god even after all these years morrowind is so pretty
3 Likes
I’ve been playing a lot of the warhammer 40k action rpg with the long title because we had a free copy of it sitting around and it’s by Neocore, the guys who made the Van Helsing arpgs. Those games are…weird to say the least. They have a tower defense game hidden in the middle of them and are hard as fuck, like Chosen: The Well of Souls hard as fuck sometimes, like you know how Diablo sends hordes of weak enemies at you? In Van Helsing they say fuck that shit, you get jumped by packs of fucking werewolves who hit hard and healing is scarce. They made 3 of them and the third game made you start over from scratch with three new character classes for no reason other than it was a test run for another game that combined the previous 3 and had all 6 classes available from the start. They’re releasing an expansion for the Warhammer game in a week that adds a new class that…can’t do any of the base game’s content for some reason. Anyway, I bring all this up because I find their games interesting because there’s just all these fucking weird design choices they do that I do not understand and that’s why I’m choosing to spend my time playing a warhammer 40k game when I know nothing about the lore and think it looks like a tradcath incel’s fictional universe.
It’s a competent if strange diablolike. I guess they did a major overhaul patch at some point to make it more playable, but consequently this means a lot of information about the game on the Internet is totally outdated. Basically if anybody tells you the ranged combat in this game is good they are fucking lying to you. The 2.0 patch made it so you don’t have to fuck with the completely awful and unintuitive cover system that your character refuses to use half the time but you still kill things twice as slow and, bizarrely, take about ten times as much damage as a melee build. I played through like half the game like this; I do not recommend it. There’s a bunch of melee weapons but I stuck to the axe because it literally does everything the other one handed weapons do plus applies a bleed DoT on every hit. It feels like there’s one way the game wants you to build most characters outside the caster guy and that’s melee + shield + crits because everything else is awfully slow and you die faster anyway.
You have a suppression bar around your health which I guess is supposed to represent how much you are getting shot at since low suppression makes you take more damage and slows you down and is essentially a death sentence in every situation where it’s possible to get that low. It’s a weird fucking mechanic that only really comes into play when you run into psykers which literally cover the entire screen in fire or lightning or something, its a really ugly particle effect, anyway their attacks annihilate your suppression instantly and are completely unavoidable so it’s kind of a dice roll if you’ll survive an encounter with one. Sometimes the game likes to put three of the fuckers next to each other.
The ambient sound in this game is completely fucked up. It’s Grandia 2 footstep noises and the same repetitive sound your weapon makes all the way down. Occasionally you’ll hear an enemy yell as they die but it often trails off mid-sound and your character taunts in combat non-stop, so the entire atmosphere of the game is like being stuck on the fucking moon with some asshole who won’t stop yelling into a soundless void about DARK ELDAR and killing people. It’s so bizarre.
There’s a ton of randomly generated missions you can do but there’s minimal incentive to do so until much later. One of the skill trees (related to suppression, no less!) only unlocks after you complete 25 side objectives in these missions but there’s only one tileset in the game the 2 side objective types spawn on, and they only seem to spawn in missions of a certain type, and even then only on about 20% of those. I have been playing god knows how many hours and am at 8/25. I will probably never unlock that skill tree.
You can generate a priority assignment once a day which is like 3 missions strung together with choose your own adventure shit in between where you make ~moral choices~ and try to balance SUCCESS and COLLATERAL DAMAGE, which is kind of cool and also how I weigh all my decisions in life. The moral choices unlock either the Radical or Puritan skill trees. I’ll save you the trouble by saying that this system sticks to how the rest of the game is balanced and Puritan is much better for 90% of characters. Your choices really don’t have any consequences besides moving a bar left or right; the ones in the campaign change the cutscene after you make them but are never mentioned again outside of that. The Puritan campaign choices are hilarious because they usually involve your character making someone explode in one hit very abruptly.
There’s also warzones which despite being level 50 and available the game has not explained to me but it appears to be more random missions strung together with higher rewards? The game did tell me about the VOID CRUSADE which is…randomly generated missions strung with HIGH REWARDS where you can pick your path through a chart and try to get to the finish with limited lives and increasing difficulty. It requires 5 same color void shards to open which you can get from doing random missions with applied modifiers from the tarot deck, which the game also barely explained. You can upgrade the deck too I guess but progress is completely random and it takes 10 upgrade cards for an upgrade, and there’s like 20 cards to upgrade.
The crafting system I have barely touched because the UI for it has like 8 tabs and is full of options about SHARDS (not void shards!) and PSALMCODES and all this bullshit the game might never explain to me. I think it’s a whole lot of words and systems that basically say “sockets from Diablo!” Anyway it’s a complete clusterfuck of a menu and I dread the day it becomes relevant.
