Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2
kimonote.com
kimonote.com
Reflecting on the pieces, the author is pretty talented at communicating effectively—I found the material interesting, the writing style lively enough to enjoy, and the presentation to have just the right balance of explanation and example. It's so well done I didn't think of any of these things as I read.
The author's bio is also a standout piece of writing to me: http://mildbyte.xyz/about.html
the normal unpatched speed run of morrowind basically involves gaining the ability to run at hundreds of miles per hour, getting two items, getting to the final boss and killing him in one hit. takes about 5 minutes. hilariously the item is called the “boots of blinding speed” and let’s you run incredibly fast but turns your screen black while equipped
Routing is not something that easily maps to application software, given that it can be deeply intertwined with game state. A spreadsheet suffices for the average case.
stealth archers best build confirmed empirically https://imgur.com/gallery/4xAA7
It's incredibly impressive that a game can have hundreds of hours of content, yet be speedran in 7 minutes.
In Arena, you start humbly, but rise high enough that you destroy Jagar Tharn, one of the most powerful mages in the whole of the history of the Elder Scrolls games.
In Daggerfall, you're the right-hand man of the Emperor, and seek out a world-ending superweapon, and may just take it for yourself.
In Morrowind, you are a god, or very close to. The reincarnation of the Nevarine. That you can become overpowered makes sense. Bandits should fear you. Ordinary people should.
In Oblivion, you're the right-hand man of someone who ascends. You walk into literal Hell and fight demons. The bare mysteries of the world are laid clear by you. You steal the book of spells of immortal characters.
In Skyrim, you're descendant from a man who became a god. You have a gift that can shatter the heavens, and break open portals between worlds. You kill the son of Akatosh.
You're right, it is design, because it makes sense.
What does this mean?
Bare as in raw, foundational, etc.
In Morrowind I used this to create an extremely long-lasting fire spell dealing 0 damage to self. The result was a spell which cost barely any mana and resulted in you walking around engulfed in harmless flames. A really cool visual touch.
I do distinctly remember being unable to recreate that one fire spell, though. Perhaps it was not possible to set damage to 0 in Oblivion? That was part of why the spell became so cheap and allowed for extreme duration.
From memory it might have been similar to that spell you find at the early part of the game on the way to Balmora.
Morrowind was IMHO the perfect game. The fact that if you were lucky and skillful you could get the best weapons and spells early in the game, or be gutted in 3 seconds made it far more risky to pay but way more fun when you figured out how to overcome it.
I would dearly love to play it but with some decent physics to make the bows fun and with slightly upgraded graphics.
They are rebuilding the game engine for Morrowind, and it's quite operable!
Better graphics, and capable of using more modern textures, etc.
It is very frustrating to start out that way though.
Not that you actually need it, since you can also be invulnerable, perma-healing, damage-to-health converting, flying, damage-reflecting one-hit-killing at the same time. But yes, stealth is an option.