The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition (PC/XBox, XBox version reviewed):

Ever thought it odd that in most video games you can walk into just about anyone’s house and bust up and/or take people’s stuff and no one ever seems to mind? Well, don’t try that in Morrowind unless you’re a really good thief or you enjoy going to jail. Ever thought it funny how in most games you can take a swing with your fancy sword at just about any NPC and not only will no one mind, but nothing will happen? Well, don’t try that in Morrowind unless you fancy a fight with whomever you took a swing at, not to mention likely a dozen guards and a likely trip to jail. Ever wondered what all those books you see in a game might say? In Morrowind there’s no need to wonder, just pick up a book (there’s better than 100) and read it.

Morrowind is a game literally in a class by itself. People refer to games like GTA: Vice City, Spiderman II (often jokingly called Grand Theft Spider), and the new Fable as “open ended”, none of them are even close to being as open ended as Morrowind. Whether or not you love Morrowind will very much depend on how you feel about its open ended nature.

You start Morrowind on a ship coming into the small town of Seyda Neen on the coast of Vvardenfel. It seems you were a prisoner, for reasons unstated, but that the Emperor himself has seen fit to have you released and brought to this godforsaken distant corner of the empire. During outprocessing from the ship you get to pick your character’s race, sex, birth sign, appearance, and class. For once your character’s sex actually has an effect on something besides how your avatar will look, a female character will have slightly different stats from a male character (a slightly higher dexterity and slightly lower strength, for instance, though the particulars vary by race). As for race, well there are quite a few to chose from, each with its particular strengths and weaknesses. There are the reptilian Argonians, the feline Khajiit, the, well, orcish Orcs, four different races of human (Redguard, Nord, Imperial, and Breton), and three different kinds of Elves—Wood Elf, Dark Elf (Dunmer), and High Elf (Altmer). What race and sex you pick for your character will set the baseline characteristics—there are eight—and skills—there are twenty-seven—and from there you can pick a class. There are pre-determined classes—thief, wizard, warrior, and a host of variations thereof—from which you can pick, or you can take a quick little test that will pick one for you based on your inclinations, or you can create your own class manually. If just the process of creating a character sounds daunting, it is a bit, but it’s also a good intro to how things work in Morrowind. Endless choices are there, it’s up to you to decide how you want to play and what you want to do.

Once you’ve created your character you’re basically dumped in the small town of Seyda Neen and told there’s someone who wants to talk to you. From there it’s up to you to decide what you want to do. Vvardenfel (Called Morrowind by the native Dunmer) is a huge island. Time passes in Morrowind, with day becoming night and who or what is out and about depending on whether it’s night or day. The weather changes—the rain can be a real PITA, but it’s nothing like the dust storms you’ll see later. There are numerous small towns like Seyda Neen with it’s dozen or so houses and couple of businesses as well as medium sized cities like Balmora and the huge cantons of the capitol city of Vivec. Just about anything in Morrowind, from plants in the wilderness to kitchen utensils on a table to books on a shelf, can be picked up, placed, manipulated, or sold. Just be careful about not breaking the laws of Morrowind—don’t steal (or, at least, don’t get caught), don’t attack anyone who hasn’t attacked you, don’t murder, and don’t bother trying to do business if you’ve any illegal drugs on you—or you’ll have to deal with a rather large number of very tough guards who want to talk to you.

Just getting around Morrowind can be daunting, walking from one end of the island to the other can take hours in realtime and weeks in game time, even longer if you don’t know your way. Fortunately there are lots of faster ways to travel. Silt Striders—huge bugs you can ride for a price—travel between most of the major cities and towns on the western half of the island, boats travel between costal cities, and teleportation is available between the various Mage’s Guild locations. Not that walking doesn’t have its advantages. All over Morrowind are bandit caves, tombs, ruins, shipwrecks, and random quests to be found—you can hardly turn around in Morrowind without finding something interesting to do.

There is a rather lengthy central quest to follow, it involves living gods, the ghostfence, and the disappearance of the dwarven race, but if you follow it at all—there’s no reason you have to, but it’s well worth doing so—it’ll probably be intermittently—in fact at points you’re encouraged to go do something else for a while. Besides the central quest there are dozens of other storylines you can follow, many of them nearly as lengthy and most of them to be found by joining various guilds and such. There’s the fighters guild, the thieves guild, the mages guild, the assassin’s guild (Morag Tong), three different Dunmer great houses (though you can only join one), the Imperial Legion, and two different religions. With a few exceptions, you can join any or all of these groups and each will offer advantages as well as a long series of quests that will allow you to rise in level and stature within the group. Or you can go off and become a blood sucking vampire, complete with aversion to sunlight and problems making friends among the living. If you’re clever you can even be cured of your vampirism later, should you decide you want to rejoin the world of the living. If you want to make up for your evil vampiric deeds once you’re human again, go free some slaves. While illegal in the Empire, slavery is allowed in Morrowind, much to the displeasure of many. An underground railroad assisting escaped slaves exists, but you’ll have to work at gaining their trust.

In most games you rarely have to wonder what to do next, in fact many games can get downright annoying about making sure you do next whatever it is the game designer intended for you to do next no matter what it is you might want to do. In Morrowind there is an utter lack of any such direction. What to do next is entirely up to you and you’ll rarely, if ever, want for choices—quite the opposite. That adds a level of complexity to the game right from the start that can be quite daunting. When you’re dumped in Seyda Neen and eventually told to see person X in Balmora, a town a day’s walk southeast, what do you do? Do you walk to Balmora, take a Stilt Strider there, ignore it all for now and become a botanist for fun and profit (some plants are worth a fair amount of money)? Later things become even more open, it’s not at all unusual to have half a dozen quest threads running at any given time. Some will find this openness exhilarating, others will find it annoying.

