I am unsure if you have picked up this little fact about me yet, but I love fantasy role playing games. I love the high adventure, the worldbuilding, the feeling that you can be whoever it is that you want to be. This is one the reasons why I find myself so drawn to The Elder Scrolls franchise time and time again, they are the quintessential fantasy RPG. Bethesda have spared no effort in ensuring that The Elder Scrolls consistently sets the bar the role playing with every entry. The result of this dedication means that a lot of the older Elder Scrolls games hold up very well to this day. (Well, if you don't mind dated graphics and clunky controls too much I guess.) Go back, try them out, and will be able to experience a piece of living fantasy gaming history.
Oblivion still sends chills down my spine every time the sky turns dark crimson as you approach Kvatch. Skyrim still swoons me with it beautiful world of spacious tundras and chilling snow drifts. Daggerfall still makes me want to gouge my eyes out with that introductory dungeon. But there is one Elder Scrolls game that sticks out from all the others, one game who's importance to gaming history cannot be understated, one with incredibly clunky combat. I am talking, of course, about 'The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind'.
If you haven't heard the story of Morrowind's development yet, just look at any of the interviews where Todd Howard explains it. He loves bringing it up. That is not my focus today, today I want to talk less about the circumstances surrounding the original product and more on the product itself. I want to delve into why we still consider Morrowind a classic despite it's many, many flaws. Full disclosure, I absolutely love Morrowind to an irrational degree, but I will try to keep rational as I go into the game itself.
In many ways, Morrowind was the birthplace for Bethesda's reputation as master world builders. Before Morrowind there was DOOM 2, Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire and Redgaurd. Games of varying quality but none that really shone out for spectacular world design. The first two Elder Scrolls games are fun but the composition of their worlds was more of a technical marvel than a design one. A computer generated waste of randomly assigned dungeons sounds cool on paper and mind numbing in gameplay, and it is. Daggerfall did introduce some of the standard world elements that we now come to expect from The Elder Scrolls, (Like the Dark Brotherhood.) but the land of the Bretons was still a mostly featureless expanse with no distinct elements. All that would change in 2002 when 'The Elder Scrolls Morrowind' would land. Say what you want about Morrowind's graphics, but you remember Vvardenfell.
Maybe that is on account of that fact that Morrowind looks like it was spawned from the shroomed out mind of a Tim Burton tribute team. The isle of Vvardenfell is writhe with oversized mushroom palaces, hulking canton cityscapes and that giant, suspended, crashing moon that the locals decided to turn into a convenient office space. Everywhere you go in Morrowind there is something new and unique to see. Things that you haven't seen in every other fantasy before. That was Bethesda's biggest strength when crafting Morrowind. They were able to create a world that felt almost alien in it's inception, but if you look closer you start to see the real world influences seep into the Dunmer people. Egyptian culture, for example, permeates through the pyramid-like design of the Dunmer's buildings, and their entombing rituals and penchant for elaborate living face masks. That touch of the familiar and foreign lends Morrowind it's implacable charm that lingers in the back of your mind.
Then there is the lore. I have spoken in great lengths about my love for videogame lore, I have even mentioned Morrowind and the litany of world-building literature that you can find scattered around the gameworld. All of this content helps establish the culture of Morrowind in the mind of the player, bringing that world to life. What is even more important then that, however, is to have that lore realized in the game. You could write a hundred books about the xenophobia of Vvardenfell's people and how particularly exclusionary House Hlaalu can be, but none of that is real until you jaunt past your first Ordinator and have him call you "N'wah" or "Scum". Completely unprovoked, that is.( All these years later I still don't know what an "N'wah" is, but I remain deeply offended.)
Lore creates context for your culture and builds structure for it's society. Every significant narrative element that adds up to create the full, involved, story is validated and bolstered by lore. And the historical influences help shape that lore and make it feel genuine. The political struggles between the Tribunal, The houses and the sixth house is almost a background element of Morrowind's story although it's fallout affects a great degree of your interactions throughout the game. Dharmic religions influence the Vvardenfell temples and their teachings. And Christian mythology is represented in the heart of the plot. Afterall, the resurrected Nerevar is know as the Nevarine; no great insight is needed to see how that draws influence from the legend of the Nazarene.
