Look I’ve been meaning to play Morrowind for Ages and never got around to it. The first time I tried to play, I was some sort of Spellsword which really meant I was Can’tKillAnythingerer and it completely killed the game for me.
I might have a bunch of free time this weekend. What are your suggestions for picking this game up? Specifically, are there classes I should pick for the most enjoyment? Guides to playing the game without spoilers? Any specific mods that keep the game fairly vanilla but improved?
I will almost certainly install the Code Patch, and I’m considering the Morrowind Graphics Extender. Any other mods that are basically necessary for a modern player to enjoy this game?
I suppose this could also be a general Morrowind thread since I don’t think we have one.
I think the real question is ‘how badly do you want to break the game?’ Personally, I found the game fairly insufferable until I figured out how to get some quality of life improvements by abusing game mechanics.
For class/stats I don’t think they matter too much due to the way the leveling system works (it can actually be to your benefit to keep your most usedt skills out of major/minor), but I usually pick the sign of The Steed because +25 speed makes the early game a lot less tedious.
Race does matter, though. Try to pick one that somewhat fits how you want to play.
The one quality of life thing I’ll always remember from DJ’s old Morrowind thread is the advice to make a cheap, low power high charge levitation ring early on. Really smooths over exploring the land.
there are like a million of them and i hate them and they make the early game a drag unless you use spears or archery.
you should build your own class, around what you think you’ll use most.
The level up and stat raising systems are convoluted and you might want to look up how they work, but dont worry about minmaxing or anything, you can make up for deficiences w/ the massive pile of gold youll have accumulated in short order.
Dont just rush off for Balmora right away, spend a little time around Seyda Neen doing the first couple quests you can find. You need to have leveled up a bit before you can continue the main quest anyway.
Dont be afraid to take a boat or silt strider to somewhere weird you havent been before. Morrowind has some of the coolest cities in its genre and its really fun to just tour around.
If you have the Tribunal expansion installed, there is a random chance you’ll get attacked by a high-level encounter anytime you try to rest in a bed, until you go out of your way to do the expansion. Kind of a questionable design decision! There are patches that mitigate this. however if you can survive it will drop a really powerful and cool looking set of light armor. You can even farm this for lots of gold early on if youre so inclined (and you should be imo, breaking Morrowind is half the fun of playing). spoilered because its a cool surprise… the first time it happens.
If you play a beast race you cant wear boots! this locks you out of a great set of boots that let you run superfast that you can get in an early quest, which uhh sucks because your movement speed is painfully slow. im a lizard person for life so this is just something i choose to suck it up and deal with, but you should take it into account during character gen.
HAVE FUN and TAKE IT EASY Morrowind is an experience best enjoyed in a slow and savory manner.
edit: also, i think having cliff racers omnipresent is honestly part of morrowind’s charm. i would not have found the game nearly as memorable without them, i’d think
Install the smart animals mod. You’ll still get attacked by cliff racers and rats early on, but after a few levels when you can one shot 'em they’ll start avoiding you but will still be hanging around, part of the world
i installed a mod called “cliff racer extermination” and it worked fine for the first part of the game and i was v. excited about it… then when i was going to do the first story quest (at the dwemer ruin) i noticed something in the corner of my screen… high, high up above the mountains, hanging frozen in space, A CLIFFRACER.
i went “oh SHIT” and turned away from it and ran as fast as i could (which wasnt fast at all). i tilted the camera around to take a look and it had come to life, flapping furiously in place. i swore and ran even further, until i was sure it was gone. i stopped to catch my breath/restore my stamina, and CRACK! it was on me, pecking me in the head.
since then theyve appeared in gradually larger and larger numbers and apparently repopulated the game. So even if you try to wipe them out of existence, cliff racers will multiply from nothing to hunt you down.
one of my big problems with morrowind is that the world felt too static, so I also added mods like travelling merchants and stuff, but that was more of a personal taste thing. I don’t think I used too many mods to be honest
But I actually find the Cliff Racer issues a bit overstated myself.
Echoing the “Race Matters” bit, particularly in regards to weapons, you generally want to focus on one thing there, and choose skills/race that compliment accordingly, along with having good agility, as that’s what effects accuracy, and not being able to hit shit is a big part of what makes starting out a pain.
not being able to hit shit is a big part of what makes starting out a pain.
Maybe an understanding that the game is doing die rolls all the time helps one accommodate to the combat?
Basically, every time you swing, as long as you’re in the general region of an enemy, it jumps straight to the stats: roll to hit, roll for damage. So movement and dodging is meaningful for you against monster attacks ('cause you’re smart enough to get out of the way) but not really for monsters against your hits.
Obviously the right solution in a real-time combat system is to not lie to the player when your sword hits an enemy, and they eventually got there, but even a rebalance in favor of agility → more critical hit chance, lower chance of infrequent misses would have saved them a lot of trouble while preserving the stat’s utility.
Morrowind is definitely top 5 for me, though. Exploration at an unfathomably rich scale for the time period in top notch weirdo setting. Consistently odd mythic pantheon that captures an experience of the godly awe and the human foibles of a pantheistic society alien to our Western culture.
And genuine excitement about three whole dimensions with tools to swim, fly, and jump and level design (that floating temple-jail! The mushrooms!) that encourage it. Later Bethesda would deem flight ‘too hard’; it still hasn’t returned. We didn’t see the joy of exploring infinite computerspace again until Minecraft
Flipping through the art book, it feels like a fantasy take on Dune; maybe the only original game that scratches that strange majesty.
Okay, this is great! I’m really excited to play the game. I’ll probably focus on a magic character because I want to see what the magic making system can do in this game. I’ll take it slow because I’m much more patient now than when I was 19 or whenever I tried this the first time.
I am going to leave the Cliff Racers as they are but there’s a mod that reduces their aggressiveness so I might try that if they get too irritating.
Now I just have to stop the thing from crashing every time I launch it…I was trying to avoid the OpenMW solution just because I’d rather deal with well known problems rather than obscure ones, but I might have to use it anyway.
I’ve read that particular article about Vivec a couple of times now, it’s one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to play this game. It’s fantastic.
