What was it about Morrowind (TES III) that drew you in?

Alucardo

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

I've never played it. I didn't even know that game existed until i started playing Skyrim.

Damn, so you missed out on Oblivion too?

Gilvoth

another thing i loved was the freedom to be allowed to go anywhere in the world, anywhere i wanted to.
nothing was blocked from exploration, even the homes and stores and everything, if i saw it, then i could go to there, even top mountains and inside caves. NO Matter WHAT level i was no matter where i was in the story line i was still allowed go where i wanted!
I LOVE THAT
that was something never seen before in anygame.
all the games today BLOCK you from explore for many reasons and it ruins it.
morrowind allows you to go anywhere you want to go no matter what level you are.
and no matter where you are in the story line.
and i could Kill anyone i wanted to, it allowed me to kill every person in game if i wanted to.
in oblivion and skyrim they destroyed that and stoped us
they refused allow certain people killed and refused allow us travel anywhere we wanted.
totaly destroyed the game
morrowind is the only one allows me to go where ever i want and do what ever i want and kill whom ever i felt like.
i will allways love morrowind for its freedom and allow me do what i want.

Gilvoth

another thing was so wonderfull was that when i finaly was able get new armor that was better, i sold my old armor to a man in a shop in town,
he acted like i had handed him down armor that was from God because he immediately put ON the armor i was wearing and sold to him.

i was astonished ... never before in the history of ANY game i had ever played was something like that happpen.
the man actually wore what i had on like it was from the hand of god, he even brushed hiself off like he was Proud i had given it to him.

Nerouyn

A combination of things.

1) No classes.

To pre-empt the *** "but Morrowind HAS classes", yes it had something it calls classes but they're not.

Morrowind has a classless, open skill system. What it calls classes only determined your beginning skill values and what skills were used to determine your player level. You could freely level every skill and use every weapon and spell.

Not classes.

ESO has classes. Boo to ESO.

2) Big open world, off the rails design.

That was kind of revolutionary back then.

3) Non-generic fantasy aesthetic. Vvardenfell is not the typical European forest and fields fantasy setting.

ESO gets this partly right.

What ESO did Telvanni to towers is obviously unbelievably awful. Vivec and Balmora look great though.

The wilds are difficult to comprehend.

We were told that the time being well before Morrowind single-player and the ash problem getting out of hand, the flora is a bit more generic forest and fantasy. I don't love that but can wrap my head around it.

However, there's Stonefalls and Deshaan. Those both evoke more of a sense of Morrowind (single player) than Morrowind (ESO). That feels like a really big fail.

4) Non-generic fantasy culture. Dark elves who live in giant shells and mushrooms instead of caves.

Gilvoth

there is sooo much in morrowind sp that happens for you and soo much that it would take a book to tell you everything AND THE ACTUALLY DID!
they actually made a BOOK that tells you things you can do in morrowind and even on the the first section it tells you that they could not contain within a book all the things that can be found and happen to you with morrowind.
they covered ALOT of it, the book is huge.

Nave_Horsespitoon

Browiseth wrote: »

Nave_Horsespitoon wrote: »

@Nave_Horsespitoon What are you talking about, "context"? the game sucks and hasn't aged well. I played it, that's what I got out of it. Stop making these excuses.

You can love the game all you want, but stop creating this nonsense to justify why you love it.

also.

Nave_Horsespitoon wrote: »

Umm, to begin with dude you are obviously one of the youthful types I pointed out.

That's where I got the idea you were belittling me because of my age. My age that you don't even know, yet you jumped to making an inappropriate assumption about it to use as a point of argument.

You don’t know what context means? Then you will never understand what I am trying to clarify for you.
Sorry, it is rather easy to deduce your age.
I am, not anywhere, using your age as a point of argument. Sorry that you did not understand.
Oh and that statement does not belittle your age. It mearly points out that you are one of the younger people I was referring to, rather than a geezer. That is not an insult. Sorry that you did not understand.
It seems you don’t understand me to well, so I will stop trying. This is tedious. Good luck to ya. Have a great life.

