‘Morrowind’ Is Broken, Buggy & The Best Open-World RPG Ever Crafted

Open world games are a tough balance to strike; on one hand, you want a world that’s as big and impressive as possible, on the other, you want a world that feels interesting and like it’s not just populated with heaps of the same bland garbage.
Given the incredible stuff we’ve seen recently from games like ‘The Witcher 3‘, ‘Breath of the Wild‘ and ‘Skyrim‘ (well, sort of recently), it might seem ridiculous to suggest that ‘The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind‘ – a game that is now 15 years old – would be better than anything released in the last 5 years, but I’m convinced it struck that balance better than any other game.
Let’s start with the bad things about ‘Morrowind‘. Firstly, it does not look great. Sure, it looked very good when it was released, but even if you crank every HD texture pack and graphics mod available, it still looks very dated – which is absolutely fine, because it is.
Secondly, some of the gameplay mechanics are very, very broken. Ranged combat is nearly impossible (although it does have crossbows and throwing stars, which are both badass and were featured in neither ‘Oblivion‘ or ‘Skyrim‘). Any quest where you have to escort someone is horrendously difficult and there is a very good chance they will get lost unless you run backwards the whole time so you can see them. 
Thirdly (and most importantly), cliff racers. 
For some reason, every corner of the map is packed with these monstrous four-winged-pterodactyl-lookin’ motherfuckers, and they will awkwardly fly either perfectly vertically or perfectly horizontally (never diagonally) to come and ruin your day (people have made mods to fix this). Fun fact: people found this shit so annoying that Bethesda added a tidbit to ‘Oblivion‘ describing how Jiub, the guy that wakes you up on the boat in ‘Morrowind‘, singlehandedly drove cliff racers to extinction.
Alright, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get into the good shit: the world was fucking crazy. ‘Oblivion‘ and ‘Skyrim‘ are both very familiar settings – ‘Oblivion‘ is medieval England but there’s lizard people, ‘Skyrim‘ is Vikings but there’s lizard people. ‘Morrowind‘ was something else.
While they drew inspiration from Ancient Roman and Native American history, they made a world that wasn’t grounded in the usual medieval / Tolkien-y fantasy tropes that most fantasy games rely on. Half the cities in the games were composed of buildings made from either giant trees or giant crab shells. The dungeons you found in the wilderness were either weird geometrically demented Lovecraftian temples for cultists, ancient ruins filled with clockwork spiders or the labyrinthine nests of one of the many, many insane looking animals in the game.
That craziness is part of what contributed to making ‘Morrowind‘ feel so big. Weirdly, ‘Morrowind‘ is actually the smallest ‘Elder Scrolls‘ game, with a map that is roughly the equivalent of 15 square kilometres. ‘Skyrim‘ and ‘Oblivion‘ are much bigger, both weighing in at around 41 square kilometres. ‘Morrowind‘s predecessor, ‘Daggerfall‘, was a whopping 161,000 square kilometres. ‘Daggerfall‘s predecessor ‘Arena‘, on the other hand, was an absolutely bullshit ridiculous and totally unnecessary 6,000,000 square kilometres.

While, in some regards, size definitely matters, what really matters is how you use it. ‘Daggerfall‘ and ‘Arena‘ were almost entirely randomly generated, including nearly every city and dungeon. For ‘Oblivion‘ and ‘Skyrim‘, the cities and dungeons were designed by humans, but the landscapes were generated procedurally. In ‘Morrowind‘, everything was placed by hand.
Every rock and every tree is the result of a mouse click from what I imagine was probably a very bored employee, which meant none of the map has that sameyness and homogeneity of something produced by an algorithm. ‘Morrowind‘ felt big because everything was new and weird. It also felt big because it was incredibly difficult to get around.
Morrowind‘ had no fast travel which, admittedly, became a huge pain in the ass if you needed to go back and forth between places for quests, but which also made it feel like every trip somewhere was a journey. You didn’t have to walk everywhere, but if you chose not to walk it took a weird amount of planning to figure out how you would get there.
There were a few transport options: you could ride on a giant bug, you could catch a boat, or (if you were a member) you could teleport between Mages Guild buildings. The problem is, not every city was on the bug route, not every city had a boat, not every boat went to the same places, and not every city had a Mages Guild. To top it off, none of this was clearly spelled out; there was no easy way to look at where you could get to by which method or how you would be able to continue from there. Your options were basically to memorise which city / fishing village had what or to just guess every time and hope you got a bit closer with every trip.
This might sound bad and annoying, but without the ability to just instantly transition from anywhere to anywhere, the world felt like it actually took effort to traverse, contributing to its massive sense of scale.
What really makes this game great, though, to me, was its complete lack of structure. Modern RPGs tend to be built on patterns: there are clearly delineated types of quests, dungeons all have a boss at the bottom and some cool random loot, each city has a guy that sells swords, a guy that sells armour and a place to get quests from. ‘Morrowind‘ did not have this.
The quests in ‘Morrowind‘ were all very ~intangible~. There was no counter keeping track of the number of wolf skins or whatever you needed to collect, no quest markers telling you where to go to find someone – often times quests would involve having to follow written instructions to get to where you were supposed to go (admittedly, often times this resulted in getting hopelessly lost).
Figuring out what quests or things for sale a city had was a matter of talking to everyone and finding out, that actually, the only thing in Gnaar Mok is a guy who will sell you some arrows. 
Dungeons, as well, were a complete crapshoot. Sometimes they were lengthy, filled with enemies and completely unconnected to any quests. Sometimes they were very short and contained one of the game’s most powerful magic items. Mostly, they were as part of a quest that, for all you know, could have come from any of the seven major factions, the main storyline, some random dude, or just about anywhere. It didn’t feel like they were just there for you to repetitively run through, grab the loot at the end and get out. 
There are definitely other games that have this feeling of a rich and varied world (‘The Witcher 3‘, in particular), but none of them evoke the complete sense of otherworldliness that ‘Morrowind‘ did. ‘Morrowind‘ gave you a big, weird world and gave you very little information about how you were supposed to traverse it or what the things were that you could do.
I’ve been sporadically picking up the game every now and then for 15 years and there’s still stuff I’ve never seen before; for instance, I didn’t know you could join the assassin’s guild in Vivec until like 4 years after I started playing, what a world.
If you’ve not played it before, I absolutely recommend picking up the Game of the Year edition for dirt cheap, absolutely smothering it in graphics mods, looking past the jankiness, and giving it a bash.
Photo: Bethesda.


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