Morrowind rebooted the original Xbox | Hacker News Reader

Morrowind rebooted the original Xbox

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240 pointspmarin163 comments

Great to see Morrowind on HN, just sharing my personal story;

I was in highschool living in a trailer park with my mother. My ma ended up getting a pay out from the government for a work related injury. She bought me a PC and we set it up in the caravan and I was able to run Morrowind. It was a great escape from the conditions at the time and I kept learning programming when I wasn't hunting Daedra's.

Morrowind looks fun but every time I try playing, it feels like doing Sunday chores. 90% of my game experience thus far has been walking. What am I doing wrong?

You're honestly not doing anything wrong. Morrowind is a really unsatisfying game for a lot of reasons. The RNG based combat mechanics feel off in a game that lets you aim your strikes. The quests are difficult to follow, offering vague and often incorrect directions for long cross-country treks where you're constantly attacked by annoying flying creatures. Getting the most out of character advancement encourages you to play in a restrictive way.

Morrowind really shines when you're able to work past all that immerse yourself in the world anyway. Without spoiling too much, you're released from prison without much skill or equipment into a fractured society, full of political and racial tension. It's up to you to explore and navigate your way through things and the world is rich enough to (usually) support your investigation. The story leans into typical tropes about the "chosen one" and power creep in a way that makes it compatible with using a little meta-gaming knowledge and min-maxing while roleplaying. After a little artifact hunting and enchanting you're soon able to breathe underwater, levitate at will, instantly kill everything in a 50 foot radius, or jump vast distances across the continent and land gracefully. All of which would feel pretty cheesy if it weren't set on an island ruled by three individuals who have amassed enough arcane power to be called gods.

Speaking for myself personally, Morrowind is one of those games played as much in the theater of one's mind as it is on the computer screen. As others mentioned, mods help a lot to make the game more visually immersive and iron out some of its rough edges. But ultimately what appealed to me about Morrowind is weaving my own story into the setting, climbing that power curve from nearly powerless to god-like.

About min-maxing: Teenage-me made the mistake of discovering that the vendor economy in Morrowind is fundamentally broken. Basically, the base price that vendors will buy and sell something for goes down when they like you more and up when they like you less. There's also a spread affected by this too, which should compensate for that, but if you max out the mercantile skill, then that spread is narrowed enough that you can buy something for cheap, make the vendor like you less, and then sell back the same thing at a profit due to the now increased base price. Luckily, making a highball sell offer offends the vendor in a way that will make them dislike you, but only for as long as the current conversation lasts. This means if you first bribe vendors to max out their affection toward you, then after that it's possible to buy their whole stock for cheap, temporarily offend them to increase their prices, then sell them everything back at a profit, end the conversation, then rinse and repeat. This way you can farm the vendors for all their gold.

You have to wait a while for the vendors' inventory and gold reserves to reset - luckily one thing you can use all that gold for is paying trainers to improve your skills, after which you'll be able to level up if you sleep (handily resetting the vendors). With the right trainers, it's possible to always improve enough major and minor skills together before sleeping, that you power level, gaining the maximum stats per level.

The first real city you get to, Balmora, has trainers that cover every single skill I cared about (maybe all of them?) and enough vendors to supply you with plenty of gold to pay the trainers. I made a "circuit" of the city, where I would run around farming vendors and paying trainers, then sleeping to level up. After doing this for a couple hours, I'd already leveled up more than the game expected me to do at all - enemies didn't seem to scale all the way up there that well, and because I'd consistently powerleveled, my stats were super high too. I still completed the game, but it wasn't all that challenging, felt more like a sandbox to play god in.

That's nowhere near the worst exploit in Morrowind. Potions let you temporarily improve stats, which lets you make better potions. You can very rapidly make this spiral into godlike power, very early on in the game.

I remember doing something similar to GP that let me craft more and more insane spells, and didn't stop until my character was a walking god

I've not played Morrowind or Oblivion but I've played the other three in the series and a similar mechanic exists in Skyrim as well, although it's not possible to do it in the early game. If I remember correctly you make a potion that lets you craft better armour, then craft armour that lets you craft better potions.

It was much easier than that in the earlier games as you could make much more unbalanced spells (and enchantments too).

You could basically make a Fortify Alchemy 100 for 1 second spell, and because potion crafting paused the game, you'd cast it, open your inventory and voila, infinite potion crafting at max skill level.

It's worse than that: Make a fortify Intelligence poition. Drink that potion. Make another fortify intelligence potion - it will be a bit better than the previous one. Repeat that a couple of times and you can make potions that fortify your attributes by thousands of points and last for hours.

But potions need ingredients you say? Find a merchant that restocks the ingredients you want. Buy them. Close and re-open the inventory - the merchant should have immediately re-stocked. Neat. You could just repeatet that but that's too tedious. Instead, sell the incredients back to them. Close and re-open the window and buy all of the ingredient agiant. Close and re-open the window and the merchant will have re-stocked the total number they had before. Repeat for exponentially increasing stocks.

I never finished Oblivion, but as I recall, by far the most broken strategy was to just never rest, so you never leveled up. Enemies are scaled with your level, but you could get most of the benefits from improved skills, but not face stronger enemies that way.

Leveling in Oblivion was linked to the major-skills that you selected at character creation, so it was beneficial to pick the ones you didn't intend to use. That way, you could pump up the important ones without scaling up the enemies.

Morrowind didn’t have much, if any, enemy scaling. Which is fun when you’re at low levels and trying to avoid caves full of high level enemies but can make things dull if you power level.

This is a good thing, it means your accomplishments and growth are meaningful and impactful. Nothing worse than becoming some godly powerful being and yet everyone else in the world suddenly is godly powerful also, makes you wonder what the whole point of leveling is. In Morrowind once you are able to take down high level opponents, you feel like a badass and you know it. You truly achieve godhood. The expansions also are more difficult so it's not until very late game that you finally get strong enough not to be challenged (unless you exploit of course).

I actually like that kind of scaling in RPGs where you start out as powerless but become overpowered towards the end - Mage classes often tend to scale like that.

I definitely prefer it as well. I find monster scaling incredibly frustrating as you never feel like you're making any sort of progress.

I did try to bribe the traders and get on their good side, but they always had

1. goods I didn't want

2. not enough money to buy my stuff

3. bad prices

Yeah, I didn't really enjoy that mechanic where you get on their good side, don't like it in real life either and I think that's what stopped me from maxing those skills.

I did, however, find a scamp in Caldera who would buy anything with a fixed original price and didn't require any flattery. He also had 5000 gold and when you maxed it out, you just waited for 24h

Scamp? Try the Mudcrab Merchant [0] ;-)

[0] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Mudcrab_(merchant)

Also, if you have the Tribunal expansion, the merchants in Mournhold tend to be a bit less broke.

Morrowind was the first and only game I had on my Xbox for the first couple years I owned it. Definite bias and rose-tinting due to that, but here's what I would suggest:

The magic of Morrowind is in the discovery of the world. Modern RPGs like Skyrim might give you an arrow to follow that points directly to where you need to go for a current quest. Leading the player to ignore most things outside of that objective arrow. Morrowind instead says "Go Northeast of the village to find this cave". By doing this, the player organically stumbles onto things and events that build out the world.

A good example of this is the early mission to travel from the starting village (Seyda Need) and head to Balmora. One option you have is to walk there, which takes a bit of time and offers multiple encounters along the way. One that quite literally falls into your lap. When it happens, the game doesn't explain anything. You have to piece it together. That discovery is part of the intrigue.