Gilvoth

oblivion and skyrim are an insult to morrowind.

Solariken

For me it was all the little intricacies. I loved that I could murder a Balmora shopkeeper, use his store as my home base and store all my treasures in his crates, and use a lock spell on the door so it all felt secure.

Difficulty was a thing. Darkness was a thing. Spell crafting was a thing. Feeling like a real mage was a thing. Creating my own character was a thing.

Alucardo

Solariken wrote: »

For me it was all the little intricacies. I loved that I could murder a Balmora shopkeeper, use his store as my home base and store all my treasures in his crates, and use a lock spell on the door so it all felt secure.

Difficulty was a thing. Darkness was a thing. Spell crafting was a thing. Feeling like a real mage was a thing. Creating my own character was a thing.

Hah, did you used to murder that Khajiit shopkeeper too? He had some decent daedric weapons on him, he wasn't very tough and there were no guards there.

zaria

It was an follow up on Daggerfall, no more reasons needed.
Until I played the game

My main downside was weak hardware at the time who caused lots of problems for me. Learned from this

Sylvermynx

Well, @Nave_Horsespitoon (um.... unusual name there.... my imagination is working overtime on that....) I'm a geezer. I'm 71, and I have been playing CRPGs since 1985.

MW is not at all my favorite of the TES games. Mostly not for any of the reasons you're "misunderstanding" @Browiseth - but because there were things about it I just didn't like compared to Daggerfall. I probably can't iterate them now without installing the game and trying to get it to run in DosBox (which windows 10 doesn't seem to like very well, at least on my machine).

It just didn't satisfy me the way Arena and Daggerfall did. Nope. No real idea why. I think this is a case of everyone has different tastes?

Alucardo

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Well, @Nave_Horsespitoon (um.... unusual name there.... my imagination is working overtime on that....) I'm a geezer. I'm 71, and I have been playing CRPGs since 1985.

MW is not at all my favorite of the TES games. Mostly not for any of the reasons you're "misunderstanding" @Browiseth - but because there were things about it I just didn't like compared to Daggerfall. I probably can't iterate them now without installing the game and trying to get it to run in DosBox (which windows 10 doesn't seem to like very well, at least on my machine).

It just didn't satisfy me the way Arena and Daggerfall did. Nope. No real idea why. I think this is a case of everyone has different tastes?

If you enjoyed Daggerfall and have trouble playing it on modern hardware, there's some folks rebuilding it in Unity - https://www.dfworkshop.net/
Not sure how far they've gotten, but I have seen it in action and it does look very impressive.

Sylvermynx

Alucardo wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Well, @Nave_Horsespitoon (um.... unusual name there.... my imagination is working overtime on that....) I'm a geezer. I'm 71, and I have been playing CRPGs since 1985.

MW is not at all my favorite of the TES games. Mostly not for any of the reasons you're "misunderstanding" @Browiseth - but because there were things about it I just didn't like compared to Daggerfall. I probably can't iterate them now without installing the game and trying to get it to run in DosBox (which windows 10 doesn't seem to like very well, at least on my machine).

It just didn't satisfy me the way Arena and Daggerfall did. Nope. No real idea why. I think this is a case of everyone has different tastes?

If you enjoyed Daggerfall and have trouble playing it on modern hardware, there's some folks rebuilding it in Unity - https://www.dfworkshop.net/
Not sure how far they've gotten, but I have seen it in action and it does look very impressive.

Wow, thank you for that! I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe when it releases it won't even be too big for me download.... *sigh*

Alucardo

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Alucardo wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Well, @Nave_Horsespitoon (um.... unusual name there.... my imagination is working overtime on that....) I'm a geezer. I'm 71, and I have been playing CRPGs since 1985.

