Morrowind 20-year anniversary book
mw.thenet.sk
mw.thenet.sk
The game more than delivered on my expectations. The music still soothes me to a large degree, and the world (glass and daedric armour or houses made from giant mushrooms) was so absolutely fantastic to me.
I've always wanted to experience the exact same thing, but with present (or future) graphics. I've tried installing the various mods and rebuilds, but it never was that great an experience.
Recently I bought Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) while it was on sale, and while I think the game itself is quite boring and constantly nudging you to subscribe, I was blown away by exploring Vvardenfell. In my opinion it really captures the same mood and it's... Just. So. Beautiful!
Not quite RDR2 graphics, but it really hit a soft spot for me, seeing Seyda Neen "remastered". I can highly recommend spending the dollars/euros, simply for that dose of nostalgia :-) or simply an image search to see some of the good old scenes with modern day graphics
I don't know if any game can quite capture what I loved about Morrowind, but you might also like Outward, or Kenshi, if you'd like a similar feeling of discovering and surviving in a strange world that wasn't designed around you.
Part of the appeal of From Software's games is their coyness. Very little is explained, and players need to piece the story together from scattered scraps of information.
Morrowind is a comparative firehouse of information. There is much more (mostly silent) dialogue, and there are a lot of books:
https://www.imperial-library.info/books/morrowind/by-categor...
tl;dr: Not enough reading.
Elden Ring is a good but drastically differently designed game. It is very unlike The Elder Scrolls by all accounts. Well, all they share in common is basic RPG elements, but that's about it.
First and foremost, there's barely anything to interact with except for attacking things. Morrowind would be a boring disaster of a game if it'd be just the never-ending flocks of Cliff Racers to cut through between a few cutscenes where the key plot points are explained.
Elden Ring has extremely limited non-hostile NPCs. They're essentially static fixtures, best they can do is switch between a few cyclic animations (like those merchants). I felt genuinely disappointed by how they had to cheat around this limitation to make Millicent just stand. But okay, I get it, no one's gonna fall at me from the sky, fine. Still, the quality of NPCs is subpar. Dialogues are so scarce and limited, they make Mass Effect's chatwheel feel as if Commander Shepard is a master orator.
Then, some reviewers brag about the lore and I found it extremely shallow, just the basic worldbuilding. There are like about 50 characters and their stories, plus some fairly weakly explained core concepts about the world order - but not much else. Elden Ring's world has no casual history, it's not a world where anyone had ever lived despite the prologue bragging otherwise. Over the half of ruins are just some meaningless assets - either just some walls or some constructs with faux doors and windows, an attempt to make it look like it is some post-apocalyptic world in shambles, but you need to exercise a fairly strong suspension of disbelief to make it feel so. Shacks and towers make it a bit more believable, but they're just... locations where someone had possible lived. Absolute best you'd get is some tools of the past occupant, and that's an exception, not a rule. Even the large and architecturally well-designed areas (so-called legacy dungeons) don't tell their stories - e.g. the Stormveil Castle is huge, but it barely has any history - just a gallery of untold potential stories, missed opportunities. It's a stark contrast from, let's say, ELEX or Horizon or Fallout, where every other building you can walk in (and you can walk into most of them) has some casual story to it, traces and echoes of the people who had lived there before the catastrophe, told either in notes or environmental cues.
Maybe this is misdirected critique - I get it, game designers might have wanted an alien world (not too alien though, just some medieval fantasy, still closely tied to human cultures), gnostic, unexplained and mystical, where most things just are and logic may not even apply. Symbols and decorations instead of writing and narration, inverbal cues opposed to verbal ones. But that's how exactly it's very unlike TES (which has both!) and why I don't think it's a good recommendation.
