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Best game this year

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: May 21, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I love this game. It is a huge richly textured world. With more flexibility then I would have thought possible. Almost every aspect of this game seems well thought out and enjoyible. That said, it didn't start out so great for me.

I too started out frustrated by the crashing of this game, but downloading a new video driver for my NVIDIA video card fixed the problem. This game can be resource hog. But if you have a computer that meets the requirements on the box and you make sure your drivers are current you shouldn't have any problems. You can download the latest drivers off the web fairly easy, even if you have a slow connection like mine.

It is worth the all bother. I spent almost 5 hours trying to figure out why it crashed whenever I tried to get off the boat in the first sequence but when I finally fixed it I encountered the most breathtaking and beautiful world. The graphics are exceptional. Everywhere you look is a detailed and unique vista. Even the sound is pretty good. The music isn't overwhelming or annoying. But the reason this game is truely exceptional is the gameplay.

This game is truely open ended. You can play this game any way you want. You can shape your character to be a master thief, a warrior, a mage, or a monk, just to name a few of the possibilities. Your skills are built when you use them instead of being assigned whenever you kill a certain number of creatures.

In fact it is possible (although not easy) to play this game without any violence if that is what you prefer. You can follow the main plot of the game or wander around exploring and going on other quests or both. I've heard there are more then 500 quests in this game and just from 15 hours of playing I believe it. The world Bethesda created seems detailed and exotic enough to intrest me for a long long time.

Pros:

Lavish graphics
Openended and non-linear gaming
Huge number of quests
Decent sound
Very flexible in shaping your character and how you want to play the game

Cons:
Need a fairly good computer
Need latest drivers
Will suck hours out of your life and may make you late for work

All in all this is the best game I have seen in years. It sets a new standard for role playing games.

Achieved instant classic status with art alone.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: December 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Bethesda Softworks, 2001)

So I picked up Morrowind a few years ago, when I still had a computer that was capable of running most things. I installed it, and the best I could get out of it after all the tweaking I could do was 0.2fps. It says something about the game that I played it for weeks with 0.2fps. I had never seen anything quite like it, and I was willing to take ten minutes to get from building A to building B just to look at the amazing graphics.

I upgraded the computer a while ago, and I dusted off Morrowind and started playing again about three months ago. The new computer actually runs it like a computer game instead of an art slideshow, so I can finally say something about it.

I played, briefly, both Arena and Daggerfall, the first two Elder Scrolls games. I was put off both by the absolutely horrible combat interface, despite having heard so many wonderful things about Daggerfall's gameplay. The first thing I noticed was that Bethesda has made the combat interface far, far simpler now (a simple "use best attack automatically" checkbox will stop you from having to learn eighteen different ways to swing a sword, thankfully). The second was that the character-building interface is much, much better in this one; Daggerfall's was already head and shoulders above that of other CFRPGs (so much so that it was riffed on in the best freeware RPG on the planet, ADOM), but Morrowind expands the character creation interface, allowing for as much or as little detail as the player would like; you can choose one of the premade character kits, have the game choose one for you by answering questions a la Daggerfall, or customize your own. From there, the game just sits at your feet, waiting for commands. There is a main storyline, and those who like linear gameplay can get involved in it immediately; for the rest of you, there's the rest of Vvardenfell. The game can be as linear or non-linear as the player would like it to be, with only a few things closed off to newbies (usually trainers or traders who dead with high-level stuff; the way they're closed off, though, is so non-intrusive as to not bother the average player at all.) There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of easter eggs to be had throughout Vvardenfell, encouraging exploration for the sake of exploration, rather than to follow a dull, overused storyline, as in most CFRPGs. Quests outside the main storyline are also to be found in great abundance, and players can spend months of both game- and real-time doing those while nursing the main storyline (again, assuming you opt to follow it) along at whatever pace the player likes. (I assume the ability to get kicked out of guilds for just not doing anything still exists; I've yet to run across it.)

And, as I mentioned before, the artwork is stunning. In 2001, there wasn't another computer game that included anything close to this level of detail. At the end of 2004, there are a handful of games that match it, but none of them have the same feel as Morrowind; as realistic as things often look, there's still a weird, out-of-place feel to it all that makes many situations that much more disturbing.

