If you’re not born on Vvardenfell you’re an N’wah!

The tutorial assumes you are a recent arrival and the content was released well after the main game, so if you want to play a native Vvardenfell resident then you have to ignore the outlander references as much as you ignore the tutorial or why you start in Seyda Neen. Suspension of disbelief has to be consistent, lol.

I do hear you though. I love when NPCs acknowledge my race or past deeds but it's just not realistic to expect them to cover all our backstories. If you're really stuck and looking for a hook, consider using that as your character's motivation - why don't they remember you? Is there some Daedric Prince up to no good, erasing memories again?

It's just typical tribalism. Anyone who wasn't born and spent their lives on that island is an outsider. You may look like one of them, you may even dress like one of them, but you are obviously not one of them. At least as far as the native Vvardenfell population is concerned.

Any little thing could tip them off that you're an outsider. The way you walk, that slight twang in your accent, the fact that you're asking questions like "What's a Halarloo?" There's just no way to know for certain what is giving you away. Somehow, they just know.

Remember Band of Brothers, based on real memories of the involved? Tight group of comrades training and fighting together . But if you missed the Bulge you didn't quite belong as before...

Exclusion is human/mer nature and reason why multicultural megastates and globalism will fail in the end.

Summerset is newer than Morrowind. That feature hadn't been broadly implemented yet back then. However they did state that mainland darkelves are seen as outlanders too by some of the people on Vvardenfell, especially the Ashlanders. Similar situations are in Summerset where you are treated like an outlander, even as an Altmer, because you are not from Summerset (but Auridon apparently and Auridon is not as pure).

bellanca6561n wrote: »

Okay this is part of the single-player game then.

Oy vey.

Thanks for explaining this. It's a pity really but I do have some N'wahs and they can do those quests. Perhaps.

Odd bit was that, just after being told off as an outsider on my DUNMER character, some NPCs tells me how brave I was for rescuing Sen Dres in Stonefalls.

I would say that single player games should not be the basis for online games, but Ultima Online handled that well. It did so by going completely its own way. Emergent gameplay is diminished if you anchor an online game to a stand-alone property. But that's never been part of the ESO ethos, alas.

It's not part of the single-player game specifically, it's part of dunmer culture and so is reflected in both games.

It's like the difference between being Scottish vs. British, or Texan vs. American, or similar examples from other real-life countries. As far as residents of Vvardenfell are concerned there are two options: you are from Vvardenfell or you're an outsider. They acknowledge that Vvardenfell is politically part of Morrowind but still see themselves as culturally distinct as well as geographically.

Ratzkifal wrote: »

Summerset is newer than Morrowind. That feature hadn't been broadly implemented yet back then. However they did state that mainland darkelves are seen as outlanders too by some of the people on Vvardenfell, especially the Ashlanders. Similar situations are in Summerset where you are treated like an outlander, even as an Altmer, because you are not from Summerset (but Auridon apparently and Auridon is not as pure).

Yes, and I noted this in my original post. Yes, you're told you're an outsider in Summerset if you're an Altmer but you get a certain benefit of the doubt *because* you're an Altmer. You can stick to the story AND reward players who may have an emotional stake in their selection of character race.

Now, why does this matter? And I'm not just speaking for the RP guilds, one of which in the EU server fashioned itself as Telvanni, that vanished in the wake of Morrowind's release. RP guilds break up for all sorts of reasons and developers can't be expected to read the backstories players craft for themselves.

As a former and now retired online game developer myself who has been bound by, at first, world history and, later, extant lore, I would have handled it differently and, I feel, better. I began my career with the very first MMO - though we didn't call them that back then - and, as developers, we had a much closer relationship with our customers than single player game developers did.

Hell, I could look at a damned box in our own office knowing people were inhabiting it at that very moment from all over the world. Plus we met with our players every year for 12 consecutive years. All of us on the team did. Thus Morrowind, to me, feels like a departure from the essential focus I feel online game developers need to have.

It's in the details.

It's one thing to have every player regarded as an outsider. It's another to rub it in in unnecessarily obnoxious ways. And I'm not talking that essential obnoxious quality that characterizes Dunmers in general.

Why, for example, on the very first quest, can I not move the quest forward without being forced - forced by the writer and designer of the quest - to ask what Red Mountain is? You're not just being regarded as an outsider by the NPCs. No. You are forced to demonstrate that you are by the writers.

So what? It's a game, right? But does that make the player feel more engaged or less? And what possible purpose could the latter serve? And if you mean to cater to long-time ES fans, how is this going to make them feel?

An immense amount of time, talent and money went into that expansion with the goal of engaging and entertaining hundreds of thousands of paying customers on multiple levels. You cannot reasonably fault a product that's 90% good for 10% that isn't unless that 10% is thoughtlessness.

Designing the world, creating all those assets, carefully lowering the poly count of each, UV mapping, texture mapping, rigging and animating the ones that move, placing all those assets, writing the AI, optimizing the engine code, creating the story and handcrafting all the quests, composing the music, creating the sound environment - all of it is hard work.

The easy part, in my view, is putting yourself in the mind of your customers.

This is why I found Morrowind so infuriating. They got the hard stuff right and the easy stuff wrong.