And there are games with alien worlds that also prioritize form, style and artistry over actual meaning, yet they don't give up on the meaning but make player assimilate it. Discarding an opportunity to enrich the lore by talking about it is just... weird. Like author is trying to cover up that all that lore is shallow and they haven't really thought it up beyond the surface. Just compare the lengths Disco Elysium's writers explore their anthropic-but-alien world - such as concept of The Pale (sure, that's a very different kind of a game). Pardon the pun but all that Greater Will stuff just pales in comparison. And there's also an example of Pathologic, or if you're up for an extreme weirdness - Vangers (a Jabberwocky of video games).
And lastly, people praise Elden Ring (and Souls-like) for having an open world without auto-leveling, so the content is "gated" by your skill (or level). But that was basically the norm for a long while, in a lot of games. Remember Gothic - it had all of that, but was on entirely another level of game design, despite being over 20 years old. I'm really, really looking for the upcoming remaster.
So, comparing various aspects of Elden Ring to various games that have similar aspects I can say it's definitely not a masterpiece. Just an above-average game - well, it surely got some love and even though neither aspect is stellar they're not awfully poor either (I just don't want to search for negative examples how bad things can be, hah). Except maybe for combat. Though idk what someone with extensive arcade fighting game experience would say - I'm really not an expert on those, so I'd leave this aspect unexplored.
Pardon my rant. I'm just disappointed in Elden Ring because it was not what I hoped it would be, misguided by all the hype (marketing). I'm really trying to squeeze out most of its worldbuilding, story and quests - the very stuff I've so highly praised games like Morrowind for - but constantly getting disappointed. I can guarantee it - it's not about that.
The community around this game never ceases to amaze me. OpenMW [0] is one of my favorite open source projects. Planning to make a little something standalone with their new Lua scripting support.
Also there is a Modathon this month, with a huge number of contributions! [1]
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/ua4daw/morrowind...
A year or two ago (it was shortly after they fixed shadows in the engine, which is what I'd been waiting for) I played the entire main quest and a good chunk of the side quests in it, plus the whole main quest of Tribunal, and started Bloodmoon (got distracted and stopped there). I cranked draw distance up quite a ways (nothing crazy, but way longer than the default), played at 4K resolution, and ran it through Mod Manager 2 with maybe 8-12 mods—don't remember exactly how many, but I've gotta have my herbalism mod, at the very least, or I'm not playing :-) I think I even had Twin Lamps (anti-slavers "guild", think Underground Railroad) in there, and it worked fine.
Zero crashes the whole time, which makes it far better than the original engine. No quest glitches or difficulties. It was perfect.
The only downside is that you can't use mods that directly modify the engine itself because they're all written for Bethesda's executables, specifically. This includes most of the more extreme "pretty" mods that make the graphics look better.
However, OpenMW is already a little better-looking than the original, and you can still install better textures, which helps a lot. I even got a replacement pack for the loading screens, to make them widescreen and HD.
> but I've gotta have my herbalism mod
Which mod is that?
But in the fantasy realm you're right I can't think of anything since Skyrim off the top of my head thats open world AND first person.
Metro is about as on-rails as you can get? It's all "go down this one tunnel and shoot everything" or "follow this actually quite narrow and linear path across the rubble and shoot everything". Some of the missions are literally on rails (you're in a subway, after all)
Far Cry is much more open than Metro, and often has some quite fun things to do if you stray off the mission path and talk to the right person. Depends how much you like to hunt and fish amidst blowing up the bad guys!
I'm not sure I'd call Far Cry series RPGs. Don't mean that in a bad way (I fuckin love Far Cry), I've always seem them as an FPS with stats (a la No One Lives Forever) in an open world.
I really wanted to like The Outer Worlds, but the writing seemed extremely juvenile; it touches on a lot of heavy themes (LGBTQ romance, corporate power, worker exploitation) extremely hamfistedly and without nuance. I had to put it down as I couldn't stop cringing at the writing...
Now, Outer Wilds on the other hand...
However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side. Heck, I think Bethesda copy/pastes too much now compared to something like New Vegas which has barely has any repetition.
