Post by N3B on Jan 29, 2006 20:20:42 GMT -5
PROS OF MORROWIND:
+ An immensely large, free-roam RPG in which you can do virtually anything. There's tons to do, fame to earn, loot to collect, and monsters to kill. You more or less live the life of the hero you create. The world is deep, full of adventure, lots of back history, and did I say huge? There're a ton of factions to join, one of which will suit any one person's needs.
FLAWS OF MORROWIND:
+ Character Creation: At the start of the game, before you've even been able to experience the gameplay and how the world works, you're made to create your hero. The customization is very detailed and complex, which means that there are hundreds of different combinations or ways to play any given character. However, at the start of the game, you're totally ignorant as to what each of the fields will do, or affect your gameplay. It's very easy to start a character and learn 2-3 days into it that you made something that doesn't suit your playstyle, or 70% of the major/minor skills which attribute to leveling up are unused, or your character just sucks because you combined skills horribly. You don't really understand the effect of what you're doing until later in game, and by that time it's usually too late to fix it, unless you want to re-roll. Things like spells, for example, aren't even mentioned with the skill definition, so you don't even know the spells you'll be using until you're actually in-game. While it does leave room for insane customization, it is also very frustrating to make what you want and have it work well without drawbacks.
+ Graphics: All-in-all, the graphics are stunning; the water looks great, landscapes look brilliant; there's really nothing that can be bashed in the visual department. However, these stunning landscapes are extremely monotonous. Virtually everything begins to look and feel the exact same as what you just saw 3 minutes ago. The world has very few distinguishing landforms and it all seems to be just a random bunch of paths, hills, and trees. The world just isn't dynamic; just more of the same. Random caves and dungeons are also present, but they also look the exact same (with minor changes in level layout).
+ Audio: Most of the sound in the game is pretty good, stunning even. However, like the graphics, it all gets repetitive, and even goes beyond the level of repetition to annoying. There's the ever present sound of your heavy feet on the ground, which sound more like you're stomping a march everywhere you go. Especially once you start traveling the overly-huge world with too-far-spread-apart towns, you'll realize how annoying this sound is and turn down the volume of footsteps, which actually is an option. The soundtrack is limited. There are 7 travel themes, 8 combat themes, and the Morrowind theme, each lasting approximately 2 minutes then going into the next song in the cycle. So basically, you're hearing a lot of the same music over and over again. It doesn't help that 50% of the songs themselves sound very similar to each other. The Morrowind theme you hear playing when you start up your character catches your attention at first and is really enjoyable, but you begin to get irked by the fact that you've heard it so often. The spoken dialogue is limited to out-of-conversation-interjections. The game is deceiving in this field, because when you start, dialogue is spoken by each character. Then, once your character is made, it reverts to text windows. The out-of-conversation things are perhaps the most annoying, because you hear guards say "Keep moving," way too much. Every time you pass by a guard (which are stationed very frequently) you hear that same thing. There's also the random animal noises you hear when you're walking around, some of which are very shrill and ear-piercing (take the Cliff Racer for example).
+ Gameplay: This branch will be divided into sub-sections Atmosphere, Combat, Exploration, Mechanics, and Quests.
- Atmosphere: The game just doesn't feel "alive." The thriving cities, sprawling landscapes, ancestral catacombs and dungeons, and mystical creatures just don't feel alive. The entirety of the game feels fabricated. The world essentially boils down to just a bunch of repeated textures, respawning bad-AI monsters, and lifeless interactable souls. Take townspeople for example; 90% of the citizens wander a set path, regardless of time of day or weather. Then, each one will say the exact same thing as the last. The geography is too bland and repetitive to seem like a breathing environment. The lack of audio dialogue, having to read everything beyond the initial 10 minutes of gameplay, begins to get irritating. Often times you'll click a conversation option and be hit by a wall of discouraging text. You find other clickable conversation cues within the response, and find 2 or 3 more walls of text. Naturally, the common person will begin to ignore the dialogue altogether and just read in their journal what they need to do, thus further ruining the life-like feel of the game (not to mention the obvious lack of spoken dialogue as is present in the real world). When it comes down to it, you just don't feel like the epic hero saving the world. It typically feels more like you're doing chores in a genuinely falsified world.
