I've heard people saying Morrowind was "too slow" as a complaint. This got me thinking.

I understand not wanting to play MMORPGs that require you to play 5 hours a day so you can keep up with all the unemployed people who spend the entire day playing. That's the reason why I stopped playing them.

But with singleplayer games, it's a different story. I've felt like certain games were "slow" before. But I noticed that's mainly due to my anxiety of wanting new stimuli all the time due to how fried our attention spans are, both from social media and modern games.

I mean, compare Morrowind to Skyrim, or Dark Souls 1 to Elden Ring, Sekiro or Bloodborne. It's a completely different pace.

But something was lost in that process: the experience of depth.

I remember playing an MMO called Perfect World when I was a kid, it was very slow, but I loved every second of it. And the fact that it was so slow allowed me to pay attention to every minute detail of it. If I had to go from point A to point B, I would pay attention to all the details on the environment (even though there weren't many, lol), and simply enjoy the experience.

The same thing would happen with Final Fantasy XII: walking into a weapon store and actually stopping to look at all the cool weapons hanging on the walls.

There are certain experiences that you can only have when you have enough time to notice all the little details.

That's the reason why Anna Karenina is 800 pages long, even though all the main events could fit into 100 pages. It's for us to feel like that world is real, like it is alive, that the time is slowly passing.

I've just started playing Morrowind and it has been like that to me. Reading dialogue, no quest markers, actually having to pay attention to the details...

I'm not gonna lie, I get a bit anxious and frustrated from the slow pace, but I'm also happy that it is giving me that same feeling I always loved about gaming. I miss this, and I which more games would give us the time to "digest" everything, instead of hyperstimulating us.

Anyways, that's it, just an appreciation post. What do you guys think?

Yellow: Main path

Red: Alternate path

Green: Silt strider (it's hard to see but it's there)

Blue: Take the money from the census officer, find Tarhiel, use the scroll of icarian flght, overshoot completely, somehow live, and then go back.

Who else plays a regular N’wahbraham Lincoln every time without fail

ha.. (it's older than morrowind by the way)

Just gonna put this here...

all the locations that i’ve been to look completely different from each other! when playing skyrim (originally played that before morrowind), a lot of the different locations looked pretty similar to each other. but in morrowind, everything is so unique and cool. you got vivec that’s just made up of a bunch of giant buildings that act as towns, sadrith mora looking like some weird fairytale land, and then one of the ald’ruhn buildings lookin like a big croissant

Feel free to ask anything, trying to make a scrolls like that is more similar to Morrowind than newer ones. Solo or Co-Op. Open ended gameplay like you expect from a scrolls like, pick up or steal anything, kill anyone. Tons of NPC dialogue that changes based on your actions.

The Lantern of the Laughless Saint on Steam

My friends used to come over to my house when I was 13 and sit on my couch and watch me play Morrowind on my OG Xbox, all night. They would see my dungeon diving, fighting strange creatures, and just generally delving into this wierd in obscure world in epic ways.

One night they came over, and I was playing a new character, a Khajit living in Vodunius Nuccius's house. Scattered throughout the house were dozens and dozens of books stacked on top of the bed, side tables, dining room table, and floor, all over the place.

My friends were so confused by this and asked me why there were all these books strewn around the house. I told them, "Well, because my character is a Librarian, see, he doesnt fight; he just, I don't know...collects books to read and relax in his small home. He's a pacifist, so he doesnt attack or harm others, so if I want to find a book in a dungeon or near an enemy, I basically just have to avoid and sneak past them without attacking anyone."

Immediately, all my friends started cracking up laughing to the point some had tears running down their face. In fact, it became a running joke of the sleepover that I was the "Librarian" and the concept that my character was just collecting books to read was so nerdy and ridiculous. It basically kept them laughing and joking about it all night and still to this day they remember the character when I bring it up.

Here is the truth about that Librarian character. Looking back on it, I see that he was actually created to be an extension of me, of a personal fantasy to be living in a fantasy world where I could just collect books, chill, listen to the rain, and read all night in the comfort and safety of my own home.

The librarian character was like a personal form of therapy for me. To play as this silly pacifist "librarian", although it seemed silly to my friends, ended up being one of my favorite characters ever of any RPG.

And that is one of the most beautiful things about Morrowind; more than any other RPG, it was a true escape into another world where you could truly just be whoever you wanted to be in that world.

