The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

The Good
One of the greatest things about this game is it's completely open-ended. The game starts out on a prison ship, and soon you are released on Vvardenfell, an Island in Morrowind. From there you can choose to follow the main quest and fulfill ancient prophesies, join one of the guilds and rise through their ranks, or just explore the huge island. You can stop and start any of these things at almost any time in the game. Those are just a few examples of how open-ended this game is. Another great quality this game has is the graphics. The detail and quality of each individual object in the game is astounding. This game will probably give you 100+ hours of game time, if not, more.

The Bad
This game has few flaws, but they're just enough to piss you off. For an example, lets say you've gotten nearly to the top rank of a guild, you may have to make a choice, to stay at the Master rank of the guild forever or try to become a Magister and then the Archmagister which are higher ranks than Master. Seems simple to make the choice right? Well your boss "forgets" to give you the choice and you automatically get stuck at the Master rank forever. Glitches like this will pop up ever so often in the game. Of course you can get a patch for most bugs and glitches in the PC version, but obviously not for the xbox. Sometimes there are ways to avoid these problems but most people don't figure that out untill it's too late. The glitches in the game, avoidable or not, are too big a problem than we hoped fore.

The Bottom Line
This game is a must get for open ended RPG fans. And luckly, the new Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game of The Year Adition, that will be coming out very soon, will fix many of the previously stated glitches and bugs in the game. It will also include the expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, which are also must gets for RPG fans. All and all, this is an amazing game that will keep surprising you when you think you've seen it all. This is my favorite game.

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
After some playing, what strikes me the most with Morrowind is it's great overall open ended feeling, both positively and negatively. You can walk to wherever you want and do the quests you want to do, in any order you want. It's fun just traveling the island and chance upon an impressive castle or some old ruins to explore. And with some skill in lockpicking even breaking into some house in the city and steal the money can be good fun sometimes. The freedom to play around is very creative and stimulating for the imagination. That also applies to the creation of your character, which can be tailored very much to your liking. And as each of the main professions has its own guild on the island there is the possibility to join one of them and do quests for them. There are even vampire clans to join! Like a lot of other RPG's the game is full of details, like books and stuff, and if you decide to steal something and someone spots you, you lose reputation points. And it's not to good to be low on reputation as it makes it difficult to talk to the NPC's.

What I really like about this game is that even after you have finished the main quest you can continue playing, which is to the credit of the creators and shows that they really had a vision of a game as open ended as possible. This is something I have missed in a lot of other games because I always wanted to have the chance to keep playing with my favourite character even after I had finished. To be true, there is no real end to this game, and in that sense it is truly open ended in the best sense of the word.

To top it off, the graphics are very nice with beautiful water effects and the day has its rotation with light and darkness. During the night you can see the stars shining in the night sky, and inside the houses there are burning fireplaces and candles, in contrast to the shadows which adds much to the nice atmosphere.

The Bad
There was ONE big problem that kept me from wanting to play. The landscape of Vvardenfell is boring. A dead wasteland with huge funguses and giant insects that serves as transports between the cities. Everything is brown and colourless. Highly uninspiring, and I don't understand why the designers wanted such a world, blah. A lot of the NPC's lack personality and are rather repetitive in their dialogue. The creatures of the island spawn very randomly and that doesn't feel very realistic. This is a feature of these kind of open ended games but doesn't feel very good implemented here.

To increase a skill you can practice that skill in the game in real time. So if you want to improve your acrobatics skill, all you have to do is jump all the way to your destination and it will increase. Interesting thought but quite silly in practice. If it had been better implemented it could have worked. You also advance in combat with experience and here it works better except that in the beginning you are so bad at fighting that when you encounter a hostile rat on your first journey, you have to fight like a tiger not to get killed. And that even if you are armed with a sword. Sure, you get better at fighting with increasing experience, but having problems with bashing a rat. Give me a break.

The Bottom Line
As I said, the environment was the biggest obstacle for me to enjoy this game, which is sad because it IS an exciting game in itself despite all of it's flaws which are inherent in this series of games, and stems from having such an open endedness. I personally prefer the island in the expansion Bloodmoon which has more traditional forest terrain.