MW is not at all my favorite of the TES games. Mostly not for any of the reasons you're "misunderstanding" @Browiseth - but because there were things about it I just didn't like compared to Daggerfall. I probably can't iterate them now without installing the game and trying to get it to run in DosBox (which windows 10 doesn't seem to like very well, at least on my machine).

It just didn't satisfy me the way Arena and Daggerfall did. Nope. No real idea why. I think this is a case of everyone has different tastes?

If you enjoyed Daggerfall and have trouble playing it on modern hardware, there's some folks rebuilding it in Unity - https://www.dfworkshop.net/
Not sure how far they've gotten, but I have seen it in action and it does look very impressive.

Wow, thank you for that! I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe when it releases it won't even be too big for me download.... *sigh*

No problem, and it's playable now! If you're interested to see what they've implemented and what's left, they have a nicely color coded roadmap here: https://www.dfworkshop.net/projects/daggerfall-unity/roadmap/
Looks like a majority of it is there :-D

Vigawatt

TES 3 is my favorite game of all time, and I still play it every few years. The world is so alien, with giant mushrooms and traveling on bug creatures. I loved that the game did not center around humans. The land was that of a race other than humans, which meant a lot to me as really embracing the fantasy aspect of it.

The story was incredible, introducing the Living Gods. Serving Vivec, and then bringing in Almalexia in the Tribunal expansion. The story was incredible, and I never wanted to do it. I always wanted to explore everywhere first then do the main quest last. I must have been in my early teens when the game came out, and I found the 6th house enemies and Dagoth Ur to be scary as hell.

Something I did not appreciate until I played Oblvion was the lack of fast travel in Morrowind, and I loved that. Yes there were silt striders and Mage's guild transport, but they were in specific locations. In Oblivion you could fast travel from anywhere to anywhere and it felt like a cop out. In Morrowind if you were in the middle of nowhere, you had to either use a Recall spell or roam half the island to get back to a city.

And something else I missed from Oblivion, and every other Elder Scrolls game since, is levitation! I've even had a fun theory that only the Nerevarine was capable of levitation, as a way of stemming my disappointment that levitation disappeared from the latter games. If you wanted to get to those Telvanni masters, you had to levitate there!

Sylvermynx

@Alucardo - yes, I looked at that as well as the downloads page.

jainiadral

I'd never touched Morrowind until last night after reading this thread. I'd picked it up on Steam years ago while I was still playing Skyrim but never installed it. I never really got into Oblivion either. I'd always get lost/stuck in the Imperial City and that would be it.

I think Morrowind's one of those, "you had to be there" things like Princess Bride or that David Bowie movie. I just don't get it. I probably never will. The music is nice. The sky is kinda pretty for the era. But that's about it. Dungeon Siege, released the same year, looks a billion times nicer. Combat is...boring and painful, to put it kindly. If I'd found anything interesting, I'd have dug out my Nexus account to upgrade the graphics. I can't though. It just feels like a relic to me.

AngelFires333

Dunno.

Liked it tho.
Probably some dark spell that tptb use to infect and control the minds of the common folk.

dazee

If someone ever puts down ES3 just brush it off as a Grand and Intoxicating Innocence.

Alucardo

dazee wrote: »

If someone ever puts down ES3 just brush it off as a Grand and Intoxicating Innocence.

I take it personally and hang their photo up on my wall for dart practice

russelmmendoza

Naryu Viran.

MaxJrFTW

Alucardo wrote: »

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

I've never played it. I didn't even know that game existed until i started playing Skyrim.

Damn, so you missed out on Oblivion too?

I played Oblivion for a bit. Just never got into it.

Smitch_59

Morrowind was the first RPG I ever played (up until then it was mostly flight sims and first-person shooters). I remember being blown away by the sheer size and scope of the game world (which probably seemed larger at the time because walking was so slow). It was the first game I played that I would describe as truly immersive. It was also the game that turned my wife into a gamer.