Many of the complaints originally voiced by players in the game have been silenced thanks to the two add-ons and a few patches; I do suggest getting both Bloodmoon and Tribunal as well, and installing them, then patching, before playing. Even with the patches, I still use a notebook to track quests and the like, but the game does do it for you now.

The last game that kept me up this late at night this often was Lords of Magic, back in the mid-nineties. Morrowind is one for the ages. **** ½

Starts slow; great middle; slow ending

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 16 / 22
Date: July 17, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Starts off very slow (weak monsters kill you easily; you have to rest all the time and worst of all, you literally move like a snail).

Then, the midgame is very addictive -- it's great to feel the effects of increased skills, new items and exploring. The world is quite expansive.

Unfortunately, you're too powerful by the end. You can run at ridiculous speeds, ignore the damage of almost every monster and quests seem like chores.

I'm not a fan of purely skill-based experience. Jump up and down 1000 times and you go up a level (because your Acrobatics increases by ten). Umm ... ok. Whatever.

Also the combat engine is poor. You can scarcely tell at what point of a swing you'll get hit (making hit-and-run tactics almost impossible), and area-of-affect attacks like fire or cold look the same whether or not you're hit; you have to keep an eye on your life meter.

Yes, as other reviewers have stated, it's buggy, but the console lets you work around some of that. And some are nit-picking. And some are real bugs. If you can get over an imperfect piece of software, you'll find it to be a good gaming experience, with some decent ideas.

Also, you MUST buy the hintbook or read the online forums -- there are too many people and quests to keep track of and too many locations you will find nearly impossible to track down. And USE THE CONSOLE -- there are some bugs that prevent the completion of quests otherwise.

Note: I'm not a hardcore gamer, my perspective is just as an occasional video gamer and RPGer.

Expect limits. They exist.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: June 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I'll be the first to admit it; Morrowind has a few problems, albeit minor ones, that can hamper gameplay. Primarily, it chugs on virtually any computer that you can find, primarily due to a problem in the game's animation; hopefully, they will patch this, and it should dramatically increase the speed of gameplay.
However, the biggest problem is that people simply expected way too much from the game. If they wanted to make a fully-interactive game featuring interacting guild politics, a completely changable world, etc.; then it would take five times as long to make and be spread out on 4 CDs. As it is, they've made a sickeningly addictive game that only took 1 CD. The world is enormous, yes; but travel is not impossible, and the landscapes are dull only because the land is supposed to be dull. One reviewer mentioned the lack of beautiful landscapes and bustling marketplaces and such...personally, I've never seen a game that could do all of that convincingly, and if they decided to do a game of that caliber on this level of detail, we'd be septuagenerians by the time they're finished, and it'd be decades behind in game technology. As it is, they had to compromise somewhere, and they opted for a large but not infinite world, a 'lite' political system, a moderately customizable and enjoyable combat system, jaw-dropping graphics, an enormous level of character customization, and basically, in all honesty, the best they could make in any reasonable amount of time. If you want a game that encompasses everything that an RPG should ever have, that has far-reaching effects that are felt by all relevant NPCs and actually change the real world, then all you've got are pencil-and-paper RPGs. No computer game right now could conceivably offer those options, because a system like that is far too open-ended to efficiently produce. However, given that there are limits as to how a game can portray a world, this is just about as good as it gets (although, to be honest, its predecessor had a little more interaction, albeit lacking in originality and graphics and substance). While it may not be perfection, it is quite simply the closest *any* all-encompassing CRPG has ever come to it. 'Nuff said.

Overrated

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: October 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Other reviewers have already covered the bases pretty thoroughly, so I'm only going to address one issue in this review...

What is all this hype about Morrowind being "open-ended"? In what way is it any more "open-ended" than any other RPG on the market?

I can only think of a few things that could conceivably be interpreted as "open-ended", but in my opinion, none of them really count, since they don't actually add anything to the gameplay.

* You can pick up almost any object you come across. This is a welcome feature, and it *could* add significantly to the realism of the game, but it's implemented rather clumsily: as soon as you pick up an object that doesn't belong to you, everyone knows about it, and starts treating you like a criminal. Like much of the rest of the game, it feels very stilted and artificial.

