -- which I'm pretty sure is not the way the game was intended to be played. Efficient leveling requires counter-intuitive things like picking skills you won't use as your major and minor skills, avoiding using certain skills if you're not ready to level up, and not leveling up until you're ready -- in essence, not playing the game -- just so that you can control each level up, rather than being at the mercy of what levels up automatically. None of that sounds particularly fun unless you've already played the game multiple times and are looking for new ways to challenge yourself.



Combat is boring and broken

Morrowind implements dice-rolling pen-and-paper-style combat in a first-person action system; you move around and swing your sword in real time, controlling when, where, and how you attack, but the dice are secretly determining whether you hit or not, and for how much damage. It's a novel idea, in theory, but the mixture just doesn't work, at least in the beginning when your skills are so pathetically low level that you can't hit a moderately non-threatening enemy who's standing perfectly still, right in front of you.

Much of the early game is spent failing at basically everything you try to do, since nearly everything has a statistical dice-roll to determine if you're successful or not, based on a combination of, primarily, your skill level, and your fatigue. In combat, this means watching your sword make contact with the enemy, and yet register statistically as a miss -- there's a very strong dissonance between what you see and what actually happens. According to the dice, your attack was off-target, when clearly, your aim was true, or else the target was nimble enough to evade your attack (based on their own defensive dice roll), but the game shows no animations whatsoever to indicate that the target has actually dodged. They just stand there and keep attacking, while your attacks seem to do nothing at all.


Performing actions like running, jumping, and swinging a weapon all cause you to gain fatigue, represented by a green meter that depletes as you take actions, and slowly regenerates with rest. That green meter factors into everything you do -- even buying and selling goods -- indicating that your character is less good at something when he's exhausted. Early on, you don't have very much stamina, which amplifies your failure rate on skill checks since it drains so quickly. What this means in combat is that the longer you fight an opponent, the worse your accuracy gets; if you have a few unlucky dice rolls at the start of a fight, then you put yourself in a hole that just keeps getting deeper and deeper as you continue to miss attacks.

As important as it is for an RPG to rely on stats-based combat, the fact of the matter is that Morrowind uses an active battle system that doesn't involve any ounce of player skill; you just click to roll the dice. Blocking and dodging all happens automatically -- you really just click until one of you dies. If your health runs low, you pause and chug a potion. The skill system further encourages you to just stand there and not attempt to dodge manually, since you need to be attacked to randomly trigger and thus level your block skill, and you need to get hit to improve your armor skills, and you need to have damaged equipment to improve your repair skills, and you need to take health damage to make use of restoration spells (if you want to level the skill "naturally").

You are entirely at the mercy of the dice in this game; there's really no tact or strategy involved in winning a fight, apart from having decent gear in good condition, and not going into a fight with low stamina. What you do really doesn't matter, because the dice are so variable that you can save right before a fight and do the exact same thing three times, and have three completely different outcomes. When faced with a tough enemy who absolutely destroyed me (I barely dented his health), I reloaded the save to try again, and, through sheer, random luck, defeated him with relative ease. If what you do really doesn't matter, and if the dice determine basically everything, and if all you really do is stand there clicking repeatedly, then everything may as well be automatic without your input, unless you want to pause to cast a spell or something.


The point of a real-time, first-person, active combat system is to immerse the player -- to make you feel like you're the one actually taking part in the action -- but the random variables undermine that feeling completely. Even though I've never swung a battle axe in my life, I can guarantee you I'd be able to hit a giant rat who's standing still chewing my toes; I'm pretty sure I wouldn't whiff thin air three (or five) times in a row. You spend the bulk of the early stages of the game (10 hours, at least) missing attacks and getting chain-stunned with hits staggering you and locking the controls up completely, and sadly, though your accuracy and damage may improve over time, the combat doesn't get any more fun. You don't unlock new combat maneuvers (unless you're a mage and learn new spells) or anything like that -- the combat remains the exact same from beginning to end. There's minimal concern for positioning, no real need for timing attacks, no reactive mechanisms like blocking/dodging. You just stand there and click. It's just so boring.

There's not even any tension of trying to survive out in the wild, since you can rest practically anywhere and recover all of your lost health, magicka, and stamina. All you need to do is survive a fight and then backtrack a little ways, to get out of range of other enemies, and you're back at full fighting form. This makes restoration and alchemy fairly useless, and makes it so you never have to worry about venturing deep into a dangerous dungeon, or getting lost in the mountains, and being unable to survive long enough to make it back to safety, low on health, out of mana, and out of healing potions. There's basically no consequence for anything you do in combat.


Exploration is bland and unrewarding

One of the biggest praises people offer Morrowind, and all of the TES games, for that matter, is the overwhelming size of their open worlds that let you set out in whatever direction you want, to discover whatever content you want, and do things in whatever order you want. People seem to relish that freedom, and enjoy "just getting lost in the world." I certainly understand that desire, since many of my favorite games feature spacious open worlds to explore, but I find Morrowind's world completely stale, lifeless, and uninteresting -- critical flaws for an open world game.

The world in Morrowind, as it is in all TES games, is simply too large. Yes, you could spend 200+ hours exploring everywhere in the game and completing all of the content Morrowind has to offer, but why would you want to, when all of that content is so bland and repetitive? After exploring your 10th ancestral tomb and finding nothing but wooden spoons and clay pots, and finding that they all look the exact the same, except with slightly different layouts and, sometimes, slightly different enemies, why bother going into any of the roughly 100 more? The answer is because it's marginally more exciting than wandering around 1000-square foot areas picking plants and mushrooms and killing slugs, rats, and mudcrabs.


If you're lucky, you might find an NPC standing along a roadside between towns, who'll offer you some type of quest, but these NPCs make up only a slim percentage of the content you can experience "out in the wilds." Otherwise, there's really nothing interesting to do and nothing unique to find except seemingly random caves, ancestral tombs, and daedric shrines. Everything in-between is pointless filler that only exists to spread the world out, to make it seem bigger than it really is. And as the saying goes, "bigger isn't always better." All this really does is turn the game into a bona fide "walking simulator" as it forces you to walk for 10 minutes at a time to get anywhere, with nothing much of interest to do between your starting point and your destination.

With the world as big as it is, you just don't have time to walk everywhere, so you sprint, which drains your stamina, which then means you have to stand and wait for 30 seconds regenerating stamina before doing anything, since fatigue determines you efficacy in everything you do. Want to buy a healing potion, or sell some gems? Better get that stamina up. Want to persuade someone to get them to like you more, so they'll tell you vital information for quest? Better get that stamina up. See some bandits up ahead, who will attack you on sight? Better get that stamina up. You spend basically the entire game slowly trudging from place to place, or waiting with your hands off the controls -- not very engaging gameplay.

The world is missing any kind of meaningful structure -- areas with purpose, design, narrative, and context. Tombs, caves, shrines, ruins, and strongholds may as well be randomly generated and randomly placed across the world map for as memorable as any of them are. There are approximately 258 of these "dungeons," which all feel mechanically and aesthetically identical to one another. What's worse, every single one of them exists in a vacuum independent of the rest of the world, since they all require you to go through a loading zone into a completely separate map. What's even worse, perhaps half of these places are filled with completely worthless, randomized loot; maybe a quarter of them have scaling loot that's at least worth selling, if you care to; and maybe a quarter, if I'm being generous, have a unique, "special" piece of loot at the end.


It's a random guess which dungeons will have rare, special loot in them, which means you have to explore every single one you come across if you want to improve your odds of finding something good. Daedric shrines are the only ones that consistently seem to have anything worthwhile. Most of the time, this means there's no reward for exploring anywhere in the world, and no elation that comes from discovering something cool, whether that be a unique item, or a unique-looking area, or an area with unique enemies, or some place with an interesting backstory. More often than not, finding good loot is just the result of random luck, rather than you getting a special reward for a special accomplishment. Even when you find a unique piece of loot that was specifically placed there by the developers, you have to wonder "why is this particular set of ultra rare, special boots in this particular place?" It all just feels so mundane, random, and arbitrary.

Towns are a little better, in the sense that they have buildings to enter, people to talk to, merchants and trainers to use, and quests to pick up -- ie, there are things to do. But even towns get overwhelming. Every NPC is uniquely-named (often with some unpronounceable, unmemorable name), so when you have to find a specific NPC you have to approach every, single, character to figure out if they're the person you need, and there are hundreds of these NPCs in some towns. Likewise, it's impossible to tell which NPCs are merchants, trainers, or quest-givers without approaching and talking to every, single, one of them. It's a tedious chore. Then, with the engine's restrictions on loading zones, you have to go through a load screen every time you enter a building, often multiple times within a building, which completely breaks the feeling of an "open world" in towns like Vivec that are simply massive, yet broken into a million tiny, copy/pasted compartments.


Quests are boring and tedious

Basically every single quest in Morrowind consists of the most tedious, boring, and straightforward FedEx errand-boy fetch quests; go here, kill this, get that, report back. Even faction quests fall victim to this simplistic structure, and they don't even give interesting narrative reasons for why you're doing the things you're doing. Join the mage's guild and you get quests that consist of "fetch me four mushrooms." Complete that quest, and you move up to "fetch me four plants." In the fighter's guild, you get quest dialogue that plays out exactly like this: "There's an Argonian by the name of Tongue-Toad at the inn in Ald'ruhn who won't keep his mouth shut. Go take care of him for me." And that's literally all you get, verbatim.

Since the game is designed to be open-world, allowing you to go wherever you want and do whatever you want whenever you want, the quests are necessarily designed without any kind of narrative or mechanical urgency, because the game really doesn't care whether you do them or not. The world will remain completely static, suspended in animation until you're ready to do a quest. If you start a quest and get distracted, it will be waiting for you exactly where you left off. That's a quality that's kind of necessary when dealing with a large open-world setting, but again, this world is just so large that everything has to accommodate the scope of aimless possibility, which means no quests that require your timely input, or outcomes that dynamically alter the world, or quests that overlap in significant ways.


I imagine it's hard to write memorable, interesting quests when you have to fill a giant, sprawling world with nearly 500 of them. This, again, is a fault of over-ambition, of making the world so big and unwieldy that it becomes bland and boring, another instance of Bethesda striving for quantity instead of quality. Consequently, there's no depth to any of the quests, no role-playing options, no way to act out your character through the game's quests. Most quests only have one solution, and unless the quest specifically requires you to fight something, or steal something, there's hardly any opportunity to put your character's skills to use during the quest.

During one quest for the fighter's guild, I was sent to collect a bounty on an orc who'd been living in town. I talk to the orc, and there's no dialogue option whatsoever to address the fact that I'm about to kill her. There's no way to show mercy and talk her into skipping town, or a way to accept a bribe from her, or any kind of interaction that escalates to a fight. I even tried talking to the city guard, to see if I could report her location -- no such luck. In the end, my only option was to brandish my sword and brazenly attack her in her own house, not knowing what crime she'd even committed to deserve the wrath of my steel.

Role-playing games by definition are supposed to be about role-playing a character, making decisions and acting in a way that embodies the type of character you envision. Are you a good Samaritan who selflessly looks out for the good of others, or are you a greedy mercenary who's only interested in fattening his own wallet? Are you a noble saint who upholds virtue and justice, or are you an evil bastard who murders townsfolk just to take a few pinches of moon sugar from their pockets? Or do you fall somewhere in between; chaotic good, lawful neutral? There's hardly any opportunity to enact these characteristics through actual gameplay -- you can be a goody-two-shoes or an evil villain, but nothing in the world really reacts to anything you do, unless you're caught committing a crime.

Since the game doesn't use a traditional experience points system, there's no incentive to do quests unless you're expecting a nice tangible reward from someone. You could say there's always the adventure component, of wanting to see the stories that play out and interacting with the characters and the world, but as I described above, there's really not much depth or weight to enjoy there, either.

I picked up a quest for a blacksmith, who thought something shady was going on with a rival blacksmith in town, who was getting a lot of bulk orders and big business. He wanted me to check it out and help him edge out the competition. I got caught stealing the contract from the rival's shop, paid a fine, and lost thousands of gold worth of valuable, useful equipment I'd stolen from other towns halfway across the world (that the guards somehow, magically knew were stolen), and returned to complete the quest only to receive a measly 50 gold and a useless, worthless dagger. It wasn't a very fun or interesting quest, and the reward wasn't worth the cost of completing it, so I loaded my save and simply never went about finishing the quest.


A lot of quests in this game send you long distances across the map, usually to areas you've never been to, long before you're ready to move on, which makes every single one of these quests a tedious chore of simply making it from point A to point B. If you're a completionist, like me, who likes to do everything he can in an area and experience as much of a game's content as possible, then you're just going to get overwhelmed -- a quest sends you from town A to town B, and along the way you might pick up two or three quests, each of which sends you off in a different direction away from town B, each to a different hub city with its own plethora of quests that send you to other towns you've never been to. It's so hard to keep track of everything that you eventually learn to ignore a lot of the game's content, because you just can't focus on more than a few things at a time.

The journal system doesn't help this cause, either, since it organizes every quest update and important note chronologically when you receive it. If you pick up a quest and then get distracted for five hours doing other things, you have to scroll back through dozens of pages hoping to find the entry you need -- if you can even remember it. Thank goodness the expansions fixed this issue by adding a quest-filtering section, because the journal was borderline useless in the base game.

