Sunday 10 November 2013

Morrowind drives me crazy

A while back I started playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The game is from 2002 so the graphics are... well, really outdated. But with some help I found a mod that makes the graphics somewhat better. All the people aren't ugly anymore and they don't walk as if they just pooped their pants anymore. All good. The fighting style, though. It looks like my character is standing with her arm stretched out and waving a toothpick around. Seriously, it looks ridiculous. But the game is old, so the graphics are bad. Let's move on.

There is no quest marker. No. Quest marker. After every playing session my head hurts from trying to remember everything. Which town I should go to and which way that town is. Where that character was and how do I get back there. Where that place is in that town and how to find my way back. It doesn't help that my sense of direction already sucks, but now I have a game that doesn't help with that. NO QUEST MARKER. At least the map of Vvardenfell that I got in The Elder Scrolls Anthology is being put to good use :/ That's the map I use the most, cause the map in the game sucks. The local map is too zoomed in to be of much help, and the world map is just a big pixelated blob that shows nothing but the places I've already been and there are no names on it. So finding my way to a new town on the world map - impossible. Finding my way out of the present town on the local map - difficult. Presently I'm in Vivec and the town is a maze! I learned Balmora pretty fast and Seyda Neen wasn't difficult, I did get lost in Ebonheart castle but nothing compares to Vivec.

There is no fast travel. Seriously. Have you any idea how frustrating it is having to walk everywhere? Unless one feels like paying a bunch of money to the people running the silt striders, that's what one has to do. The island of Vvardenfell is huge. I've played the game for 12 hours already and I've only been in the south-western corner so far. Just exploring the island could take me 100 hours of game time. Not kidding. Hopefully I'll get some quests done in that time.

There is no autosave. I had no idea about that so the first time I started the game I went around Seyda Neen and got killed. Assuming that the game would autosave upon entering and leaving locations (as both Oblivion and Skyrim did) I had not done a proper save yet. I was killed and realised that, yay, now I have to start all over again -.-' Now I try to remember to save often, but there are moments when I've forgotten and been killed and then realised that I'll have to redo a bunch of small side quests, because I forgot to save.

There is no button for blocking. I tried to find it before but then I realised that the higher the Blocking skill is the more the character blocks. So the blocking is automatic. I hate that. I just stand there waving my toothpick hoping my character has the good sense to block in time.

I don't understand the level system. As a level 1 and 2 I could beat a level 5 without much difficulty. As a level 2 I met with a level 8 character that I had to kill. He beat me. In two hits. TWO HITS. Fine that the level 12 character killed me in two hits, but a level 8? While I could beat a level 5? So I decided that since the game is so unfair as to not give me any quest markers it's alright for me to cheat a little with the leveling. So I found the console command for money. Typed it in and then spent half a fortune with different trainers leveling my character. I'm now level 7 and the game has gotten somewhat easier. Though I meet a lot bigger creatures when I'm out walking now. I kind of miss the slugs (Kwama Forager), the mudcrabs and the rats. Now I'm fighting dinosaurs (Kagouti). Dinosaurs against a toothpick.

I'm also not sure if I approve of the quests and the factions. I've encountered a quest that only a male character can do, and since I am a female character I can't. It bugs me that there are quests unavailable to me because I chose to be a girl. Then there are the factions. From the quest names that I've seen online it's obvious that the Fighters Guild and the Thieves Guild are fighting against each other. But I could join both? Will I have to choose later? Can I join all the Great Houses, or am I stuck with Hlaalu now because it was the first Great House that I encountered? Since the Great Houses all are fighting amongst each other, I wonder if it's possible. I want to be able to make every quest the game offers, as I did in Oblivion and as I've almost done in Skyrim. But I'm starting to wonder whether the game will let me.

I guess it's true that games were harder in the past. But out of all this I've mentioned, what bothers me most is the lack of a quest marker. Not just because my sense of direction sucks (I would love to not have my head ache after every session, though) but because it feels really weird not having a pointer to follow!

It sounds like I only have complaints, but when I am playing it I'm actually enjoying myself. It's only when I turn the game off that I realise how bad it really is by the present day's standards. Those who have played Elder Scrolls since the beginning tell me that Morrowind is the best game of the series. I will finish it. But I can't pretend that I don't miss Skyrim every time someone in the game mentions Solstheim... Or every time I meet a Nord... Just like I missed Skyrim every time I entered Bruma in Oblivion.