Even if you're not interested in the characters or culture, the game offers a lot. You could alternatively delve into the empty steam-driven ruins to find who built them and why they are empty. Perhaps instead you see an unknown cluster of plants to pick and practice your alchemy. Maybe you stumble onto a wrecked ship full of pillows and want to track down the owner listed on the shipment invoice.

If you feel like you're walking from point A to B to C, you may be following too close to that arrow. Trying to find what you're pointed to without seeing what else is happening around you. Stop and look around every once in a while. There's probably something or someone nearby. Anything that catches your interest should be investigated. What may seem like minor events often become the most memorable moments.

I probably have on rose-tinted glasses, too, but I still remember the sense of exploration on discovery in Morrowind. The vast, ash-blown landscape was fun.

Oblivion felt like a slog because of the auto-scaling, but I finished it.

Skyrim felt exactly like Oblivion but with more rails and even fewer voice actors, even though there might have actually been more voice actors. I have only made it a few hours each time I try to get into it. The voice acting alone ruins the immersion. Everyone looks and sounds the same!

It's not rose colored glasses. That would be if you were claiming the combat was good... But they definitely made design choices in the subsequent games that made them feel less enchantin. Mostly by taking any real work out of the game. Which is ok. They are just seeking a different audience.

Yes, a different audience... and that is fine! They obviously found a recipe that works for a lot of people. I am still waiting for the next Morrowind, though.

Yeah, same. I really enjoyed it above any of their other games. The obscurity of the setting was wonderful too. Skyrim and Obliviom we're impressively realized worlds but a little too rote fantasy.

+1 on the rose tinted glasses. In retrospect, I'm still quite bitter about Skyrim. In many ways it's the best TES game so far, definitely in terms of environment etc. But even at the time, it fell short; voice acting is one, bad animations is another. I think it's the engine and core technology, which at the base is still the same as Morrowind's.

I mean I get it, they have a staff that is experienced in that engine and a heap of modders. But it's past its prime, and I hope (but doubt) that for TES VI they make big changes.

I know, it's like how many adventuring careers can be ruined by arrows to the knee? The sheer density of forced retirement by knee-arrow in such a small land area is highly unlikely.

It's not just the number of actors, it's that there are a couple of very distinctive voices, and they're associated with characters you interact with frequently. It's distracting when roughly one out of every eight NPCs is Tigger.

> Oblivion felt like a slog because of the auto-scaling, but I finished it.

Agreed. Thankfully, there are mods that replace the level-based scaling ith location-based scaling.

I agree in principle, but disagree about specifics. In Morrowind, I would argue that there's probably not something or someone nearby. And that's part of the beauty of it. That's realistic.

When you do stumble onto something, it gets all the more interesting -- of all the nothingness, why is this here?

It's a drawn out form of gratification, compared to the every-other-step-you-run-into-a-procedurally-generated-cave type of instant gratification I felt with e.g. Skyrim.

Morrowind is more aimed at exploration than later games, and some amount of nothingness in the world is required for this.

----

Of course, nothingness is relative. In absolute terms, I'm sure Morrowind has less nothingness tran later games, but the limited graphics and draw distance and smaller populations makes it feel more empty.

> If you feel like you're walking from point A to B to C, you may be following too close to that arrow. Trying to find what you're pointed to without seeing what else is happening around you.

This is true, but with the default draw distance it's very hard to apply in the base game. Mods that improve draw distance are critical to enjoying Morrowind, in my opinion.

The Elder Scrolls games are polarizing because they're not fun in the traditional sense (they got better on this axis over time, but were never great)

The fun of an Elder Scroll's game, for me, is the sense of aimlessness in a world that doesn't feel structured like a quest-checklist, but like a world. Something I can poke and prod and truly make my own goals and activities in. You could almost call it "meta-fun". The individual actions aren't fun - some in Morrowind are almost painful - but the big picture is enthralling for someone like me.

But not everybody's like that; and not everybody likes them

What are some modern equivalents of this type of game

RPGs like the Baldurs Gate sequel are very structured

Outward in my mind is the best modern rpg in Elder Scolls style, and with that I mean a great focus on the atmosphere of the world that you walk around in and immerse yourself in. I played Morrowind as a teen with 5.1 sound and absolutely loved it, strong memory of going through that long valley into the northern desert area, immersive game.

Now Outward is a third person game made by an indie team, but the game has matured a bit now and they have released three DLCs. You got some factions, have to chose your build, cook food and sleep in the wilderness. And it has great outdoors areas that you are just gonna fall in love with, and really great music to go with the exploration. And the nature and creatures in the game actually reminds you of Morrowind. A real gem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN8fSxg7cEs&ab_channel=Play4...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD0vqPnbQPc&ab_channel=PlayS...

I've had the very same feelings playing Elite Dangerous. Of course it's a space sim, not an RPG. But it had this sense of a world living without you. And a ton of mechanics where each one seems boring on its own, but allows you to build your unique complex stories and memories.

Many mmorpg can be played like this. You go out and explore, and basically ignore the main plot.

Crafting games can be somewhat similar, where the main objective is more of a theme in the background.

Baldurs Gate is to my memory a game that focus fairly strong on the main story, and so I find the experience quite far away from Morrowind. In that game you did not look out and see a big mountain with wonders of what might be lurking there.

Pillars of Eterntity 2 is incredibly open world. The main plot is there, but it's the exploration and faction quests that are what you actually spend time doing.

My main gripe with PoE2 (and the later Elder Scrolls games too) was that the urgency of the main plot detracts from the freedom of exploration and the flow of faction and side quests. Morrowind was great about this: you get to Caius Cosades and he tells you to go do other things before he gives you your first orders. There are a few other stopping off points in the main story too. It makes the faction quests and just taking your time exploring make so much more sense.

Yeah, agreed. The story in PoE1 made way more sense in that sense. The game itself is just so amazing than I forgive a lot of the plot-related holes.

The worst part is that it's clearly set up for a third which will almost certainly never happen.

The de-protagonising is definitely a concern also, but I file that under the "Empire Strikes Back" approach (i.e the second can end on a cliffhanger (sortof)) which will all be resolved by the third.

I think it's more that they coln't decide if they wanted to make a follow-a-god-around-and-skype-with-some-other-gods-but-but-not-impact-the-story-yourself game or a pirates-versus-companies-versus-natives-faction-builder game so they just made both and released them as one. The exploration it has is not really the same as a TES game.

Witcher 3 is fairly similar. Although it has a lot of quest markers and directions in game, it still feels very vast, open and inviting to explore. I spent the first 30-40 hours playing Gwent (an in-game card game) and chasing all additional cards for it. Main story had to wait

So I actually went back to it after Oblivion, and found it really engaging. Though it was on PC. Part of these recommendations assume PC, but some are true regardless -

First, mod it. It looks old; make it prettier. The walking doesn't feel as bad when the scenery is nicer.

Second, either consider a travel mod, OR start focusing on what fast travel the game presents you. There are boats and stilt striders, and then the mages guild can teleport you between different mages guilds. The Intervention spells take you back to the nearest Tribunal temple/Imperial cult shrine.

Taken together, this means a spell gets you 'out' of whatever wilderness bit you're in, to a civilized place, and then you have methods (albeit ones you have to learn) to travel between civilized places. Once I learned these well enough, it was actually pretty easy to get around. Not Oblivion/Skyrim level easy, with fast travel, but not painfully so, and having to actually walk through the wilderness each time, following roads, etc, meant I felt a greater feeling of exploration than I did in those other games.

