Elder Scrolls III : Morrowind Comments by Gestalt

fair score.. its full of flaws but the sheer possiblitys it offers more than make up for it.

the minimum spec is a bit of a joke tho

This game should have a health warning on it - its soooo adictive.

I installed it, and got into the game. The next time I looked at the clock, 5hrs had passed - and all that time the only thing I had done was wander between cities, examining the local terrain etc.

This game is phenomenal. Hopefully a patch or two should put right some of the problems. A patch is currently being worked on.

Given that it's taken me a whole week of almost non-stop play to review the PC version, I doubt I'll be able to do the same again for the Xbox one. :) If we get sent a copy we'll probably give it a quick try to see how the interface and controls work and how the frame rate and draw distance are though.

Hopefully the lack of dedication with the graphics isn't a sign that they've faltered in other, more important parts of the game like...

not being riddled with bugs?

i breathed a sigh of relief when the xbox release date slipped - obviously an attempt to try and ship with only two or three hundred bugs instead of the traditional elder scrolls one crash per day guaranteed. they've kludged the console controls from the build i saw - an analog stick will never suffice to control a mouse pointer - which beggars the question: why shove a PC game onto a console? the only answer is 'because we can', but it's a silly one.

the box graphics aren't noticeably different to a PC running the game at medium detail, although the draw distance is tighter. the water effects that everyone coos about are all in there too.

like all elder scrolls games, if you're willing (some would say anal) enough to put up with its failings you can get a lot out of it... but if you have a PC and a box i'd recommend the PC version, as you get a mod community, regular patches and a construction set for less than the price of the box version.

i say 'recommend' in the loosest possible sense of the word though.

I've actually borrowed this from a mate and at the moment it just seems bloody massive. I've spent a while playing it and only visited a few towns, the biggest of which I haven't completely investigated.

Actually doing quests and beating things up just doesn't reward you much so ... it feels like basically an exploration game more than anything else.

I kind of agree, but I think that's the case with most RPGs, isn't it? The "thrill" is supposed to be from following the storyline, I think. I've got no idea what it is in Morrowind - I've just been exploring - but I might try getting into it soon.

My biggest problem is the fantasy setting. It has never really appealed to me. Still, the game has been entertaining so far. And yep, I've managed to experience a number of bugs, from screwed up text to not loading to falling through objects.

The only other issues are a rather weak combat system (I'd have prefered a hand-to-hand style as in Jedi Knight 2), shops not closing at night (I'm playing a thief and I'd rather be robbing people at night) and weak guards (it seems you can pretty much do anything and still get away with it).

I just wish I had a fancier graphics card so I could see that pixel shading (is that the right term?) on the water. I also think some of the cheap looking creatures are down to that too.

the weather and general environments are also very nicely designed and atmospheric

Is it me or does weather and daylight only really change when you exit/enter an area?

My biggest problem is the fantasy setting. It has never really appealed to me.

Totally agree, fantasy RPG's is a bitch that never dies. Many of them are great, I just don't fancy the setting anymore. I still try to put up with it though, as the rest of the actual content in many RPG's are quite rewarding.

Yes, indeed, Fantasy is just so tired, roll on Deus Ex 2!!!!

not being riddled with bugs?

The game isn't "riddled with bugs". There are a few, but I scarcely noticed anything while playing, it didn't distract at all. It ran fine on all computers I know, for that matter, someone I know with a freaking P2 400 and a GF2 MX was playing it.

The score is pretty high and pretty fair. It's easily the best looking game I ever saw, the quests are a bit tedious, but I have yet to see a CRPG without tedious quests. The world is just breathtaking and the freedom is unheard of, which in my eyes makes and breaks an RPG.

I remember spending 15 hours downloading Daggerfall, only to find out it was one of the worst games I'd ever played. It took me hours just to get out of the starting dungeon, simply because the control scheme was so horrid (how difficult did they want to make using a weapon anyway?) and everything was, well, slooooooooooow.
After several hours I was out into the open and decided to visit a town.
Spending 10 minutes walking from one end of the town to the building you need to visit at the other end is not my idea of fun.

I have to be honest for all its flaws I am enjoying this and if anything it certainly gives you ya moneys worth in the longevity...and thats even without the new maps and things that will soon be coming out for it...

I have to be honest for all its flaws I am enjoying this and if anything it certainly gives you ya moneys worth in the longevity...

Well this has certainly been the case for me. I'll see about the longevity. The sheer scope of it might make it seem like it'll last for ages, but the question is whether the gameplay becomes too repetitive.

and thats even without the new maps and things that will soon be coming out for it...