Less immersive than an ostensibly grand city that only has a handful of named NPCs and a few guards? The best and worst city Bethesda have made thus far is still Vivec. Best because it has enough NPCs and redundant economy to feel like a plausible city. Worst, simply because the structure of the cantons is poorly conceived, and because the exterior is barren.
Deprecating authored settlements in Fallout 4 was quite disappointing but Boston is probably the most impressive technically, diamond city etc nestled amongst the sprawling and surprisingly explorable ruins of the city.
Basically if I can't get lost, it doesn't feel like a city. I can get lost in Boston or Vivec, those feel like cities. The others require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but Diamond City particularly makes that hard.
I concede that Vivec is dated (although I first played Morrowind about 2 or 3 years ago and still enjoyed it.) I consider Witcher 3's Novigrad as an example of a modern game getting it right. There's not exactly a ton of named NPCs in Novigrad, but there are enough buildings, alleyways, etc to get lost when wandering around. Also there is redundancy in the town's economy; numerous smiths, taverns, etc.
DayZ (and it's ilk) is probably the only game that comes close to 1:1 but is not to most players tastes to take a human amount of time to walk across rows of empty fields. That game is absolutely enormous. It's a pretty niche game though.
Do you think that in the 2020s, we can't do better generators than what existed in the 1990s?
At the time, you could get a demo run a stone so at least some of the party could join quickly. But that took human interaction, some synchronisation ... it was nice and involved.
Disclaimer: I havent touched WoW in more than 10 years, but from what I know of it today -- it's teleport all the way, straight into the instance, with pre-made aor automatically composed groups. You pop in, you loot, you get out. Rinse and repeat.
Some people will enjoy the "instant gratification" part of this. I'm probably amongst those who did not, who don't and who probably never will. It is my opinion (widely shared? no idea) that immersion has been killed by all those "QoL" improvements.
My 2p.
There's really nothing stopping people from going the extra mile for role-playing and immersion, it's more the local server communities that have been harmed by these tools but WoW classic brought back a lot of that "old-school" feel for those who seek it.
I'm not really up on the current state of either but I think there's merit in both approaches, I personally found both enjoyable.
Debatable. I wasn't around for Vanilla but I played Classic up through AQ. The game felt like a walking simulator.
Current WoW is certainly more streamlined, but you still have to earn the ability to travel around faster in current content. One of the Shadowlands zones didn't even let you mount (except for a rare drop for a special mount) until one of the content patches. And that and another zone still don't let you fly.
When you use the matchmade dungeon/raid finder, you do get teleported right into the instance. But for Mythic+ dungeons and Normal or higher raids you still need to manually gather a party and 2 people need to get to the summoning stone.
All of the city portals and the 15 minute hearthstone cooldown do make me a little sad though. My mage portals aren't appreciated nearly as much! :)
Fair enough, didn't know that :)
non combat abilities is something I feel like modern MMO needlessly eschew. Some people just want to fish and read lore and don't care about combat segments at all.
I don't buy that modern players don't have time either. WoW was only seen as an addictive timesink by the contemporary media but if they looked at the average hour counts of most modern multiplayer games, it would surprise many. Most modern service games demand fairly eye-popping time dedication to the casual observer.
I like discovering my own stories, but I want those stories to be how I fought off a dragon to save a town, not how I went into a dungeon for no reason whatsoever and came out with some more treasure and otherwise made no impact on the world.
I could imagine that potentially being extremely immersive, and doing it for a pure text-based interface would be a great first step on eventually doing it for a 3D open world game.
I'd say that having to tell the story in your head is a sign of failure on the part of the game. But, for an open world sandbox RPG, so is restricting you from enacting whatever story you want and we don't have the technology to avoid both.
Rim World, Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi, Caves of Qud are all fantastic narrative generators and give you a crazy amount of freedom.
Another type of game I've fallen in love with that I don't remember being around when I was a kid is automation games like Factorio or Satisfactory. Gives you that open world feeling + exploring but you're not just running errands or slaying dragons.