There’s also like 12 currencies and I’ve only figured out what money, fate, and void shards do so far. Fate is especially bizarre because it’s like a fucking currency in a F2P game, you get one per mission and there’s a ton of upgrades you need to buy that requires like 250 each.
It’s such a weird fucking game, it has like 2005 budget eastern european game aspirations of punching above its weight class except the reality is a complete systems clusterfuck that never quite comes together. It’s pretty good!
8 Likes
fucking stop it youre making me want to get back into disgaea
I’ve already spent too much of my adolescence item worlding
Item worlding is significantly easier in 5, there’s no cap to how many floors you can run, only how many levels the item can gain (500 initially, can uncap it to 9999 later). So I’ve been doing a lot of it to grind out some beneficial innocents, although I really wanna start innocent breeding and so far the game hasn’t revealed how.
Disgaea 5 feels like a greatest hits of Disgaea mechanics, with all the rough QoL edges sanded down.
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If you’re gonna spend all this time playing cellphone worthy currency bullshit you may as well be playing wow classic with me or ESO with me and gary
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Nothing would please me more than to play MMOs (I did my time in vanilla wow but I’d try ESO) with you but I still need a better laptop. Farewell.
I am level 4 and it’s goofy as hell but I’m getting the hang of it
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I would probably enjoy the experience solely based on being able to wander around Morrowind once again
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how dare you ditch me and final fantasy for cuba
2 Likes
still disappointed that none of the main stories have been as good as 1 or 2 in my opinion. havent pulled the trigger on 5 cuz my library is already huge but you’re making me want it
think i’m just going to go with openmw and a handful of mods, looking at some of these guides for configuring the base game are some linux from scratch tier shit
This is entirely my motivation and it’s a little weird from a Morrowind lens but at least I get to wander through the mazes of Vivec City and steal from manor lords and walk through the marshes and see netches floating and bobbing
Plus crunchier combat
Cliff striders are huge winged lizards now, it’s a little weird. They’ll still knock you on your ass out of nowhere though.
Also everything feels much more compressed, but my memories of Morrowind’s scale are hazy
6 Likes
morrowind’s landmass was tiny and they hid it very well through the ridiculously close fog
3 Likes
it doesn’t feel terribly tiny to me even as i play it on modded-up pc in 2020! it’s also really dense–like, this is the crpg breath of the wild. there’s a volcano and everything. a little bit more fucked up shit i somehow was not expecting to be such a constant focus, e.g. slavery. many plantations to liberate in this weird, almost lawless land of struggling powers.
anyhow, idk, but imo modding to some extent is a very good idea.
8 Likes
I think it’s a huge world in context of the time – there are at least 9 major cities and a dozen smaller ones, hundreds of dungeons, and each biome stretches past several horizons.
If it’s dense, it’s dense in good ways – I really hate over-dense worlds that feel like theme parks, and Morrowind is very good about avoiding exclamation points everywhere. And without auto-populating caves on the minimap, they’re able to be keep travel distances small; compare to Oblivion, where the compass almost always has three dungeons to point out at all times, foreclosing any possibility that the player will find it themselves.
Morrowind supports being alone in a way most games find allergic
2 Likes
btw to be fair i did have it looking pretty nice with fewer mods earlier–i held off on going for ‘morrowind enhanced overhaul’ because it makes a variety of pretty significant changes… but now i would say they’re pretty much all for the better. that’s what i’ve got pictured above, as far as what you can gather from one screenshot. below’s a screenshot from before the bigger overhaul:
(biggest differences being the original meshes and no grass, plus a number of ui changes)
3 Likes
i remain curious about whatever companions i may find, yet i cannot really imagine myself wanting to use them and spoil the solitude. morrowind makes feeling alone and just being a mischievous explorer-observer who can also fight… uh, really good.
2 Likes
keep an in-fiction diary, I can’t recommend it enough for Morrowind
write it at night when you look up at the stars and moons
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there’s a really good MWSE mod that lets you write in your journal as much as you want and it fucking rules, though I don’t really play Morrowind with anything but the most basic mods
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btw
if you all want to try out OpenMW but don’t know how mods are supposed to work with it, good news there’s a website for that
It has multiple modlists for every taste, plus instructions on how to set things up!
One thing I love about OpenMW is that it makes modding way way easier than vanilla morrowind. Especially if you’re a lunatic like me who likes to install and uninstall mods constantly until they get just the right mix
2 Likes