* The conversation system. You can ask anyone you encounter about any topic you've heard about. But everyone says the exact same thing about a particular topic. And you have to scroll awkwardly through page after page of dense, complex mythology (and refer frequently to your equally dense and complex journal), to figure out what's going on. There is no voice acting, and all of the text is presented in a tiny font. The whole experience is more like reading help files in a DOS window than an actual conversation. (I have similar complaints about the interface as a whole, especially the inventory management system.)

* There's an absolutely massive 3D world to explore, and you can go anywhere - up into the mountains, along the sea, across the marshes, etc. But - here's the fatal flaw - there's no *reason* to. The same half-dozen lame monsters populate the entire continent. There are occasional dungeons to explore, but their rewards are strictly technical (experience points and gold), and the baddies never say anything or engage you in any sort of story - they just exist to be killed. Without the context of a storyline, you don't feel connected to the adventure. Since most of the monsters you encounter are easily dispatched, and it doesn't take long to collect an abundance of gold, even the technical rewards quickly become meaningless.

* OK, I said I was only going to address one issue, but I'd like to comment briefly on the graphics while I'm at it. The rendering engine is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but the art itself is rather unappealing to my eyes. Everything has a bleak, washed-out, angular feel to it, and the people are just downright ugly. Maybe that's what they were going for, but it would have been nice to have some more variety.

I'm very much in favor of RPGs that allow the player to go off in unexpected directions and find creative solutions to problems, but the Morrowind engine ends up feeling more aimless than liberating. To be fair, I did spend a few dozen reasonably enjoyable hours playing the game, but after seeing the same thing over and over, I just got bored with it.

Great idea, came up very short

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 18 / 28
Date: August 24, 2002
Author: Amazon User

All games have their pros and cons, things they did just right and other things that could have been done better. Morrowind is no exception, what makes it unique is how drastic the pros and cons are.
Morrowind is set in an enormous world for the player to explore. The size of the world is so big and so detailed, that at times it seems to good to be true. You could spend weeks walking around the "world map" in Morrowind, and never see the same thing twice. You have more freedom than in any game I have ever played, it truely is a breakthrough in this respect. So why do I think the game [disappoints]? Check out these cons:
The game's programming is nothing short of lunacy. The number of bugs in this game are uncountable. And these aren't small bugs, I'm talking about bugs that crash your system, I'm talking about bugs that you encounter every 15 minutes of game play. If you ask me, it is outrageous that this game was allowed to be shipped to stores with the number of programming bugs in it. Without a patch, the game is seriously unplayable, it crashes constantly. What really infuriates me about this game is that they designed a vast and complicated world that is a programming phenomenon, but they said "heck with it" when it came to making it stable. What a waste of a wonderful game. Another example is that they put a 3rd person perspective in this game, which I love. But they didn't put a crosshair on the screen to use to aim, there is only a crosshair in first person mode. In other words, if you are playing in third person, you can forget about long distance arrow shots or magic spells, you'll miss every time unless you have hours and hours to practice. If you go to their web support page, you will see that "how do I get a crosshair in third person mode" is a question in their FAQ. When you click to see the answer, it simply says "you can't". Thanks a lot for the help guys! If there are so many people wanting a crosshair that it warranted a FAQ question, you would think they would release a patch to allow it to happen, not just say "you can't". It would take a decent programmer about a half hour to accomplish this.
Finally, and this may be the most important flaw of all, the system requirements are outrageous. What is indicated on the box as the recommended requirements is a joke. There is no way you could play this game with the "recommended" machine. I have a 2.4 ghz processor with a 128 meg GeForce 4 card and I can't get a smooth framerate in this game. Every piece of my computer is state of the art and I can't play this game at decent quality. The graphics are good, but they aren't that good. Grand theft auto 3 uses a very similar graphics engine and it looks worlds better with smooth as silk framerates. Morrowind is so half assed it makes me sick. They designed the perfect world, and threw the gameplay and stability out the window. The interface is horrible and the fighting is also terrible. What a horrible shame. Hopefully someday someone will create a world similar to Morrowind, but take the time to include game play in the equation! As well as make it stable and not crash all the time. Now that would be perfect!