Since then, we've enjoyed Oblivion and Skyrim, and now of course ESO. These days Morrowind seems quite dated to me (especially the graphics). We still play it occasionally, but mostly for nostalgia. As a console gamer, the quest journal got quite cumbersome after a hundred pages; that's probably what I dislike most about the game.

But I still have vivid memories of crossing the dwemer bridge west of Arkngthand for the first time, where I encountered Snowy Granius, the Imperial battlemage who could summon skeletons; my level 1 character died so quickly that I was horribly traumatized. It was months before I had the courage to go back to that bridge, and by then I'd leveled up so much that I killed the battlemage easily. Few games have made such an impression on me.

Varana

jainiadral wrote: »

I think Morrowind's one of those, "you had to be there" things like Princess Bride or that David Bowie movie.

Yeah, I think so. You can make it look decent with a load of mods (except animations; those will stay terrible), but someone getting into Morrowind today and without a bit of experience, would not look for those mods. And so, without a graphics overhaul, it has not aged well.

Similarly with the combat - to me, the idea that for every attack, there is a dice roll in the background that determines your hits and misses depending on your character stats, instead of fancy-pants hitboxes and stuff, was normal. That's what RPGs were supposed to be - Might&Magic, Lands of Lore, Wizardry, even Baldur's Gate had all these (pseudo-) DnD mechanics running under the hood. Hitting a guy directly in front of you and missing? Of course, nothing weird about that, your skill is not high enough or you rolled badly. Nothing to write home about. The guy in front of you is just a representation; what really matters, are the numbers and dice rolls.

So yes, its age definitely plays a role.

Nestor

The following thoughts are from Daggerfall and Morrowind:

Having grown up on JRPGs like Final Fantasy and the like, it was refreshing to play in a first person open world where I could go where I wanted and do what I wanted to do.

I also liked that in the earlier TES games, your character was weak until they had some levels and skills. I even enjoyed missing with my weapons.

I also like being able to skip or completely ignore the main quest of the game.

Myrkgrav

It was my first exposure to a game or videogame like this as a child. It was so gritty and immersive, and so seemingly never-ending. Up until that point I had an N64, Gameboy, etc. The closest thing to the wonder it gave me world-wise was probably Pokemon, but still, Morrowind was something else.
edit: it was also very difficult to little ol me. I didn't understand the machinations of classes, etc at that point. Synergizing weapons with fitting type armor. I was just rolling on through. I think that's part of the reason why it took me so hard. It was just so DIFFERENT.

personman_145

I loved the evil cultish feel of the 6th house locations. Nothing in ESO creeps me out like that. The moon-sugar/skooma thing (if I can't be an ESO drug dealer in Elsweyr I'll be kind of bummed.)

It was very rich in lore and conversation because all the dialogue didn't have to be voiced.

The ordinators scared the hell out of me, I think it was mostly the voice.

Those are off the top of my head, If I think of more I'll post em.

Red_Feather

Morrowind was the first video game I played that felt like an rpg brought to the screen.

I watched my friend play it on xbox and remember asking if they could do this, or do that and we laughed as they could.

Araanim

Had nothing left to do in Oblivion, and I still had a year before Skyrim came out, so I decided to give Morrowind a try :-P It was hard going backward after starting with Oblivion, but I can definitely see the appeal. It's such a rich, strange, unique, alien world, unlike Oblivion and Skyrim. I think the biggest draw for me was that I had just finished Shivering Isles, and there was a lot about morrowind that shared that strange, otherworldly experience.

Then Skyrim came out and I haven't really been back since :-P I'd love to get back into, but between modding Skyrim and ESO it's hard to go back and start Morrowind again. I might just have to wait for Skywind...

Enemy-of-Coldharbour

Exploration. There is just something about a game with a huge map and thousands of nooks and crannies to explore that hooks me every time.