OpenMW – open-source TES3 Morrowind reimplementation
openmw.org
openmw.org
What works: everything. Everything I tried. What did I try? All the parts of the game listed above, plus 20-30 plugins, including one obscure library plugin that's not on Nexus. Used Mod Organizer2, IIRC. No problems. Worked great. Know what's amazing? No crashes. Not. A. Single. One. Anyone who played Morrowind back in the day remembers all the crashes. So many, even with stability mods and later versions of the game. This? Rock solid.
What doesn't: plugins that patch or wrap the Morrowind .exe file. That's about it. Oh well.
Bonus round: you can crank up the view distance to fairly high levels on even a medium-good rig, much farther than in the original game. Definitely improves it.
It's pretty impressive that the project has been so successful with such a major transition, and that things didn't stall and fall apart along the way despite how long it took.
OpenMW-CS is also really well done, to the point where we ended up maintaining our own collection of plugins in its new format for ourselves. [0]
Bethesda themselves have also released a few really good expansions to each of their games (Tribunal, Shivering Isles, Dragonborn to mention one from each game since Morrowind) as well as a few smaller but satisfying DLCs (Hearthfire for instance).
That they also misstepped with a few shamefully overpriced minimal mods deserves being called out but does not undo any of the above.
I think it's actually done now? I struggled mightily to get through the tutorial dungeon when the original Daggerfall was made freeware long, long ago, and one of these days, I swear, I'm going to really play it.
I've tried to get into Daggerfall multiple times over the years (before and after the game was made free), but combined with it being testy to get running right in Dosbox, and that even when you get it running some keys seemed to not work quite right, I've never quite gotten a game more than a few hours in.
As of January, their roadmap says they are at "All game features now supported", so this seems an opportune time to try again...
https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_Dag...
LOTS of fixes and improvements, it's meant as a ready to play fixed daggerfall-installation.
If that works on Oculus Quest 2 with multiplayer mod, that'd be awesome!
Being able to ignore it's in your face faults in a modern world, I honestly dont think any other RPGs will hit me the same way. Okay, there's one. It's Oblivion.
As much as Todd Howard has been a weasel, they've created two of the greatest RPG's ever made, imo.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.omw&hl=...
Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs.
IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience.
I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.
It feels like a cross between a few features of a modern TES game and a rogue-like.
Combat btw becomes a lot less tedious if one knows that chance to hit / block / evade depends on fatigue and fighting while exhausted is a bad idea. Modern games have sophisticated cues to make such effects known, like audible heavy breathing noises and visible screen bobbing and blur effects, etc. MW has no such cues.
Also, the game play is very old-fashioned by modern standards.
Oblivion was unplayable because of the extreme auto-leveling, if you weren't extremely lucky with how you played it or fixed it with a mod.
Morrowind had none of those flaws. There was auto-leveling (mainly leveled lists with a small range, iirc), but the effect was small and felt organic. And the world is less filled with generic bs, no shoved in story told in every cave. The lore presented and the atmosphere was awesome, with the local gods and their path to power, the nerevarine part of it and the diverging perspectives (though a modern game might have used that for a non-linear story, which MW completely failed to do).
I also got the impression that the stories written in the ingame books were a lot more interesting in Morrowind. In the later games that got too boring fast, in Morrowind I actually read most of them. Might have been me becoming less patient over time, but I read somewhere the authors changed, so not impossible my impression is valid.
Graphics are obviously worse, Quests can be a bit off - especially the guild quests. Not only are they strange in what they ask from you, breaking immersion; Like in Oblivion and Skyrim following those quest lines and becoming a guild leader does not amount to much. Only do one, then it's okay. Some game mechanic can be broken rather easily, but if you don't search for ways on Youtube I doubt that's an issue when just playing - but Oblivion and Skyrim are a bit more stable there.
I liked Morrowind best, but it was also the first I played and the one I wrote simple mods for.
I understand that we have different preferences and it is fine, my wish would be to have more unique dungeons in the next games.
I normally love things like that in games. I read everything and there's not a game I own that I don't have a 100% in. In Skyrim it's barely even storytelling.
My experience with Skyrim did lead me to developing strategies for other games, after having less time, but at the time I definitely went about it in one of the longest ways possible.
It's probably time for a replay.
The game I had too much time to play was Gothic for me, this one has no quest markers and I also had no internet so I had to struggle with it but I still have it burned in my memory.
Now I started maybe 1 year ago a new game on SE, just essential mods for me because I had the bad luck of my game crashing in certain regions of the map when I was around level 30 and I had to give up on the save. I was using those cool mods that improve the cities with new buildings, NPCs and quest. I could not solve that issue and I promised myself that I will play next time only with minimum stuff.
I suggest to ask in winegaming subreddit for more info on what other players are using and what to avoid. If you have both games try them both , no mods and compare how it looks and feels.
FNV did that way better - but okay, FNV did everything better.
There are a lot of issues with Skyrim, there are some very funny videos about it, but for me personally those quirks are not significant enough to complain.
But that's just it: They don't add lore, they add noise. If this kind of story telling is done well and occasionally, then players would actually read those letters. You are right, here they don't, and that's not surprising if they are placed everywhere.