Here's another, weirder, reason why Morrowind is remembered. The combat. Specifically, how terrible it is. It seems strange to credit one the game's greatest failings as one of it's most memorable aspects, but we do tend to remember the things we have the strongest reaction to; and Morrowind's combat mechanics certainly drew a lot of strong reactions from gamers. For those unfamiliar, Morrowind was created by a team of people who were all huge 'Dungeons and Dragons' nerds. They loved that tabletop experience so much that they used it to shape a few of the weirder design decisions in Morrowind. Like that terrible navigation system wherein you would meet a quest giver and they would give you directions to your destination. 'That doesn't seem so bad' you may think. 'In a world before quest markers, directions seem like a sensible replacement.' The problem is that your goal could be on the otherside of Vvardenfell and your client will provide with an onslaught of vague directions on how to get there.(Better get your pen and paper out.) One guy even gives you the worst piece of advise any direction-giver can give: "If you see x, then you've gone too far." Then why in the heck did you even mention it!
I'm getting a little off track. The D&D influences ran so deep that it even infested the combat system. You may ask, how can a tabletop roll playing game be represented in a action adventure video game without being terrible? Morrowind says it can't. In Morrowind you will find that fighting your enemy is not so easy as connecting with the swing of you sword or the shot of your arrow, making contact is step one. Once you hit the enemy the game does a little back end calculation to decided if the sword hit, actually hit. It takes a few factors into account, the most prominent of which being your weapon skill level. If the game so decided it, the attack you just conducted will be invalidated and the enemy will take no damage. That sounds pretty annoying already, but what if I told you that it got worse. You see, Morrowind was the start of The Elder Scrolls tradition of skills that are improved through practise. A tradition that I very much like. This mean that you start the game with no skill and it improves the more you engage in that activity. Unfortunately, this system is almost incompatible with the combat system. Low level players will find that their skill level is so low that only 1 in 15 hits actually registers on the target, but the only way that they can improve the skill to be more reliable is to get in hits. Or sink a fortunes worth into a trainer. The whole practise is pointless because your only reward for going through the trails and tribulations of improving your weapons skill level it to be able to conduct a fight like any other game, where you hits actually register.
If you think all that sounds bad then allow me to enlighten you; that is just the way the game plays now, at release things were even more confusing. Fight an enemy in today's Morrowind and you might notice that little yellow bar appear above your health. That's the enemy's health bar. Standard affair for any RPG ever, you may think; but what if I told you that wasn't always the case. Yep, enemy health bars were added alongside the Bloodmoon DLC. They were absent at release. I can't be sure why, but I believe this may be another bit of the D&D inspiration rearing it's ugly head. Afterall, In D&D you can never be sure of an enemy's health until they fall down or you cast some sort of status revealing spell. (Of course in Dungeons and Dragons there is the universal solution of just asking the DM about how their enemy looks. You may just get a ballpark description but it's better than the nothing Morrowind offers.) The problem with this system, if it isn't obvious, is that it means fighting your enemies was conducted with complete guess work on the player's part. Wiki is any modern players invaluable tool for trying to play the game this way as it will allow you to see your specific targets exact HP. Of course, than you have to go through the effort of calculating your own weapon's DPS and predicting how much you need to wail on them before they stop moving. But that isn't even all, because you also have to take into account missed swings. Because of the asinine skill level system, you don't know that you have missed unless you fail to here the smack sound cue. A sound cue that could just bug out because this is game made my Bethesda. If, by the end of the day, you aren't ready to blow your brains out, then you might just make it through a whole playthrough of Morrowind.
For better or for worse, Morrowind is a game that will forever have a place in fantasy role playing history. Even when Oblivion slowly loses it's luster due to it's eyewateringly garish visuals and Skyrim withers and dies through Bethesda's oversaturation, fans will look back on the third Elder Scrolls with a justified, if confused, reverence. Few truly creative and distinct ventures with the size and scope of Morrowind get realized to today's world, and I think that modern day entrainment is worse off for it. Would today's Bethesda have made Morrowind? I think almost certainly not. Not if they are happy with publishing products of the quality of 'Wolfenstein: Young Blood'. A truly imaginative and original idea might give them all heart attacks. If you've ever looked at Morrowind and thought 'That looks interesting. Dated, but interesting." I'd say look up some video's first, know what you're getting yourself into, and if you still haven't run away screaming, pick it up. You might love it, you might hate it, but you'll definitely remember it.
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