Customer Reviews
A game too big to fit into words
The original version of Morrowind had 300+ hours of gameply on it. The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind: GOTY adds at least 100-200 more hours of tasks to complete, dungeons to plunder and land to explore by adding on the two PC expansion packs on the 300+ hours of gameplay that was already there. You can now visit the snow covered island of Solstheim, which is only inhabited by barbaric tribes who never get any visitors and don't want any and there is a large imperial fort on the southern coast of the island. There is also the capital to visit, but this can only be done after you have reached level six. If you haven't played Morrowind at all before, I guess I'm starting in the wrong place. The Edler Scrolls III Morrowind is a massive, open ended RPG that lets you do... pretty much whatever you want to do. There is nothing to stop you from stealing whatever you like, attacking and random person you see or accepting any task you come across. Your journey begins in the marshy, sea side town of Seyda Neen. You are awaken by a dark elf (think a grumpy looking six foot tall elf with a deep scratchy voice and blue skin) and find yourself in a ship with no knowlage of the past or how you got there. A guard then explains that you were in prison and were realeased and shipped to the island of Vvardenfell under orders from the emperor himself. However, no one is sure why you are being released. You select your name (it allows you enough space to make a really long, strange name) and a guard comes and takes you to the police office in Seyda Neen. You then get to select your spices, sex, hair style and face. You do have a wide range of choices to choose from in the spices department, but it isn't quite as great as the whole "create and play any kind of character you can imagine" thing that they say on the back of the box, as I can imagine some pretty strange things. Once you get inside the office, you get to select your characters class from a wide range of types, some just overlapping other ones with only very small differences other than the name. You can also create a custom class in which you name it and choose the major skills that you character has (I always do it this way). Once you have all this done, you will be released with orders to take a package to a man in a nearby town called Balmore. Many people have complaining in their reviews about how long it takes to walk from town to town in this game, and it's true, although I love being able to hike all over the place at my own leisure. There aren't any restrictions as to where you can go. Go wandering off the path untill you find yourself in the middle of nowhere. Go for a swim in the lake or off the coast. However, in the wilderness there are all kinds of deadly animals to deal with. There are ships and "silt rider" transport stations that you can charter to get around, but they cost money and not every town has one. You would think that the game creators wouldn't go to all the trouble to put little details out in the wilderness but there isn't any part of the map that isn't covered with plants, rocks and dungeons, (there are hundreds of dungeons scattered across the map and no two are alike). Vvardenfell is a really, really big place to explore. If there was a clear path that cut through all the mountians, rivers, trees, dungeons, hills, man eating creatures, and any other type of obstruction on the island to make a path leading from one end of the island to the other, it could take anywhere from 2-3 hours to get across the whole thing. Balmora is about a 20 minute walk from Seyda Neen. Once you get there and give the package to the man, you are free to do whatever you want. The first real task in the story line is pretty hard, so they expect you to spend a lot of time leveling up and taking work. You can join a faction (there's one for just about any profession) such as the mages guild, thives guild, fighters guild, ect. The guild masters will provied you with tasks to complete and you can rise through the ranks in your guild and accept pay for a job well done. If this doesn't sound like the kind of freedom you were hoping for, you can just do free lance work, wandering the island taking jobs from strangers, rooting out dungeons, tombs, shipwrecks and ancient ruins. The textures are somewhat dated, but you hardly ever notice because of the huge amount of detail. If you go into a house, you'll notice clutter scattered all over. Things like gold coins lying on the table with no one watching them... HAHAHA!!! THEY'RE MINE NOW!!! Yes, you can also steal just about anything you can get your hands on, not just being able to steal whatever is in that spacific type of cabnit. Even completly useless things can be taken like dinner plates, burnt out candels, (lit candels, torches and lamps are good to have around for dark caves though) forks, brooms, ect. The overall hundreds and hundreds of tasks to complete and quests to emark on are never restricted by the way the game thinks the player should act in the situation. For example: say that you were wandering down a path with no tasks on hand and no reason to hurry. Suddenly, you come across a woman standing on the side of the road. You talk to her and find out that she is lost and needs to find her way back to a certian town (there are a lot of towns to visit in Morrowind). She promises to pay you 150 gold coins if you will guide her back to town. The more heroic and kind player would most likely take her into town just like she asked and accept the payment. The more efficent or just criminally minded player would probibly just kill her and take the money she promised them off her hands without having to go out of their way to escort her to some town who