Just as the world of Morrowind isn’t static, in fact it changes quite a lot as things progress, your character advances as time goes on. When you first land in Seyda Neen your avatar will barely be able to lift a sword, let alone hit anything with it. In Morrowind advancement is in part based on success. A good example is blocking. Let’s say you have a shield, each time an enemy takes a swing at you there is a certain percentage chance you’ll get your shield up in time to block it. At first that percentage chance is pretty low, but each time you do successfully block an attack your block skill goes up just a little bit more. Once it goes up enough, you advance a level in that skill and become better at it. Go up in enough skills and you advance up an entire level and get a certain number of points to distribute amongst your characteristics. There are twenty-seven skills and all of them advance in this way, you have to successfully use them to advance in that skill or you can in some instances pay someone to train you up a level in that skill. As in everything else in Morrowind, what you become good in very much depends on what you put effort (or money) into.

For all that Morrowind can be a very complex game, in large measure because of its open nature, it’s not an overly difficult one to play. When you first start out it’s likely your character will have little more than a sharp stick for a weapon and barely be able to hit the broad side of a barn with it. But the opening areas are relatively kind to your character and the kinds of baddies you meet will depend largely on your skill level. As long as you don’t wander into anyplace too nasty by accident—save early and save often—you’ll soon have a character that can slice ‘n dice (or hurl fireballs, or what have you) with the best of ‘em. Money isn’t hard to find in Morrowind, stripping bandit caves—or bandits, for that matter, you can strip your defeated enemies to their underwear and sell their stuff if you’ve a mind to—and selling everything you can find can be quite lucrative. Raiding ruins—something generally best saved for once your character has a little experience under her belt—can net you money, weapons, and armor—not to mention magic items of great power—to sustain you through much of the game.

The combat difficulty can be adjusted in Morrowind (indeed it has one of the highest degrees of granularity I’ve ever seen in a game), but at its default settings you shouldn’t find it too difficult. Early on you’ll mostly deal with annoying crabs (you’ll learn how to avoid them quickly enough), bandits, and cliff riders (these annoying pterodactyl things that’ll pester you throughout the game). It’s possible to wander into some very unhealthy places as a less powerful character, but you’ll quickly learn that ruins and such are best avoided until you have some decent armor, a good sword, and plenty of magic. Once you do have all of those things—especially if you’re like me and tend to work at leveling up a lot in the beginning—the latter fights can seem even too easy at the default difficulty.

The graphics in Morrowind are a mixed bag. On the one hand you’ll see many interesting and even some beautiful sights (the sun rising over Ebonheart, for instance), on the other hand the fog and pop-up will drive you plain bonkers at times. Pop-up tends to be less of an issue these days than it was on earlier generation consoles (N64 games could sometimes be horrid that way), but here Morrowind is just so bloody big that pop-up in almost inevitable. Sound is another mixed bag. There are a couple of dozen phrases you’ll hear people say over and over and over again, beyond that most conversations are handled in text trees that can get quite lengthy. After a while you get to the point where you want to skewer the next guard who says “Move along, Citizen…” to you. There are also a half dozen musical pieces that you’ll hear over and over. They’re nice enough work, if nothing you’ll want an MP3 of, but the repetition does get to be a bit much after a while. Fortunately the game doesn’t feel the need to play them continuously so it’s unlikely your ears will start bleeding.

The controls are arraigned very logically in Morrowind, with my only bitch being that scrolling through your magic list can get to be a nightmare after a while (no real way to solve that, I suppose), and the book that keeps track of critical conversations, quests, and such gets to be so long as to be useless quite quickly (that was solved in the PC version, but not on the XBox). Not surprisingly in a game of this size, there are load times here and there, but they’re generally acceptably quick. Loading your save game, however, well, have some tea and crumpets handy. Lastly on the technical side, I did run into game lock-ups and crashes. A relative rarity in console games, not as surprising in a port, especially a port of this complexity. Definitely something to be aware of and make sure you save early and save often—fortunately saving is relatively quick and painless (though you won’t be able to save to a memory card, the saves are too big).

The GOTY (Game Of The Year) edition of Morrowind includes a number of bug-fixes from the original release and includes two expansions—Blood Moon and Tribunal. Blood Moon occurs on the island of Solstheim, to the north and west—a wintery wasteland where werewolves (which you can become, should you wish) are at war with an Imperial outpost. Tribunal occurs in and under the Imperial city of Mournhold, where you will work for and later work to defeat (yet another) demi-god—or, in this case, demi-goddess. Definitely get the GOTY edition rather than the original, especially since they’ll generally be the same price. The bug-fixes alone make it a better choice and the two expansions add upwards of another 20 - 50 hours to what is already an extremely long game (you can easily spend 100 - 150 hours on Morrowind if you want to try and see and do everything).

On the surface Morrowind looks like a rather common swords ‘n sorcery hack ‘n slash, in reality it’s much more than that. Open ended in a way that no game to date has been, Morrowind manages to come as close to creating a whole living and breathing world that you can interact with as you see fit as any game has to date.

Given that I find I rather like open-ended games, it is my hope that Morrowind is a taste of things to come. With the increased storage space (Blu-Ray, here we come), processing, and graphics horsepower that will be available on the nexgen consoles (and is available now on PCs), even more intricate and open worlds will be possible. I can see a day when entire fantasy planets ranging from sword ‘n sorcery to realistic to futuristic will be available on disk for you to play around with. These will be truly open, it will be possible for a player to do anything from open a whorehouse to becoming empress of the universe, as is your wont. Such games won’t be for everyone, any more than Morrowind is, but for those who enjoy such open ended play Morrowind, while not perfect, is definitely pointing the way.

Myria