Even then, the journal entries are sometimes too vague to be of any use. At one point I picked up a main quest to find a missing NPC, and then had to shut the game down for the night. When I came back the next day, I couldn't remember the lead I was supposed to follow. All the journal said was "find so-and-so." I tried asking the quest giver for the information again, but all she said was "he's missing." I wandered around talking to other NPCs, hoping to ask if anyone knew anything, and didn't even have the option. I gave up, consulted a guide, and suddenly all the details came rushing back. "Oh yeah, I remember her saying that now. Why couldn't she tell me that stuff again? Why does the journal not keep track of this vital information?"


Atmospherically, it's ok -- not great

What good is having a huge, sprawling world if it doesn't drawn you in? There's a lot to like about this world -- namely, its unique fauna, wildlife, and architecture, which make it one of the most memorable, distinct-looking fantasy worlds of any video game -- but the whole world feels dead and lifeless. Consider: NPCs stand around, in the exact same spots, 24 hours a day, doing absolutely nothing, spouting the same lines of dialogue no matter the time of day or recent events. They don't even go to sleep at night. They don't care if you barge into their homes at night. They don't care if you draw a weapon and start swinging it around them.


Basically everyone in this world is a cardboard cutout with no personality whatsoever. Even major characters that are part of faction quests, house quests, and the main quests are just mechanical objects dispensing quest dialogue at you. The writing for dialogue feels identical for every character, and the complete lack of meaningful interaction leaves them feeling simply like bounty boards and merchant windows. Put simply, these characters have no character. Good luck remembering anyone's name, or describing them in any way beyond their occupation, location, or what menial task they set you on. Part of that is admittedly the fact that there's hardly any voice acting, and no animations during dialogue; these would certainly help bring the characters to life, but they're also not necessary, as plenty of other games have featured interesting, memorable characters with text-based dialogue.

Graphically, the game looks pretty good for its age, apart from the horrendous character models and animations. It's really easy to feel immersed wandering around in the world, just because of how everything looks. Jeremy Soule composed some really nice, memorable music for this game, which also helps put you in the mood of adventuring through Vvardenfell, but the music gets to be really repetitive after a while, since you hear the same half-dozen tracks everywhere you go. The music doesn't set the tone for specific areas; it doesn't matter if you're in a dark crypt, a daedric shrine, the blight-infested ashlands, or a major city like Vivec -- you hear the same music. Perhaps that's why it's so memorable, since you hear the same stuff over and over again for 100 hours.


Why Gothic is better than Morrowind

As I mentioned at the top of the article, the reason I find it so difficult to appreciate Morrowind is because the Gothic games, which came out around the same time as Morrowind (Gothic 1 actually predates Morrowind by a full year), offer a very similar experience to Morrowind and do a lot of the same stuff, but better.

A better leveling system

Gothic uses a traditional experience points system that rewards you for defeating enemies, completing quests, and completing certain tasks/activities/challenges. After earning a certain amount of experience points, you level up, automatically improving your maximum health and gaining 10 skill points to invest with trainers. Skill points can be spent improving your attributes (strength, dexterity, mana), training your abilities with different types of ranged and melee weapons, learning new circles of magic and magic spells, as well as learning and improving other useful abilities like animal skinning, alchemy, weapon forging, sneaking, lock-picking, and so on.


The benefit of this system is it rewards you for every little thing you accomplish, since even a measly 50 experience for killing a giant rat will add up over time. And since enemies don't respawn (with limited exceptions), experience is finite, which makes each amount of experience earned that much more valuable. It also means you can't max out every stat and learn every skill in the game, which forces you to make tough decisions about how to allocate limited skill points to your best advantage, and allows your gameplay and playstyle to change and evolve over time as you learn new skills and improve your character.

More engaging combat

Like Morrowind, Gothic relies heavily on stats in combat, but implements them in an active battle system that rewards player skill. Realistically, you have to be a certain level, and with certain stats, to take on stronger enemies, but the balance between character stats and player skill allows a clever, skilled, and determined player to make up for weaker stats with his own abilities, to tackle tougher objectives before he statistically should be able to, or allows a player with less personal skill to rely on superior stats to lead him to victory by waiting until he's stronger to face a tough challenge. There are no random variables; everything has a fixed value, except a random chance for critical hits which improves with skill training, so you can control and plan for what happens in combat. If you lose a fight, it's usually your own fault, not because you got screwed by bad luck.


Combat is also a lot more fun and involved than simply standing and clicking until one of you dies. You can control the direction of each attack -- attacking left, right, or forward -- and string multiple attacks together to form actual combos, a feat that requires the correct timing between attacks, lest you fail the combo and leave yourself exposed for a moment. Blocking and dodging attacks is also done manually, requiring good reaction speed and knowing how to anticipate certain attack behaviors. Different types of enemies require different strategies to defeat, which means learning their attack patterns and finding their weaknesses. The system also changes and improves over the course of the game, with you unlocking new combos as you invest skill points.

More rewarding exploration

The world in Gothic is not nearly as large as in Morrowind, but it crams a lot more interesting locales, discoveries, and encounters in a smaller space, for a much better content-per-square-area ratio. You don't have to walk for five minutes at a time before you find something interesting; there's something interesting every single direction you look. Environments are given more purpose and structure, with specific relations to adjacent areas, which makes for a more memorable layout. I can remember every square foot of the colony from Gothic 1 -- even after playing the starting areas of Morrowind four times over the last 10+ years, I can't remember anything beyond the starting town, and a few things in Balmora.


No loot in Gothic is randomly generated; everything in the environment is hand-placed by the developer, put there for a specific purpose, to reward players for their ingenuity in exploring off the beaten path or for tackling a tough challenge, or to tell a specific story. When you find something -- whether it be a hidden NPC, a valuable sword, a unique monster, or just an interesting area -- you feel like you've accomplished something. Places within the environment have their own mystique, lore, and backstory, like the black troll cave, or the cave guarded by skeleton archons that houses the great Dragon Slayer, or the orc shrine, or the mage's collapsed tower with its failed necromantic experiments. Everything is unique, and feels heavily integrated with the rest of the world.

It's also a very dangerous world, filled with cutthroat bandits, deceitful allies who will rob and beat you, and deadly beasts. While exploring a forest, you can be hunting harmless scavengers and molerats and suddenly find yourself face to face with an enormous shadowbeast, that can kill you in one or two hits. Death is around every corner, which teaches you to be very careful about where you go, how you prepare, and what you do. It also allows you to set your own level of difficulty and challenge -- do you venture into dangerous areas early to try to get better rewards, or do you save it for later, until you're stronger? If you go early and find some clever way of surviving, you're treated with immense rewards, and if you save it for later, then it's a sure sign you've gotten stronger, which is rewarding in and of itself.

Interesting quests from likable NPCs

When you boil Gothic's quests down to their basic structure, they fall victim to the same type of simplistic errand boy fetch quest nonsense for which I criticize Morrowind. The main difference, here, is that Gothic's quests are given to you by NPCs you know and care about -- people with whom you have a lasting relationship. Early in the game, a farmer's wife feeds you and gives you a place to sleep in exchange for helping out on the farm; later, she falls ill, and her husband sends you into town to fetch a healing potion. It's the simplest, most mundane thing, but it shows some of the dynamic qualities of the world, and makes you care about helping her, because she's a named character that you know, not just some random nameless, faceless NPC who'll become useless and obsolete once the quest is over. 


Although not a thorough, in-depth RPG with a multitude of dialogue options and multiple ways to approach and solve every quest, Gothic frequently allows for multiple solutions with different rewards and consequences, with overlapping quests and interests between NPCs. A carpenter's daughter is indebted to a merchant, and asks you to help get her out of trouble; the merchant will independently task you with collecting the money he's owed, if you talk to him first. There are two sides to this quest. You can choose to pay the money entirely on your own to appease both sides, or tell the carpenter the full story and piss of his daughter, or blackmail the merchant (if you've completed another quest), or rough up his daughter and take the money from her, or persuade her with the right dialogue to give you the money. Each approach has a slightly different reward, and completing the quest a certain way opens new opportunities for later rewards and dialogue.

Livelier NPCs and a dynamic world

Gothic's world feels much more alive, atmospheric, and immersive because its characters behave much more realistically. NPCs follow a daily schedule, going to sleep at night, sitting by a fire in the evening, waking up in the morning, urinating throughout the day, and so on. During the day, they don't just idly stand around; they eat, they smoke, they drink, they hammer slats into their huts, they play music. Cooks stir their cauldrons, blacksmiths hammer swords out on an anvil, sword trainers practice weapon handling, mages cast spells. NPCs react to your presence and actions; walk into their hut, and they'll threaten to call the guards; draw a weapon, and they'll draw theirs, eventually attacking you themselves if you don't back down; stand in their way, and they'll tell you to move; beat up a guard, and he'll pretend not to notice when you're beating up a merchant in his presence. Even animals go about daily schedules, sleeping at night and hunting for food.


Every single character also has spoken dialogue and animations, which helps lend characters a more unique identity. Main characters have memorable names, voices, personalities, and roles, who recur throughout the entire game and show up in different scenarios. It also helps that only important, unique characters are named -- all the atmospheric "filler" characters who are there simply to populate the world are given generic titles like "citizen" or "miner," so that you don't have to waste time talking to every single person to find out if they're useful or not. You can still talk to these generic characters about a wide range of topics, and receive fully-voiced responses, and they also play a role in the world around them -- spectating and cheering on fights, making idle conversation with one another, and so on -- so they feel like actual people.

The world also changes as you complete quests, more dramatically so as you advance the main story line. Help a group of farmers reclaim their property from bandits, and they'll get back to work farming and open a new line of trade for you. Blackmail a merchant to solve another quest, and he'll refuse to do business with you for the rest of the game. When returning to familiar locations after completing other quests, you'll find new characters, missing characters, people being attacked by orcs, and all other sorts of things changing over the course of the game. This all makes the world feel so much more rich, deep, complex, and alive.


In conclusion

There's very little I can find about Morrowind to praise that isn't prefaced by saying it's a better alternative than what Bethesda have come up with in subsequent games in the series, or that doesn't come with some kind of "but." It's a unique, memorable world, some of the quests are genuinely interesting, and it is kind of fun to come up with new characters in the character creation. I like its greater reliance on stats-based ... everything ... as compared to Oblivion and Skyrim, which have progressively removed most of what gave the series some semblance of being an RPG, but it makes certain things way more tedious than they really should be, and doesn't blend well with the intended first-person action combat. Leveling feels like it happens automatically, combat may as well be automatic, quests are straightforward and boring, there are very few opportunities for genuine role-playing, and the world is so static and non-reactive that I just don't feel a part of it.

And yet, I can totally understand why so many people were so enamored with Morrowind back in its time. I think, quite honestly, if I hadn't played the Gothic games before going into Morrowind, I would love it as much as the next person. But having already played Gothic and Gothic 2, I realized how much better games can be. Even then, as I got more involved with RPGs, I came to realize that other games that came out in the years immediately before and after Morrowind -- Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, Deus Ex, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Knights of the Old Republic, and so on -- were all much better RPGs that offered many of the exact same gameplay elements as Morrowind, but with more focus, more care, and more attention to detail. Granted, Morrowind has a much bigger world with more more freedom than any of these games, but what's the point if there's no meaningful significance to any of it? Morrowind just feels like a bland, bloated amalgamation of ideas without any soul.

If you're someone who adores Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls in general, then I would like to encourage you to try Gothic and Gothic 2 -- at the very least, just Gothic 2 with its expansion -- to see an alternative point of view for how these kinds of open-world action-adventure-RPGs can be designed. Hopefully, you'll be able to appreciate just how clever and well-designed these games really were, and given your appreciation of Morrowind, you'll be able to enjoy their relative similarities. Perhaps you'll experience the same revelations I did and come to realize Morrowind really isn't all it's cracked up to be, but I won't hold it against you if you don't.

75 comments:

  1. Another classic. This is a fantastic breakdown of the problems with the Elder Scrolls series, just as with Skyrim. I can only hope this article gets way more recognition than the other one (though I have tried to share it with as many as possible).

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  2. I discovered this blog recently, and I have to say - your reviews and editorials are awesome.
    I never understood why does TES get so much praise. I completely agree that, although Gothic games are much smaller, they are in fact superior in every other aspect.

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  3. Yup, agree. Typical Bethesda. I still think Morrowind is the best out of the Elder Scrolls Series, but by no means a good RPG in comparison. Bethesda can design an open world, a shitty main quest, millions of meaningless sidequests and then they leave it to the community to mod the game playable.

    Even worse, they took the Fallout series and destroyed it to get the console shooter audience to play it.

    It's so ridiculous how people praise TES + Fallout 3 as if it was the holy grail of RPGs, even though they never played a decent RPG before.

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  4. What a coincidence, I was just about to reinstall this on Steam and then you reminded me why I never managed to play more than 10 hours without uninstalling it.

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  5. My first experience with the world of Morrowind was the day the GOTY X-Box version was released. I was a much younger man back then and gave up on Morrowind after a few half-hearted attempts that never progressed further than Balmora. After all, there was GTA to play! Fast forwards to 2015 and for some reason I just got the itch to try it again.