- Combat: At first it seems really fun; grab a weapon and beat the crap out of target. In the end, every combat is dumbed down to this mindless button-mashing festival. In most instances where you'll be fighting, it's 1v1 and the best strategy is to stay still and just keep hacking. If you move around too much, your endurance level drops and you'll start to hit less often and for less damage. So, simply standing and hitting until target falls over, is what the smartest way to fight is. There are a few cases where you fight mobs in groups of 2 or more, but usually this also settles down to "Stand still, hit target A until target A = dead. When target A = dead, hit target B until target B = dead. If health <30%, then use potion." The combat leaves little room for strategy and just winds up being mind-numbingly boring. A realistic effect Bethesda tried to add was a recoil when you take damage. While realistic effects make a game seem better, this proves more annoying than good. There are times when I need to switch to my magic to heal myself, but because the opponent hit me, I'm in recoil waving my arms around. This usually leads to a chain sequence where you get hit, recoil, hit, recoil, and wind up dead after several seconds of being disabled by this recoil. If you try to run away, the other target is fast enough that they keep hitting you as you run, putting you into recoil and stopping you dead (sometimes literally) in your tracks where they begin the chain cycle again.
- Exploration: The world is simply too huge. And monotonous. And repetitive. If you're out exploring the wilds trying to find fame, glory, monsters to fight, caverns to raid, or loot to plunder, then you'd better just stay in town, because you can find more of that there. Exploring the entirety of the map is just not rewarding; you wander over five too-similar hills/swamps, killing two or three rats or nix-hounds and the only possible loot you've found consists of foliage with a value of less than 1 Drake. This is how the majority of the world is. You run around everywhere, don't find anything (not even a cool-looking landform), and then wonder "Why am I bothering?" Even when you do find a cave, there're two things that could happen: 1) You get through it no problem, but there just isn't anything with a value of over 30 Drakes (or it's all heavy armor from mobs that you can only carry 2-3 of before getting overweight), or 2) You are outmatched by the mobs inside and are forced to retreat. Well, you might be thinking "I'll come back to it," but by the time you get thirty feet from the cave, you'll have forgotten all about its location, since it blends in with the over-repeted land texturing. To top it off, after you level a bit there're constantly tons of Cliff Racers (airborne prehistoric-esque birds). It gets to a point where you walk for 15 seconds, fight 3-4 Cliff Racers, walk another 15 seconds, fight 3-4 Cliff Racers, etc. Then when your health or magicka is too low, you want to rest and regain it, but wait! There're more Cliff Racers around and you can't sleep! Add this constant presence of the Cliff Racers to the boring combat, and you get a recipe for sheer frustration.
- Mechanics: The level-up system works by increasing your major and minor skills. You need to gain 10 level-ups in any of your major/minors and then you will get your new level. Well, if you set Athletics, Acrobatics, Sneaking, or any other similar skill, you can exploit to level 10 before leaving the first town. All you must do is set your character behind a chair on "sneak" mode, leave the computer for a few hours, and you've made a few levels. Things like running and jumping will level-up as you move about the too-large world. Merchants have limited gold on them, never more than like 8,000 in the rare occasions that you can find one with that much. If you're robbing townsmen or merchants or find the rare case when you actually are rewarded by your monotonous exploration of the map with a really expensive item, you won't ever be able to sell these. These items with 40k-150k values will sell in a shop for 19k-70k, which is more than any one merchant will ever own. So you finally get your reward for exploring, and you can't sell it. Then you think "Why the hell is this even in the game? The stats are worse than what I bought from town, and I can't even sell it!" If you're into alchemy, you can exploit endless money from buying supplies from vendors, since they renew their inventory every day. The spell-customization and enchanting system is just horrid. If you want to make a really good spell, it'll either use more magicka than you have, cost more money than you have (60k or more, all earned at intervals of 1500 a day, since you can't sell your 82k helmet), or have a high chance of failure upon the actual cast. Even if you make a good spell, later in the game, most mobs have a chance of reflecting this damage back at you, thus rendering your spell(s) useless and even a detriment to your health.