I've taken a look at the Morrowind official site and the variety of mods is quite something. We're not just talking different maps or models. Some guys seem to be able to completely restructure the game. With that said, unless you're a mega-uber-super-fan then I don't think you're going to need more than you get in the box.

Ohh, and thank god Tyson lost. I'm definately not a boxing fan, but neither can I stand wife-beating rapists. I was insulted when our government let him into/fight in our country.

Ohh, and thank god Tyson lost. I'm definately not a boxing fan, but neither can I stand wife-beating rapists. I was insulted when our government let him into/fight in our country.

I hear ya, that clown should be put back in jail again.

The game isn't "riddled with bugs". There are a few, but I scarcely noticed anything while playing, it didn't distract at all.

there are a lot, but chiefly due to bethesda's sloppy programming and so it comes down to what setup you run it on as to whether you'll get one crash a week or 13 in a day. getting stuck in scenery, however, is a common occurrence, although not to the extent of constantly falling out of the world in daggerfall.

i'm not bashing it: i played daggerfall without patches from start to finish and just learned to laugh off every game-destroying bug. and the moments that make TES games -

Can't beat the feeling of trudging along a beaten path in the rain, only for a couple of massive towers to materialize from the fog.

are definitely still worth the hassle (jogging through forests at night in the snow to come across the warm lights of a town in daggerfall did it for me back in '97).
unmatched freedom? no, other games have done better, but they've been long-forgotten. morrowind's good, but only if you know what you're getting yourself into. and after sinking hundreds of hours into the game trying out every possible extreme of your freedom (it won't take you as long to hit the walls as you might think) the experience is somewhat hollow - the price of relying on the scenery to make the setpieces rather than the people.

it's a love or hate thing.

I had a few crashes, but given that I spent a week playing the game for hours at a time I'd say that's not too bad. I also managed to get stuck in a rotating door one time, which was a bit annoying. The main problem was the ridiculous amount of time it took to quit to Windows though.

there are a lot, but chiefly due to bethesda's sloppy programming and so it comes down to what setup you run it on as to whether you'll get one crash a week or 13 in a day.

I can only judge from personal experience, and that of the real life friends who played it. I think there was one person who said the game booted once, and then never again, but I don't think he really tried to get it running again. Everyone else ran it without problems, including that guy with a low-spec PC. Bethesda's programming can't be that bad if the game runs on a computer half the minimum requirements.
I'm more inclined that it comes down to people who know how to use a computer and people who don't, although I'm sure there are smart people who don't get it running as well - there always are. I just doubt the number of those is as high as you'd think. Official support boards really aren't a good source of information on that: judging by them every game crashes all the time.

getting stuck in scenery, however, is a common occurrence, although not to the extent of constantly falling out of the world in daggerfall.

I tried hard to get stuck in the scenery, but the only time I managed to do so was when I was levitating and dropped into some mountain. I opened the console, typed "FixMe" and I was free again. In all other cases I managed to wiggle myself out just like I had wiggled myself in.

unmatched freedom? no, other games have done better, but they've been long- forgotten.

They might have done better, but at a far lower level of technique. It's easier to have a multitude of different landscapes if all you do to present them is use ASCII tiles of different colour instead of larg 32bit textures. It's easier to have ten times the number of weapons if there's just one model for every weapon class.

The main problem was the ridiculous amount of time it took to quit to Windows though.

I quit the game, what, once a day? If I just wanted to have a quick look at emails or look for a hint in the BBS, I just alt-tabbed, which the game could quite well (still an accomplishment). Apart from that, I let the game decide when to quit it, if it crashed I usually called it a day. ;)

I can only judge from personal experience, and that of the real life friends who played it.

as can i, and you'd be welcome to come and watch it crash on my system. as i've said previously, it's not a bad game - but it would have been nice if bethesda had taken stock of the failings of TES in general (which are much more disappointing than memory leaks and crashes) and made an effort to address them. after how long i waited for the game, i was hoping for a bigger improvement than beautiful graphics.

as freeform RPGs go, it's definitely the most bang for your buck you can get out there (pending neverwinter nights, but i went off D&D about 13 years ago). but it could easily have been a 10/10 out of the box with a little more effort - which the mod communities will certainly put in. it would be unfair to say daggerfall's mod community did more for the game than bethesda ever did, but true.