    The world Bethesda created in Morrowind is more engaging then it ever was to me back then. I was too young to appreciate a slower paced game and was glued to more colorful, action packed games like an ADD riddled adolescent. It's true this game hasn't aged well, and there are bugs, and sometimes it feels a little all-too-the-same. But it's also true there are completely novel moments like finding yourself and another character surrounded in a bar by racists. There's also a short sorta-quest where you come upon the body of a dead drug addict. I'd really like to know another game where you can experience these events without it making up the majority of the game. The graphics now feel uninspired and there were certainly problems but Morrowind's substance is in the story and the way the world is presented.

    It's a great thing modding communities exist because just about every problem I had with the game could be remedied quickly with a mod. The single and only irritating element for me now is cliff racers. In short, Morrowind is still a great game to me but can only be endured through the use of a few mods common to the game.

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  6. Great review, even though I do like Morrowind (played it for the first time last January and really enjoyed it). I can't necessarily disagree with any of your points,as they're all pretty much true, but I still liked it. I've always found Bethesda rpgs to be incredibly immersive, despite their flaws, which is generally more than enough to draw me in for a long playthrough. I need to get around to playing Gothic, I've been meaning to for awhile.

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  7. Good review. This make me want to try Gothic now

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  8. The only rpg game developers worth a sh*t currently are obsidian and pyranha bytes. Then there are few others like larian and developers of wasteland who are fine.

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  9. I like Morrowind, but I think it's really telling that the quest I remember the best so far was the theatre one in Mournhold. I found that one unique and even quite funny (though the solution to it is lame). And the pilgrimage quests were OK, but not that memorable. It's also pretty sad that I found it much more fun just to run around and explore Vvardenfell randomly, not bothering to do most of the quests until I've actually explored the geography a little. That made up for the regrettably half-baked roleplaying options of the game's main territory. At least the two expansions actually had something of a more focused storyline and more focused quests (if lesser in number - but again, quality over quantity). And most of the "dungeons" are indeed repetitive - there were only a few which I found not only sufficiently unique, but non-generic in feel.

    BTW, could you review the original three Thief games, if you're familiar with them ? Or at least some of the better missions from The Dark Mod ? If you ever do that, thanks in advance ! (Trust me, you won't regret trying those.)

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    1. I played Thief 2 back in the day and really enjoyed it. Not sure I'll ever get around to replaying it, though. With the recent free release of Thi4f on PS+, I've been trying to get around to playing Deadly Shadows. The Dark Mod's never truly been on my radar because the plethora of missions always made it seem overwhelming.

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    2. You rag on a game that you played for 10 to 20 hours? You're an idiot.

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    3. **"You rag on a game that you played for 10 to 20 hours? You're an idiot."**

      I'm assuming this is directed at me, even though it's under a different parent comment, since I'm the only person to mention "10-20 hours" anywhere in the article or in comments. Please note that this review was written after completing a full playthrough, which was roughly 90 hours of doing as much content as I cared to seek out; the "10-20 hours" comment was specifically about my experience playing it back in ~2003, when the game didn't hold my interest enough for me to stick with it any longer than that.

      Even then, 10-20 hours should be plenty of time for someone to form a reasonable opinion about a game; this sort of notion that you have to play a 100+ hour game in its entirety to have a valid opinion on it is absolutely ludicrous.

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    4. 👻Necropost☠

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  10. And thank you for saying good things about the first two Gothic games. A lot of thought and hard work went into those and it's a shame to see many people seem to forget about them nowadays.

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  11. You're comparing MTG to DnD or Shadowrun. Both are good games but one is an apple and the other is an orange. Why compare, why not both?

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  12. Fuck Morrowind! This game gave me nightmare. The quests were awful, the combat was laughably bad, exploring was so slow that it drove me to suicide, the atmosphere was nice though. Felt like Arabia. I remember spending half of the game hunting freaking crabs with a crappy bow and arrow. Never again. No idea why it is so beloved by the gaming community.

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  13. Lmao git fucking gud you absolute skrub

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    1. Obviously you just don't know how to play the game. Also, your grammar's off. Go back to first grade, scrub.

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    2. Obviously you just don't know how to play the game. Also, your grammar's off. Go back to first grade, scrub.

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  14. You're absolutely right. Gothic blows TES out of the water in every aspect. There really is no excuse for the signpost NPCs in morrowind when Ultima 7 did living and breathing worlds about a decade before. Bethesda has always been the master of interesting ideas, but mediocre execution.

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  15. Still remember playing Morrowind for 14 hours and spending half of it shooting crabs with arrows. It was a nightmare.

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  16. Still remember playing Morrowind for 14 hours and spending half of it shooting crabs with arrows. It was a nightmare.

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  17. I am generally a fan of your writing: most of your reviews (the praise of Gothic, the criticism of Skyrim) are spot on and they capture precisely how I feel about those games, in addition to being pleasant to read. I also love the wealth of information in your Gothic walkthrough and its organization.

    When I stumbled upon your Morrowind blog, it was the first time when I disagreed and believed you mostly missed the point of this game.

    THE GOOD STUFF IN MORROWIND:

    Richness of the world (architecture, fauna) is only one of the aspects and perhaps the most obvious one. There are many others that might be just as important, yet one starts to see them only after experiencing the game for a while.

    - The itemization: there are so many hidden or less hidden treasures that cannot be bought from merchants or enchanted, thus rewarding exploration. For example, boots of unseeing swiftness make you crazily fast yet blind. This is the reason why mods with trophy rooms are so popular in Morrowind. It is also one of several reasons why Morrowind is so much better than Skyrim or Oblivion. It is true that most of the loot is randomly scaled but there is still more unique loot than in all of Gothic.
    - The abilities and effects: you can jump, fly, shapeshift, create your own spells/combos, and more. This makes the exploration more fun and combat more tactical. Absent in both Gothic and Skyrim.
    - The factions and politics: there are about 20 factions in Morrowind compared to three in the Gothic games. Unlike Skyrim factions, those in Morrowind can be mutually exclusive or conflicting. Furthermore, your rank in one will affect your disposition with the others. Just consider the complexity of the reaction table in http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Factions.
    - Reaction to actions and status of the PC: this is something related to my previous point but additionally, the NPC greet and treat you differently as you progress through major quests. Thus, the world is not as static as in Skyrim.
    - The charm and humor: there are quite a few quests like the one in your picture when an NPC complains about stolen pants. Gothic has this to an even greater extent, but I totally miss it in Skyrim.
    - The lore: the background lore is great and makes you appreciate when you meet the last living dwemer, for example. Like many players, I love some of the in-game books and keep in-game libraries. The game is good at gradually introducing you to the lore and background info, unlike Skyrim which throws unfamiliar names at your face without any explanation. I would argue that there is even more item- and place-related lore in Morrowind than in Gothic.
    - The sense of danger while exploring: what you wrote about Gothic applies to Morrowind as well, especially in the dungeons.
    - Modability: there are so many wonderful and diverse mods released for Morrowind. Admittedly there are few quests with multiple outcomes, but you can install an awesome story altering mod like "Great house Dagoth".

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. Modabillity is not something to praise a game for, and only an idiot would list modding as a positive trait of a flawed game! A game should be good on its own! A bad game with the potential to be fixed by modders, doesn't make the original product less bad.

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    3. I agree!
      I prefere the OG game to some modded abomination. Modding feels like cheating the game (if you get stronger equipment from it even if it's just slightly or affects just early game) and breaking the immersion in a way.

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  18. Continued:
    THE BAD STUFF IN MORROWIND:

    Bethesda has always been releasing half-baked games unfortunately. One has to patch them multiple times and then mod them. This way you can address most albeit not all of the issues. Thus, when reviewing, it is important to keep in mind which issues can be easily fixed and which cannot. For example, Oblivion is commonly critisized for creatures levelling with you, yet there are mods that address it in a good way. In contrast, there is no simple remedy for the blandness and lack of good itemization.

    There exist very good mods that fix the following issues in Morrowind mentioned in your blog:
    - masochistic levelling,
    - dependency on stamina (the issue goes away at higher levels anyway),
    - ability to rest everywhere,
    - same music everywhere.

    Then, your blog lists a couple of issues that I do not perceive as such:
    - lack of structure in the world: in the real world, most areas are lacking structure. It might be the rarity of structure that makes us admire harmony. You claim that in Gothic there is structure and relation to the adjacent areas. How are the black troll cave or the Dragon Slayer cave related to the surrounding wilderness? Can it be that your opinion about Gothic locations being more memorable is due to you spending more hours with Gothic than with Morrowind?
    - loading times were a problem back when Morrowind was released but they are very short on modern machines.

    Of course, there are some issues that are not fixed easily, which makes them more important:
    - You do have to put up with uninspiring combat. Truth to be told, it is not that great in Skyrim either. In Gothic, melee combat can be moderately fun but only post low levels. At low levels it takes a lot of painstaking attempts to time the moves correctly. None of these games are known for great combat, even Risen does it better. When it comes to magic, at least two thirds of the spells in Gothic are borderline useless, perhaps more.
    - NPC routine and AI. This is one area where Gothic truly shines and is hands down better. Better than Skyrim in fact, despite being released some 10 years earlier.
    - Quests with multiple outcomes. In fact, Morrowind does have quests that can be approached in multiple ways but only a few. For comparison, I cannot recall any in Skyrim. The issue can be addressed to an extent by mods but overall, Morrowind is not the best RPG out there; its strength lies somewhere else.


    In conclusion, I strongly recommend that you mod Morrowind to address the issues that can be addressed, play through the entire game with an open mind, and see the greatness of Morrowind for yourself.

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    1. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to write such a reasoned and thought-out response. I always enjoy reading counter-arguments from people.

      That being said, my opinion of Morrowind is one that's been formed and solidified over the course of almost 15 years. I've probably played over 150 hours while having taken 3-4 solid stabs at playing it; it's not like I played it once and just didn't like it or just didn't "get" it. Clearly, I don't actually understand the game's appeal or why people enjoy it so much, but I have tried real hard to enjoy the game and have given it more chances than any game should ever deserve, and Morrowind just doesn't do it for me. That's not to say that I'm some kind of definitive authority figure on the game, and that my opinion is 100% absolute truth, but rather to demonstrate that I'm pretty firm on how I feel about Morrowind and basically nothing is ever going to change that.

      Am I biased by Gothic? I pretty much stated so at the beginning of the article. After all, I played it before Morrowind, and enjoyed it so much that it set the bar for what I expected when it came to open-world action-RPGs. While you have many good points about what makes Morrowind a good game, I'd argue that the bulk of those arguments point more to Morrowind being a better sandbox, and not necessarily a better game. Morrowind has, without a doubt, more items (including unique ones), more special abilities, more factions, deeper lore, etc, but that doesn't translate to tight, cohesive gameplay in my view. Rather, it makes Morrowind feel bloated to me.

      I understand that mods can fix a lot of issues, but I simply refuse to judge a game based on its mods. Video game criticism should be principally about what the developer/publisher put out for public consumption, judging the work that they put into the game and the product that they deemed the "final" version that was ready to sell to people. Seeing as mods are a continual, progressive evolution of the base game, it's just impossible to keep up with them all, and unreasonable for people to review a game based on thousands of different variations. If John plays with Mods A, B, C, D, and E, and Mark plays with Mods C, F, G, H, and J, then they're bound to have different experiences, which relate more to the differences in the MODS than the base game that they're both playing.

      In cases where mods take a game that's merely "average" or "mediocre" and elevate that game to whole new levels where it's actually a really good game that's actually worth playing, I just can't, in good conscience, tell people to buy the game just to play with mods, because that rewards the developer for their lazy, uninspiring base effort. Because why should they bother testing and balancing things, or thinking up radical new ideas, or tightening mechanics up, so and on and so on, when they can release the tools and let other people fix their games for free?

      Don't get me wrong, mods are a great tool and I'm so happy they're such a part of PC gaming, but when it comes to reviewing a game, I HAVE to judge it based on the "Vanilla" version. And if I just do not like the vanilla game, then I'm not willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that mods will change it enough to change my opinion. I'd rather play something completely different than spend more time and effort polishing a turd just to see if I can make it shine.

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  19. Thanks for the detailed response. I did not realize you played Morrowind for many hours.

    Your stance on mods is somewhat surprising. What about fan patches? Would you agree that the definitive experience of playing Gothic 3, KOTOR 2, and a few other games is that with a fan patch?

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    1. We're getting into somewhat murky waters when it comes to fan patches. They might be an exception to my "no unofficial alterations" rule because their INTENTION is typically to keep the game the way the designers wanted it to be while merely fixing problems and, in some cases, restoring lost content, as opposed to simply changing things for sake of change.

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  20. I seriously hate Morrowind to the core. Never understood its appeal. The world felt boring and monotonous to me. The quests were trash and hollow, the factions, although many, were quite bare bones. The combat was atrocious, but that was the norm in those days honestly. The stamina system was laughable, took hours to reach anywhere. Don't even get me started on the journal.

    Seriously, Elder Scrolls series has so much lost potential that it is not even funny. How hard it is to write better quests, even indie games do it better. Considering the direction they took with Fallshit 4, fucking infinite quests system, I doubt them ever fixing the glaring flaws in quest design. I will just wait for Cyberpunk 2077...