But, if that feels too daunting, no shame in modding it.

> Second, either consider a travel mod, OR start focusing on what fast travel the game presents you. There are boats and stilt striders, and then the mages guild can teleport you between different mages guilds. The Intervention spells take you back to the nearest Tribunal temple/Imperial cult shrine.

You missed the two: - One of the official plugin that adds teleportation between any Dwemer ruin and the Caldera mages guild. - The Mark and Recall spells.

The former isn't really helpful early on; the latter you're right. I was thinking "Well, that's not going to help you navigate" so dismissed it, but in tandem with an intervention it becomes a great way to fast travel back to town for supplies/etc, then get back to where you were.

The true greatness of the game is how text based it is. Because it didn't have VO, the text could be far more abundant. It meant there could be truly interesting dynamics around information.

You needed to find the right questions to ask or the right level of friendliness or intimidation to for example unlock the secret of a murder. The characters would also give you long explanations of how to find places. Finding places became something you could become good at. Sometimes the directions were wrong which might leave you stuck on a mission for some time.

The later game in the series have traded in some of this but the limited options necessitated by VO just mean they cannot be as robust. The newer games have a very paint by numbers sameness to every mission. Obviously this is to streamline the games for a wider audience.

Though they are still incredible achievements.

My problem with every single.elder scroll game kind of ends up boiling down to, why am I doing any of this. Skyrim was the worst of this for me. Every dungeon followed the same pattern and featured a convenient shortcut back to the beginning at the end and inevitably nothing you ever find is worth it.

Oblivion's level scaling made nothing you found or did worth it at all.

Morrowind was very large and pretty and fairly amazing for its time, but its world is empty and pointless.

I dunno, somewhere along the way, developers seem to forget, sure we could add every single random real world item to every random house and sure it's realistic, but it's not fun.

Finding piles of dishes and foodstuffs, exploring random building after random building to find.essentially nothing that adds to the game, go through lousy generic quests that add essentially nothing to the game and basically...

I dunno, last time I played oblivion I played as a naked punching cat, because why not nothing you do matters anyway. And sure enough, the gameplay experience was about the same as when I actually tried playing the game properly.

When I was into Morrowind I already had about ten years of practice escaping into fantasy worlds via books and games. After listening to The Blindboy Podcast (after art and history, one theme is mental health) since mid-2020 and practicing cognitive behavior therapy to make more time to act between stimulus and (too-often-harmful) response, I no longer feel compelled to escape into games. Perhaps all those hours I spent exploring imaginary spaces helped in some way (I am much more grateful to authors of books, because they helped me develop visualization) and I try not to sink into regret. Having a child was a major contributor to growing up, too, perhaps the top; now I’m more adult and I get to freely enjoy childhood activities again with less risk of dependence.

My point is: it’s okay to grow out of things and move on.

I do get that and I find my ability to escape into fantasy has dwindled in recent years, but I played morrowind at the time when I still read plenty of long winded fantasy books and the other games actually helped lead to my decline in enjoying fantasy.

To counter that. I recently for the first time played dark souls and a couple years back played hollow Knight. I was able to immerse myself into both games because, every single thing you do and find has a point.

Nothing really wastes your time. There's a reason for doing everything in those games. The things you find are worth it and rewarding. Exploring is worth it and rewarding.

I never once really got that feeling from the elder scrolls games, or open world games in general.

They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying.

I prefer games with less things, but each thing feels worthwhile and meaningful. I'd rather find one awesome cool thing that changes the way I play the game or gives me something cool and new for my player over 20 Rusty forks and some apples any day.

I appreciate your comment. In my childhood open world games were - at least in my mind - the non-plus-ultra because the possibilites appeared to be endless. Nonetheless, you are right: Too often those possibilites are trite. I dislike Skyrim and Oblivion for those same reasons but for Morrowind I have a place in my heart because it really felt like you were exploring the world by yourself (not following your quest marker) and the rewards you could get were not just defined by its loot system but designed (so that you could get a really great sword relatively early if you found your way there), but you are right in that the world is rather empty and can be boring for some players like you. Actually, what has not been topped for me personally are 2 games: Might&Magic4+5 (you could play them as a combo-game, changing worlds!) and Fallout 2 because in both those cases the worlds were massive and you could go wherever you wanted to but still had comparatively much and different stuff to do wherever you went. In both cases I was always fixed on finding stuff that usually I wouldn't have at this point in the game and that worked really well, but also the worlds were really interesting. In M&M you had those minigames where you would simply read a text of an NPC and had to answer his question like a puzzle or something; very simple but quite rewarding (however also too easy to look up the answers nowadays ;)) but also you had to learn skills to get to some places in the world like swimming and mountaineering, a really cool feature as well. I don't know if you would like those games, especially nowadays, but compared to 3D games they had the added advantage that walking around didn't take SO much of your time. Which is a dealbreaker for me oftentimes, too.

The first two fallout games were great and even fallout 3 and new Vegas were pretty good. I think the latter two were good because they were smaller and actually did have some interesting stuff to find and do even though they did the open world thing.

I played the m&m series a long time ago, they kind of blend together in my head with bards tale, ultima, those gold box d&d games and games like those. The puzzles in those kinds of games always made them enjoyable.

> They have many, many things to do and find, but none of them feel satisfying.

I’m usually downvoted to oblivion (pun intended) on Reddit for saying: I didn’t like Breath of the Wild for this reason. Empty world, no real rewards, infuriating weapon system, lack of scenario, no memorable music.

Yeah. Breath of the wild seems the same way. I've never played it but i watched my old roommate play it.

Its focus on exploration was cool, but it missed that thing that made zelda 1 fun.(apparently this was the inspiration for breath of the wild)

Zelda 1 was pretty open ended, but again, all the things you found were useful, sure you could do the dungeons in a variety of orders and go wherever, but that's not what made it fun, what made it fun was that you could do that and that all those dungeons had one cool, useful, gamechanging thing to find.

BoTW gave you all the game changing stuff at the beginning and said here...here's a world, ganon's over there, you probably can't get him now, but just wander around long enough and you can, or know what you're doing and you can.

In theory that seems fun, but the lack of structure and progression kills it. That's what made zelda so great to begin with.

I guess it's a matter of personal taste, because for me, the disadvantages you list are what makes an open-world RPG desirable.

I like the feeling of being in a world that feels real independently of you, with its normal citizens doing normal things, its work and errands going on, its cities and spaces, many of them irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but where you may get lost doing some quest or other if you so desire.

For me, it's much better for immersion than most modern games which focus on tight storytelling: you're special, have to follow your destiny, everything in the world is placed there to drive the plot, help you in your quest or entertain you. There are no dishes and food in residences (or maybe, no residences at all) because who cares, that has no bearing in the quest of the great hero. When I play games like that (i.e., most), they feel artificial and limited to me so I don't enjoy them as much.

In fact, for me the best TES game is not even Morrowind, it's Daggerfall (if anyone wants to try it, there's a very good modern remake: Daggerfall Unity) because it's closest to the ideal of the realistic huge world that doesn't especially care about you. I think you wouldn't like it at all because it has the things you don't like about Morrowind, but taken to the extreme :)

Mind you, I totally get why some people prefer the tight storytelling where the experience of following the main quest has been distilled and optimized, and has more detail and uniqueness due to not relying so much on procedural generation and repeated models. It's very personal. So let's hope for plenty of RPGs for every taste in the future.

