ycatzz's Full Review: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for Xbox
Ahhhh, I wish that I had stayed in Morrowind. But, alas, I'm back here in the real world, searching for another game that begins to compare. I don't think I'll find it.
Imagine a game where time is real, seasons and weather are real, fatigue is real, you develop relationships with others based on your actions, you make your own destiny. A game that has the ability to evolve and does so on a constant basis. A game that has a map so vast it takes days to walk across, yet so detailed that you learn the landscape and can explore every square inch with no limitations. This is Morrowind.
I'm not going to go into every little detail of this game. I'm just going to hit on a few main characteristics that distinguishes it from any other game on the market. I'm also going to tell it to you from a 28 year-old, married females perspective.
The Map
Morrowind is set up like many other map based role-playing games. It has towns, cities, caves, swamps, beaches, fields, camps, islands, etc. What makes it so unique is the fact that you can go anywhere on the map. You can jump into trees, scale the sides of mountains, walk into swamps, dig into rotten tree stumps, swim to the depths of the ocean. A lot of games like this will allow you only in the places that follow the story line, Morrowind lets you go everywhere. This game allows you to spend countless hours simply exploring. In fact, a friend of mine comes over not to play the game (storyline) but to just run around and find new places. One thing that you'll notice first thing in the game is that you're not talking a few minutes to cover the map, it's incredible detailed and jammed with all sorts of terrain and points of interest.
Storyline
Morrowinds story line is several fold. Yes, there is a main quest that you can follow straight to the end. The great thing about this game is that you have the ability to evolve the storyline by taking on sidequests and by making different decisions. If two people began playing the game at the same time, with the same character, within minutes their storyline would diverge into their own unique game. For example, everyone starts out at Seyda Neen, a little crummy fishing village in the south of the continent. Depending on who you meet and what you decide to do, you could end up staying on in the village for a while, or heading North to Balmora.
Quests
In Morrowind, you can be anything you want to be. It's great because part of your personality can be reflected into the game. You can be a trained assassin, striking fear into the hearts of all you meet, you can be a healer, skilled at creating potions, identifying and collecting medicinal herbs, you can be a warrior cleansing the land of all evil doers. There's no limit. You do this by joining different "guilds" There's three main ones, Mages, Thieves, and Fighters. Each guild you join sends you out on different side quests. All testing your abilities and increasing your stats.
Armor and Weapons
One great aspect of this game is that you can evolve your characters characteristics. You can specialize in Heavy, Light, or Medium Armor. You can specialize in Acrobatics, allowing you to be agile and quick. You can specialize as an Armorer and repair you're own weapons for free. There's over 20 main categories that you can build for you character. There's a huge amount of armor and weapons you can accumulate during the game. All very unique and interesting, although somewhat reminiscent of other rpg's like Final Fantasy and Zelda.
Potions and Spellmaking
You can learn to creat your own potions and spells. In fact, there's over 500 different spells that you can create or learn from others. As long as you have the tools of the trade, you're good to go. For making potions, you collect items throughout the game, mushrooms from the swamp, feathers from cliff racers, etc. By creating different combinations, you create different effects. This part of the game could be an entire game in itself, simply becoming a great Mage. To create enchanted items you must have a "soul gem" from a creature you've killed and an item that you're carrying. You can enchant items to allow you to fly, become invisible, boost your personality, etc.
Gameplay
You can play Morrowind in either 1st or 3rd person. You can switch back and forth at your discretion. It makes it great because you have excellent control of your character at all times. You use keyboard commands to control your character. Movement is very easy, although I did ruin my shift key before the game was done with from over use.
All the menus are very self explainable, and easy to use and access. You can control the fog depth, Artificial Intelligence Levels, etc.
Graphics
The graphics in this game are unreal. Everything has depth and texture unlike many other games. While moving about, you feel part of your environment. This is due to the excellent weather and time effects of the game. No longer do you automatically go to sleep at night. When it gets dark, unless you find a bed, you're still awake. The weather changes just as it does in life. You have rain and sun and wind. Certain places on the map have different weather patterns specific to the area. For example, if you're in Aldruhn, a desert town, you'll see a lot of sand storms, hot parched dry weather and sunshine. In Seyda Neen, in a swampy area to the south, you'll find it rains a lot, is dreary looking and feels wet.
Mods
Shortly after the game released, you could find hundreds of game mods for Morrowind. These are little programs that "plug-in" to your program that do anything from adding a mansion of your very own, to adding on additional quests for you to partake of. The fact that this game is exceptional already, only makes it more unreal that you can add all these things to it for free. It's almost like being able to download a new game every day. For some, I'm sure, Morrowind may never end. Because each time they finish a quest, they can simply download a new mod to plug-in and start a new adventure. It's nothing short of a miracle.
Just to recap, Morrowind is engrossing, surreal, entertaining, addictive, and on and on and on. I couldn't get enough of Morrowind. There was days where I, a young, married housewife, would sit at my computer until my hands and feet had grown so cold from lack of circulation that they'd creak as I'd begin to move them. Times when I could care less if I saw my husband for days. Times when I'd go to bed at night and dream of Morrowind and wake up craving the same.
If you're looking for a game to take you into another reality, one where you can be anything you want, do anything and go anywhere, you will love Morrowind. Be prepared to spend some major hours at your computer. And prepare to be amazed.
To be fair to all you readers out there I have to voice the parts of the game which I found less than appealing, yet were in no way a deterent to my love of the game.
The map is vast. Vast to the point that it nearly became stressful thinking that to finish this piece of the quest I'd have to Travel from point a to point b. At least be warned that it's not something you can explore and be familiar with in a short time. It took me weeks to get familiar with the intricacies of the map. Find all the boats and silt walkers and mages guilds so that I could transport myself in a moderate amount of time.
I found it very difficult in the beginning of the game to acquire enough money to sustain my needs. By this I mean, buying training, weapons and armor, potion and spells, etc. I cheated and used a mod to get my funds and I liked the game just as well.
There wasn't a huge varieties of enemies and they didn't seem to scale with my experience. In some games, as your character develops, you'll encounter more and more powerful enemies. This didn't happen here, so as I became very strong, enemies became more of an annoyance than a challenge. There also seemed to be no specific hierarchy of enemies. In some games, you start fighting the little guys and build up to mini-bosses, then a level boss and then a Big Boss. In this game, it seemed as though there were just a bunch of mini to middle enemies and then one big fight at the end. Still fun though, don't get me wrong, just wished in the upper levels there could have been more challenges.
Game ending... I won't tell you how it ended, but I will say that it wasn't what I was expecting. Not so much in a bad way, but again, I wish it had been more challenging, or even more drawn out. This is coming from the fact that I put about 200 hours of game time in before I finished it off and I felt a little cheated. Someone else may have a different experience. I'm going to revisit this game soon as I have become bored and download a mass amount of quest mods and play it all again.
Good luck, I hope you can make it back from Morrowind. I did, but it was very, very difficult to click those ruby slippers together. If it wasn't for my husband whacking my feet together, I might have stayed for good.
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