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  21. Another of Morrowind's big problems was the 'gotcha' formula used for enchanting. Place the enchantments in the wrong order? You just screwed yourself by creating a much less potent item then you have otherwise had. I've seen the formula- it's effectively uses algebra to get what you thought you were getting.

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  22. I have had Gothic in my library for some time but i instantly installed it after reading this review, and because of my good experience with the first Risen game.

    Only problem is, it seems like saves become corrupted when it rains? what is that all about?

    Anybody know of any fixes? Or should i just go for the GOG version?

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    1. also i completely agree with your views on Morrowind, most of your points are my exact thoughts. I got 100 hours into the game before i decided to go with my better judgement and just uninstall it allready.

      The game is designed to make you think that it is more interesting than it actually is, and as soon as i understood that, i was gone.

      it's a facade and i'm done.

      now play The Last Guardian :D

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  23. (Part 1)

    Where do I start...
    I'll comment on what I disagree with. Everything else is either obvious, I agree with it, or I don't care.

    >I generally don't like it when I'm forced to spec-out a character before I've had a chance to even play the game.

    Even in better done systems like Tyranny you have to do this, otherwise it just won't work. The thing about Gothic is that it's scened that way that you can start from a scratch, even though it seems stupid at times, since MC couldn't logically have literally zero body/mind development before he got to colony / to Xardas, but that's another story.

    >It's easily possible, as I'm sure most people who have played Morrowind will attest, to create a character and discover, after 10 hours of gameplay, that it's either completely broken, or flawed in some significant way, or just doesn't play the way you expected it to.

    In Gothic it can hit after much more time, like choosing mage instead of fighter or choosing Swamp Camp without knowing that you won't allow to get as much of armor and stuff as you could, etc.

    >to spend your life's fortune paying trainers to improve the skill (which you can't afford early on)

    Gothic fan doesn't know where to get lots of moneys to pay ingame bills? What am I reading? Is this a joke? Also no one is stopping you from draining your own attribute to pay less for training.
    I'm seriously curious how you weren't able to apply Gothic-hardened wits to this game.

    >If you do end up making long blades viable, then it won't make any progress towards character levels, anyway, since it's not a major/minor skill. You're screwed either way.

    Levels matter in different aspect than Gothic ones, so I'd call that a miss.

    >system that encourages (and basically necessitates) repetitive grinding, doing the same basic stuff over and over again, like a mindless, time-wasting Korean MMORPG.

    Why do you describe core Gothic gameplay in an article about Morrowind? Or you want to persuade me as a reader that XP in Gothic doesn't solve almost everything?

    >instead of failing every single spell and wasting all of your mana and having to rely on melee weaponry, which will be just as ineffective since you set them up as minor secondary skills, then you have to spend a week's time (or more) in game casting destruction spells over and over again, and resting to do it all over again.

    No one is stopping you from making 1 mana spell and casting it until you level up something you wish for. Also I don't remember mage in Gothic giving up on melee combat, since mana is too expensive to burn on something trivial (if we disregard gear abuse).

    >Unless you play the game as a hardcore min/maxing number-cruncher, there are no important decisions to make when leveling

    I'm still reading an article about Morrowind and not Gothic, right? I'm beginning to doubt.

    >everything happens automatically as a byproduct of playing the game.

    Since when it's a crime?

    >Realistically, you're going to pick whatever attributes are most useful for your particular specialization, and whichever happen to give you the highest multipliers.

    Still, nothing immersion breaking and compelling to play out of character.

    >which I'm pretty sure is not the way the game was intended to be played.

    Tell me moar about "how game was intended to be played" next time you level up x9-x4 (e.g. 29-34).

    >None of that sounds particularly fun unless you've already played the game multiple times and are looking for new ways to challenge yourself.

    It just gives space for min-maxers, nothing new.

    >They just stand there and keep attacking, while your attacks seem to do nothing at all.

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    1. (Part 2)

      Enemies can miss as much as you do, depending on skill value and dex value.

      >Early on, you don't have very much stamina, which amplifies your failure rate on skill checks since it drains so quickly.

      I don't remember having everything I desire at desirable rate in Gothic, so I don't know why it shouldn't be like this.

      >Morrowind uses an active battle system that doesn't involve any ounce of player skill

      If you play LMB fighter than yes, but not really that if you care about what happens on screen. Because duh, enchants, scrolls, stuff.

      >The skill system further encourages you to just stand there and not attempt to dodge manually, since you need to be attacked to randomly trigger and thus level your block skill, and you need to get hit to improve your armor skills, and you need to have damaged equipment to improve your repair skills, and you need to take health damage to make use of restoration spells (if you want to level the skill "naturally").

      You can dodge projectiles, and I cannot understand what's unnatural about having to hit or to get hit to git gud at it.

      >When faced with a tough enemy who absolutely destroyed me (I barely dented his health), I reloaded the save to try again, and, through sheer, random luck, defeated him with relative ease.

      That's not an approach Gothic veteran would exercise. Idk about that one.

      >You just stand there and click. It's just so boring.

      Fighters in almost any RPG work like that, why bringing up this as a crime against humanity for specific game?

      >This makes restoration and alchemy fairly useless

      You complain about amount of stamina and now you say restoration and alchemy are useless, what's wrong with you?

      >makes it so you never have to worry about venturing deep into a dangerous dungeon, or getting lost in the mountains, and being unable to survive long enough to make it back to safety, low on health, out of mana, and out of healing potions. There's basically no consequence for anything you do in combat.

      How is that different from Gothic where you can summon and heal for no mana?

      >The world in Morrowind, as it is in all TES games, is simply too large.

      You sound like a game journalist right there, please stop.

      >all of that content is so bland and repetitive?

      Again, how's that different from exactly identical caves and Jharkendar temples?

      >After exploring your 10th ancestral tomb and finding nothing but wooden spoons and clay pots, and finding that they all look the exact the same, except with slightly different layouts and, sometimes, slightly different enemies, why bother going into any of the roughly 100 more?

      Name 10 tombs you've been in. Even the very first one consists constant enchanted ring. You're exxagerating. Also Gothic caves no better, not everywhere you can find 190 dmg sword or something as viable as mere rune stone, mostly it's garbage but still necessary because limited supplies.

      >wandering around 1000-square foot areas picking plants and mushrooms

      Gothic 2, innit?

      >killing slugs, rats, and mudcrabs.

      You would have encountered different enemies if you at least explored or just followed the main quest.

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    2. >which drains your stamina, which then means you have to stand and wait for 30 seconds regenerating stamina before doing anything, since fatigue determines you efficacy in everything you do

      What stops you from just waiting for 1 hour? It takes less time than that. I don't understand how Gothic veteran finds such trivial matters challenging. Especially with all the backtracking both Gothic games involve and they don't offer much for making it less existing except for some teleports and haste potions, which are, once again, limited.

      >Want to buy a healing potion, or sell some gems? Better get that stamina up. Want to persuade someone to get them to like you more, so they'll tell you vital information for quest? Better get that stamina up.

      I literally don't follow you on this one, since time basically stops when you engage in convos. Try casting some 5 second spell and engage in convo, you'll see it doesn't wear out.

      >See some bandits up ahead, who will attack you on sight? Better get that stamina up.

      So basically you're complaining about the concept of stamina. Bad take.

      >waiting with your hands off the controls -- not very engaging gameplay.

      WAIT. FOR. ONE. HOUR.

      >perhaps half of these places are filled with completely worthless, randomized loot; maybe a quarter of them have scaling loot that's at least worth selling, if you care to; and maybe a quarter, if I'm being generous, have a unique, "special" piece of loot at the end.

      I'm sorry but "manually placed" loot in Gothic in most cases isn't that much better. Fite me.

      >Even when you find a unique piece of loot that was specifically placed there by the developers, you have to wonder "why is this particular set of ultra rare, special boots in this particular place?" It all just feels so mundane, random, and arbitrary.

      Tell me why worthwhile cave loot in Gothic is where it is and I'll take my words back.

      >Every NPC is uniquely-named (often with some unpronounceable, unmemorable name), so when you have to find a specific NPC you have to approach every, single, character to figure out if they're the person you need, and there are hundreds of these NPCs in some towns. Likewise, it's impossible to tell which NPCs are merchants, trainers, or quest-givers without approaching and talking to every, single, one of them. It's a tedious chore. Then, with the engine's restrictions on loading zones, you have to go through a load screen every time you enter a building, often multiple times within a building, which completely breaks the feeling of an "open world" in towns like Vivec that are simply massive, yet broken into a million tiny, copy/pasted compartments.

      This is full game journalist mode. I don't see how every NPC having unique name is bad thing to happen since it's more immersive, more realistic, and also...did you try actually asking NPC where to find services? Or you just got used to Gothic approach that every person with a name can be quest related or trade related? Come on.


      Quests are boring and tedious

      >If you start a quest and get distracted, it will be waiting for you exactly where you left off. That's a quality that's kind of necessary when dealing with a large open-world setting, but again, this world is just so large that everything has to accommodate the scope of aimless possibility, which means no quests that require your timely input, or outcomes that dynamically alter the world, or quests that overlap in significant ways.

      How is this anywhere different than Gothic? Like, how?

      >Most quests only have one solution, and unless the quest specifically requires you to fight something, or steal something, there's hardly any opportunity to put your character's skills to use during the quest.

      And how's this different than Gothic?

      Delete
    3. >During one quest for the fighter's guild, I was sent to collect a bounty on an orc who'd been living in town. I talk to the orc, and there's no dialogue option whatsoever to address the fact that I'm about to kill her. There's no way to show mercy and talk her into skipping town, or a way to accept a bribe from her, or any kind of interaction that escalates to a fight. I even tried talking to the city guard, to see if I could report her location -- no such luck. In the end, my only option was to brandish my sword and brazenly attack her in her own house, not knowing what crime she'd even committed to deserve the wrath of my steel.

      That's how it's supposed to be, because if you dove deeper you'd understand something's fishy. Also there's taunt mechanic which allows you to aggro people at you.

      >Role-playing games by definition are supposed to be about role-playing a character, making decisions and acting in a way that embodies the type of character you envision.

      In Gothic you can role-play, let's count: overseer thug, mercenary thug, weed addict thug, and mage thug. later on you can role-play thug in shiny armor, mercenary thug, mage thug. Doesn't seem too much of a choice.

      >Or do you fall somewhere in between; chaotic good, lawful neutral? There's hardly any opportunity to enact these characteristics through actual gameplay

      How about playing a game that is designed around making choices, like Planescape:Torment, Tyranny? Instead of comparing this aspect in two games (or even TES with Gothic series) which don't focus on that AT ALL.

      >Since the game doesn't use a traditional experience points system, there's no incentive to do quests unless you're expecting a nice tangible reward from someone.

      I'd say that there are too much things to do in Gothic since game FORCES you to squeeze the experience out of everything. Go ask literally anyone if they are super willing to do quests for every faction possible if they already sure about which one they want to join, and on and on and on. Don't be ridiculous.

      >I got caught stealing the contract from the rival's shop

      Your Gothic experience didn't help you out there innit?

      >(that the guards somehow, magically knew were stolen)

      I'll specifically agree here that this is indeed stupid and got less stupid in next game.

      >I loaded my save and simply never went about finishing the quest.

      That doesn't sound like Gothic experienced player. Come on.

      >It's so hard to keep track of everything that you eventually learn to ignore a lot of the game's content, because you just can't focus on more than a few things at a time.

      Game was designed when people were more able to keep things in their heads or write them down.

      >The journal system doesn't help this cause, either, since it organizes every quest update and important note chronologically when you receive it. If you pick up a quest and then get distracted for five hours doing other things, you have to scroll back through dozens of pages hoping to find the entry you need -- if you can even remember it. Thank goodness the expansions fixed this issue by adding a quest-filtering section, because the journal was borderline useless in the base game.

      It's both worse and better than Gothic one. Latter often doesn't contain even half of quest description and that is sometimes irritating, especially when you're given DIRECTIONS.

      Delete
    4. >Even then, the journal entries are sometimes too vague to be of any use. At one point I picked up a main quest to find a missing NPC, and then had to shut the game down for the night. When I came back the next day, I couldn't remember the lead I was supposed to follow. All the journal said was "find so-and-so." I tried asking the quest giver for the information again, but all she said was "he's missing." I wandered around talking to other NPCs, hoping to ask if anyone knew anything, and didn't even have the option. I gave up, consulted a guide, and suddenly all the details came rushing back. "Oh yeah, I remember her saying that now. Why couldn't she tell me that stuff again? Why does the journal not keep track of this vital information?"

      Name any quest like this, since I stated above that this isn't the case.

      >Graphically, the game looks pretty good for its age, apart from the horrendous character models and animations.

      That's a straight hipocrisy if you really do a comparison to Gothic. In Morrowind people at least have things called fingers.


      Why Gothic is better than Morrowind

      As I mentioned at the top of the article, the reason I find it so difficult to appreciate Morrowind is because the Gothic games, which came out around the same time as Morrowind (Gothic 1 actually predates Morrowind by a full year), offer a very similar experience to Morrowind and do a lot of the same stuff, but better.

