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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question.

I had the original Morrowind on Xbox and never got anywhere with it (I think I spent like 30 minutes creating my character, opened a chest in the first room in the game because apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, got beaten/arrested, and then I put the game down).

I did buy the PC version specifically for OpenMW use--because until Proton that was the only way to play it on Linux, but I've not gotten around to doing a full playthrough. I wanted to know about mods because those usually can help provide some QoL adjustments that can ease the learning curve if you didn't grow up with the game.

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Some nice resources here: https://modding-openmw.com/

OpenMW is definitely the way to go for a fresh game.

There’s a lot of random advice I could give but here’s my important ones:

- Replace the vanilla leveling system.

- If you are playing a modpack with relatively vanilla mechanics, you want a magic-based character. Being bad at magic is a huge disadvantage in the vanilla game, it’s heavily biased toward glass cannons.

- Make sure you have a teleportation (mark/recall) mod. Many of them are balanced so that they don’t feel like cheating, but the vanilla game makes fast travel and traversal too tedious.

Teleportation? That would kill the hiking simulator vibe!

There's a "signpost fast travel" mod that lets you teleport to any town mentioned on signposts as long as you have visited it before, while paying a small fee for an imaginary guide. That's a decent compromise, given how tricky actual real-time pathfinding can be in Morrowind.

(Otherwise my favourite system comes from Daggerfall Unity, where there is a mod that lets your character automatically, in real time, follow roads until the next fork/intersection. With an option for time compression that really hits the sweet spot of being explicit travel without being tedious.)

Teleportation is actually in the base game, just with only one mark and recall point, as you may know.

The mods I’ve seen add a selectable list and scale out how many locations you’re allowed to save based on your associated magic skill.

So it’s both a boon to quality of life and still relatively balanced and not too overpowered.

I would suggest playing with a modlist like Path of the Incarnate [0] - it'll give you QoL improvements, graphics improvements, quest and landmass mods all integrated into one tested setup.

The Morrowind modding scene is huge and was a big part of my teenage years. It's nice to see it's still going strong.

[0] https://www.modlists.net/docs/6poti/Home

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