The basic idea of CRPGs is to give you an avatar that is as different or as similar to you personally as you want and let you experience the avatar's interactions with the world they live in. It might seem that it's currently the case for 90% of the games, but please remember that early CRPGs competed with Pong, Pacman, and Asteroids, not Quake. You'd have a hard time identifying yourself with a paddle or imagining spending your entire life in a maze being chased by ghosts. You would have a much easier time with an Elven archer roaming Middle-Earth, especially if you've read and memorized the Trilogy by heart.
From that basic premise, I'd roughly distinguish two main ways of realizing it: via numbers or words.
By numbers, I mean a situation where your avatar can be described as a bunch of numbers, as is the world, and you're supposed to find your own meaning in those numbers. Which ones matter to you, which you don't care about, or which represent an ability to do things you care about. You are then given an array of activities that both require the numbers to be aligned in a particular way and allow you to improve the numbers for you.
By words, I mean a situation where your avatar is presented to you via description. The numerical values that underpin the avatar identity and the shape of the world are still there, but you experience them only indirectly, through the description of the environment, your avatar actions, and their consequences.
There are not many "pure" realizations of either way because, taken to the extreme, the number case turns into an Excel sheet with all column and row names garbled, while words simply become a book or novel.
Of additional note is the issue of effort on the game creator's part. You generally can't procedurally generate descriptions above a certain length, especially not if you want the descriptions to be meaningful, not only readable. You'd need AGI for that. Procedurally generated content is crucial because it allows you to lengthen the time the game is played. You can read a good fantasy novel in a few days, while you can easily lose 200 hours to a single CRPG.
Back to exploring the wilderness. Morrowind leaned towards the numbers-based gameplay if my memory serves me right. You were required to perform an action repeatedly to improve your skill in that action. Take jumping, for example. I remember locking the spacebar in a depressed position on long treks between cities because jumping raised your strength. On the other hand, it did have a lot of hand-crafted, meaningful locations that you would visit multiple times. It had a few different plotlines you could follow and some memorable NPCs and you were given quite a lot of freedom in how you wanted to interact with the world. These are all features closer to the words-based gameplay. Still, most of the game consisted of repetitive, although more tactical than dexterity-based combat in the wilderness or dungeons.
Some people have a stronger preference for one gameplay style, and for them, Morrowind found a perfect balance. Relatively high freedom in what you could do, the plot, and the NPCs who sometimes even spoke more than a few words, were enough to give them a plausible reason to go and have real fun... By killing skeletons for 5 hours, nearly dying for 4h 50m, then getting a level-up, a corresponding dopamine rush, and going on a skeleton-killing spree in the last 9 minutes. You'd probably die to the boss lich in the last minute, allowing you to rage-quit the game and go back to beating skeletons again the next day.
Is it fun? Yes. It's one of the kinds of fun CRPGs are designed to give you. Since the early days - and I mean the times of ADVENT[ure] and Zork - the CRPGs evolved tens of subgenres, took advantage of the progress in hardware and in the general inflation of game makers' budgets, enlarging the scope, but the basic idea is still the same. To give players either: enough of the descriptions to make grinding meaningful or enough grinding not to frustrate them into not finishing the story.
One note: obviously, at some point nearly all CRPGs became graphical and later multi-media, one way or the other. That didn't, and still doesn't, change much. You can present the description of the world with words alone, with words and images, words and animation, images alone, images and music alone, and so on. What's important is that you are describing a world, an avatar and its actions within that world.
Another note: multi-player changes things drastically in the case of CRPGs, especially if it is not co-operative or is "massive". The metaphor is still the same, but the cost-benefit ratio of various game features is completely unlike the single-player version. MUDs were early multi-player CRPGs evolved as a cross between BBS and IRC, and their rise and eventual brutal demise under the weight of op-wars and spam a warning widely heard by CRPG makers. The MUDs persisted, barely clinging to existence in some niches, and later gave us MMORPGs, which are also completely different from single-player (or 1-4 people coop, later on) games. So I don't think talking about WoW is very relevant to the topic, ie. Morrowind.