      A better leveling system

      >The benefit of this system is it rewards you for every little thing you accomplish, since even a measly 50 experience for killing a giant rat will add up over time.

      So basically it rewards for grinding and punishes for not doing that.

      >experience is finite, which makes each amount of experience earned that much more valuable. It also means you can't max out every stat and learn every skill in the game, which forces you to make tough decisions about how to allocate limited skill points to your best advantage, and allows your gameplay and playstyle to change and evolve over time as you learn new skills and improve your character.

      How it's different from Morrowind? Even in games where things respawn, like Diablo, it also doesn't give you the window to max everything. On the other hand, Gothic 1 did allow you to max out pretty much if you grind with passion (if we measure getting to 100 of a stat the maxing).

      >Gothic relies heavily on stats in combat, but implements them in an active battle system that rewards player skill.

      And whatever whatever whatever, which is basically about how good you're at exploiting game engine, hitboxes, weapon length and people/monster patterns.

      >There are no random variables; everything has a fixed value, except a random chance for critical hits which improves with skill training, so you can control and plan for what happens in combat.

      I remember range weapons having hit chance or something that can be trained too? And you call this randomless?

      >If you lose a fight, it's usually your own fault, not because you got screwed by bad luck.

      Try to convince me you didn't load several times to pick a tough fight where you just have to have NPC hitting wrong combo so you can hit them before they do you.

      Delete
    5. >Combat is also a lot more fun and involved than simply standing and clicking until one of you dies.

      I don't see how fun it stays at second half or Gothic 1 and in Minental in Gothic 2, when it becomes a terrible chore, just for the sake of poor balance (haha Cassia with 175/175/640 just as Cord, she must be a marine corps veteran).

      >Blocking and dodging attacks is also done manually, requiring good reaction speed and knowing how to anticipate certain attack behaviors.

      Stepping back which acts as invincibility frames, yes totally realistic and well designed, especially for monsters that cannot be physically capable of dodging this way.

      >The world in Gothic is not nearly as large as in Morrowind, but it crams a lot more interesting locales, discoveries, and encounters in a smaller space, for a much better content-per-square-area ratio.

      This take just doesn't make any viable sense.

      >No loot in Gothic is randomly generated; everything in the environment is hand-placed by the developer, put there for a specific purpose

      Technically every piece of loot is also placed manually in Morrowind too, except for scripted thingies which are no different from "clear that cave off from crawlers that can beat your ass only to discover a hundred gold and few mushrooms". That's not a well thought argument.

      >a unique monster

      What's this even?

      >Places within the environment have their own mystique, lore, and backstory, like the black troll cave, or the cave guarded by skeleton archons that houses the great Dragon Slayer, or the orc shrine, or the mage's collapsed tower with its failed necromantic experiments.

      Where in the game can I read of listen about those? Just where.

      >It's also a very dangerous world, filled with cutthroat bandits, deceitful allies who will rob and beat you, and deadly beasts.

      You've been complaining about your ass beaten in Morrowind and now you state "it's fine when Gothic does it". What the heck man.

      >you can be hunting harmless scavengers and molerats and suddenly find yourself face to face with an enormous shadowbeast, that can kill you in one or two hits

      That's none of the ordinary, for real.

      >Death is around every corner, which teaches you to be very careful about where you go, how you prepare, and what you do.

      I don't see this as something unique to Gothic or alien to Morrowind.

      >It also allows you to set your own level of difficulty and challenge -- do you venture into dangerous areas early to try to get better rewards, or do you save it for later, until you're stronger?

      It doesn't really reward for doing that. Give me an example how it does. Dragon something sword? Wow, spending goods to kill all totally balanced undeads or just grab and run just to acknowledge that best thing this sword goes for is to be sold.

      >If you go early and find some clever way of surviving, you're treated with immense rewards

      You just stated above that you're unwilling to do this in Morrowind and now you again state it's fine when Gothic does it. What's gotten into you?

      >she's a named character that you know, not just some random nameless, faceless NPC who'll become useless and obsolete once the quest is over.

      Divinity Original Sin way: when quest giver's quest is over, it becomes XP. I cannot remember since when it became different for Gothic, since game encourages and almost forces you to do it, it also concerns the fights with people in Khorinis early on to get first levels earlier and venture to wilds more prepared and leveled.

      Delete
    6. >Gothic frequently allows for multiple solutions with different rewards and consequences, with overlapping quests and interests between NPCs. A carpenter's daughter is indebted to a merchant, and asks you to help get her out of trouble; the merchant will independently task you with collecting the money he's owed, if you talk to him first. There are two sides to this quest. You can choose to pay the money entirely on your own to appease both sides, or tell the carpenter the full story and piss of his daughter, or blackmail the merchant (if you've completed another quest), or rough up his daughter and take the money from her, or persuade her with the right dialogue to give you the money.

      That's not enough for "frequently". Not. Enough.

      Livelier NPCs and a dynamic world

      >all the atmospheric "filler" characters who are there simply to populate the world are given generic titles like "citizen" or "miner," so that you don't have to waste time talking to every single person to find out if they're useful or not.

      I don't understand how this can be called BETTER. In any way.

      >if I hadn't played the Gothic games before going into Morrowind, I would love it as much as the next person.

      Those games are as different as, I don't know, Witcher and Tyranny? You're going too far on with that.

      >Morrowind just feels like a bland, bloated amalgamation of ideas without any soul.

      Given that you gave up on trivial matters like stamina management, you surely didn't really play it, you just seem to complaining about it, not playing.

      >If you're someone who adores Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls in general, then I would like to encourage you to try Gothic and Gothic 2 -- at the very least, just Gothic 2 with its expansion -- to see an alternative point of view for how these kinds of open-world action-adventure-RPGs can be designed.

      I adore Gothic 1 and I spit on Gothic 2 addon balance for reasonlessly overbloated states, as well as for many, many things that are designed for player to suffer and survive through them in counter-intuitive manner, I guess it's called "hardcore"? It has its charm, but sometimes it just becames gimmick.

      Delete
    7. I think that's it. Please reply back and have a good one ahead.

      Delete
    8. @Randych

      I'll be frank with you: I stopped reading part way through and just started skimming because most of what you've said is either wrong, misguided, or a matter of opinion. These responses go way beyond the realm of "nitpicky" and often critique the language of the argument rather than the argument itself, or make outrageous assumptions about me and how I play these games, or rely on strawmen to attack the argument. But in the interest of discussion and defending myself against some of these bogus accusations, I'll reply to a few that I did bother to read:


      #1.
      It's easily possible [in Morrowind] to create a character and discover, after 10 hours of gameplay, that it's either completely broken, or flawed in some significant way, or just doesn't play the way you expected it to.

      > In Gothic it can hit after much more time, like choosing mage instead of fighter or choosing Swamp Camp without knowing that you won't allow to get as much of armor and stuff as you could, etc.


      Choosing mage doesn't lock you out of fighter skills, and the game also gives you opportunity to experiment with magic scrolls so you can test for yourself how fun/viable magic is before committing to the path of magic. They also give you options to interact with and learn about all factions before making a choice -- even if you can't know EVERYTHING to expect in advancec they at least let you make an informed decision. Joining the Swamp Camp only yields weaker armor in Chapter 2 (allegedly because of a bug/oversight), which is still pretty early in the game; in every other case armor values are equivalent between camps.


      #2.
      to spend your life's fortune paying trainers to improve the skill (which you can't afford early on)

      > Gothic fan doesn't know where to get lots of moneys to pay ingame bills? What am I reading? Is this a joke? Also no one is stopping you from draining your own attribute to pay less for training.
      I'm seriously curious how you weren't able to apply Gothic-hardened wits to this game.


      You're making assumptions about how I play the game while ignoring the fact that pretty much everyone acknowledges that skill trainers are expensive, hence why the drain attribute trick/exploit is even a thing, or how merchants rarely have enough money for you to sell valuable goods without using other exploits or meta-gaming knowledge.

      #3.
      system that encourages (and basically necessitates) repetitive grinding, doing the same basic stuff over and over again, like a mindless, time-wasting Korean MMORPG.

      > Why do you describe core Gothic gameplay in an article about Morrowind? Or you want to persuade me as a reader that XP in Gothic doesn't solve almost everything?


      Are you seriously trying to equate Gothic's leveling system to Morrowind's? You don't improve your stats or skills in Gothic by going into crouch mode behind a chair and walking away from the game, or by spamming a spell over and over again while doing nothing else in the game.

      Delete
    9. #4.
      Unless you play the game as a hardcore min/maxing number-cruncher, there are no important decisions to make when leveling

      > I'm still reading an article about Morrowind and not Gothic, right? I'm beginning to doubt.


      Every time you level-up in Gothic, you have an interesting decision to make -- do you spend those 10 LP on strength to equip a better sword, or spend them on dexterity to equip a better bow, or train your sword combat so that you can improve your chances for a critical hit (and to unlock new movesets), or learn some other skill like alchemy so you can make potions to survive longer while exploring, or lockpicking to be able to access restricted areas/chests, and so on. Even if you're planning to learn all of these, how do you prioritize them? You simply cannot tell me that my statement about Morrowind describes Gothic, because that's completely inaccurate.


      #5.
      [Leveling] happens automatically as a byproduct of playing the game.

      > Since when it's a crime?


      Matter of opinion, but I would argue every day that ACTIVE gameplay is better than PASSIVE gameplay; when your character's stats and skills improve primarily as an automatic process through background mechanics, rather than active decision-making or resource-allocation where you get direct influence and control over how your character improves and evolves, is boring and uninteresting.

      #6.
      Realistically, you're going to pick whatever attributes are most useful for your particular specialization, and whichever happen to give you the highest multipliers.

      > Still, nothing immersion breaking and compelling to play out of character.


      Immersion wasn't the issue, it's that it's a shallow and straight-forward decision devoid of interesting choices or consequences. This argument is a strawman.

      #7.
      When faced with a tough enemy who absolutely destroyed me (I barely dented his health), I reloaded the save to try again, and, through sheer, random luck, defeated him with relative ease.

      > That's not an approach Gothic veteran would exercise. Idk about that one.


      So apparently the factual truth of what happened is invalid because YOU don't think that's an approach a Gothic veteran would exercise. Here's a fact for you: when I die against a tough enemy in Gothic, I reload the save and try again, and if I do better it's because I made smarter decisions or had better reactions; if I die against a tough enemy in Morrowind, I do the same thing, but in Morrowind if I do better it's because the dice rolls decided so, not because of anything I did.

      Delete
    10. #8.
      You just stand there and click. It's just so boring.

      > Fighters in almost any RPG work like that, why bringing up this as a crime against humanity for specific game?


      Here you're twisting my words to make a simple complaint look more egregious as a way to discredit it. I never said it was "a crime against humanity," just that it's boring. And just because other games are also guilty of this, doesn't excuse or justify it in other instances. Meanwhile, this argument doesn't discredit the fact that, by my estimation, Morrowind's combat is inferior to Gothic's because it lacks the qualities I mentioned in the article: concern for positioning, timing attacks, reactive mechanisms like blocking/dodging.

      I would also argue that "fighters in almost any RPG work like that" is an oversimplification or else is misattributed to more conventional, straightforward RPGs as opposed to action-RPGs, which is really the genre that both of these games fall into (or, at least SHOULD in Morrowind's case -- the underlying mechanics are PNP-style but in a first-person action-based system). Besides Gothic, games like Severance: Blade of Darkness, Die by the Sword, Enclave, Dungeon Lords, Drakan, Ultima 9, Crusaders of Might and Magic, Rune, etc are all fantasy-themed games that have varying degrees of overall quality (and some are more action-adventure than action-RPG) but all these games at least TRY to implement more actively-engaging melee combat systems with active blocking, dodging, special attacks, timing, positioning, etc that are more actively engaging than standing there and clicking to let the computer roll the dice.



      #9.
      Gothic frequently allows for multiple solutions with different rewards and consequences, with overlapping quests and interests between NPCs. [Describes the quest between Gritta and Matteo]

      > That's not enough for "frequently". Not. Enough.


      Here you chose to latch onto the word "frequently" while disregarding the overall point. I listed one example to illustrate what I meant by multiple solutions and consequences, NOT the frequency with which these types of quests occur. Maybe that's my bad for assuming "frequently" was a given, but here you go:

      What reward do you accept for Lobart's quests (money, or lowered price on clothes), do you move promptly to get the pan for Gritta like she says or put it off, what do you decide initially when Canthar offers you the pass, what do you do when he asks for the follow-up favor in town, what do you do with the farmer's clothes (give to Greg or keep yourself), how do you choose to get into town, which master do you choose to join up with, do you let Rengaru go or turn him in, do you join the Thieve's Guild or expose them to Andre, how do you deal with/respond to the bandits outside of lobart's farm, how do you prove Bennett's innocence, do you drive the militia away or collect rent to get Lothar's vote, who do you give the swampweed package to (Andre or Cipher)?

      These are just off the top of my head examples of quests that either have different paths to the solution, or different solutions altogether, or different consequences for how you solve them. I'm sure there are other examples.

      #10.
      if I hadn't played the Gothic games before going into Morrowind, I would love it as much as the next person.

      > Those games are as different as, I don't know, Witcher and Tyranny? You're going too far on with that.