I miss the Steam Overlay. Had to disable it to get the graphics mod working. Now I can't take screenshots.

4 comments:

  1. Måste vara frustrerande >.<
    Jag har inte spelat Morrowind men vill och har pratat om det med en vän. Han berättade det där med questmarkern och fast traveln.

    Questmarkern måste vara JÄTTEFRUSTRERANDE....tips: anteckna xD
    Att det inte går att fasttravla är i min stil faktiskt, jag tycker att resan till målet är kul och använder sällan funktionen i skyrim .
    Autosaven låter också skit.

    De flesta som varit med från början verkar gilla Morrowind bäst, men jag tror det är generationsfråga xD Gillar också Skyrim bäst, för att det finns fler möjligheter och är smidigare helt enkelt.

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  2. Questmarkern är sjukt frustrerande >.< Jag använder mig utav två skärmar så den skärmen som jag inte spelar på får fungera som anteckningsblock. Använder mig av Elder Scrolls Wikia och The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages för att läsa om questen och vart jag ska etc. Och tack vare min karta över Vvardenfell från Anthology så vet jag vart jag ska xD

    I Skyrim kan man ju bara fasttravla till de största städerna i början. Jag brukar göra resan i början och gå dit. Men när jag väl varit på platser så gillar jag att kunna fasttravla dit. Jag har gått vägen mellan Balmora och Seyda Neen fem gånger nu. Jag hade väldigt gärna kunnat fasttravla där :/ Jag gillar att gå till nya ställen, men det är drygt att springa fram och tillbaka mellan olika städer istället för att snabbt kunna ta sig emellan dem.

    Morrowind var sjukt avancerat för sin tid. Jag har ingenting emot själva spelet i sig: hur det ser ut och interfacen etc. Men vissa saker är bara för jobbiga >.< Jag vill ha ett nytt Elder Scrolls-spel. Och TESO har inget officiellt release-datum ännu. Så jag spelar igenom de gamla spelen medan jag väntar på det nya >.<

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  3. I was googling for the puzzle maze (in vivec) and your map pic is right at the top of the google search page (as of 27-1-15).
    Your blurb about morrowind just about made my spleen rupture with laughter; "...stand there waving my toothpick...",hilarious :), but man do I know that feeling .

    At any rate I thought you might like to know that morrowind is basically a non-licensed adaptation of the really old-school AD&D games ( advanced dungeons and dragons) . And is based on it's rules and game-play ( which was designed for board games with turned based combat, based on dice/chance elements ) Hence some of the early game play is outright Bizarre to modern gamers.

    For instance, when you start you are a noob in the game universe, no matter how skilled you may be IRL, so blocking and hitting are controlled by your stats and not your reflexes.

    This may seem lame but in the old D&D games there was immediate open ended game play...If you wanted to march straight to the bad guys castle of doom right away you certainly could, but no amount of fast twitch reactions could keep you from becoming bloody sushi immediately.

    Also the games tended to be more complex, sociologically speaking; meaning unless you learned the actual politics of the various factions it was likely you would be tricked into helping the wrong side ...and then killed.

    The bottom line is even the most skilled fighter *can* be killed by a lucky shot (and you occasionally can kill a much stronger opponent by luck) or bad decision and oddly this 'element of chance' is what made games more fun, because real life is a game that you have to start playing before you know the rules too. ( in the old days you would spend hours building a character and when he would get killed , that was it he was dead, unless one of the other characters could resurrect him/her, and even then the characters would take massive hits to all the levels of development. It made one very careful about rushing headlong into battle)

    Also I cannot find any male/female bias in the code of Morrowind, And I went so far as to play as a totally naked female character for about three hours ( no one seemed to care) . As it turns out some "people" ( npc's) in morrowind are just jerks until you join their group, bribe or trick them .

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    Replies
    1. I know all that actually :) I finished Morrowind almost a year ago :) http://elinchan.blogspot.se/2014/04/ive-finished-morrowind.html

      I got better at it, but coming from newer games it had quite the steep learning curve ;)

      Also the bias for male/female referred to some tiny misc quests that I encountered while out running, but I may have misunderstood them at the point of this post. I don't really remember anymore.

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