TL;DR: I think the distinction of CRPG vs. TRPG is useful, and directly comparing the two doesn't work that well.
I'm not even sure if you can actually reach another town on foot, there's so much of flat boringness. You can definitely get lost and never find your dungeon again in one of those (Arena?) because there's no map helpful enough to find your position.
Of course, I gave up at that point, having run out of things to do (besides walking), and not being able to come back to the fast travel.
But, to go back to the original topic a bit, you only gave up (wandering the wilderness) after you ran out of things to do. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but you did have fun until you had things to do there :P Exploring the wilderness in MM6 and MM7 was also fun, and actually essential if you wanted to seriously power-up your heroes. There were random encounters with enemies, some waaaaaay above your current level, but the physics engine and the exploitable real-time-but-turn-based mechanics were primitive enough to let you, with some luck, camp a troll safely from behind a rock. Then there were one-time semi-random treasures in chests to discover (watch out for traps), hidden locations with quests, altars and trainers, in general everything you would need to take it easy in the latter parts of the game. Of course, there was a high risk of ending up dead, having run into too powerful opponent. For example, in MM7 there was a killable and exploitable dragon (high-level monsters sometimes had more than one drop, and you had to click twice to get them - but if you saved after the first drop, you could repeat second click as long as necessary for there to be 3rd drop generated. Rinse and repeat. I spent a frickin' DAY doing this. Got enough money to last me to endgame, though) in the tutorial, that you could find if you explored a little. It was, obviously, mercilessly slaughtering low-level characters, and it was impossible to kill it without a very heavy save scumming and a lot of preparation. On the flip side, entering a random cave in the tutorial and facing a screenful of fire-breathing winged lizard kind of set the tone of "wilderness exploration" later on.
In summary: exploring the wilderness can be fun, but it's the "numbers based" part of fun. I mean, sightseeing was not really worth it until much later, when the 3d-accelerated graphics begun in earnest. And even then, the main motivation was to level up, find treasures, kill monsters for exp - all focused on bumping up some numerical values in your character sheets. There were certainly some useful clues to discover here and there, and the mentioned hidden locations and quests too, but the meat of the game at that point was to grind. And it was fun! At least as long as monsters still gave you enough exp, the drops were still worth the effort, and you could get back to civilization relatively quickly.
To be honest, I'd be very happy to play a modern take on the CRPGs from around MM6 time. Large, but not vast, maps filled with randomized content but hand-tuned and with frequent hand-made locations, with quests and subplots to discover, without "you cannot go there, because you cannot go there" prevalent in modern CRPGs... I would like it combined with a mainly tactical, but real-time combat as in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. First person perspective, preferably solo, or in a party with mechanics similar to Vampire Redemption/Bloodlines. Non-linear plot, freedom to decide how to finish the more important quests (not just 2 choices, make it 6 at minimum), freedom to ignore the plot entirely and focus on buying a house... Fallout 3 was, IIRC, kind of similar to what I have in mind, but I'd like a dark-fantasy setting. If you know of any game like that, please share :D
https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=1689 (I really can't stand forum-as-documentation...)
Elden Ring is like that (or rather, not in-your-face about it). You can tell it's filling a void because re-releasing the DS formula keeps selling like hot cakes.
He recently completed an epic, multi-chapter, role-played morrowind series[1]. Hundreds of hours of content, and all with an overall story arch. Was a constant of my life for almost a decade and it's still weird to me it's done.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/SorcererDave
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w08TwfG3KDA&list=PL0VJ_-KbXC...
Its so nice to hear so many different stories connected by one shared experience.
So thanks!
"I'll finish watching that, one of these days", I keep telling myself... Well, the seventh time I'll make it to the end for sure!