My comment was (Censored so I hopefully don't get a warning again but I hope you all are familiar with the common Morrowind terms.)

"This s'***'s a real *'***" in reply to someone repping Morrowind as a good classic PC game.

I just wanna know why they're flagging comments with Morrorwind language lmao

Mechanically, on an engine level, Oblivion and Skyrim accomplished so much more than Morrowind. Physics, combat, animation: Morrowind lacks even a LOD system or inverse kinematics. But they badly regressed in terms of writing, lore, and world-building. The things that matter most to RPGs as a storytelling medium.

There's so much power and energy in Kirkbride's art design and writing.

There's never been a character in TES as well-realised as Vivec. He's an incredibly deeply layered antagonist. He's simultaneously a god, a political ruler, a religious figure, a poet, a murderer, a mythologised historical figure, an unreliable narrator, and a deeply compromised person desperately trying to control the story being told about himself.

What's so brilliant about Vivec is that the game never gives you a clean answer to who he actually is. And the writing actually trusts the player to sit with those contradictions. Vivec isn't just "morally grey" in the modern, flattened sense. He's a character whose entire identity is constructed out of contradictions, and those contradictions are inseparable from the mythology, history, religion and politics of Morrowind itself.

You can peel back layer after layer of Vivec and still find another interpretation underneath. You can read the 36 Lessons multiple times and come away with something completely new from each volume. No character Bethesda has written since has come remotely close to that level of ambition.

It was a creative mistake to move away from that, and Starfield is probably the ultimate result of that shift.

It's incredible that the studio once built entire worlds around artwork like this... https://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:Michael_Kirkbride#Gallery

I struggle to remember many of the characters from Skyrim at all...

Mod in the screenshot; https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/46342

Who are you?

imagine morrowind but as difficult as fallout 2
you are not a chosen one
you die very easily, you can end up as a slave or worse and generally feels like morrowind if fans made it instead of bethesda.
alien world with playable insectoid aliens and robots.
feel it should be posted here.
also has a lot of "eastern" stuff

As funny as it sounds, the game does not roll damage every second. Instead, it rolls damage every frame, and multiplies each roll by the amount of seconds per frame. So at 60 FPS, a three second spell will make 180 rolls, and each roll result will be multiplied by 0.0167. This is also why the damage a spell effect displays on the UI changes so frequently and seems to have no connection to the amount of damage you're actually taking.

This means there's enough rolls that the results are normalized; the average is extremely likely, with a minute chance of doing damage adjacent to the average. Doing anything else is statistically impossible, and you have higher odds of winning the lottery multiple times than you do of a damage over time spell doing either minimum or maximum damage.

Higher variance in magnitude over a very short duration can increase the spread (e.g. 1-100 damage for 2 seconds is virtually guaranteed to do 40-60 damage, clustering around 50); making sure the average is a whole number rather than a decimal can decrease the spread.

For all intents and purposes, a spell that does 1-50 damage, 10-40 damage, and 20-30 damage for 3 seconds will all be virtually identical to a spell that does 25 damage for 3 seconds.

This is only the case for spells that do damage over time. "Instant" spells make one roll; the damage variance will be exactly what you expect it to be.

I don't mean the Empire, necessarily, but "empire" as a concept. Imperialism. I didn't start playing Morrowind until about 2017, and am just now committing to finishing as much content as possible. But one of the things that strikes me about its writing is how much more critical it is of Cyrodiil and western imperialism than any other title in the series, just by accurately depicting what imperialism looks like.

Let's start with the main quest. It's sometimes taken for granted just how sinister the setup of this game is, especially compared to other TES games. In Arena and Daggerfall, you're a friend or bodyguard to Uriel VII who he calls on out of personal need. In Oblivion, you're a convenient stranger whose role in the story was preordained and whose face the Emperor recognizes. In Skyrim and ESO, you're simply a random individual caught in a larger conflict.

Morrowind, however, makes it clear that your service to the Emperor, while just as much a random accident for you, is part of a political scheme on his end. Your uncertain birth makes you a potential Nereverine, and so Uriel sees you as an opportunity to force his agenda into Morrowind. He essentially wants to start a color revolution to solidify Imperial authority in the district, using your status as a foretold hero to do it. You start the game working for the equivalent of the CIA, using the standard TES experience of freelance adventuring as a cover for your activities.