      Do you not understand what genres are? Are you seriously incapable of understanding how one might draw comparisons between two fantasy-themed open-world action-RPGs from the same era? If not Gothic, then what other game matches those three criteria and came out around the same time?

      Delete
    11. #11.
      Morrowind just feels like a bland, bloated amalgamation of ideas without any soul.

      > Given that you gave up on trivial matters like stamina management, you surely didn't really play it, you just seem to complaining about it, not playing.


      Where did I ever give the impression that I "gave up" on stamina management? Once again, this is putting words in my mouth and creating a strawman in order to tackle the argument. Just because I DIDN'T LIKE the game's heavy reliance on stamina, doesn't mean I GAVE UP on managing it. Using THAT as your proof that I "surely didn't really play it" is utterly asinine, and is reaching so far that your arm may as well have come off your shoulder. Never mind the fact that I've put around 150 hours into this game across like four different plays (admittedly, only one of them a full playthrough) -- you have no right and no grounds to claim that I didn't play this game, and/or that I'm just complaining about it. Hell, I flat-out said in the article that "I have fond, nostalgic memories of playing Morrowind back in the early 2000s" and that "I can totally understand why so many people were so enamored with Morrowind back in its time." I seriously, legit TRIED to like this game so many times -- so many more times than any game should ever deserve -- and at the end of the day I just find it far less enjoyable than other RPGs of the time, with Gothic being the closest comparison and the biggest influence.

      ==================

      Anyway, that's all I'm going to bother responding to, as I haven't bothered to read everything and will be here all day if I do. It looks like there are a lot more points I could argue, but it really seems to me like you're getting way too hung up on semantics and trying to extrapolate way too much from a misinterpretation of my words while simultaneously making no effort to try to see things from my point of view. Some of these claims are just completely outrageous. For as much scorn as you give me for supposedly "not playing Morrowind and just complaining about it," it kind of seems to me like you're doing exactly that with my review -- seemingly looking for excuses to complain without considering the context surrounding cherry-picked statements, or even bothering to read follow-up sentences that elaborate what I mean. I would say I'm happy to continue the discussion, but I really don't want to discuss this with you any further because I feel like it's going to get us nowhere. Most of what you've done is attack me and my assessments, while not offering anything of constructive value in Morrowind's defense that could lead to an actual discussion. So respectfully, I'm done with this thread, and would like to thank you for your time and interest.

      Delete
    12. While this commenter's writing is indeed a bit difficult to parse (not a native English speaker, most likely), I very much agree with their general point that most your criticism of Morrowind seems like you're irrationally trying to make up things to criticize even if that means bad-mouthing gameplay aspects that you've praised in Gothic, some of the issues you cite are based purely on your personal taste (which apparently is diametrically opposed to the reasons why most people play this specific genre of huge open-world RPGs in the first place), or they're just plain not based on facts because you're willfully ignoring the intended solutions or whole aspects of the game. To anyone who has played Morrowind for more than a few hours, it's very obvious that you are guilty of exactly the same things that you accuse this commenter of in the beginning of your answer, and as a result you come across as hopelessly biased and blinkered. (I'm giving you the benefit of doubt here and am going to assume that you're not simply too immature to admit you've been wrong. Though your flat refusal to consider your own bias even with years of distance or even just to read the disagreeing comment all the way through doesn't exactly make this easy...)

      I respect and value your opinions on the Gothic games and a few other games you've reviewed, I really do. But sadly I cannot respect your clearly massively biased opinions on Morrowind, which you seem to view through a lense of disgruntlement that this game "stole" the fame that Gothic 1+2 deserved, so you apparently cannot bring an unbiased mind to reviewing this game in good faith, the way you do with any other game reviewed on this blog. A little bias is okay, but not when it leads you to spread blatant falsehoods just to support your point. Judging by your answering comments, your irrational hatred of Morrowind is so deep-seated that you can't even see your bias or admit where this review was factually wrong. Even though it's been years, I don't expect you to ever change your mind about any of this, because people simply don't when they're coming from this sort of emotional mindset (doesn't matter if it's a "nostalgia filter" or the polar opposite thereof). So I won't bother trying to convince you or having the "discussion" you disingenuously claim to want just to keep the moral high ground. I'm only posting this comment to lend a vote of confidence to the above commenter, lest their thorough deconstruction of your "arguments" be distrusted due to their challenges with the English language, and to show potential new readers who come here because of your relatively recent Skyrim video review that they should take your review of Morrowind with several boat loads of salt.

      Delete
    13. As for Morrowind's combat system: Sure, it's not the greatest in the world, but that's not the selling point of a wide-open-world explorative RPG, and I don't understand why everyone keeps complaining that an RPG makes your success in battle dependent on your *character's* combat skills (i.e. there are hit dice getting calculated in the background, with your chance to hit the enemy improving with your skill level - just like with D&D-based games like Baldur's Gate) instead of the *player's* ability to time their moves right or aim to hit the target box (like in an action-adventure game, where learning the game mechanics is most of the gameplay). This hit dice mechanic contributes to immersion and roleplay for me (you *should* be crap at fighting as a low-level character, IMHO - that's what makes leveling up feel worthwile), and while I did manage to get good enough at Gothic's more player-skill-dependent fighting style that it didn't actively frustrate me anymore, I never managed to "master" the Witcher fighting style to the point that this part of the game ever became particularly fun for me. This is a large part of the reason why I prefer RPGs over action-adventure games. (Though I will say that I normally start playing Morrowind using mostly archery in combat, which probably makes the low hit chance at low levels feel less "unrealistic" and immersion-breaking than seeing your sword pass right through the mob model. And I do dimly remember experiencing a bit of frustration when I first started playing the game, until I realized that I shouldn't expect this RPG to work like Thief or Outcast, where testing the player's aiming skill and learning to snipe enemies from afar is the main part of the gameplay.)

      I'd like to add that the Alchemy skill in Morrowind is how you get a steady income early in the game (just like that's the main reason to learn smithing or animal skinning in Gothic), as well as solving the stamina issue - though I've never found the latter to be much of a problem (possibly because I don't run/jump everywhere just to artificially boost the Athletics skill). Why do you think the programmers gave the non-guild-aligned potion merchant in the starter town Balmora a relatively large money pool to buy stuff from you? There is the legitimate issue that your self-made potions sell for the same price based on your Alchemy skill and the quality of the tools you used, no matter what kind of effect they have (i.e. even if you made a poison or an effectively useless potion made from basic food ingredients), which could have been programmed more sensibly; and as far as I know there are no cheap/common ingredients for mana potions, so you can't mass-produce those for a full mage build - but once you have Alchemy at a middling level, you'll certainly have all the money you need to pay for trainers. So yes, it is a very useful and necessary skill.

      Delete
    14. The following was meant to be posted in between the two above comments, and I thought it was, but now it appears to be gone... Again. Are you auto-censoring comments for using the word "pr*stit*te"? Seriously??


      As a German who started by playing the Gothic games and enjoying them very much (to the point that I got so used to the odd controls that I edited other games to use the same key bindings for years afterwards) and who only picked up Morrowind a few years after it came out, I loved the latter game precisely because it played so similar to Gothic in terms of the game mechanics and relatively mature writing - only there was a lot more game world and lore to explore, the artistic style and world-building was a lot more exotic and interesting compared to Gothic's extremely generic setting (excepting the Night of the Raven addon, obviously), there was a lot more replay value than with Gothic (especially since the moddng community is far bigger, thanks to Bethesda offering better editing support), and Morrowind didn't limit my roleplaying to some boring white guy. (Plus, the Morrowind writers, just like D&D-based game writers at the time, had already left behind this idea that the one thing that should be kept realistic in their quasi-medieval fantasy world is the social role of women being limited to wives, pr*stit*tes, hag-like witches, cooks and maybe a market seller or two. Yes, I do remember that there were one or two female characters of some power in Gothic 2 - that's still no comparison to egalitarian world-building like in Morrowind or contemporary D&D. I realize you probably didn't notice this as a problem, but from my perspective, sexist world-building in a fantasy setting is annoying and spoils my escapist fun. And I'm the kind of person who loves watching realistic dramas set in the Victorian/Renaissance/Roman era and who watches tons of history documentaries - so how do you think the majority of the female gamer demographic, who don't have my high tolerance for sexism in a historical context, feels about games where 90% or more of the important NPCs are male? For all its well-thought-out storyline, I'd argue that this extremely male-centric world (and rather objectifying attitude regarding the few female characters it did have) was a big part of the reason why Gothic 1+2 weren't a bigger commercial success. It's simply stupid to alienate half your potential customers like that.)

      (Yes, I'm a woman - and I don't mind playing as a specific male player character in action games like Witcher or Outcast or Thief, so long as it really is a *character*, not a nondescript placeholder. But I wouldn't call that a "roleplaying" experience. Gothic kind of is the worst of both worlds in this regard, limiting the player to a specific look and gender, but not even making that player character interesting in any way or giving him a personality that's at least entertaining to engage with in the same way as with the main character in a novel. I do get why *you* wouldn't see this as limiting and that you don't have any problem empathizing with or projecting yourself onto an intentionally bland, personality-free white "every guy". Just don't pretend that this is the case for every player.)

      Delete
    15. @Vivi

      I have zero control over how Blogspot moderates comments for content, other than enabling captcha in an effort to cut down on bot-spam, and in fact I have zero restrictions set up against commenting whatsoever. If you were having trouble commenting something, that problem lies with Blogspot and not me -- I didn't even see your comments until now because I don't check the blog comments regularly.

      Describing my opinion on Morrowind as "irrational hatred" is an extreme spin and completely insincere to how I actually feel. It's a game I very much WANT to like, as evidenced by the fact that I have such fond, nostalgic memories of playing it in my youth and that I've been routinely compelled to come back and keep trying it over the years. I specifically praised it as being "the best of the modern Elder Scrolls games" for its unique and interesting world and its deeper, more complex stats-based RPG mechanics. I also conceded there was a reason it was so popular and that I understood why so many people find it so appealing. These are all things I explicitly stated in the review itself, and I have a comment from 2019 that further states "it's a game I genuinely WANT to enjoy."

      You insinsuate that this review is based on "an emotional mindset" as if I'm on some kind of hate-fueled rampage looking for excuses to lambast Morrowind, but that's really not the case. I approach every review with a calm and rational mindset and put A LOT of thought into WHY a game makes me feel a certain way. I didn't just come out making unsubstantiated insults against the game like "this sucks, I hate this, this is boring, this is bad," or anything like that -- I tried to explain how the mechanical design contributes to those feelings, and why THIS game specifically makes me feel a certain way even when other, similar games might commit similar issues. Some of my criticisms of Morrowind could apply equally to Gothic at face value, for instance, but there are subtle differences in execution and overall context between the two games, which I took into consideration when evaluating why something might bother me in one game, but not the other.

      I was also blatantly clear in this review that my opinion was being heavily influenced by the fact that I played the Gothic games first, so it should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention that this review would likewise be influenced by at least a certain degree of subjective preference. You can't seriously claim that I've issued a "flat refusal to consider [my] own bias" when my conclusion explicitly states "I think, quite honestly, if I hadn't played the Gothic games before going into Morrowind, I would love it as much as the next person," and when I have a comment from 2016 stating "Am I biased by Gothic? I pretty much stated so at the beginning of the article." I not only explicitly acknowledged that alleged bias, but I also directly considered how it influenced my perception of Morrowind.

      Gothic and Morrowind take slightly different approaches to a similar genre and gameplay style, and I simply find one to be a more satisfying, engaging, and rewarding experience than the other. I feel that my explanations for why I feel that way were perfectly reasonable and were based in large part on objectively accurate evidence -- like how Gothic's leveling system implements more active decision-making and resource-management into the equation, or how its combat system is more responsive and works better in the context of a real-time action system, or how the world feels more noticeably reactive and dynamic, or how the world design is more detailed and intricately laid out with more rewarding discoveries to find more frequently during exploration, and so on.

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    16. @Vivi 2

      You're bringing up alchemy as your primary example of where my assessments of Morrowind are factually wrong, but I never said it was NOT useful or that it COULDN'T be a benefit to the player. I simply stated that it (and certain restoration spells) were "fairly useless" in the specific context of survival because you can completely circumvent their healing benefits by simply backing up and resting for one hour, thus eliminating all or most of the need for healing methods outside of combat, while also eliminating resource management from the equation of long-term survival. Note that I also qualified that statement as FAIRLY useless, not COMPLETELY useless; obviously alchemy can be beneficial, but I certainly wouldn't argue that it's "necessary" like you're claiming, seeing as there are usually alternative solutions to whatever problem alchemy might potentially solve. I, for instance, made no effort to level-up alchemy and didn't have that much difficulty in getting through the game or its two expansions beyond the early game struggles that every player is inevitably going to experience while you're low level.