PS: the kind of games I'm praising often have the massive imbalances you point out, like being able to win with an absurd character (I guess because it's very hard to balance things when you're free to do a wide range of actions in the world, rather than following some predetermined quest lines). Daggerfall also has plenty of that kind of issues, including choices at character creation that feel like exploits and make the game much easier. But for the kind of person who likes this kind of games, this doesn't matter that much. I roleplay my characters. I wouldn't create an OP absurd character because it isn't fun... I just think what kind of character I want to be in the world, and create it.

>I guess it's a matter of personal taste, because for me, the disadvantages you list are what makes an open-world RPG desirable.

Totally agree with it being a matter of personal taste. If people didn't enjoy those kinds of games they wouldn't make them.

>For me, it's much better for immersion than most modern games which focus on tight storytelling: you're special, have to follow your destiny, everything in the world is placed there to drive the plot, help you in your quest or entertain you.

I'm not really a big fan of linear story driven games either to be honest. Most of them go way too far in the opposite direction have have many of those flaws you describe in your post. The modern final fantasy games or the Drake series type stuff all have those problems.

>So let's hope for plenty of RPGs for every taste in the future.

100% agree with this. More variety is always better.

I think where our tastes seem to differ when it comes to these kinds of games is more in the implementation of exploration.

Say, take a game like dark souls. I find its world to be more immersive and suitable for roleplaying a character than something like daggerfall. In dark souls, you escape from a prison, end up in some dying kingdom, get a vague hint about what's going on and you're pretty much left on your own to piece it out and figure out what needs to be done and where to go. But you don't have to if you don't want to hell, you can turn around and play an entirely different main story if you want to and you're skilled enough.

The world and the NPCs don't feel like they exist for your quest, as you wander around you get the impression it really is a dying world full of lost souls awaiting the inevitable. Everything you find feels like an actual part of the world. There's a reason for it to be there, both gameplay wise and usually if you pay enough attention, you can figure out the story of why the item's there, even with random pickups like souls.

To me that feels more immersive than walking into a house and being like, oh ya someone lives there, look their table's set up, or that NPC just told me they need to go take a shit.

Because in the end, it's a video game not a life simulator. The world in a game doesn't need to be a complete reflection of our own mundane world for it to be realistic and immersive. The world just needs to be consistent, well realized and the gameplay and story should go hand in hand. The game shouldn't tell you the story, it's not a movie or a book, you should play the story.

For me, the best balance is games that have a story and structure, but leave it vague and open ended enough for you to create your own story by playing. I feel like those rare games that manage to do that, are the ones that really utilize the full potential of video games as a unique entertainment medium.

If there is one thing that annoys me in games, it is when every NPC only has dialog that pertains to your story. Or when areas are walled off/boxed off/locked away because they are irrelevant to the player's goals. Maybe I have played too many games where the player is the center of the universe, but I am frankly extremely tired of it.

I want to see this minutia, it tells me that the game designers are detail-oriented and it is a huge part of what makes a game world feel real to me. Why does every game have to make me feel super important, when all I want to do is break into houses and steal NPCs' fancy jewelry and silverware?

Also I don't get this argument that dungeon crawling is irrelevant from a loot perspective. With the exception of crafting, and looting autoscaled overleveled roadside bandits (very unfun if you ask me), the best stuff in my game came from dungeons.

>If there is one thing that annoys me in games, it is when every NPC only has dialog that pertains to your story. Or when areas are walled off/boxed off/locked away because they are irrelevant to the player's goals. Maybe I have played too many games where the player is the center of the universe, but I am frankly extremely tired of it.

But I mean, oblivion, skyrim and most open world games have those. If you try to wander into any quest area before you've got the quest, either you break something or you just can't enter or finish the whole area. If you talk to any important NPC, they still treat you like the hero and talk about things only pertaining to you and your quest. Just because it's hidden behind a bunch of other pointless stuff doesn't mean that when it comes down to it, anything important in the game still revolves around you.

They also tend to have the opposite problem, where the world doesn't actually react to what you do.

In new Vegas, I decided I didn't like Caesar's legion, so I murdered them all with a flamethrower. I cleared the entire main legion encampment, all their leaders everything. Then, I went back and continued on my way to new Vegas. Any legion encampments or anything I found were exactly the same. No acknowledgment that I'd obliterated their entire leadership. It didn't matter in the end other than that I'd failed and completed a bunch of quests I didn't even know about. It didn't actually change anything in the game world.

For me, that kills the immersion. What's the point of a big open world where you can do anything if nothing you do actually has any effect or consequences?

Sure, NPC's might wander on a schedule, but they don't react at all to the fact that the slavers are completely wiped out from the area? The other side doesn't start moving in to take over their territory? Not a single thing actually changes or reflects my choices in the game.

In the end, they're still just static worlds with the illusion of giving you freedom.

>I want to see this minutia, it tells me that the game designers are detail-oriented

No it doesn't, it says designers know how to copy and paste $Generic_Useless_Item and reskin it in a variety of ways. It says they can't actually be bothered giving a world real useful detail so they fill it with meaningless padding.

> the exception of crafting,

That's the problem. What you can craft is better than anything you find in a dungeon. So when it comes down to it, you spend several hours messing around in your inventory or gathering mundane stuff so you can craft an item because you need it to go through the dungeon, but then when you go through the dungeon what you find is less good than what you crafted, so you might as well have just not even bothered.

Perhaps you should try a build that ignores crafting, then. In a lot of games it is a potentially broken mechanic.

As for immersion, there are games where behavior changes when you do things like slaughter an in-game faction's leadership. But it's going to be fairly rare, because it's expensive. You might want to check out Kenshi, as that game will appropriately react when you slaughter an entire town -- that factions enemies might move in to occupy it, and game conditions might change. But Kenshi was a one-man project that took something like a decade to complete, and I have even heard that those kinds of meta-interactions are scripted so you can't even take that sort of thing very far.

Also, what you described about Caesar's Legion sounds very plausible in a post-apocalyptic world without reliable long distance communication. In historic times wars sometimes lived on beyond their end as distant, far-flung generals had not yet received orders of a ceasefire. If there is one thing I hate, it is when an entire faction turns against you because you killed one of their dudes in an isolated fashion and yet, somehow, magically, now the whole faction knows? How does that even work plausibly?

Finally, I think that expecting video games to accurately model real life is a fool's errand. We will likely never reach this level of interaction, not without a massive budget and all the other terrible things that happen when you try to reach as large an audience as possible. If you frame your immersion to stick to the limits of the gameworld and the context that is was built under, you will experience far less disappointment.

My point wasn't that I expect those things in a game, it was that the goal of realism through minutae falls apart as soon as you consider anything meaningful.

>Also, what you described about Caesar's Legion sounds very plausible in a post-apocalyptic world without reliable long distance communication.

I'm not going to argue too much about the facts of life in a fictional world because it was just an example. But, the factions in fallout seem pretty organized. I imagine they have runners and messengers much like in times before long distance communication. Sure news might not spread immediately, but at some point, those legionaires hanging out are gonna wonder why they're not getting orders and supplies and the other factions are going to start to notice a lack of activity...

But anyway...it was an example. The overall point was, outside quests and other scripted events, your actions tend to not have any effect on the game world and to add to this, nothing you do in the game really changes the way you interact with the game world.

