The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

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.

The Good
The greatest thing about Morrowind is that you can pretty much do anything you want. If you want to be a hero you can go off and kill some monsters and if you decide that you just want to walk around the continent picking mushrooms then you can do that as well. The stilt strider in my opinion was a great idea even though you never actually get to control it yourself. This game could take literally years to get bored of if you are a hardcore player and tryed to explore the whole map. The towns and citys in Morrowind are beautifuly set out apart from one (Vivec) and you even have the choice of going in someones house, killing them and then taking the house for your own. There are also so many secrets that can be found and probably if you went around and looked in every hollowed out tree stump you could find a very powerful weapon.

The Bad
If you decide to travel by foot then you are going to be in for alot of frustration because when you are walking about every 5 minutes or so you get attacked by annoying creatures called Cliff racers. And even if you decide to be sneaky and swim to get away from the the Racers you will be attacked by Slaughter fish instead, so that usually takes most of the fun out of traveling by foot. The only otherthing that really bugged me about Morrowind was that even on X-box there were alot of bugs and I could have been running across a bridge and then I would for some reason just fall straight through it. Though this did not happen very often.

The Bottom Line
A great game to buy and well worth the money you pay for it. You can probably get this game for about $40 now and thats not much to pay for the amount of entertainment you get out of this game. If you like Rpg's or you juts like freedom in a game then this game is more than worth taking a look at.

The Good
I don't know how they did this, how long it took, and how much effort was put in it, but I do know, it is the best game ever.

When Arena was released, it tried to break away from other RPG's and distinguished itself. It could have been great, but Bethesda failed to make it fill its potential. A while later, Daggerfall came. It could have been great, but the graphics and stability pulled it down. And now, Morrowind has arrived, and boy is it good! The game features some of the best graphics ever seen, along with a very impressive array of races, characters and quests. But still what astounds gamers is the size. You can explore Morrowind to its greatest. You can follow the main plot, take some side plots, or join a guild and perform duties. Or you can just do anything you want. The hundreds of items and weaponry is very impressive, and the detail put in the game is simply amazing.

The Bad
The only thing I didn't like about this game was the character build. Polygon placement in coordination with the "spine" (as i call it) build makes some characters move stiffly, and it looks rather stupid.

The Bottom Line
Nevertheless, this game is a must have for gamers, whether you like RPG's or not, this game is a must.