It's easier to have a multitude of different landscapes if all you do to present them is use ASCII tiles of different colour ... It's easier to have ten times the number of weapons if there's just one model for every weapon class.

sod the landscapes, i'm talking about NPCs who wander around like they have a life to follow and aren't a roll call from Which Random Name Generator?s awards edition. number of weapons? i'd settle for one, as long as combat involved more than rolling the mouse at monsters whose behaviours run the gamut from blindly attack to blindly flee.

maybe TES 4: oblivion will sort things out :)

the minimum spec is a bit of a joke tho

I agree, the game is running well on my celeron 366 w/ a Geforce 2. Good game, deserves a high score.

In my opinion, this game is the closest thing to 'Elite' that exists at the present time.

I'm just hoping that David Braben will give us what we all want - Elite 4 !

I'm enjoying it, it does remind me a very empty MMORPG game at times but at least there aren't hordes of guys shouting out they've got something to sell, kill stealing or camping. :-)

One weird problem I had with it is on my Nforce motherboard, the sound is messed up unless you use basic acceleration in Windows ME, in 2000 it's fine. Fortunately I've got a dual boot system so I'm not too bothered.

If anyone wants to buy a copy Streetsonline are doing it for a piddling £17.99. I thought I had got it pretty cheap at 25 quid from Play.com... Bugger

That is cheap.

That is cheap.
That's what I thought. When they first started their game prices, especially pre-orders, were excellent and I never went anywhere else. Obviously they then ended up running out of cash and Kingfisher bought them and prices shot up....

"If anyone wants to buy a copy Streetsonline are doing it for a piddling £17.99"

If you are getting it there, I'd suggest you hurry up - it's probably a mistake. They have the RRP down as £19.99 when it's actually £34.99. Whoops. :)

Missy! Indeed, I heard from Gawa that you got home a while ago. I'll drop by some day, things have been hectic the last month. Browsing for a job, and something of a meaning of life. Haven't been playing FLF at all...

That price has been there for at least a month! I got the game during a 10% off weekend hehe £17.16 for a most enjoyable game.

Yes the journal sucks, Yes I get stuck in the landscape (twice - thanks for the 'Fixme' console trick :-D ), Yes some of the quests are terrible, yes it rains inside in some parts of Vivec! and yes it takes a million years to quit to windows (even worse when the GF is looking over your shoulder :P)but what an emersive game! I'm at the point where I need to slow down and read the books, do some alchemy et al..

Good review!

I got the game during a 10% off weekend hehe £17.16 for a most enjoyable game.
Git! ;-)

I've been surprised at how stable it was with all the reports of it being a buggy mess, on my Win2K system (so my sound works properly) I've had precisely one CTD and no other crashes.
The skill raising through use is a better way than most RPGs use, however it's just as well the NPCs aren't too bothered by someone constantly running around jumping to improve his athletics and acrobatics skills...

"it's just as well the NPCs aren't too bothered by someone constantly running around jumping to improve his athletics and acrobatics skills"

Yeah, I'm glad I picked atheletics as one of my major skills - I swear half of my level advancement in the game was down to spending all the time running around. ;)

I like this game very much. As seems the norm with Bethesda, it's cracking good fun with enough rough edges to give you splinters now and then.

Regarding /some/ of its chuggage/crash problems on some systems, I'm wondering how much safedisk, otherwise known as the Great Untested Knackerer' has to do with it.

I really enjoyed it at first, but it does get very repetitive and the journal is dire as gestalt says. The more you play, the more all npc's seem to say the same thing too. The dialog's ropey and the quest system inflexible making the quests very dull after a while. Shame, great world graphically, just a bit dire on the content.

And those flipping flying things all the flipping time, gah!!

"IF it were a real life type thing do you think that you would get great stuff from killing a rat?"

LOL! No, in real life you'd be more likely to get great stuff from killing a level 32 Dark Mage. o_O

;)

*giggles*

Actually, one thing I found with Morrowind was that I ended up with more money than I knew what to do with by the end of the game. I was bribing everyone in sight and buying up all the cool kit I could lay my hands on, and I still had a ton of cash. Plus I had some items that I'd nicked from the Mage's Guild while their backs were turned that was so valuable that nobody could afford to buy it. Having limited cash at shops is all well and good, but it's a bit much when there are things like powerful soul gems and bits of ordinator armour that nobody can ever afford to buy from you. :-/

It is the exploration factor that really makes this game for me. When playing, I always get the sense of a huge world around me - its brilliant when you 'discover' a 'lost' mine or ancient ruins. Yesterday, I spent hours just scouring one particular piece of coastline for an underwater cavern !