Overhyped Monotony

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 26
Date: July 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The first 9 or 10 hours playing Morrowind will keep you entranced and interested. The graphics are great (although for the system requirements, the maximum view / clipping is disapointing, even with all video options maxxed out), and there are some neat features. But before long, the bugs and quirks of this game get absolutely frusturating. They pile up and pile up, until all these little things turn into a huge problem. Here's a short list of the flaws:

1.) NO QUEST LOG. There are hundreds of quests, and no way to efficently keep track of them. This was mended in the expansion sets, which you have to be High level and pay another 30 bucks for, but why bother.
2.) RIDICULOUS NAMES. Quests become convoluted and confusing because the people you need to see and the places you need to go have names that were created by someone slamming on the keyboard and running 5 syllables of consonants together. After the hundredth "Erabenimsum," "Assarnibibi," "Nchfulgenbengrog," and "Shazbolg mun-Ngrobozsl" you just don't care anymore.
3.) CRASH BOOM CRASH. The game is filled with technical bugs, including crashing to desktop just by loading a game, picking up certain items, etc., and this is AFTER I downloaded the HUGE patch off the official website.
4.) SHUT UP, PEOPLE! Just walking past people makes them talk to you, saying things like "Yes? What? What do you want, Outlander? Make it Quick! Say what you want!" This sounds small, but after you hear the same things 1000 times over and over again, you're compelled to slay entire towns. Characters really shouldn't engage you unless you engage them first.
5.) MONOTONY. All ruins look the same, all mines, all forests, all landscapes. Does not have the interesting diversity of, say, EVERQUEST. All areas are repetitious and therefore eventually dull and boring. All side quests are esentially the same: "find item, give it to someone" or "defeat this enemy, then come back to me." BORING!
6.) THAT'S ALL? By level 10 you're able to obtain armor and weapons that enable you to face and defeat anything, especially with a few potions. Nevertheless, every rat and bird ("cliff racer") will attack you at every step. Poor combat system and design.
7.) FREEDOM? NO. You DON'T get to do anything you want. Even if no one sees you slay someone or steal from them, somehow everyone in the world instantly knows what you've done and the game freezes... you can't travel anywhere or buy and sell. Do it enough and you can't even pay a fine; you're attacked by all guards, esentially making you start the game over. Not so non-linear after all.
8.) HARD WORK FOR NOTHING. I climbed to the rank of GuildMaster of the Fighter's Guild, but you don't get to send people on missions, travel with them, give orders or anything. You can't even unlock locked doors in your own guild! Or you're thrown out of the guild entirely! LAME and POINTLESS.

That's just a short list. The game has some merits, and some interesting factions and story, but I think people have been praising this game for its ambitions rather than its acomplishments. Someday someone will perfect a single-player "EverQuest" non-linear game, but Morrowind is far, far from perfect, sadly.

Morrowind: The best damn RPG there is!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: October 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is the best RPG I've played, and believe me I've played a lot. The visuals in this game are ultra-cool. All the characters, items and especially the nature are modelled nearly perfectly. Especially the sky is wonderfull and has a full around the clock weather system.
The character building system is propably the best I've seen up to date.
The 21 character classes don't matter so much in this game (you can also make your own if you like).
Because they only give you the starting skills and here's when the beauty of the game comes in. The 27 character skills evolve as you use them and there are no limitations to it, unlike in some other recent RPG's. Neverwi...cough! Sorry. And when you evolve them enough you gain a level, Then you can increase you're 8 primary skill's (like strenght, intelligence and so on).
But the freedom is what makes this game truly special.
Right from the start you can do anything you want, go anywhere you want or kill anyone you want. If you like (or you're just otherwise a happy person) you could just slaughter everyone, I mean everyone, even the character's essential to the main plot.
Speaking of the main plot you don't have to follow it one bit if you don't want to (I played it for about to weeks before I started doing the first main plot quest).
The sounds in this the game are also pretty good although I must admit that the music (composed by Jeremy Soule) gets a little boring in a game that you play for +100 hours.
Besides that there's not much to complain about except for a few things.
The enemy AI can be sometimes pretty bad and the fighting system is also a little too simple (In melee combat you press your left mouse button, target an enemy and release it. The longer you hold it the more powerful the attack will be.
You repeat this until the enemy dies and you can't even see their health).
But fortunately the superb magic system saves the shortcomings of the melee combat. There are about 500 spells in the game and you can make your own spells at spellmakers shops.
You can mix any spell effects you know in a spell and choose its magnitude, range and area-of-effect.

