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The Literary Merit of Morrowind
Gamers with Jobs has a piece looking at the literary achievement that is Morrowind. The author discusses the depth of Elder Scrolls III and contemplates the upcoming release of the fourth game in the series. From the article: "It comes down to this: In spite of my having devoted dozens of hours to conquering its enormity, I have only ever scratched the surface of Morrowind, the previous game in the Elder Scrolls series. I am frankly unprepared to move on to any further games in the series, knowing that there remains much to do in the previous installment. And with your permission, I would now like to inflict my piddling insecurities upon you, if only for a short time--after which, feel free to remove the wax."
I'm still in the first 1/3 of Morrowind, and enjoying it. I actually find the enormity of the game freeing--I'm gonna be playing this sucker so long, I don't feel any need to upgrade to an XBox 360 (or bigger PC) to take on Oblivion. By the time I "finish" Morrowind, Oblivion's going to be in the discount bin, or on the Platinum list.
It's kind of like the Everlasting Gobstopper of video games.
boobies... and horses, houses, and boats you could buy. and a lot more intuitive quick travel feature. those are good, too.
abort, retry, fail?
My outstanding memory of Daggerfall is finding out it had corrupted all of my save games after an all night session with the game. After I stopped screaming, I booted up the game again, and started playing a new character.
Not many games can have you coming back after that kind of abuse.
The article writer says that we've only just scratched the surface of Morrowind. Uh, sure, maybe that's true for him. While I personally got bored of the gameplay style and mentally cracked the system the game ran on (it became no fun to play the game. I still love the setting behind all the Elder Scrolls games, though), this is not true of a friend of mine.
This friend has, over the years, systematically worked through every aspect of Morrowind, Tribunal, and Bloodmoon. He's downloaded mods, made them himself, and played all he can. If you ask "But how? Morrowind is teh hueg!", well, the man started back when the game came out. Bloodmoon's been out for what, 2.5 years now?
The article's author is content with Morrowind for now, but for all us veterens who have been waiting for the next installment, Oblivion will "be like a fresh drink of water" (In the words of another friend.)
I think this is one of the best games ever.
The graphics, hm, maybe. The freedom, yes, interesting. The depth and complexity, again, is only a brick in a larger wall. The usual "gamer values" all apply to this title, no doubts.
But still, what I found really astonishing during countless hours in Vvardenfell was the literature: the raw amount of "things to read" is per se staggering, but has also what I consider an extremely well done achievement, and done particularly well in Morrowind.
Every event of history has been recorded with the "natural" bias and spin of the writer and the faction recording it. It's filology and storiography at its best, and the authors needed to take uttermost care in proposing different viewpoints on "facts" that are invariably narrated by a biased narrator.
All the major events of the plots are written down in at least a couple of factions' "official version". And if you listen to each faction, each and every one of them is deeply convinced that their official version is THE only reasonable version.
And IMHO to discover what really happened is the true quest of the game. Deciding who's right and who's wrong. Or who is enough right for you to follow and enough wrong for you to fight against, is in itself a breathtaking experience. Like in real world, you have views on facts, never raw facts, to help you form your own opinion on what's your duty to accomplish.
I think this aspect alone - very often misunderstood and underestimated by gamers and reviewers - is what makes me put TESIII:Morrowind on the pedestal of best game ever.
The rest of more mundane achievements, technical or strictly gameplay oriented, are minor compared to this aspect, merely functional, if you wish, to the presentation of a world where the Truth is never only one.
I'm very, very glad this game and its expansions still work decently on my aging linux+cedega rig. Till I bought cedega, I kept a win partition only for it.
... in addition to the 360 version[, which] seems to keep getting graphically downgraded.
Show me one article that states the 360 version is being graphically downgraded and I'll show you multiple articles that claim the graphical difference to be marginal, at best.
Of course the PC version will get patches sooner, but Bethesda can always include them with downloadable content through Xbox Live for 360 owners, if need be. The Xbox 360 is a static set of hardware, so testing on it is far more reliable than the near-infinite PC configurations. This fact alone makes it far more likely that the game will run better on an X360 than a random PC. Not to mention that Morrowind was essentially a console port of the PC version, while Oblivion was developed specifically for the X360, as well as the PC.
Then again, the PC version enables users to create their own content, adding dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to an already lengthy game. That is, in my opinion, the biggest advantage of picking up the PC version over the console one.