The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Moby ID: 6280
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Freed by the decree of Uriel Septim VII, the Emperor of Tamriel, a lone prisoner is transported to the province of Morrowind. It seems that the strange dreams this prisoner has been having lately may have a connection to equally strange events occurring there. The protagonist is given a simple assignment: join the Blades, a secret organization whose goal is to protect the safety of the Emperor. This leads to a discovery of an ancient prophecy and an evil scheme concocted by a powerful deity whom the protagonist alone is able to stop.

Conceived in the tradition of the Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind is a fantasy role-playing game with a vast world open for exploration. After being released from a prison ship at the shores of the island Vvardenfell, the protagonist may do more or less what he or she wants: follow the main quest and solve the mystery of an ancient prophecy, join any of roughly a dozen guilds and rise in their hierarchy by performing duties, or simply explore the gigantic island with its stylistically diverse cities, hundreds of dungeons and tombs, ancient ruins and mighty fortresses.

Morrowind uses a two-stage skill system. The hero’s primary stats (strength etc.) increase with each level gained, while secondary abilities improve by use – for example, the more often the character jumps, the more proficient he or she becomes in the Acrobatics skill, etc. The action-oriented fights are simple exchanges of strikes or spells, until one combatant dies. The enemy's hit points and condition were not originally shown; however, at the request of customers a health bar was added for enemies as part of the first upgrade patch.

The protagonist's race and gender, but also his or her reputation influence the reactions of NPCs. If a character’s sympathy for the hero is low (rated on a scale from 1 to 100), he might refuse to answer questions; if it is high, the player will get more detailed information and better bargains in shops. Most quests involving other persons can be solved by persuasion, pick-pocketing, or simply by force.

The game's NDL 3D game engine is powerful in drawing wide, detailed outdoor landscapes as well as complex indoor environments. Transitions are not fluent; houses and dungeons must be loaded upon entering.

Spellings

  • 上古卷轴III:晨风 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 上古捲軸 III:魔捲晨風 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

118 People (80 developers, 38 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 83 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 283 ratings with 23 reviews)

Probably the biggest disappointment in my RPG career

The Good
First things first: I loved Arena. I loved Daggerfall. And I tried so hard to love this game, but I failed. The best things about this game is its story and its world, that's basically a continuation of the first Elder Scrolls games. Other than that, there's not much to like about this game. I will explain why.

The Bad
Morrowind is a huge game. It is huge and extremely open ended. Now both these descriptions are usually used to point out the good things about a game. But not this time! Morrowind manages to make both huge and open ended be bad things. The game is so huge the developers ran out of juice after, like, the first village. The rest of the game is bland, generic and colourless. Also, since there's no speech and no real physics system, the game feels horribly dead. The npc's are even worse. No matter who you talk to in the entire game, they always say the same things! If you would talk to a child (there are no children in Morrowind by the way!) you'd get exactly the same, detailed descriptions about the world as if you were talking to the village elder. Everyone, and I mean everyone, seems to know everything about everything.

For some reason this game is well known for its graphics. The same graphics that look bland and yet drives even the meanest gaming computers to its knees. The viewing distance is short and the human models look like.. monsters. Oh, right. The monsters. Take a stroll through the wonderfully repetitive landscape of Morrowind and within ten minutes you will have fought at least ten flying lizard birds. And so it goes on and on and on. Should I mention the equipment? It's incredibly easy to get hold of and since the economic system doesn't work, it's unsellable. You start at level 1 in the game. 20 minutes later you'll be level 10. Around three hours later you'll be level 20 and have most attributes and equipment maxxed out. And if you don't want to wait that long there are trainers that can train you to max in every skill in the game. Practical? Yes. Fun? NO.