>If there is one thing I hate, it is when an entire faction turns against you because you killed one of their dudes in an isolated fashion and yet, somehow, magically, now the whole faction knows?

I agree with you there. I recall the soldiers in TES games being like this.

>Finally, I think that expecting video games to accurately model real life is a fool's errand.

But wasn't your whole point that open world games are enjoyable because they accurately model all these minute real world details that make the world interesting to explore?

My point wasn't that it needed to be accurate, my point was that for games that sell based on the concept of a 'large living fully realized world to explore' the game worlds are actually relatively static. In which case, I'd prefer less padding and more actual game. If you're going to get a static world either way, I'd rather less overall stuff in it, but each thing to have an actual purpose. Not necessarily in regards to 'you the hero' just a purpose.

Either through game mechanics or simply world building. I don't need to be able to fill my inventory with every rock, random household item or scrap of animal part and I don't need to hear about Gertrude the milk maid's worries about the health of her calfs or the story about how little Billy fell down the well again for the world to feel complete and fully realized.

The thing is, I don't think it would take all that much to improve at least some of these issues.

For the Elder Scrolls games in particular. A few things I think honestly would have made the games far more fun

Hide the main quest from the player. Make them find it. Both the later two games start off with scripted areas that pretty much tell you, you're the hero, here's the quest. Then lets you loose. You know what you're supposed to do, but it's up to you if you do it or not.

You've basically got two games at that point. The on rails, story driven main quest and the random exploration. Make finding the main quest part of the exploration. Let the players slowly unravel the world and figure out what's going on.

Maybe little Billy falling down the well is actually important? You don't know because you don't actually know what's happening. It gives more meaning to all the meaningless stuff lying around.

Don't be afraid to challenge players. Make them work to figure out what's meaningful or not. Throw some surprises at them. Stick a tough dungeon near somewhere easy to find with the intention of making players come back later. Put some kind of cool treasure just out of reach and make players figure it out themselves. Make it require something obscure or something. Stick a big shiny, unique looking locked door in the middle of a dungeon and hide the key elsewhere in the world.

Let players make their own quests and give them something rewarding when they 'complete' it. Break up the structure of travelling from place to place and just doing the sidequests of the area or wandering around until you find a cave, kill the monsters, walk through the tunnel, open the chest, then waltz back out.

Even side quests, make them impactful. Make how you complete quests, or not complete quests actually have an impact. Like, if you don't save little Billy from the well, expect the townspeople to not be very nice to you. Even just little things like that.

Overall, I've found it's more satisfying when players are left on their own to discover both the meaningful and meaningless things in the game. When there's consequences for the things they do and when they're challenged unexpectedly or forced to be creative.

In the end, the elder scrolls games still want to tell you their stories. They want you to explore the world, find the sidequests, follow the main quest and hear all the cool narratives they've concocted for you.

Instead, they should take that world they've got and do their best to make it as fun as possible for players to play their own stories through the game.

Whether it's the joy of figuring out that strange idol you found in that one dungeon will let you get past that big ass door or those tough monsters that have been nagging at you since you found them earlier, or discovering for yourself, little Billy was actually the heir to the throne in hiding because of some interpersonal struggles in the Royal family you only learn about after journeying there. Learning about some hidden artifact weapon or armour or something and finding out it's actually pretty awesome when you get it.

I think there's a missed opportunity for open world games. It would be cool to see one that unravels like a giant puzzle, rather than simply being a stage for the developers set pieces.

Morrowind has a wide spectrum of difficulty but in the end it's like Dark Souls. Don't charge head-on, run around and find good items first.

Specifically soul gems and high-value amulets/rings. How to win at Morrowind? Enchantments. Get the Fortify Skill spell from Mournhold and imbue an expensive ring with xxx pts of Fortify Enchant for 1 second. Cast the effect and instantly open your inventory.

Now you can practically become Exodia. Open lock 100pts? Fire, frost, and shock damage 100pts at the same time? Paralyse for 30 seconds? My favorite is resist magicka 100pts for 1 second, enough to slip on the boots of blinding speed without being blinded.

Buying these enchantments from a mage would cost you hundreds of thousands. You only need to kill 1-2 dark brotherhood dudes and sell their gear to pay for your initial boost and have enough GP left for fast travel forever. Spellmaking and enchantments are in a different league from Oblivion and Skyrim.

A lot of people mention RNG and such but you just need to train some stats. Don't forget to Admire the trainer to 90-100pts to get huge discounts. You can get easy money from soul trapping monsters in stolen gems and selling them, selling nice NPC gear, or raiding Vivec vaults. You only need ~10k to max out a skill with a trainer. Your greatest difficulties in Morrowind will be where to sell this 500K's worth of NPC gear you got from killing a few dudes at a plantation.

For me the novelty of Morrowind doesn't quite last, you could just play Skyrim imho.

Morrowind had a world that was so expansive at the time it was awe inspiring. I think that was the main thing that made it so wild. It lacked a lot of quality of life features that make it hard to play today, and I remember routinely taking a break then forgetting which five month long plot I had been playing before going on vacation for a week. Just not the kind of game you can pick up in a weekend.

Most quality of life features just make games a bit boring though, like WoW-style waypoint markers where you don’t even read the quests or talk to people anymore because the game tells you where to go.

Skyrim is especially bad imo because it all takes place in the same biome with no sense of “wtf is going on here?”

My advice to people here: Get OpenMW and start playing Morrowind with a notepad open that you can alt-tab into for notes. I never beat the game until last year.

If the pace is too slow, fine, just open up the console and find the command to double or triple your walking speed. It’s a game best enjoyed slow otherwise, as you unfold the mysteries of the world. I think it definitely holds up to 2021.

It's painful but the walking speed is intentional. You're supposed to trudge through the world for a couple levels so that you feel so much faster by level 5, and really fast by level 10 or 15.

The hardest part of morrowind these days is those first five levels, when in addition to learning the game's systems, you have to get past the game intentionally being harsh. With the low speed, the bad rolls, and the crappy fatigue, it takes a toll.

One fun way to deal with the speed issue is the "boots of blinding speed."

They're easy to get, and they let your character run extremely quickly. But they also completely blind you - the screen goes black when you put them on.

You can get them by escorting or killing a traveler on a road near near Caldera. They promise you a great treasure if you walk them to a nearby town, but the boots are pretty useless if you don't have a way to resist magic.

Personally, I liked the game's sense of humor.

I can't believe so many people got filtered by the bandit in the cave near seyda neen, me included. Years later I got filtered by dark souls, and now it's total war. I went back and replayed them all with a new mindset based on learning, and it's a totally novel experience.

It depends on your playing style. If you don't have time to get very immersed and just want to relax for a bit, then a game like MW is not going to work for you.

Personally I tend to go for less complex when I have time to play, but a slight hoarder mentality makes me spend far too much time on inventory management in these types of games. I couldn't even get into Skyrim because of that and the game only became fun for me when I disabled the inventory limit.

After that it was great, except for that one mission where they take all your stuff and give it all back at the end. The script, that plays a tiny sound effect for every item you receive, is not built for the amount of items I received at the time. It sounded like damage to my speakers and ears.