All well and good until an add-on introduced some guards with a shield that 100% reflected my epic fireball, resulting in not only my character being fried but also my poor PC having a blue screen of death.
In many ways it went beyond Morrowind. Morrowind was huge but it also had moments where it felt mostly text driven to get immersion.
In Gothic for instance, the levels feel incredibly organic and NPCs are doing stuff on their own. For instance, in the wild monsters would engage in combat with each other. Vast underground mining camps require no loading screen to enter and explore.
Have a look at Gothic if you liked Morrowind. The world is nowhere near as huge but the story, dynamic levels/npc, all combined create a fluid and very rewarding almost Skyrim like world in the early 2000s.
Gothic 2 had the newworld, the oldworld, the addonworld and the dragonisland. Only in Gothic 2 are there no "dungeons" (internally indoor vs outdoor maps) so to speak, but there are some underground places which do not require loading screens.
Why I love Gothic so much is because the entire world is handcrafted. Nothing is procedurally generated, they just used their world editor (Spacer, they released it) and placed items, benches, fires, etc etc. This was also done by a much smaller team, basically it started with 2-3 german CS students wanting to make something as cool as Ultima, but of course it got bigger later on.
The monster AI is really great. Various monsters also behave in packs, i.e. you can lure Scavengers away one by one, but Snappers all attack you if one attacks you, even if they didn't see you. They also each have a distinct fighting style (more relevant in Gothic 2 than in Gothic 1), so you can learn patterns and theoretically beat the biggest monsters with terrible gear.
I can only recommend it as well if you like these type of older RPGs.
To me some of the best games I played allows me to build these internal dialogues with what has transpired so far. So much of Gothic 1 world seemed organic and quite dangerous with enough diversity and variability that creates unique character for each region.
I can't put in to words just how good that game was. Running through a dark forest with low HP, trying to make it to the new camp, witnessing bunch of Snappers gang up on a Scavenger and attack it etc while I hide. That was super impressive because it made me think there was some food chain ecosystem going on.
The story was quite good too and I could identify with the struggles easily. It was a believable world. Bunch of rebel lawlessness in new camp, the resource centric old camp competing, and buddha like spiritual group who seeks to escape the samsara.
I just have not played a good RPG like this on the PC, Stalker also shared similar qualities, perhaps FF7. But it was far more enjoyable than any new games I played recently. In fact I stopped purchasing new games since 2017.
Really wish the coop multiplayer mode in Gothic would've been released, used to get super excited seeing that.
I played this game first as a kid, and it really left an impression on me. And yes, the game world is just so real, it all kinda makes sense. The forest has a really dark atmosphere, they did a funny trick there, they hardcoded it that your character state goes into threat mode, so the music changes to the threat version.
I have to be honest, it kind of ruined RPGs for me long term, since none of them really ever held up to the standards Gothic set that early. Too bad PiranhaBytes also never truly recaptured what they had.
And yeah coop would have been fun. Final game still links to wsocks, because they had it internally at some point, and some Net classes even remain too, but it's all unuseable. There are multiplayer servers though for actual roleplaying, but the multiplayer part is written outside afaik.
1. https://kotaku.com/morrowind-completely-rebooted-your-xbox-d...
Morrowind had a much more interesting world than Oblivion, but I really appreciated that Oblivion did not do that. And that NPCs could chase me out of buildings.
Anyway, maybe the full weight of the hypervisor-based solution didn't land until the 360, but even a generation later, other players were in catch up mode like, wasn't the Wii still doing goofy stuff like making individual games include the code to show the "system" pause screen when the home button was pressed?
It's easier to just load big chunks of data at pre-defined memory addresses, and once you need to overwrite most of the memory anyway with new data, starting from a clean slate with a reboot is much more straightforward.
