The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

The Good
Let me start out by admitting that it's been several months since I played Morrowind. At first I thought that that would make my review a little suspect, but I've reached the conclusion that instead it might actually help people, since my remarks represent the impressions that have stuck with me over time.

First, the good. Morrowind is by far the most immersive RPG I've ever played. That's because it all takes place in first-person, in a convincingly rendered 3D world. Unlike most RPG's, which make you strain to convince yourself that you're actually the character on the screen, Morrowind lets you don the armor of your character of choice quite convincingly.

Hand in hand with that goes the fact that the art, the sounds, and the animations are all done nicely, and there are some genuinely interesting sights for you to see--at least for a few hours, until no matter what you see you'll have the distinct feeling that you've seen it all before.

Finally, the stats system is nice, with lots of areas for you to dump points into, and the freedom to shape your character as you'd like. Oh, and for the creatively inclined, the inclusion of a full-featured editor is a major boon--at least until your game gets so clogged up with crappy, doofus-grade mods that you swear off the use of them entirely.

The Bad
Ok. So much for the good. The bad: it's boring. Even though when you first start out, you'll be impressed by its seemingly limitless horizons, you'll soon realize that Morrowind is little more than yet another Federal Express simulator. The NPC's are flat and characterless, and there is absolutely no sense of life or activity in the countryside. Not a single butterfly or bird flits about in the sunshine. There is only lifeless landscape dotted with the occasional out-of-place looking "monster" (I put "monster" in quotes because none of them are particularly frightening). You'll be hard-pressed after a few days of repetitious slogging through Morrowind's environments to convince yourself that you're in anything like a realistic, living world.

Adding to this problem is the fact that Vvardenfell (the actual name of the island on which the game takes place) has got to be the most depressing place ever conceived. If Everquest is like crack, Morrowind is like Valium, and beyond one humorous main-quest NPC at the beginning of the game, there is nary a smile or bright moment to be had in the entire game. At least, there wasn't up to the point at which I finally had to quit playing before I just slit my wrists and ended it all. Every dark place is filled with evil and foreboding, but it's not exciting evil and foreboding, like, say, Mordor. It's dull evil and foreboding, like Cleveland, and somehow the designers have made even the bright, sunny areas of Vvardenfell seem merely like bright and sunny tombs full of nothingness.

As I said, the quests are boring. Even the main quest, which features one of those dime-a-dozen monumental revelations about your true nature so common to RPG's, lacks any ability to engage the intellect or imagination, and simply serves as one more excuse to send you hacking and slashing into yet another cave full of dark foreboding and evil. On the one hand you could ask, what does one expect from an RPG anyway? But on the other, you could ask with equal justice, why does the obvious and boring have to seem so doggone obvious and boring as it does in Morrowind?

The Bottom Line
Morrowind is a fun game for awhile, and is easily the most immersive RPG made to date. But it suffers from the somewhat serious defects of being boring and depressing. To be sure, it has legs among a certain segment of the population--those, I guess, who rather like boring and depressing games--but I imagine that for most people the interest in it will be relatively short-lived.

The Good
This game is BIG. It's graphics are BEST. There tons of activities, tons of possibilities and tons of stuff to collect. You can always play it again and again and choose different paths, its almost impossible to get bored. The music is perfect

The Bad
When I first read the review of Morrowind in a local computer zine, I was only thinking about one thing: I NEED THAT GAME. It was in Summer 2002, and I even couldn't imagine that my dream would come true. My PC was Pentium 166, so I figured it'll take years to get a new PC (I didn't have any money). But in February 2003, my dreams came true: I bought a normal, 1700MHz PC. By that time I had forgotten about Morrowind and one day I started reading about it again and went out and bought the game. When I was coming home from the shop I already imagined it: my char wondering around Morrowind, slaying stuff. But when I installed it, and started the game, I was disappointed. Why you ask? The game itself is good. REAL good. BUT. All the NPCs are just standing there. They aren't doing anything. Even the badguys aren't lurking around (except wild "animals"), they are just standing there and waiting for you. When I first saw Syena Need (sorry I don't remember the exact name but It's the first town you see in Morrowind) I thought those people were zombies because all they did was walked around and said "Make it quick outlander, I havent got much time". Why are they so boring? Why Bethseda was working on Morrowind for 6 years and didn't make NPCs more active?!?!! Even Ultima 9 has that! That is the worst part of this game.

The Bottom Line
Although it has it's setbacks, this game is good. It has excellent graphics and sound and a lot of activities to do. Buy it!

The Good
The world is huge and beautiful. In fact its so big you often get lost, but to your pleasant surpise in the middle of nowhere you find ruins, tombs, or people. Speaking of the people there are over 1,000 NPCs you can interact with in the world. over 20 cities to go to, many books to find for pre-story and more story for those people who like RPG's a lot. Plus 13 factions to join and do missions for, 10 races to choose from, over 21 preset professions or create your own! The possibilities in this game are limitless and although you might feel like "what do I do now?" when you first start because there is no guided main mission. There does exist a main mission which happens to be the hardest in the game, as well as 1,300 other missions to do. So clearly you can see that the team has worked really hard on this game. Most impressively in all the text you come upon in the game, I haven't found one typo.

The Bad
Travelling in the game can get kind of cumbersome because the means of transport are limited (silt riders, mages guild, spells, game addons) unless you want to walk. Because the world is so huge, you kinda wish you had a horse but that would mess up the whole game for many reasons. The huge city of Vivec is too huge in my opinion, I've gotten sick of walking up and around the huge buildings, but the rewards of what's inside the buildings almost outweigh the walking distances. The journal and map could be better, but that is fixed in the expansion packs.

The Bottom Line
This is a great RPG, if you like RPG's you'll love this. If you don't "like" RPG's you'll like this game. It's worth just to look at even the sky is beautiful.