It depends on your free time , what I was a child I could waste hours trying to parse some instructions like "take a right after the big rock then a left after the curved tree" , the issue I had is that this is ambiguous, "is this rock the big rock or that one there", "did I waled to much and missed the path", "is this the path or is just some clearing" . I finished Gothic and Gothic2 with no internet for help but today I don't have the time to play similar games - but maybe is not the time but maybe I changed, the most hours I spent in last years were in Minecraft and Skyrim(not playing the vanilla main quest),

Funny enough I played again Morrowind a year back(managed to hack the openmw engine to make it read the text for me) and I stopped after I got lost trying to find a location to complete some quest, at least a general area on the map would be helpful.

For anyone else who is interested in reliving the nostalgia of Morrowind, but is turned off by how outdated it feels now, I highly recommend Morroblivion.

https://morroblivion.com/

There's also Morrowind in Skyrim.

https://tesrskywind.com/

Looks amazing, thank you for sharing.

If being slow annoys you then the game gives you ways to improve that. You can train attributes to get faster, craft spells that make you fly and move faster, collect items that boost your speed.

And you can also memorize the fast travel options which unlike other games aren't just clicking on a map but using restricted teleportation spells, items or talking to NPCs and employing their services. They form a sort of transportation network.

It's also totally unbalanced, if you want to lookup a guide you can figure out how to become the flash in a short time and leap over mountains.

The game gives you a lot of freedom.

I think Morrowind wasn't as much of a masterpiece as people claim it to be sometimes, but it has a lot of nostalgia because it was one of the first 3D open world RPGs people were exposed to. In Central/Eastern Europe Gothic 1 and 2 have the same spot, being a cult classic, overshadowing Morrowind.

Give Oblivion a try if you haven't. It has less flavour than Morrowind, but it's a great combination of the older style of game writing with more modern mechanics. I still have vivid memories of the Assassin's guild storyline and all the Sheogorath stuff..

Haha yeah that sounds right. I think it’s time has passed as we have become accustomed to some of the nice quality of life improvements in modern games. My most vivid memories of Morrowind involve trying to use the paper map that shipped with the game to interpret vague quest directions and find the place I was supposed to be going. Lots of wandering around lost in the Ashlands

Morrowind is a hell of a grind. It didn’t detract when that was more common and when I was a kid with all kinds of free time. I tried it again but didn’t have time for the grind so it just didn’t work for me anymore :/

That said it’s one of my favorite games for what it was when I had time for that.

I dealt with that accidentally by finding "Boots of Blinding Speed" off of Pemenie in the western swamps; then later finding the Cuirass of the Savior's hide in Tel Fyr. It increases run speed a ton, and it works with levitate, so if you have the levitate spell you can speed around the map.

[1] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Pemenie_and_the_Boots_of_...

[2] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Cuirass_of_the_Savior%27s...

I found some extreme jump spells at the start of the game, which let you travell a huge distance, then you crash to your death. They were more a joke than a real spell.

I found I could save, jump, look around, die, load, jump again, use the gained knowledge to end in the water or against a tall building or on someone's head or whatever, and live.

I made a mod on PC back in the day which was modeled off of The Matrix Reloaded’s hallway of doors to address this very problem.

“Welcome to Balmora, Mr. Anderson...”

It’s one of those games that it feels best to not really know what type of game it is at first going in. It felt like the ultimate “lots and lots under the surface” game when it came out, but now so many features have been coopted what seemed really clever before now feels like a waste of time since you are more intimately familiar with the mechanics. It’s a “what’s over there?” game.

rpgs are kind of chore simulators

the other comments have a lot of good points, but one thing i see left out -- the biggest difference between skyrim and morrowind is their growth curves. Skyrim is logarithmic while morrowind is sigmoid -- very flat and punishing in the early game. but once you hit that first inflection point it gets a lot more fun. you enter a feedback loop of getting missions -> winning combat -> getting paid -> getting stronger -> repeat

but you definitely have to have a mindset for taking it slow and appreciate exploring a hand crafted world piece by piece.

Create a spell that increases your speed, strength and jump to 100 for 1 second. Have the spell Slow Fall ready. Take a running start, cast the spell and jump immediately. Boom, instant travel.

Mark/recall helps a lot.

I find it unplayable without a speed/stamina mod tbh.

Morrowind's 'fast travel' system feels like a drawback since it makes you skip the content/world. I generally start using stuff like silt striders after taking the walking road a couple times perhaps

I could not tolerate the game at walking speed. I downloaded a "full stamina" mod so I could at least run everywhere. Faster movement was one of the main rewards in the game for me, from flying shrines to Jump items to teleportation.

Its a product of its time. Back in the day it was amazing. But by today's standards it is not very engaging. I spent hours and hours on it, and yet, I can't even play for an hour today. Too bad really, as it is truly unique.

It's 20 years old, open world games tend to age poorly. I loved Morrowind when it came out but I tried playing it again a few years ago and it wasn't great.

It seems like the kind of game you can only enjoy with the patience of a teenager. Like most rpgs far as I'm concerned.

It's a hard game to pick up now if you don't have experience playing when it was new. There have been so many things about RPGs that have come to be expected: evenly distributed fast travel, objective indicators, a compass, a quest menu, favorite item hotkeys, etc.

To pick it up now, the early levels are such a slog: constant stamina drain, slow leveling, etc that unless you really want to dig in, you'll never get to the "good part".

I remember thinking that the game felt like the fanciest database client I've ever seen. Still fun though

Just an FYI, but Morrowind runs great on Android using OpenMW.

A MUD I worked (uh volunteered, as a total newbie) on had a soft-reboot implementation for deploys that blew my mind when I first saw it in action. Open telnet connections were all sent keep alives before the MUD launched a new instance of itself from the executable (which may have been a different version from the currently running copy) and then killed itself. To users on the other end a message appeared saying "Relaunching the server" and was followed up shortly by "You may now resume play". Since this engine was designed to constantly fall over due to instabilities and OOMs it stored the current game state in a persistent state (originally on-disk files - most of it was migrated to MySQL) so the only things that really needed hacking were re-acquiring the right sockets and remembering which user is which.

This included, FYI, under development new game elements which were mostly written and launched using a mix of things called RPROGs, OPROGs, CPROGs and Descs (among other things) all of which were written in a custom domain language input into the MUD itself - devs like myself worked only on underlying mechanics and had no need to wander into the specifics of all those triggers.

This probably opened up a number of security holes but, given that the game only ever checked the first six characters of a password (and checked them one by one against a plaintext copy - that was patched) there were lower fruit available to criticize.

If you want to check it out an older copy is available open-sourced[1] - it's a DIKU variant MUD.

1. https://github.com/webbj74/RPI-Engine

Copyover MUD servers used to do all sorts of cool stuff. I remember seeing one that would reboot by:

1. Open a pipe

2. fork()

3. parent exec()'s the new binary with an argument saying "reload yourself from pipe at FD #n"

4. child writes the entire game state including open connections down the pipe, and closes

It's done this way so the PID of the process doesn't change.

Great example of the benefits of crash-only software.

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos03/tech/full_paper...

As far as I remember, this wasn't a "hack", but "booting into a new map" was a recommended technique in the SDK documentation to reduce loading times, simplify memory management and reduce the memory needed for code (e.g. you'd compile different "executables" for different parts of the game, like main menu vs singleplayer-mode vs multiplayer-mode).

Exactly. This isn't some amazing thing that only Morrowind did -- it was a standard practice that was made available via a well documented API.

In fact, your example of main menu vs single player vs multiplayer is still the example provided as the use case for similar APIs on more recent consoles.

Not just consoles -- games based on id Tech 3 (Quake 3's engine) would often ship with separate executable files on PC for single- and multi-player.