This sense of freedom is evident in games like Elite - and, in my opinion, Morrowind III is the first game since elite to give me a feeling of true freedom (although Deus Ex came close). For example, in Elite, you could embark from a spacestation, and just explore the galaxy. In Morrowind you essentially do the same (but in a fantasy setting, obviously).

With a few improvements/patches, and perhaps a hardware/processor upgrade, this game will be one of the best released in a long time.

Now ... if someone can provide me with Elite 4 please !

so valuable that nobody could afford to buy it.
There are some plugins that give merchants a lot of cash. I wish I had that problem though, at the moment I've been having to bribe so many people to get them to do stuff/give stuff up that I was forced to sell some fire arrows just to afford the fare to Balmora from Vecci...

Errol, sometimes you speak sense when you get off the subject of your trousers. That description of Morrowind sounds really enticing and is making me think about going out and buying a GeForce 3. Hmm.

Errol, sometimes you speak sense when you get off the subject of your trousers

High praise indeed !

edit - you could probably pick up a Geforce 3 pretty cheaply now I bet. I think the game is quite processor dependant as well though. I would'nt recommend running it on anything less that a PIII 800mhz (and thats the minimum, imo - Although, I suppose this depends on how much of a frame-rate junky you are).

I would'nt recommend running it on anthything less that a PIII 800mhz (and thats the minimum, imo

/otto looks at his PIII 600, looks glum, and goes back to his Gamecube

:(

Well I have this running on an Athlon XP1900 with a GF4 card and it's not the fastest game to be honest. Although (and I'm not 100% sure here) I suspect as my screen is locked in @ 1024x768 60hz this may have something to do with it. Maybe it's cos I maxed everything out though..........

But I back up Errol here (careful with that phrase gentlemen please).

Morrowind looks like it's going to be alot of fun. I only purchased it last night and played through the introduction. I always tend to pick the Elf Archer type character; blame my misspend youth watching the D&D cartoons if you will. I went through all the Voigt-Kampff questions and, ka-boom, it said my character would be the perfect "Archer". So I got what I wanted and no stats involved!

Hm .. well, there's now a patch available, but only for the American version of the game. My review copy was an American retail copy, but when I just tried applying the patch it .. er .. crashed. Ahem.

Maybe I'm just unlucky. :)

Maybe I'm just unlucky.
Looks like you're unlucky, I'm using a British copy with one of the better no-cd hacks and it patches and works. I did get an error message during the patch about a file being present but the wrong size or something however it continued,.after a long pause on one of the files it completed ok.

On starting the game it came up with a list of plugins that were made using the previous version but hitting yes to all of them the game runs fine, once you put the disc in now of course....

"after a long pause on one of the files it completed ok"

How long? Maybe I just wasn't patient enough - it got stuck on 33% complete and sat there for about a minute before I killed it. :(

It took a while with nothing much happening at around the 33%-34% mark, not sure how long really, maybe a minute or two, I thought it had crashed but I wasn't in a hurry and eventually it continued. Works fine and loading and resaving the plugins in the editor gets rid of the warnings that appear too.

Lets hope the Euro patch isn't too far away!

Lets hope the Euro patch isn't too far away!
The patch that is out works fine on UK copies, presumably any version that's in English is identical.

Ooooh really?

Any special messingaboutwithstuff needed or it a straight EXE and tea break?

or it a straight EXE and tea break?
Run it and let it go, have a look at the other posts I've made about it a bit earlier in the thread.

Ahhhhh, someone vists gamecopyworld then obviously!

Cheers Billy Whizzo.

Ahhhhh, someone vists gamecopyworld then obviously!
Well doesn't everyone? ;-) I find it a pain in the arse looking around for discs all the time, however in the case of Morrowind it was to keep the game running quickly without unSafeDisc causing hassle, however since I've patched it seems to run just as fast with the CD in so it's not really needed.

I'd still like another no-cd patch though I'll admit being able to start up games when I want straight away is nice.

Yeah I 2nd that. MOHAA is much better without having to dig around for the disk.

...and before anyone starts calling me Captain Pugwash or something, all my games are legit.

The man at the bootfair told me so.

So nir.

RE: Walking speed.

Starting a new game to try out a more tank-like character I found the 'man in treacle effect'. My nimble-footed high level thief goes like the wind, however.

Is this ever getting a review on the XBox? Just asking cos Digitiser were going on about how good the XBox version was this morning.