      I can't admit that my overall opinion of Morrowind as being relatively boring and unengaging is "wrong" when that's the 100% honest truth about how I felt playing it, and everything I said is accurate to how the game played out in my own experience. I've given Morrowind more chances than any game should ever deserve, and I just cannot get into it or appreciate it as much as the general population. Obviously, there's some kind of appeal that I can't grasp, personally, and I'm sure there's a lot more praise it's deserving of than I've given it credit for, but I'm not going to change my mind and say "This game is fun and engaging and immensely satisfying for me" just because people come out and say "no you're wrong" while making condescending slights against my intelligence. Maybe some of my explanations for WHY I think the game is boring and unengaging are somewhat flawed or misguided; I'm not fanatically obsessed with the game, so I haven't done a deep dive into every mechanic and gameplay style or explored every possibility to have a deep understanding of all its mechanical nuances. The end result is still the same, however -- I did not like Morrowind and simply cannot enjoy it as much as Gothic or any of the other RPGs I mentioned in the conclusion.

      Contrary to what you might think, I'm indeed open to the prospect of discussion regarding these games' respective merits, as long as it's handled in a constructive manner that promotes actual discussion. However, when people come at me aggressively nit-picking every little thing in a hundred bullet points and cherry-picking statements out of context while making ridiculous assumptions about me and how I play these games, or condescendingly insulting me and making a bunch of false equivalencies and false allegations of things I never said, that's not a discussion -- that's someone trying to start an argument. By all means, feel free to disagree with me and explain why you think Morrowind is more deserving of praise than I've given it or why you see things differently than me -- I'm all for hearing other people's opinions and seeing how other people can perceive games differently than me, but I have no interest in participating in a heated argument where all we can say is how wrong the other person is, whether offensively or defensively.

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    17. @Vivi 3

      As for Morrowind's combat, you say you "don't understand why everyone keeps complaining that an RPG makes your success in battle dependent on your *character's* combat skills instead of the *player's* ability to time their moves right or aim to hit the target box." Well, that's because Morrowind isn't JUST an RPG -- it's a blend of action mechanics and RPG mechanics. You obviously understand the game's RPG foundations, but there is undeniably an action-based component to the combat system, with regards to how the game gives you direct control over your character to determine when you take actions, where you move within the game space, where you aim your attack, how you swing your sword, how you manually dodge or avoid attacks, and so on, all of which is based on direct player control and not the character's stats or skills.

      If you conveniently ignore the whole action-side of the combat system and blindly insist that it's JUST an RPG, then sure, Morrowind's mechanics are perfectly fine for an RPG and line up reasonably well with other "pure" or more traditional RPGs. The RPG mechanics are perfectly fine by themselves, in other words, but they don't necessarily blend well with the other half of the equation, which leads to the action-based systems feeling at odds with RPG mechanics and vice versa. Even though we can argue that the focus is more on being an RPG than an action game, it's still a valid criticism to bring up. After all, I've made similar criticisms about Deus Ex (a game I absolutely love) and how its RPG mechanics don't mesh very well with the FPS mechanics, leading to an incongruous gameplay experience early on until the two eventually start to synergize later in the game. It's also something that Bethesda themselves seem to understand and acknowledge, since the series has progressively moved towards having more action-based combat systems, with Oblivion removing the dice-rolling elements and giving the player manual control over things blocking, suggesting that they understand the dice-rolling feels out of place in a more realistic and modern action-RPG presentation.

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    18. @Vivi 4

      Regarding your thoughts on Gothic's male-dominated world design, I can certainly understand why that would affect your enjoyment of those games, but the Gothic games take more of a low-fantasy approach, while TES (and D&D) are more high fantasy, which lead to inherent differences in world design. Low-fantasy is generally based on realistic periods with fantasy elements injected into an otherwise real world, while high-fantasy is entirely fictional, made-up worlds that adhere to their own made-up rules. (Note that these definitions are quasi-nebulous and open to debate, but the point is that the Gothic games have a more realistic, grounded approach to its setting versus things like D&D and TES which are far more fantastical and other-worldly.) It's not necessarily fair to hold low-fantasy settings and high-fantasy settings to the same standards of expectation, because they have different goals they're trying to accomplish with different methodologies for achieving those goals -- historical context and realism being some of the ways they can differ.

      At least in the case of Gothic 1 it makes logical sense for the NPC population to be almost entirely male, seeing as the Colony is both a prison and a mining operation. Based on real world statistics, roughly 95% of all coal miners are men, roughly 95% of all incarcerated criminals are men, and roughly 99% of prisons are separated by sex. Simply put, it would not make sense to have a bunch of women in that setting, as doing so could very well make the world feel implausible and immersion-breaking. The few women who exist in Gothic 1 are depicted as servants (and implicitly, sex-slaves), which is probably accurate to how most women would be treated in a lawless, low-fantasy prison full of villainous, scummy men, and I certainly don't want to see more of that. So I'm perfectly alright with Gothic 1's setting being almost entirely male.

      In contrast, Gothic 2 features a lot more female NPCs, but you're correct in that relatively few of them play major roles in the gameplay/story. That also makes sense for the world, however, given the historical context of its low-fantasy setting where women wouldn't traditionally occupy high places of power/influence and wouldn't be in the type of roles expected of the player's interaction. Consider that the three factions are knights, religious monks, and mercenary bandits, which are historically male-dominated "professions" that still persist (in varying degrees) to this very day. In the case of Gothic 2, I think the setting could be made more interesting by having more women in more prominent roles, but I don't consider it an egregious error for the game to somewhat mimic the historical context that its low-fantasy setting is based on.

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    19. @Vivi 5

      Regarding your allegation of the Gothic developers "alienating potentially half of their customers [ie, women] with this extremely male-centric world," and how that, by itself, "was a big part of the reason why Gothic 1+2 weren't a bigger commercial success," -- I don't think that's statistically accurate, because you're assuming an even split of men and women playing these games, when in fact the actual demographics skew more heavily towards men in this genre. A 2017 study by Quantic Foundry about genre preferences in regards to gender, with a sample size of 270,000, found that the percentage of women playing specific genres is only 26% for western RPGs, 20% for action RPGs, 18% for sandbox games, 18% for action adventure games, and 14% for open world games, which are the sort of genres that Gothic and Morrowind would fall into. If we were to take the extreme assumption that ALL women playing these games would be put off by Gothic's male-centric world, and that ALL men would be indifferent about it, then it would only be about 15-25% of their audience that they'd alienate. Those numbers may not be accurate to Gothic, but I seriously doubt gender had any significant impact on the game's sales or success figures.

      I would say the more realistic explanation for Gothic's relative lack of commercial success, and why it was over-shadowed by Morrowind, stems from the fact that Morrowind came from a bigger production studio with a greater budget for advertising and distribution, who was also already known within the industry by enthusiasts by virtue of having been around for years and having already released two somewhat successful iterations within the series. The fact that it was ported to the Xbox dramatically increased its market potential, and by re-releasing it once again as the “Game of the Year Edition” (even though it only won GOTY from two publications while pretty much everyone else gave it to Neverwinter Nights) also sparked a new wave of sales. In other words, Morrowind was already primed for success from the get-go, which enabled it to subsequently be even more successful.

      Gothic, on the other hand, came from a smaller, unknown developer out of a country not known for producing international hits. No one had even heard of Piranha Bytes in 2001, and it took seven months for a publisher to pick it up and localize production anywhere outside of Germany. And when those international versions came out, there was zero marketing behind them – it didn't even get reviewed by a lot major publications because they didn't even know about it, or else decided preemptively that it wasn't high-profile enough to cover. Most people still haven't heard of Gothic, not because the games are bad, or because of their male-centric worlds, but because there were so few copies initially produced and distributed in North American and the rest of Europe, with no budget whatsoever to promote the game and drum up interest. Simply put, women can't be turned off by a game with mostly male characters if they don't even know the game exists in the first place. The limited production run and complete lack of marketing stunted the game's potential success long before people were actually playing and reacting to the games themselves.

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    20. @Vivi 6

      As far as the Nameless Hero goes, the whole point of his character is that he's a bit of a blank slate so that you can more easily inject yourself into the gameplay and situations while not being a completely silent, practically non-existent protagonist, a la Gordon Freeman. Sometimes when playing a more-defined character with a more prominent personality and independence from the player, it becomes difficult to identify as the actual character because the way they react to things may be wildly different than the way you do. See, for example, how they portrayed the Nameless Hero in the Gothic Remake Playable Teaser; they tried to make him more of an actual character and absolutely ruined my and many other people's ability to inject ourselves into the role of the protagonist, and made us actively dislike him because of his obnoxious personality.

      Let's not pretend, meanwhile, that the Nameless Hero in Gothic 1 and 2 is completely devoid of personality or just "a bland white guy." That's completely over-simplifying things and willfully ignoring his actual personality which is readily on display at numerous points throughout the game. Nameless is basically a reluctant hero contemptuously putting up with the crap happening all around him, which is evidenced by his sometimes snarky, sarcastic, and impatient comments when people ask him to do things or expect him to do all the work solving some kind of crucial problem. He's a plucky anti-hero with kind of a "devil may care" attitude begrudgingly doing things because no one else will, and he gets more cocky and confident about things as the main quest-line progresses in each game. Those personality elements are absolutely there; you just have to pay attention and be willing to see them.

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  24. The amount of salty fanboy bullshit on this post and in these comments is insane. The title should be, "Gothic fanboy trashes arguably better game". This is not a fair review of Morrowind regardless of what your 10 or so fans think. What it is, is an extremely bias comparison between Morrowind and the authors favorite game, Gothic. I love Gothic and imo it does do some things better than Morrowind. But for every 1 thing Gothic does better, Morrowind does 10 things better than Gothic. It is a MUCH more polished and deep experience all around and that is why it was so much more successful. Anyway it's funny how the majority of the people in this comment section that are trashing Morrowind have themselves admitted that they never played more than a few hours. Morrowind is a truly MASSIVE game and there is no way anyone can judge it properly after only playing it for a few hours. There is an insane amount of things to do and see in Morrowind. Hell the magic system alone is something that can keep you busy for hours just having a blast experimenting with different spells and combinations. But hey, you'll only get out of it what you put into it.

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    1. Look, I perfectly understand the appeal that leads people to enjoy Morrowind, and in no way, shape, or form do I ridicule anyone for liking it. Hell, it's a game I genuinely WANT to enjoy and I still have fond memories of playing it back in the early 2000s, even though I ultimately lost interest in it then, and in every subsequent attempt to replay it.

      What I don't understand is how people just aren't allowed to dislike Morrowind, and if you do then your opinion is considered invalid. It really feels like anytime anyone offers serious criticism against Morrowind hordes of people come crawling out of the woodwork to defend it, often by attacking the critic's credibility -- "You just didn't play the game right" or "You just don't understand it" or "This game just isn't for you" or "You obviously didn't actually play the game" or "lol go back to COD." You call me an extremely biased, salty Gothic fanboy, but it seems to me like a lot of Morrowind's defenders are themselves extremely biased, salty Morrowind fanboys who are too closed-minded to accept any ounce of criticism against their favorite game.

      Comparisons between Gothic and Morrowind are perfectly valid, seeing as they're both fantasy-themed open-world action-RPGs from the exact same era, and saying that one game is better because it does things that are more to your liking is equally valid. And when I find things like world design, quests, exploration, characters, combat, difficulty, the leveling system, and immersion better in Gothic, and provide thought-out reasonings to explain my point of view, that apparently makes me an ignorant, biased fanboy.

      And mind you, it's not just Gothic -- I listed seven other RPGs from that same era (or before) that I find to be better, more enjoyable RPGs than Morrowind. And it's not like I'm sort of radical rebel for saying that, seeing as pretty much every major video game journalism hub typically ranks many or most of those RPGs I listed in the conclusion as being better than Morrowind. I get that Morrowind aims to be more of a sandbox than a pure RPG like some of those other games, but just in terms of being an RPG with a huge world to explore, I don't find it very enjoyable and consider the design elements in other, similar games (like Gothic) to be better.

      So call me what you want -- I don't really care. You're not going to convince me that my opinion or my assessments are wrong by slinging profanity and insults at me. If you want to defend Morrowind, then please do it in a constructive way that contributes to or facilitates discussion, rather than simply antagonizing people.

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    2. ”[Morrowind] is a MUCH more polished and deep experience all around and that is why it was so much more successful.”

      I'd argue that Morrowind was more successful for the primary reason that it came from a bigger production studio with a greater budget for advertising and distribution, who was also already known within the industry by enthusiasts by virtue of having been around for years and having already released two somewhat successful iterations within the series. The fact that it was ported to the Xbox dramatically increased its market potential, and by re-releasing it once again as the “Game of the Year Edition” (even though it only won GOTY from two publications while pretty much everyone else gave it to Neverwinter Nights) also sparked a new wave of sales. In other words, Morrowind was already primed for success from the get-go, which enabled it to subsequently be even more successful. And please, can we not talk about “polish” in a Bethesda game? Morrowind may be better than some of their recent games in this regard, but Bethesda is basically a meme at this point and doesn't deserve any praise whatsoever, even retrospectively for “polish.”

      Gothic, on the other hand, came from a smaller, unknown developer out of a country not known for producing international hits. No one had even heard of Piranha Bytes in 2001, and it took seven months for a publisher to pick it up and localize production anywhere outside of Germany. And when those international versions came out, there was zero marketing behind them – it didn't even get reviewed by a lot major publications but they didn't even know about it, or else decided preemptively that it wasn't high-profile enough to cover. Most people still haven't heard of Gothic, not because the games are bad, but because there were so few copies initially produced and distributed in North American and the rest of Europe, with no budget whatsoever to promote the game and drum up interest.