- Quests: The majority of quests involve going to some distant town, talking to person, killing random mob/finding random item, going to another distant town, talking to person, and going all the way back to the starting town. When you wind up in another distant town you'll inevitably pick up some new quests/tasks along with what you already started. These quests involve going to a different town to kill a random mob/find a random item, then go talk to another person, etc. So you form a web of random quests which, in the end, don't reward you with anything spectacular, most of which you'll never get around to or will totally forget about. You may begin to try to strategize where you'll go in what order so that it all gets done efficiently, but in the end, it's impossible to do.
+ Conclusion: The game feels like it's just a random compilation of things that leave you with more questions than answers. It's bland, lifeless, and has no "catching point." There are many flaws and exploits which breaks the game. Sure, it's got great concepts, but all-in-all, everything in the game was spread too thin; the world, the quests, the monsters, the loot, the spells, everything. I started playing again after making my best stab to enjoy it over a year ago because I didn't have anything else to play. I'm now getting into Dungeon Siege, Legends of Aranna, and Dungeon Siege 2; I ordered DS1, and figured I'd play Morrowind until it came in; an expected 6-9 days until delivery. Well, it came after only 2 and a half days, and I realized how pointlessly boring and unlatching the game is when I was able to put it down without feeling any loss. There was no catching aspect of the game that made me want to stick to it; it felt like a chore to play the game. If you played Morrowind and liked it, by far, you'll enjoy the series for PC Gothic more. If you played Morrowind and agree with its flaws that I've pointed out, you'll definitely appreciate the Gothic series. Gothic succeeds in almost every way that Morrowind failed, as outlined above.
+ An immensely large, free-roam RPG in which you can do virtually anything. There's tons to do, fame to earn, loot to collect, and monsters to kill. You more or less live the life of the hero you create. The world is deep, full of adventure, lots of back history, and did I say huge? There're a ton of factions to join, one of which will suit any one person's needs.
FLAWS OF MORROWIND:
+ Character Creation: At the start of the game, before you've even been able to experience the gameplay and how the world works, you're made to create your hero. The customization is very detailed and complex, which means that there are hundreds of different combinations or ways to play any given character. However, at the start of the game, you're totally ignorant as to what each of the fields will do, or affect your gameplay. It's very easy to start a character and learn 2-3 days into it that you made something that doesn't suit your playstyle, or 70% of the major/minor skills which attribute to leveling up are unused, or your character just sucks because you combined skills horribly. You don't really understand the effect of what you're doing until later in game, and by that time it's usually too late to fix it, unless you want to re-roll. Things like spells, for example, aren't even mentioned with the skill definition, so you don't even know the spells you'll be using until you're actually in-game. While it does leave room for insane customization, it is also very frustrating to make what you want and have it work well without drawbacks.
+ Graphics: All-in-all, the graphics are stunning; the water looks great, landscapes look brilliant; there's really nothing that can be bashed in the visual department. However, these stunning landscapes are extremely monotonous. Virtually everything begins to look and feel the exact same as what you just saw 3 minutes ago. The world has very few distinguishing landforms and it all seems to be just a random bunch of paths, hills, and trees. The world just isn't dynamic; just more of the same. Random caves and dungeons are also present, but they also look the exact same (with minor changes in level layout).