knows how far off. Another thing comes to mind: the deaths of NPCs (non player characters) You can kill whoever you want, including people crucial to the story line, but doing this won't effect the game itself in any huge way, just make the story impossible to finish. It is also much harder to kill people (and animals) then in games like Fable. This game has a very bare bones combat system of only three different types of attacks with weapons, but magical powers add to the fun. You will find your character very unskilled with weapons at the beginning, and you will have extream difficulty hitting the targets, even if the cross-hairs are directly over the enemy. This adds to the challange, as I was very dissapointed with Fable's combat allowing you to hack through just about anything with little trouble; just lock on and start swingin'.The towns people generally become easy to kill after you level up once, but on the other hand, you aren't going to want to kill a person in town because of the guards, and these town guards are no joke. I wasn't able to kill a guard in this game untill I was at level 25, and it takes a lot of of time and fighting to get to a level like that. If I was up against two guards, I still didn't stand a chance. However, you don't have to fight a guard if you get into trouble. They will run up to you and you will have three choices th choose from: you can either pay the fine and return any stolen items you have on you, go to jail which will cause you to lose any stolen items, but no money, and you might have a skill decreased, or you can resist arrest, which means that you'll have to either kill the guard, run away, or die trying. You can kill people in their homes or shops where there aren't any guards prowling around. Even then, they might scream and someone outside might hear it, causing the crime to be reported. If this happens, you will get a price on your head. You can only get in trouble with a price on your head if you talk to a guard. However, if the bounty is more then 1000 drakes, the guards will attack you on sight. If you do kill a guard, towns person, or any other person, they'll be gone forever. They won't respawn. This means that if you got a character more powerful than anything in the game, you could wipe out a whole town. The two expansions add a lot of extra things to do. The snow covered island of Slostheim is a very deadly place. Ask anyone in Vvardenfell and they'll say that it sounds like a terrible, terrible place. However, there are some people who live on Solstheim. Not all of them are friendly, as they rarely get visitors. The environment is very spooky. Walking through the forest with a strange mist hanging over the ground and packs of wolves stalking through the trees tends to keep one on their toes. There are supposed to be warewolves on the island, but I haven't come across any, not that I want to... The enemys on Solstheim are unusually powerful. I would say a character with a level of about 20 or so should do ok on the outside of the island itself. Some of the dungeons are packed with creatures that can tear you apart in seconds. The other expansion which allows you to visit the capitol adds more quests and the shop keepers there have much more money allowing you to sell very extravagent items for a better price. On the other hand there isn't too much land to explore there. You can jump from the expansions to the normal game without any change. You will still have same items and things like that. You're basicly taking a trip to a new place (you can even swim to Solsthiem). I have really only skimmed the surface of all the things you can do in Morrowind, but after an hour and a half of typing, I'm ready to finish this review. I doubt there would be enough room on the page to mention every little thing anyway. Overall, this is a great game for die hard RPG fans. This is the kind of game that you either love or hate. If you have been longing for a game that will let you go anywhere, wander off the path and explore to your hearts content without anything pushing you to follow along with the story and play at your own pace, this is the game for you. If you like to have something always telling you what to do so you'll stay on task at all times, you probibly won't like this too much, but if your still looking for a good RPG, you might like Fable or the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic games.
Some people are just stupid
First I like to say that i've only been playing the game for about a week now so I still don't know alot about the game.But what I do know is that this game is the shi*!..Why are some people complaining that the worlds are too big..Sure it's a long as walk and you could get lost easily but come on,What other game has that kind of freedom to just roam where ever you want.also, I think the creators of morrow wind tried to make the game as realistic as possible I.E stealing anything you want.But come on now,Complaining that if you carry to much stuff you cant move And I also bet your stupid ass tried to sell the stuff you stole back to the barter...I'm Not saying this games for everyone
But if you like games like lineage(who does),World of warcraft,Evercrack.....Then you should check out this game,Or if you've everplayed Kings field on the Playstation I Recommend this game to you also...Bottom line,The load time are a LIL too long...Every time you die good 1-1/2 minute load time..But for how big the game is and MINOR 2-4 sec when opening a door I think It's worth the wait,Although sometimes fustrating..so far for me this games a 5/5
ick
Cool, a sword! Lets go find something to kill with it. Hey, look, its a slug! Die Die Die Die! Why dont you hit him? Aw, F***! Now I died and have to go through the ABOMINABLE load times again!
Ick.