      Saying that Morrowind sold better and is therefore a better game is like saying Justin Bieber is a better artist than Stevie Wonder just because Bieber has sold more albums.

      "Anyway it's funny how the majority of the people in this comment section that are trashing Morrowind have themselves admitted that they never played more than a few hours.

      It's also funny how you think that three people admitting they only played a small amount of Morrowind, out of the 13 people who expressed agreement with my review (only two of whom could be remotely described as "trashing Morrowind"), is a majority. Either you don't understand how numbers work, or you have strange metrics for criteria selection. Either way, it's a weird comment to make especially with how you phrased it.

      Seems to me like a lot of people who dislike Morrowind actually did play a considerable amount of it, and with a game as big as Morrowind you can't only accept opinions from people who sunk dozens and dozens of hours into it, because you'll get confirmation bias -- only people who enjoy the game will play it that long. And even when someone DOES play the game in its entirety (with both expansions) and still doesn't like it, there's a tendency for Morrowind fans to dismiss that opinion as still being wrong and invalid, so it seems like there's a double-standard at work, here.

      "You only played 10 hours and didn't like it? That's not enough to form a valid opinion."

      "You played 80+ hours and did as much exploring and as many quests as you could find and still didn't like it? Nah, you didn't play the game 'right,' you didn't 'get it.'"

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  25. I agree with your review tho my personal experience with bethesda's games comes from Oblivion and Skyrim. Skyrim bored me after playing it for 15-20 hours and ending up just grinding stuff for money in blacksmithy after doing some main storyline quests. Even Skyrim despite coming out 10 years after Gothic is still inferior in myriads of ways to it, and what annoys me is how bethesda stole credit for "revolutionizing" rpgs by badly implementing something Gothic did half a decade earlier. Only games to echo Gothic genuinely are games like Witcher 2 and 3, but even there its only partial, Witcher 2 is equally as restrictive as Gothic Teaser that was got recetly, which isnt any good. Gothic deserves proper remaster that is widely marketed and maintains all of the mechanics to actually reveal them to the wider audience instead of copying terrible trends from dosens of other mediocre games. It should mimick more recent piranha games it shouldnt mimick Witcher 2, or anything else.

    It should be based of Gothic II with more polished out elements of it and rewritten engine or exacly recreated mechanics on new engine with original and beta content restored so fans of original have some more content to chew on again. It shouldnt even ditch the keyboard only control scheme, it actually should default to it unless someone really wants mouse and keyboard but even then it shouldnt be designed like Gothic 3 or latter games were...because it makes combat much worse, it must retain versatily of Gothic's combat, consistent controls from G1 and be unitrusive. Instead i see another badly made cashgrab made by people who either dont understand original game's design or dont care and respect it, considering it inferior and acting with superiority "FIXING" it. For me its worse because both of my beloved games from my younger years get this kind of treatment at the same time Warcraft III with its illfitted thouthlessly made Reforged.
    Which in case of this game is much worse because of it's thriving custom map making community that kept it alive for so long with what adds up to pretty much infinite amounts of unique games within warcraft III just because of how powerful Wc3's map editor is. Way they tackle asset remakes is pretty much casting away everything made by community while at the same time making impossibly high fidelity standard for most creators to meet in timely manner or to meet at all. Pretty much leavign people with a choice to ditch tousands of models and skins and other assets in gigantic variety for handful official assets that ship with the game or ditching HD assets of the Reforged, making it utterly irrelevant. That's on top of tons of other issues it causes liek breaking existing maps in tons of ways, while providing nothing community that plays wc3 eitehr competitively or casualy wanted. Plus we had several instances of blizzard doing much better job before directly with some of the assets or in World of Warcraft sometimes. It annoys me that noone is there to cover it and expose the issues, tons of clueless people that are outside of the core audience of mapmakers themselves praise it blindly. Team shown nothing but disrespect to original game several times, by mocking it and its original artist's on 2018 blizzcon panel, laughing at it in subsequent interviews. Its just saddening for me. Some things can be fixed by mapmakers like me but only to certain extent, even hardcore competitive(melee) players are not happy about it. Only good things may be influx of new players, release of full resolution original cinematics which ingame are still in highly compressed 360p resolutions.
    I know that i go a bit offtopic but it is a tied to how Gothic Teaser looks so far and how game from same period from different genre yes(tho it has strong rph elements, its combination of RPG and RTS which is also reason to how versatile and powerful its editor is becaue it opens infinetely more capabilities than something that hs just units and no underlying rpg mechanics to use in clever ways)

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    1. I would highly recommend for you to play Warcraft III, if you didnt get a chance so far. Starting ofcourse with Reign of chaos which is base game, tho recently it got fused into one game, tho access to it got restricted because of Reforged, where its tacked on to preorder of Reforged. Tho i could help you get it without this just by getting a CDkey, i still have archive installers for older version of the game(it can update itself to most recent one). Also sorry for a wall of text but i have problem with keeping well pretty much 'essays' concise and a bit more structured...

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    2. You just dont get it, that's ok, no need to write a whole book about it.

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    3. As someone who really enjoys Morrowind, but hated it at first, I can appreciate this review. It does a really good job breaking down the(many) flaws of the game. That being said, I do want to offer a few corrections. These don't change the core argument. The points still stand even if the examples are wrong, but I'm gonna nitpick. ;)

      You say that Restoration and Alchemy are unneeded since you can simply rest. This is true except for the ever-present threat of diseases in the ashlands. Admittedly your can just carry some scrolls for it, but this is a niche for those effects. Also, rather than healing you can focus on fortify effects. I.e. using those skills to boost a bad skill so you can actually hit. Also, enemies can attack you while resting, though it generally isn't a huge threat in dungeons so the original point remains valid imho. The one exception is enemies that permanently damage stats. Without a means to restore them you're screwed. Also, the stamina thing is irrelevant ib towns since you can wait an hour. It won't heal or recover mana but stamina does regen. Sadly this DOESN'T address the issue with slow movement speed in the wilderness, where moving fast matters most.

      My other point of disagreement is the argument that spears are bad. In actuality, spears are probably one of the few skill based weapons in the game. They have almost double the range of other melee weapons(except some staves), and can be combined with Athletics or acrobatics to evade enemies and take no damage, except those annoying cliffracers. It's a weird build but extremely rewarding, especially if combined with Marksman. You can fight things completely outside your weight class with these tactics, but if you don't enjoy kiting you'll be bored to tears.

      Anyways, these nitpicks don't detract from the arguments imho. Good article.

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  26. As someone who really enjoys Morrowind, but hated it at first, I can appreciate this review. It does a really good job breaking down the(many) flaws of the game. That being said, I do want to offer a few corrections. These don't change the core argument. The points still stand even if the examples are wrong, but I'm gonna nitpick. ;)

    You say that Restoration and Alchemy are unneeded since you can simply rest. This is true except for the ever-present threat of diseases in the ashlands. Admittedly your can just carry some scrolls for it, but this is a niche for those effects. Also, rather than healing you can focus on fortify effects. I.e. using those skills to boost a bad skill so you can actually hit. Also, enemies can attack you while resting, though it generally isn't a huge threat in dungeons so the original point remains valid imho. The one exception is enemies that permanently damage stats. Without a means to restore them you're screwed. Also, the stamina thing is irrelevant ib towns since you can wait an hour. It won't heal or recover mana but stamina does regen. Sadly this DOESN'T address the issue with slow movement speed in the wilderness, where moving fast matters most.

    My other point of disagreement is the argument that spears are bad. In actuality, spears are probably one of the few skill based weapons in the game. They have almost double the range of other melee weapons(except some staves), and can be combined with Athletics or acrobatics to evade enemies and take no damage, except those annoying cliffracers. It's a weird build but extremely rewarding, especially if combined with Marksman. You can fight things completely outside your weight class with these tactics, but if you don't enjoy kiting you'll be bored to tears.

    Anyways, these nitpicks don't detract from the arguments imho. Good article.

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    1. Actually, this comment brings to mind one of Morrowind's biggest issues. What depth there is isn't explained. You have to look either on the wiki or even deeper to understand how certain mechanics work. Like skills governed attributes often have no relation to their usage. A spear is a great skill, but without investing in boosting Strength your damage will never increase. The skill only affects accuracy, and Endurance literally has ZERO connection to spears. This pattern is repeated across a lot of skills.

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    2. Hammers (only 2-hand) have 50% more reach than other weapons (somehow).

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  27. The ammount of text made my eyes hurt reading, but yeah, mostly of the morrowind fanbase are made out of biased toxic cunts who will do anything to defend the game regardless how constructive and valid the criticism was, i remember how i asked an NPC for directions to find someone to complete a quest but he just told me to find him and didn't told me anything else, i asked other NPCS around town and they also didn't helped much and just told me who he was and what his job was but didn't told me where he lives, most cities except for the starting one and balmora have such terrible designs that you will likely have to open up the wiki to find the place or NPC, i still have headaches everytime i remember about vivec, i'm also trying really hard to like the game but when i played other greater RPGS like Fallout 1 and 2, it spoiled it for me and they were released BEFORE morrowind. and unfortunetly after daggerfall bethesda kept becoming more and more lazy and unlikeable till they created the abomination that was FO76.

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    1. To this day, Daggerfall is surprisingly fun. The horrendous graphics kinda hinder it but not much. I remember grinding hours for the HUGE SHIP where you can store your Items. In the end I actually got it. The first time I played Daggerfall was at age 15, so no Nostalgia involved.

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  28. Thanks a lot for the point of view! Definitely going to try Gothic.

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  29. "Leveling is flawed and unsatisfying"
    "Combat is boring and broken"
    "Exploration is bland and unrewarding"
    "Quests are boring and tedious"

    You just described just about every Bethesda RPG that released after Christopher Weaver was forced out.

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  30. I think Morrowind is a great game eccept one aspect:
    It's so sloooooooooooow🐌🐌🐌
    I chose speed as a main attribute, Atlethics as a primary skill and Argonian (High speed) but you are still so slooow that getting from one place to another can take literal hours (no exaggeration)! Navigating the towns is tedious and you spend the most time walking. I tried using a mod to "fix" this, but this resulted the animations to look off, Cliffracers being SUPER FAST and other bullcrap, shattering the immersion. Next time I will just try to be patient and plow trough, because besides this problem, the game is really great! I actually like the combat.

    I really enjoyed how alive the world feels in Gothic with the NPC routines and passive dialogues, but sadly the combat is difficult and broken. Human NPC attacks aren't telegraphed at all and while I didn't fight enough of them to judge, Orcs didn't seem better. Before leveling your skills, your weapon swings are super slow.

    I think Skyrim has bad combat. There is no blocking and dodging and no complex stat System like in Morrowind. It's a DPS test.

    Surprisingly, Fallout 4 was the most fun out of these 4 games for me despite not being a Medieval\Fantasy RPG. There are way too many gun users in this game but that adds to the challange of sneak attacking, using covers or just doing smart builds, rather than attacking head on. Oneshotting or stunlocking enemies with a Sledgehammer is very satisfying. The main challange is getting close to the enemy, rather than the combat itself.

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  31. This article is way old, and I still come here periodically for detox when I get sick of people praising Morrowind.

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  32. Its a Zenimax what did you expect? Also Morrowind is so old now, its hard to weigh something most generations never got experience. I'm not one of them, but I can say it was both amazing and terrible for its time. Mostly because there was nothing like it at the time. Oblivion got its break by using mass advertising at the time by comparing itself to LOTR movies at the time, to capitalize on this Zenimax to screen shots of early test builds of characters faces looking off camera. This gave the illusion of a LOTR setting, what we ended up with was a shit turd cluster fuck of a game. It was pretty like WoW in its use of Speed Tree and bright colorful landscapes, but everything else felt stale and hollow. Even the so called radiant AI. The worst feature of Oblivion was its potato head facegen character maker. You could spend hours making your best potato face.

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  33. Although I share your experience of always having the nostalgia to reinstall Morrowind and play, then ended up quitting after 15 hours into it, and all those problems you pointed out about Morrowind or the Elder Scrolls series overall (you exaggerated the problems or shortcomings for sure), my take on this is that the thing attracted me most of the Elder Scrolls series is its lore and world building, you have to admit that the amount of lores the Elder Scrolls series have is more than the Gothic series, the Risen series, and the Elex series combined, way more! And the complaints you have about the emptiness, repeatedness of the Morrowind game world in fact exist in all rpg games of our era, it's due to the technical limitation mostly, not poor game design. If we will live to see the Elder Scrolls 7 or 8 or 9, you are going to get the ideal open world rpg game you want. Now about the combat system, Morrowind is an action rpg more focused on rpg than combat, obviously Bethesda had improved that quite a bit in Oblivion and Skyrim, but if real time combat is your thing, the Piranha Bytes Studios' games are probably better, but shouldn't the From Software's games even better? They are just different types of games compare to Morrowind, so it's totally unfair to criticize Morrowind from that angle. Lastly, one key strength of western rpg games is their willingness to portray human suffering of the pre-modern society, and we human have a special love-hate emotion towards seeing such suffering (which is why the Games of Throne are so successful I think), and for that matter, the Elder Scrolls series, with its grand world and lore, had portray the human suffering deeper than the Gothic series.

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