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Comment by laserdancepony | Hacker News Reader

Morrowind will still not be popular with younger players. I imagine the lack of fast travel, map markers and the class/skill system is just too much for most.

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Part of the game is learning how to figure out what the fuck you're supposed to do.

I love immersive sim games. Miss back in the day when we didn't have maps for dungeons and you were supposed to be drawing a map on paper. I never did, as a little kid I just learned how to memorize dungeon layouts really well and now I memorize any place I go on foot.

The visuals are pretty rough and the map is small. The map size actually is a blessing though since your character moves at a snails pace.

The gameplay, especially from a melee perspective, is rough at best, and directly unfun at its worst.

A case of limitations working in concert. The rather oppressive distance fog helped conceal just how small the world was, and it felt a lot more expansive thanks to the slower pace of the game.

No sprinting, no mounts, no fast-travel-from-anywhere (beyond mark/recall and the teleport to temple spells) and the in-game fast travel systems were varied, thought out and well placed. Having to plan a route of mage guild teleports, boat rides, stilt striders, and/or the teleportation complexes helped immerse the player in the world.

> character moves at a snails pace.

Boots of blinding speed to the rescue! No idea why authors think it was good idea to make default speed so low and lock game-fixing item behind some random-looking quest in the middle of nowhere

That was the beauty of the game. You could randomly find amazing things.

Yep, my first TES was Oblivion and I loved it so much that I tried going back to Morrowind. I don't mind having to read and I don't mind walking, but holy hell the combat makes the game almost inaccessible.

I think younger players can get over those things. The dealbreaker with Morrowind is the incredibly clunky and frustrating combat system. It presents as a real time first-person action game, but almost every action you take in a combat scenario is governed my hidden die rolls. When a player swings their sword and they see it visibly clip through an enemy, but the die roll calls it a miss, the player feels like they've been cheated by the system.

The combat in this game was considered rough when it was new, and it has only aged like milk since then.

If they had simply shown "hit" or "miss" when the weapon was used, it would have been less frustrating, I think. Even if it still intersects the character model, you would at least know the miss was intentional and not a bug.

just brand it "the dark souls of x" and young players won't be bothered by complexity

Morrowind: The Dark Souls of The Elder Scrolls.

It has a nice ring to it!

I don't know if it has a nice ring to it, the title is a bit unwieldy to say.

It's the Dark Souls of game titles.

Morrowind has several different systems of fast travel, the best being the silt strider

No way! My favourite method of fast travel will always be scrolls of Icarian flight. Sooo freaking hilarious!

I remember first coming across the scroll at the beginning of the game. "Surely this isn't intentional? I have some sort of mod installed don't I?"

Mark-recall, teleport to temple, teleport to imperial cult, mage guild, silt striders, boats, propilion marks, overcharged jump spell ;)

I gotta admit, as someone whose first Morrowind experience was on a smartphone running OpenMW, combat that requires aiming correctly and having hit chance was infuriating. One or the other would be fine, like with a Zelda-esque lock-on feature combined with hit chance.

I mean the open world design philosophy in Elden Ring is not too dissimilar to Morrowind's and it was a massive hit. What really needs updating is the combat system, it wasn't great when the game came out and it aged horribly.

I haven't played Morrowind, but Elden Ring has both map markers and fast travel.

Morrowind is similar, with map markers for major landmarks and diegetic fast travel, but still requiring the player to explore and orient to find quest objectives.

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