All in all Morrowind is a must have for any RPG-fan, though it'll take up a lot of your time(I myself played it about a month in my summer vacation).
I highly enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone.

Can't say enough about this game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Elder Scrolls III is absolutely one of the best games I've ever played.

There are so many things to do in it. Normally, I can finish a game in a matter of weeks or days (depending on how big it is). I've been playing this one religiously for about 3 months and still haven't finished it. There are tons of quests (I'm trying to do as many as I can) & hilarious easter eggs.

I don't yet have parts 1 or 2 - it wasn't necessary to be able to understand #3.

Elder Scrolls III also comes with a construction set which allows you to alter anything in the game. You can create your own dungeons, quests, characters, races, weapons - anything...

The ability to enchant & customize weapons and create your own spells is a lot of fun.

The graphics are phenomenal, the voice acting is great, and the story line is detailed (nonlinear). The books in this game are amazing - I feel as if I'm there.

I'm a huge fan of the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Diablo, and Arcanum type games. Elder Scrolls III ranks right up there with them. I recommend this one to anyone I can!

Good, but with some shocking bugs

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: June 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Morrowind is basically a world. If you can think of something you'd like to do in Morrowind, chances are there's a way to do it. Jump from a rain barrel to a rooftop to escape pursuing guards. Poke around in the bushes outside of town and discover a hidden crypt filled with ghouls. Paddle out into the ocean, fire an arrow at a giant jellyfish, and high-tail it back into town so the militia will protect you. There is a lot of fun to be had in this entirely 3-D world. That said, of course, there are some rather serious bugs that still haven't been corrected.

1) The most egregious I've encountered is the disappearing item bug. Basically things in your inventory simply vanish. Sometimes it's so minor you never notice. Other times, it's a gem worth 15,000 gold. Then, you notice. At first I just assumed my naive 20th level guy was just a constant victim of pickpockets. Then the suit of chainmail he was _wearing_ simply vanished while he was walking down the middle of an empty road. I reversed course back into town and tried to buy another one from the local guard. Since I had joined the Imperial Legion, no one would talk to me since I was now "out of uniform." Finally I found a non-Legion shop that carried Legion chainmail, bought a suit, and put it on. The game crashed. Reloaded, tried again. Game crashed again. Finally I just gave up on either being in the Legion, or ever having a Legionnaire NPC ever talk to me again (still out of uniform).

2) Ranged combat is bizarre. For anyone used to 1st person shooters, using a bow and arrow and crosshairs to peg a target shouldn't be too challenging, but it still requires some coordination and timing, particularly when that target is trying to sneak up and kill you. However, it's not enough to simply line up something with your bow and shoot it. You have to ALSO "hit" it with your stats. So if your character is bad with a bow, you can fire longbow arrows directly through people's heads on screen and not hit them. Doesn't matter how big and lumbering the target is, if your stats say you miss, you miss, even if you see that arrow go right through its chest.

3) If you start the game and just barter with the first shopkeeper you find for about an hour, you'll soon be able to turn a huge profit just selling him back the items you buy from him. So whenever you need money, you can just swap the same expensive item back and forth a few times to clean out the house. Then you can use the money to just train yourself up levels.

4) Unpredictable NPCs. A lot of the time, fairly innocent things will turn NPCs aggressive. On the plus side, the guards will usually let you go with a minor fee/bribe, but it can get annoying fast, particularly when all the NPCs are "linked" so that if you [irritate] one, someone on the other side of town somehow magically senses it and runs over with their axe. A classic example is opening a chest 3 floors above any NPC, then heading downstairs into a swirling pack of angry people. Then when you kill them all, you're the bad guy, heh.

All in all, it's a visually stunning game that can prove to be very frustrating in play. I find I can only take it for an hour or two at a time.

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