jonOS's review of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

Early in 2020, I decided to take an interest into the lore of the Elder Scrolls universe. I had a years-long obsession with the Souls series… and yet, I’d spent more hours on Skyrim alone than any single Souls game. So why not check it out, huh? It turned out to be a peculiar yet engaging rabbit hole, at the centre of which was a peculiar yet engaging game: Morrowind. I am definitely too young to have had any nostalgia for it, and while I am well aware of it now, I think that people won’t be able to see it in the shadow of Skyrim’s immense influence, as I once didn’t. I know this isn’t really a hot take (I’m not from the generation who wouldn’t regard this as a hot take), but I don’t think that should be the case. Morrowind is a truly spectacular setting whose sheer confidence in itself is enough to keep anyone engaged, and a pretty on point example of what ludonarrative harmony looks like. Yeah, it is one of those games where you will restart a couple times because you don’t get the mechanics or you found out later your build is totally unviable. That’s okay though: some of the best games are guilty of that just because of how differently they’re designed from modern mainstream stuff, and it takes a minute to learn. And Morrowind is worth learning. In a modern setting, the mechanics can often come across as clunky. Morrowind comes from a different school of open-world rpg design than (ironically) Skyrim. Whereas Skyrim uses the shortest path to immersion by trying to make it’s mechanics seem like a natural simulation of life, Morrowind is more comparable to a game like Dungeons and Dragons, which relies on abstraction and player creativity to fill in the gaps. When combined with a set of complex mechanics, it ultimately creates more interesting tableaux and stories for players to tell. A running stab followed by a precise downwards slice to execute your enemy might not look flashy in the engine, but the experience feels more visceral because you have agency over your attacks. Meanwhile, Skyrim just picks a premade kill animation to show you, which is… fine. Dialogue is another of my favourite examples of more subtly immersive mechanics. Rather than picking crafted dialogue options, you can use keywords from conversation or common phrases to chat with NPCs. They might mention the local tradehouse, so you click the word to ask for directions. Sure, you might miss authored dialogue, but it leaves the player character as a proper vessel for the player. Abstraction is the word here. You can really imprint personalities onto your characters because there’s no author to facilitate a personality. It’s a system I’m quite favourable of, and I think one that should be revisited for that purpose. Morrowind also involves one of the best magic systems in a game ever. Spellcrafting is a great mechanic that I have seen popup occasionally, but I don’t think I’ve played a game with such a breadth of magical abilities to craft from. There are effects to fly, cast fire, drain your enemy, trap souls, unlock doors, walk on water, breathe in water, and on and on. The side effect is that Spellcrafting totally breaks the game... but it’s also what makes magic so awesome. It achieves ludonarrative harmony, because the plot describes a hero who rises from nothing but eventually grows powerful enough to overthrow even gods themselves. Learning magic which pushes the limits of the developer’s intentions does feel like shaking the world and mocking the gods, pissing in the eyes of their mortal shackles. It’s no wonder that ongoing games in the series drastically scale the system back, because it’s buck wild and totally awesome. This game also has some great narrative and quest design. The transition from the first act to the second and the climax is well defined and naturalistic. In the first act, you’re literally directed to start doing some adventures in between missions to beef yourself up, which leads to you naturally learning more about the setting itself. Once you start doing your main missions though, the theme of your quests inform you about the grander plot that you’re about to become a part of. Once you’ve found your place in the actual prophecy at the heart of the story, you already feel right at home. While the second act is technically a boring checklist of factions to impress, the juxtaposition with the characters who operate under those factions is interesting. They aren’t monolithic figures who represent the ideal versions of their factions - they’ve each got their own motivations and angles that you have to play too. By the time that you’re meeting the face of God and battling ancient vampires within the heart of a volcano, it feels like you’ve earnt the right to those grand quests because you’ve been progressing along this ancient prophecy that you’d slowly learned about from the start of the game. It’s beautifully, beautifully done. Whether or not you’ll enjoy the game comes down to a simple question however, which I had managed to avoid until this point: do you like walking? This game does not hold your hand when it comes to exploration and encounters. There are no quest markers and the map only fills up with places you’ve actually explored. Enemies can also be ridiculously tough early on, and are persistent in their presence throughout the whole game. But nothing is as challenging as walking. It’s slow, it’s tedious, and the easiest way to overcome it in the early game leaves you vulnerable during battle. The regular walking speed really does feel just… way too slow. Despite this, I think that it’s actually a kind of clever way to incentivise better engagement with the game’s various mechanics. There’s no instant fast travel system, but you can catch rides between settlements and get wizards to teleport you between major cities. You can catch boats if you need to travel along the coast. Who knew that plotting a public transport route could be so fun? It also makes you feel that much more powerful when you learn spells that let you traverse Vvardenfell at ridiculous paces. Ultimately though, I think the walking is most useful for pacing your quest as well. It makes narrative’s scale grand cause you really do get how long it takes to traverse these great distances and overcome their challenges. It removes any of that confusing non-time that happens in Skyrim where you think ‘wait, does the world devouring Alduin die within like, 2 weeks of his return? Damn what a binch’. Not everyone will feel this way however, so I’ll be totally honest - if you reckon that that walking is just too much wasted time for you, then I couldn’t disagree. It’s valuable to me but I’m a weirdo, and most other people who say it’s good are staring through rose tinted glasses that kind of look past long walking periods (which dw they still agree are shit). Morrowind is fantastic. I found so much I love in this game, so many design decisions in terms of mechanics and narrative that resonated with me so well. I think that you should play it just for that almost, because these sorts of design decisions become kind of harder to do as tech gets better. As much as I love rudimentary directional melee system, it was made due to limitations of the tech - you think they wouldn’t have done the bad-ass animations if they could back then? So yeah, it’s got some old baggage, and if you can’t get over that then I couldn’t really convince you to love this game. It is undeniably great however, and even if I don’t think everyone could be convinced to play it, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.