A bad game can still be saved by a strong story and fun quests. Does Morrowind have any of these? Unfortunately, no. Most side quests consist of you getting item X to character Y and as a reward you get the useless item Z. Repeat forever, since there are lots and lots of these quests in the game. Due to its open endedness the game feels totally unfocused and there's nothing to drag you into the story. After about an hour of playing you will have forgotten what the hell you're even doing in the game world. And after you've completed the game you'll be feeling confused, empty and disappointed because you will still not have grasped why you did everything you did.

And on top of all of this, the game is way too easy, it has lots of show stopping bugs, suffers from minimal dungeons and it isn't even true to the world set up by the previous games.

The Bottom Line
After buying and playing Daggerfall in the mid nineties I was eagerly awaiting Morrowind as soon as I first heard of it. It took the game five years to arrive (I think) and when it came out it turned out to be this. I don't think I have ever been so disappointed in my entire life when it comes to a computer game. Fortunately for me I found the excellent Gothic game series instead.

Windows · by Mattias Kreku (413) · 2003

Fun game if only somewhere else

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.

Windows · by Vashna (17) · 2007

One Giant Ball Of Awesome

The Good
The Environments were spectacular and the creatures and landscapes were amazing. Bethesda crammed so much wonder into a little disk. The characters were wonderfully designed and beautifully generated. The random weather system itself was good. And just the amount of caves and tombs they could fit in and did fit in are just..wow.

The Bad
Well It lacked an actual conversation system. The only reason you talked to a guy was to ask for directions or kill him.On another note the combat system is repetitive.Just slash and slash and hope you kill your enemy before it can kill you. Also I believe that there isn't enough good loot to steal. That's what I love most about the game but you can pretty much only get cups and plates from someone you rob.

The Bottom Line
It's good still outweigh the bad. A perfect game for any true Elder Scroll lover. While others might have trouble with it just give it time. It's a wonderful game.

Xbox · by Lord Dayin (9) · 2007

[ View all 23 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Add Game Group karnak1 (22) Dec 24, 2012
Morrowind vs. Oblivion Unicorn Lynx (181780) Jul 26, 2007

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Content

Morrowind is told to include 3244 NPCs, 316.042 hand placed objects, 480 billion possible characters to create and play, 150 billion spells by using spellmaking in the game, and six full sized novels worth of text.

Creature differences

Some monsters and creatures went through drastic visual changes from Daggerfall and Battlespire to Morrowind. First, the type of khajiit are the same as those presented in Redguard, while the Dremora were turned from fair-skinned, horned demons to black and red-skinned demons. Harpies were replaced with (visually at least) Winged Twilights, and other monsters such as the slaughterfish, orcs and others remain much the same, though much better looking in true 3D.

Graphics

Ever wonder why Morrowind can run at such a slow FPS sometimes and why the game is notorious for making even expensive, fast systems (as of 2004) seem slow? The answer is simple; polygons. While playing the game you'll encounter vast areas full of people, objects and architecture. All these are made from polygons and require the videocard to process them. Morrowind has possibly the heaviest counts of polygons in a single video game, most likely surpassing every game before it and still with a vast number more than contemporary games.

References

There is a single daedric crescent from Battlespire hidden in Morrowind, but getting to it requires some work and initiative (it isn't a part of any main or faction quest), or access to a hint guide.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2002 – #9 Best PC Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
  • Computer Games Magazine
    • March 2003 (Issue #148) - #3 overall in the "10 Best Games of 2002" list
  • Computer Gaming World
    • April 2003 (Issue #225) – RPG of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2002 - PC RPG of the Year
    • 2011 – #14 Top PC Game of the 2000s
  • RPG Vault
    • 2002 - Game of the Year
    • 2002 - Role-Playing Game of the Year

Information also contributed by calavera, Jason Musgrave, ShadowStrike and WildKard

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by NeoMoose.

Xbox One added by Kennyannydenny. Xbox Cloud Gaming added by Sciere.

Additional contributors: PCGamer77, -Chris, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, OFoglada, Shoddyan, Sciere, Aubustou, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, Kennyannydenny.

Game added May 10, 2002. Last modified March 28, 2024.