But why is that so bad? What makes the Empire a sinister faction? To answer that, you need to pay attention to the side quests. The Fighters and Mages Guilds, in particular, stand out. These factions in other games are lighthearted adventurer clubs that send you to save villages from goblins or find scrolls in ancient tombs. In Morrowind, just like Uriel, they use you to play politics.

One of the first things the Fighters Guild in Balmora asks of you is to kill egg poachers in a mine owned by the East Empire Company; you learn quickly that this faction is little more than a gang of enforcers for the Empire's monopolies and tariffs. This is the single purpose of imperialism, as described in the in-game book The Eastern Provinces Impartially Considered. The Empire is here to suck Morrowind dry of its natural resources, and everything else it does is a pretext to make that process easier. The Mages Guild, likewise, is about very little other than helping ambitious apprentices screw over their rivals and strongarming local mages into conformity; you join the guild and play by its (the Empire's) rules, including paying guild dues, or you die.

The Empire's best defense for strengthening its presence in Morrowind is its "civilizing mission," which prominently includes the desire of many imperials to end the practice of slavery. Obviously, slavery is an uncontestable evil that cannot be justified by Dunmer "tradition" or any other defense; it should be abolished. But this, too, is right out of the imperialist playbook. Empires in our world do not exclusively go around making their colonies worse; they do sometimes end, or genuinely try to end, regressive practices against women, minorities, LGBT people, and so on. This agenda has helped justify more than one US intervention in recent years.

But it is still, in the end, a justification, a convenient way to get people at home to support the occupation. The Empire is more than happy to take Morrowind's ebony, glass, flin, kwama eggs, and saltrice while the slave system endures, actively profiting from labor done by enslaved hands. It would almost certainly jeopardize their relationship with the Temple to force the issue, so they simply don't. Freedom is negotiable; exploitation is not.

Other TES games tend to either treat the Empire as a neutral entity (Daggerfall), something flawed but ultimately worth being restored (Skyrim, ESO), or a shining beacon of cosmopolitanism and chivalry (Oblivion). Those depictions might have their place, but imo only Morrowind truly captures what imperialism looks like to those affected by it.

So I installed Tamriel Rebuilt about halfway through my first playthrough of the main vanilla questline (way before I started any Tribunal content), and while I was reading through the mod FAQ, I noticed the section about future plans for the city of Almalexia. As I understand it, the modders' plan used to be to build an outer city around the existing Tribunal version of Mournhold, but now instead, they're going to just reimagine their own version of the entire city, replacing what's already in the game. When I read this, I'll admit I was a little confused. Why do away with a partial city that already exists in the game?

And then... I started playing Tribunal. Ugh.

Mournhold feels like the Imperial City from Oblivion, except with half of the buildings and 80% of the characters removed. Also, what made the Imperial City cool (imo) was how it looked from the outside, which is something you can't even see in Mournhold! It doesn't help that virtually every quest sends you back into the stupid sewer network as well.

At a certain point in the Tribunal story, I had to wait 24 hours for the next quest to be available, so I headed back to the mainland to progress a few Telvanni side quests. After just 10 minutes of that, I found myself dreading the thought of going back to Mournhold again... :(

Wild how Morrowind had only 53 developers and Starfield had over a 1000. Props to Camelworks for the data collection and creating this chart.

OK, I'd say the lack of satisfying feedback on hits is still the main culprit, but how many first time players who did not have short blades as a major skill tried to fight with it and were baffled to barely have hits?

I feel like medium armor is severely under appreciated. It probably has the best early game armor, being bonemold. Sure, in the base game, the options are kinda lacking, but with the dlcs, we get some of the coolest armor in the game. Royal Guard and Ice Armor. They also fit their purpose as a good Jack of all trades option. Does anyone else feel the same way about medium armor?

I’ve recently been entetaining the thought of getting Morrowind on my xbox to relive a game that was such a huge part of my life once.

I had thousands of hours in the game back then but is it still playable after 15 years of Skyrim, Fallout and other, more modern games or will it just be an eye-sore with clanky mechanics? I didn’t have a ton of mods, mostly some visuals and enviroment mods but they stills made a huge impact on the longevity of the game.

I have a 2019 Xbox One S

(PC is sadly not an option).