+ Audio: Most of the sound in the game is pretty good, stunning even. However, like the graphics, it all gets repetitive, and even goes beyond the level of repetition to annoying. There's the ever present sound of your heavy feet on the ground, which sound more like you're stomping a march everywhere you go. Especially once you start traveling the overly-huge world with too-far-spread-apart towns, you'll realize how annoying this sound is and turn down the volume of footsteps, which actually is an option. The soundtrack is limited. There are 7 travel themes, 8 combat themes, and the Morrowind theme, each lasting approximately 2 minutes then going into the next song in the cycle. So basically, you're hearing a lot of the same music over and over again. It doesn't help that 50% of the songs themselves sound very similar to each other. The Morrowind theme you hear playing when you start up your character catches your attention at first and is really enjoyable, but you begin to get irked by the fact that you've heard it so often. The spoken dialogue is limited to out-of-conversation-interjections. The game is deceiving in this field, because when you start, dialogue is spoken by each character. Then, once your character is made, it reverts to text windows. The out-of-conversation things are perhaps the most annoying, because you hear guards say "Keep moving," way too much. Every time you pass by a guard (which are stationed very frequently) you hear that same thing. There's also the random animal noises you hear when you're walking around, some of which are very shrill and ear-piercing (take the Cliff Racer for example).
+ Gameplay: This branch will be divided into sub-sections Atmosphere, Combat, Exploration, Mechanics, and Quests.
- Atmosphere: The game just doesn't feel "alive." The thriving cities, sprawling landscapes, ancestral catacombs and dungeons, and mystical creatures just don't feel alive. The entirety of the game feels fabricated. The world essentially boils down to just a bunch of repeated textures, respawning bad-AI monsters, and lifeless interactable souls. Take townspeople for example; 90% of the citizens wander a set path, regardless of time of day or weather. Then, each one will say the exact same thing as the last. The geography is too bland and repetitive to seem like a breathing environment. The lack of audio dialogue, having to read everything beyond the initial 10 minutes of gameplay, begins to get irritating. Often times you'll click a conversation option and be hit by a wall of discouraging text. You find other clickable conversation cues within the response, and find 2 or 3 more walls of text. Naturally, the common person will begin to ignore the dialogue altogether and just read in their journal what they need to do, thus further ruining the life-like feel of the game (not to mention the obvious lack of spoken dialogue as is present in the real world). When it comes down to it, you just don't feel like the epic hero saving the world. It typically feels more like you're doing chores in a genuinely falsified world.
- Combat: At first it seems really fun; grab a weapon and beat the crap out of target. In the end, every combat is dumbed down to this mindless button-mashing festival. In most instances where you'll be fighting, it's 1v1 and the best strategy is to stay still and just keep hacking. If you move around too much, your endurance level drops and you'll start to hit less often and for less damage. So, simply standing and hitting until target falls over, is what the smartest way to fight is. There are a few cases where you fight mobs in groups of 2 or more, but usually this also settles down to "Stand still, hit target A until target A = dead. When target A = dead, hit target B until target B = dead. If health <30%, then use potion." The combat leaves little room for strategy and just winds up being mind-numbingly boring. A realistic effect Bethesda tried to add was a recoil when you take damage. While realistic effects make a game seem better, this proves more annoying than good. There are times when I need to switch to my magic to heal myself, but because the opponent hit me, I'm in recoil waving my arms around. This usually leads to a chain sequence where you get hit, recoil, hit, recoil, and wind up dead after several seconds of being disabled by this recoil. If you try to run away, the other target is fast enough that they keep hitting you as you run, putting you into recoil and stopping you dead (sometimes literally) in your tracks where they begin the chain cycle again.
