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."

Comments

Re:Huge Big Game

[caffeination]

Morrowind reached the point of obsession for me. I built a beautiful thieves guild mod with hidden trapdoors to hideouts in each guild, plus a nice little extension to the balmora guild. My specialty was stealing. I stole everything, including that stupid heavy hammer that's of no real use whatsoever. I used to love coming up with newer and cleverer ways to steal. I used stealing to build a character with bought training, just to experience the parts of the game I was less interested in earning, and even that was worth it.

Even today, all this time later, I could easily fire Morrowind up and play it. I still do from time to time, but only on the Xbox since I moved 100% to Linux on the PC. I've even done the hacks necessary to run mods on the Xbox (if you're thinking of doing this, be aware that it does hurt framerate - they optimised the Xbox version quite well).

Only problem is that with so much intimacy with a game, you really start to see the flaws, and they really dig into the suspension of disbelief - Morrowind has some major freaky stuff that you don't notice at first. Even so, enjoy it while it lasts man, Morrowind is one of the best games I've ever played.

Just don't get into the vain habit of giving a shit about Tamriel Rebuilt. Those guys are extreme addiction cases.

Re:Why no mention of Daggerfall?

[Dinosaur Neil]

My own experience with Daggerfall was that of disappointment. I had played Arena way back when, and looked forward to the "immersive 3-D experience" followup, but the huge, sprawling and randomly generated dungeons were way too easy to get lost in (even with the auto-map) and even after three system upgrades, including faster and more capable videos cards each time, I still fell through stairs on an alarmingly regular basis.

Daggerfall had a far more sophisticated story than anything else available at the time, unfortunately (IMHO at least), it suffered from iffy gameplay. Morrowind was far more entertaining, both in the even richer story, and in the far more robust gameplay.

The real question is, "Why no mention of Battlespire?"

Re:1 The quality of passing all moral bounds;

[Quaoar]

According to the little blurb on your link there, only 59% of people agree with not using enormity to mean "big." That's not a terribly overwhelming majority.

Hard to Top

[bahwi]

Morrowind was great, huge, with lots of flexibility. I know others were good too(daggerfall), but Morrowind was just amazing. I've spent hundreds of hours playing it. I feel like oblivion will be cheating on Morrowind.

I have done everything I've wanted to do set in Morrowind. I've done the whole vampire thing, the werewolf thing, lots of mods, lots of mods not loaded at all, all different types of stuff, all the guilds, none of the guilds. Way too much, and it was great.