The video linked in the article is a lot more technical and refers to the, indeed documented, the XLaunchNewImage function. I'd give it a watch!

I was surprised to see that (at least on the 360) there was no way for a title to terminate itself; the game process ran until it was killed by something else (e.g., the user launching another title, or shutting the console down).

Another surprise was the utter lack of a date-and-time clock chip. Without a network (and I'm guessing, without actually connecting to XBox Live), the 360 had no idea what time it was. That saved a bunch of money on hardware, and removed headaches involving coin cells (such as shipping policies).

It's still the case on a Series X. There are separate pools for applications and games, as well, and the Series X is able to keep state for multiple running games at once, which is nice.

The only downside is that it seems to cause a certain amount of pain with applications sometimes not working when there's a contest over sending Dolby to a receiver.

On the time thing: turns out that PlayStation 3 and 4 will stop letting you run games if you replace the battery and it can't re-sync time with the PSN.

To be more precise, the "if your battery dies you can't play games" thing only applies to downloaded PS3 games. It does apply to all PS4 games (both physical and digital) though.

You can only exit PS3/4/5 games by pressing the PlayStation button; I don't know if this is a technical or UX/cert limitation.

Cert. Pretty standard rule, no quit or exit buttons on menus. It is the first thing I implement when making a new main menu.

...so why are we still confronted with “Press [Start] to play” messages in splash-screens? It feels like an anachronism... outside of retail environments games don’t need an “attract mode” - the only thing it’s attracting is my sense of ire...

On older consoles (X360, at least), that screen served two purposes:

- prompt the user to pick a location for their saved game (the console supported saves on the internal HDD, over USB, and later featured cloud saves)

- prompt the user to pick their local profile

For online-connected games, it also provides a "safe" spot to land if there are connection issues, which are very common nowadays (many games have online components and will drop the connection if put into sleep mode).

Just a design choice, I added one to Railgrade since I like the look. It gives the opening less clutter and a chance for players to get oriented.

On switch many games use the "Press L + R" pattern to detect which controller is the preferred controller.

> It gives the opening less clutter and a chance for players to get oriented

An attract-screen for a privately owned game isn’t “player orientation”: it’s a monkey-ladder scenario[1]. Just give me the main-menu right-away; just like how all PC games do.

————————-

[1] I’m aware the actual story is likely apocryphal: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/games-primates-play/...

I only recently got back into PC gaming and all the titles I've played so far have an annoying "press space" or "press enter" before the main menu, before loading or both. This is with Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk 2077 and the original Halo:CE (don't ask :D).

What happened if you deliberately did something stupid like dereferencing a null pointer? What if you returned from the loop on the main thread?

I don't remember for sure. I think that if the title exited (by returning, or hitting an unhandled exception), the console tore everything down and relaunched the title . . . but it also might have just let threads die until there weren't any left to run, and then just sat there (running just system and UI threads).

It wasn't something I expected, and there were good reasons for the behavior other than "let's hassle developers with more annoying cert requirements".

>I was surprised to see that (at least on the 360) there was no way for a title to terminate itself; the game process ran until it was killed by something else (e.g., the user launching another title, or shutting the console down).

This is true of iOS apps too. Apple highly discourages apps closing themselves (maybe even outright forbids it, it's been a while)

I remember some launch demos were able to exit, usually with a forced splash screen ad for the full game. I thought it was a neat trick to use the xbox button to quit out of those and skip the ad.

So maybe exiting was allowed early on and discontinued later.

The original Xbox was a huge pain in terms of memory. I'm amazed they got Morrowind to run on it at all. I worked on an Xbox game, and me and another programmer (much more skilled) spent a couple weeks trying to get memory usage down so that it would fit - and to eliminate almost all leaks.

There was a TCR that required the game to be able to run for an extended period, don't remember how long. But to prepare for it, I'd set it up to run in a loop overnight on the dev kit, and if it was locked up in the morning when I came in, I knew I still had work to do.

Interesting article but I just have to say that XLaunchNewImage is basically execve or kexec. Calling it “rebooting” makes it seem like the game developers put in some dirty/crazy hacks when in reality all they did was call a public API that was explicitly designed to accommodate this use case (e.g. not resetting video state).

Morrowind for Xbox is the reason I’m a game developer today. I loved the game so much, but the Xbox version was really, really slow and wasn’t able to use mods. I convinced my parents to split the difference with me on a pc barely capable to play the PC version. My brother and I made countless mods and quests.

Video from Modern Vintage Gamer walking through the process of how this worked along with a demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0TKwPnHc-M

This guy is the best video game tech youtuber out here. He knows his stuff deeply.

He was part of the original Xbox homebrew scene.

It is funny they say the Xbox was known for only having 64mb of RAM. The PS2 only had 32mb. The GameCube only had 27mb.

Your numbers are a bit off. The PS2 had 36 MB of RAM (32 main, 4 graphics), and the Gamecube had 43 MB (24 main, 16 audio, 3 graphics).

Why did the GameCube dedicate so much of its RAM to audio?

It wasn’t dedicated to audio - it was DRAM (slower than the main RAM) that could be used for various things - but audio was one of the most common.

The RAM could be used for things other than audio, but audio on the GC was driven by a dedicated special DSP chip, so it's not weird for that thing to have its own bank of memory.

AFAIK the Wii used the same audio chip and I think the Wii U might have as well?

Indeed. XBox was the easy target of those 3.

Presumably then if the game was glitching on you and you did a save/load then the problem would magically fix itself.

(have you tried turning it off and back on again?)

Today you can run Morrowind quite well on the Xbox One (not to be confused with the 1st gen Xbox.)

I highly recommend running it on PC with OpenMW, especially with the Tamriel Rebuilt mod installed.

that was a great post, typical fun exploitation to rid yourself of the problem of memory management. There was a way to force garbage collection in Flash as well that was used by the clever pros at the time.

It blew my mind to hear that the Xbox ran on 64mb of RAM.

An interesting quirk was that retail units used the same motherboard as the devkits with 128mb of RAM, so you could DIY your own 128mb Xbox

https://quade.co/2018/xbox-128mb-ram-upgrade/

Regular Xbox games don't benefit of course, but it becomes possible to play arcade games based on the Sega Chihiro platform (an Xbox derivative with 128mb RAM)

PlayStation 2 had 32MB of RAM, and GameCube had 24MB.

64MB was small compared to contemporary PCs, but it was a powerhouse among the major console competitors.

As I said in another comment, those numbers are a bit off. The PS2 had 36 MB of RAM (32 main, 4 graphics), and the Gamecube had 43 MB (24 main, 16 audio, 3 graphics). In any case, much less than the Xbox.

That blew my mind as well. I remember it looking so good.

Xbox - 64mb

Xbox 360 - 512mb

Xbox One - 8 GB (later 12 GB)

Xbox Series X - 16 GB

This last one also surprises me, was expecting at least 32GB

At least in the PS5, the ultra-fast SSD and some technology around it are supposed to drastically reduce the need to keep things in RAM in case they are needed quickly later. There's a talk about that and other PS5 innovations by Mark Czerny. It's a very high quality talk.

> Xbox Series X - 16 GB

> This last one also surprises me, was expecting at least 32GB

Well the GPU is comparable to 8GB models, so I can see why 16GB would work fine. You don't need that much space for game state.