Aside: I would love to see the other regions in Nirn someday as well. We've yet to see anything beyond Tamriel in the modern games, and there are even other races / species we have yet seen which could make for a really interesting game if done correctly.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Nirn
Edit:
If they do a Morrowind Sequel or Prequel they need to be careful not to overlook even minor details, unless they go far enough forward / backward to where most things are ignored, but I would say even check the books and the quests of the game to make sure nothing is amiss.
On the story front I think what it did well was have the lore tie into weird things about the game world. The sand storm, the blight, the floating rock are things that dagoth did on purpose. Likewise, vivec and company are "Gods", that you can meet, but they're also Dunmer who used artifacts to become immortal who knew you in a past life. The visuals are more tangible because the story is integrated into what you see.
Bethesda is culturally a "level design developer" imo. Kind of like Valve in that regard. They have a technical idea of what they want the player to experience, not a strong narrative one. New Vegas is so interesting because Obsidian clearly do not have the same culture, it was ALL traditional RPG storytelling (and some okayish levels) in the same Bethesda framework.
I know by now my favorite play style (Dark Elf, long sword, heavy armor, destruction magic). But I need to branch out to try something else, but then I won't be playing my favorite way! Magic in particular is pretty difficult to work with in this game.
I still remember discovering the mushroom buildings of Seyda Neen.
You're probably the first person I've ever seen to have confused the Scroll of Icarian Flight with the Boots of Blinding Speed. ;)
As it happened, the weather was foggy, so I got quite close to the tower before it suddenly loomed up out of the fog in front of me. I've never been quite so stunned by anything in a game before or since.
Games feel...not as great as before. Ghost of Tsushima was excellent but it's been a while since a game has truly made me go, "Whoa!"
All of the games have this half life where you love it for the first 60 hours, enjoy for another 100 hours of modding and then you are sort of disgusted by the realization that NO game can really sustain this level of scrutiny and you see all the seams, copy-paste that such a diverse world needs.
The Outer Worlds was undoubtably an attempt to mimic the style of Bethesda but I honestly couldn't play more than 30-40 hours of it. Even New Vegas, my favourite in that engine, doesn't have enough of the repetitive grind that really makes these games so unbelievably popular.
Play the game with the original view distance, and the island feels enormous, mysterious, full of possibility.
Turn up the draw distance, and you realize that Pelagiad is closer to Balmora than my house is to the corner store.
What's perhaps more surprising is that Microsoft-owned-Bethesda hasn't yet started working on an official remaster of it. Given that Bethesda still uses the same engine, it would be relatively cheap for them to do as opposed to building a new game and it would sell like hotcakes.
'same engine' is something that gets thrown around a lot by salty players but it's not really reflective of the massive changes that have happened since then.
The main mechanical difference from modern games, other than that, is the lack of fast travel—but it kinda does have it, it's just in-world. The three (? IIRC? Though admittedly one is a ton of work to get) fast travel networks, the mark and recall spells, and almsivi/divine intervention, between all those there pretty much is fast travel, it's just in-world rather than a meta thing you do on the world map.
Oh, and the lack of quest markers, I suppose. You do actually have to follow the directions people give you, to find things. But that's excellent and it's a shame they took that out of the later entries.
Four; silt striders, boats, and mages guild are straight forward, but propylon chamber are a pain in the ass.
For anyone not aware of it, I strongly recommend Tamriel Rebuilt: https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/
It's a community-made mod that adds a huge amount of new content. TR itself focuses on adding mainland Morrowind to the game while there are sister projects aimed at adding other regions such as Skyrim.
Back onto the shelf it went.
And this was a surprise to you in an RPG? Even in Ultima I back in 1981, you'd get attacked by the guards for stealing stuff in town.
I think my frustration was not that stealing is a crime in the game so much as the game's UI didn't really do anything to warn me that I was stealing. If the UI had maybe coded the action in red font with "Steal plate" instead of grey text "Take plate", I probably would have reconsidered.
... but, crucially, when you cure it, the bonuses remain, while the penalties go away. So you can use it to pretty much max out your strength and endurance.
Is thenetsk some reference that I don't get ?