- Exploration: The world is simply too huge. And monotonous. And repetitive. If you're out exploring the wilds trying to find fame, glory, monsters to fight, caverns to raid, or loot to plunder, then you'd better just stay in town, because you can find more of that there. Exploring the entirety of the map is just not rewarding; you wander over five too-similar hills/swamps, killing two or three rats or nix-hounds and the only possible loot you've found consists of foliage with a value of less than 1 Drake. This is how the majority of the world is. You run around everywhere, don't find anything (not even a cool-looking landform), and then wonder "Why am I bothering?" Even when you do find a cave, there're two things that could happen: 1) You get through it no problem, but there just isn't anything with a value of over 30 Drakes (or it's all heavy armor from mobs that you can only carry 2-3 of before getting overweight), or 2) You are outmatched by the mobs inside and are forced to retreat. Well, you might be thinking "I'll come back to it," but by the time you get thirty feet from the cave, you'll have forgotten all about its location, since it blends in with the over-repeted land texturing. To top it off, after you level a bit there're constantly tons of Cliff Racers (airborne prehistoric-esque birds). It gets to a point where you walk for 15 seconds, fight 3-4 Cliff Racers, walk another 15 seconds, fight 3-4 Cliff Racers, etc. Then when your health or magicka is too low, you want to rest and regain it, but wait! There're more Cliff Racers around and you can't sleep! Add this constant presence of the Cliff Racers to the boring combat, and you get a recipe for sheer frustration.
- Mechanics: The level-up system works by increasing your major and minor skills. You need to gain 10 level-ups in any of your major/minors and then you will get your new level. Well, if you set Athletics, Acrobatics, Sneaking, or any other similar skill, you can exploit to level 10 before leaving the first town. All you must do is set your character behind a chair on "sneak" mode, leave the computer for a few hours, and you've made a few levels. Things like running and jumping will level-up as you move about the too-large world. Merchants have limited gold on them, never more than like 8,000 in the rare occasions that you can find one with that much. If you're robbing townsmen or merchants or find the rare case when you actually are rewarded by your monotonous exploration of the map with a really expensive item, you won't ever be able to sell these. These items with 40k-150k values will sell in a shop for 19k-70k, which is more than any one merchant will ever own. So you finally get your reward for exploring, and you can't sell it. Then you think "Why the hell is this even in the game? The stats are worse than what I bought from town, and I can't even sell it!" If you're into alchemy, you can exploit endless money from buying supplies from vendors, since they renew their inventory every day. The spell-customization and enchanting system is just horrid. If you want to make a really good spell, it'll either use more magicka than you have, cost more money than you have (60k or more, all earned at intervals of 1500 a day, since you can't sell your 82k helmet), or have a high chance of failure upon the actual cast. Even if you make a good spell, later in the game, most mobs have a chance of reflecting this damage back at you, thus rendering your spell(s) useless and even a detriment to your health.
- Quests: The majority of quests involve going to some distant town, talking to person, killing random mob/finding random item, going to another distant town, talking to person, and going all the way back to the starting town. When you wind up in another distant town you'll inevitably pick up some new quests/tasks along with what you already started. These quests involve going to a different town to kill a random mob/find a random item, then go talk to another person, etc. So you form a web of random quests which, in the end, don't reward you with anything spectacular, most of which you'll never get around to or will totally forget about. You may begin to try to strategize where you'll go in what order so that it all gets done efficiently, but in the end, it's impossible to do.
+ Conclusion: The game feels like it's just a random compilation of things that leave you with more questions than answers. It's bland, lifeless, and has no "catching point." There are many flaws and exploits which breaks the game. Sure, it's got great concepts, but all-in-all, everything in the game was spread too thin; the world, the quests, the monsters, the loot, the spells, everything. I started playing again after making my best stab to enjoy it over a year ago because I didn't have anything else to play. I'm now getting into Dungeon Siege, Legends of Aranna, and Dungeon Siege 2; I ordered DS1, and figured I'd play Morrowind until it came in; an expected 6-9 days until delivery. Well, it came after only 2 and a half days, and I realized how pointlessly boring and unlatching the game is when I was able to put it down without feeling any loss. There was no catching aspect of the game that made me want to stick to it; it felt like a chore to play the game. If you played Morrowind and liked it, by far, you'll enjoy the series for PC Gothic more. If you played Morrowind and agree with its flaws that I've pointed out, you'll definitely appreciate the Gothic series. Gothic succeeds in almost every way that Morrowind failed, as outlined above.