Though looking into the Series X more, they sure set up the ram weirdly. There are 4 1GB memory chips and 6 2GB chips. This gives it 10GB of very fast memory, and 6GB of somewhat fast memory. The operating system reserves 2.5GB of the somewhat fast memory, and games get 13.5GB

The 'natural' setup would be 20GB, and they didn't even go that high, so they must be plenty confident that 32GB is well beyond what they need.

While I have no insider knowledge here, weird memory architectures like that are often a cost measure. The XBox 360 had a small block of super-fast memory alongside its huge block of slower memory (the super-fast memory was used for framebuffers, among other things) and there have been occasional PC video card releases that had weird tiered memory architectures as well - I believe NVIDIA released at least one card where part of its VRAM had certain limitations.

> While I have no insider knowledge here, weird memory architectures like that are often a cost measure.

It depends on what you're comparing to. It costs more than having 8x2GB, but costs less than 10x2GB.

> I believe NVIDIA released at least one card where part of its VRAM had certain limitations.

Well there was the fiasco that was the GTX 970, because one chunk of memory was one seventh as fast as the rest. Plus a couple other quirky models. This move should be much easier to deal with, and making developers deal with it is the kind of thing a console can do much more easily than PC hardware.

I think the theory with the current gen is that devs get a lot more out a mere doubling because of all the improvements to SSD streaming.

Like, it's 16gb, but it's 16gb that only has to cover the next few seconds of gameplay, not the next 30 seconds.

16GB of GDDR6 is pretty expensive - moving to 32GB for a 2020 device would be cost prohibitive on already expensive devices

I suspect the budget went mostly into having 1 TB of NVMe storage; still shipping with spinning disks had become the big bottleneck on the One/PS4.

Modern games on PC don't even use 10GB.

Well, remember that consoles use unified memory. A modern high end PC game can easily use 5GB of VRAM + 8GB of RAM.

Yep. The function would reboot into a new executable without disrupting what was on the screen.

I don’t recall which one, but this was used by an FPS to switch between single-player vs. multi-player exes that were developed by two completely different studios.

Call of duty did it first I think but it's not uncommon to do these days...

PC versions of CoD do this, and switching between mode on a 360 was always kinda slow so I could definitely believe its doing something similar

Good to mention OpenMW: https://openmw.org

Skip the blogspam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0TKwPnHc-M

His video on Monday was great about this. I like that they checked first if they were running low on memory and then just rebooted the darn thing if it was.

Wow, that's a cool hack. I wonder if they did more stuff like that to go around Xbox limitations. Reminds me of Crash Bandicoot hacks for ps1 :))

For those who haven't read/watched it: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/war-stories-how-crash...

It is indeed a story of creativity in design.

Complete with a cautionary tale about the dangers of being too creative: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/...

It's notable that the controller and memory card slot are on the same bus-- in fact, the system isn't talking to the memory card directly! It has to send requests and data through the controller, back to the system, and then to the card port.

This is because the original specification would have had a memory card slot in the controller but it was too expensive. They also had considered using floppies for storage, but they were too unreliable (and my experiences with 1.44MB 3.5s definitely agrees that consumer-grade cheap disks sucked hard)

Bumping the timer spreed is not the creative part, creative part was zeroing on the issue. For software guys used to reliable hardware and no prior knowledge how to debug hardware bugs this is hell.

Wow. That story is going to give me nightmares.

It's indeed a bit like a kexec.

On system initialization, kernel routines are copied into RAM by the bootloader[1]. Executables run in ring 0, and have a jump table to call kernel routines in their own address space (IIRC) [2].

As such, loading any executable counts as a soft reboot.

Also, there is a functioning open source emulator, Xqemu [3] (and its sibling/fork focused on speed and compatibility more than accuracy, xemu [4])

I recommend reading "17 mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system", which is very informative [5].

[1]: https://xboxdevwiki.net/Boot_Process

[2]: https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel

[3]: https://xqemu.com/

[4]: https://xemu.app/

[5]: https://xboxdevwiki.net/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xb...

I’ve been working in games since before then, and it’s a common trick. It’s often portrayed as if it would occur because of poor memory management (I.e. memory not being freed), but even with perfect memory management it can happen in constrained memory environments (like consoles).

What happens is you would are allocating large memory chunks at level loading time, and potentially a number of smaller allocations during the a user playing that need to be persistent (for example, player save data). You would inevitably end up with a small block of memory allocated in the middle of a large free chunk, and would unable to allocate a large chunk that spanned the small allocated chunk. This was manageable up to point, you would try and pre allocate as much of the persistent memory as possible so that it would end up at similar addresses and contiguous, but it was difficult to guarantee.

Theoretically, of course, you can develop without allocating persistent memory in game, but it becomes difficult to maintain, and limits you in other areas. If you used any 3rd party libraries that allocated memory, or certain template functions or standard library functions that allocated memory, you had to work around that. If your game wasn’t linear and players can move around dynamically, this becomes exponentially difficult.

On consoles, we also had to pass “soak” tests, where the game has to run in a demo mode for 24-48 hours or longer, continuously without crashing or errors.

Inevitably the only solution was to force all your memory to get remapped, but the only way to do that was to reallocate everything in a relatively predictable order, and the only way to do that was to save your state, force a reboot, and reload. Hence the “hack”, except that this was so common, facilities existed that helped you do it. Normally, there was a chunk of memory that persisted between soft reboots, so you could store your state here. You could also pass flags to the rebooted executable, to tell it where or how to load.

It took me a few minutes, after reading both the article and the first few comments here, before I realized Morrowind was a game (in the Elder Scrolls series, it seems), and not the code name for some early Xbox firmware (what I presumed at first).

There was a Sega Genesis game (I think it was X-Men) where it prompted you to "reset the master computer" or summat. There was no button on the controller that would reset the computer. Instead you had to mash RESET on the console itself! Somehow, it saved a bit of state that would detect a soft reboot at that point and resume the game from before you hit reset.

Too bad later Genesis models lacked a RESET button...

This was common in console games and console SDKs had special APIs to support this. It's a decent solution to memory leak and fragmentation issues

> Presumably, the reason for this behaviour was that it was simpler to boot the game fresh when loading a save, rather than trying to unload all the game assets in memory from the current game.

So, 'arena'/'region-based' memory management, of a sort. Figures. Wonder if any other games used the same trick.

Nice write-up! The Nintendo Wii did more or less the same thing. It would (re-load) various IOSes [1] when opening a game or applet.

[1]: https://wiibrew.org/wiki/IOS

I think that's a pretty clever hack, and a strong case to make startup and reboot times as fast as possible, especially for a single purpose device (or operating mode, e.g. boot straight to the game in this case).

Interesting parallel to the “nightly reboot”, the Java community’s dirty little secret ... memory management is hard.

I'm reminded of the way GitLab built a whole architecture to cope with their serious memory leaks, rather than fixing the leaks. [0] This is despite that GitLab is written in Ruby, a garbage-collected language.

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/operations/unicorn...

Why Java though? Java uses object handles, not raw pointers, so a stop-the-world GC in a JVM can relocate and defragment memory whenever it wants.

Java because GC lures people into a false sense of security. You can still leak memory by failing to release references here and there and in a heavily used system this can rack up quite considerably over a 24 hour period and it's often more pragmatic just to reboot the application than get somebody to fix it. I suppose most other languages/environments could suffer this but with Java it's drummed into you from the very start that "you can't get memory leaks" so people just don't worry about those things.

Well, that's what I call thinking outside the (X)box to work around a limitation.

great hack! thanks for share

Soft Reboot, is that like Sudo Purge?

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