role-playing

I have waited a long time for this third installment of the Elder Scrolls, and it was worth it! This RPG is incredibly good. Abstain from playing it if you don't want to be glued to your PC 24/7.

The construction set included with the game is incredibly entertaining and easy to use, once you get the hang of it. I was able to add a house to the gameworld to suit my character perfectly. (and believe me I am a very technology challenged person) I think I have spent more time on the construction set than on the game itself. It is so much fun to use and is not limited to modifying architecture. With it the player can create new objects, classes, races, npc's, weapons, armor, the options are almost limitless.

The official site boards are a wonderful source of information on every aspect of the game. On them, the players themselves enthusiastically share their experiences and answer most questions regarding Morrowind. Finally, fan sites are mushrooming all over the web with everything from tutorials on using the construction set, to solutions to the most obscure quests and puzzles. Leave it to the fans to generously share their creativity. All in all, I will be playing this game for a long time to come.

Kudos to Bethesda for another job well done.

I am going to make this very simple, the quote on the box states "best looking RPG ever". This is not an exaggeration -- this is pure fact. The monsters, weaponry and game space are without equal -- anywhere, in any game. But at the same time, imagine trying to play Doom 2 or Civilization on an Atari 2600. You got it: it won't work -- just like Morrowind on most modern day HOME computers.

Unless you're running it on an NSA mainframe (think Cray supercomputer), then expect three hours of wait time for every hour of play time, or worse. And even though the visuals are stunning, it becomes maddeningly frustrating to have to deal w/ all the load times, oftentimes in the middle of battle.

To give you a sense for the system requirements, I run an HP 9895 with 256 MB of RDRAM with an Intel 1.7 Ghtz Pentium 4 processor and a video card with 32 megs of video RAM. And this game cooks all system resources and consistently crashes my machine about every 45 minutes. If Bethesda Softworks (the company who eveloped this game) is reading this: yes, this is an indictment of your ability to manage code and system resources -- you've done a terrible job of this in Morrowind.

Net/net:
1) Awesome visuals
2) Cool monsters and weaponry
3) Huge, and I mean huuuuuge world to play in
4) Unfortunately, do yourself a favor, put your money and time elsewhere -- this game is simply not fun due to the exasperatingly slow play caused by flawed programming

I absolutely LOVED the Tribunal expansion for Morrowind. Some fans complained that the expansion was too "quest-orientated" and provided little opportunity to explore the backcountry. Well, I guess I've always loved the quests and hated aimlessly searching the outback for some obscure landmark, so Tribunal's mechanics suited me just fine.

Tribunal provides many features to enhance your Elder Scrolls experience. Most notably there is now an enemy lifebar, making gameplay much easier and enjoyable. Also, enemies and quests are generally considerably more difficult, and should be pleasantly challenging to the average player who has completed the original game's main quest. Also, now vendors have more money and you can sell some of your more expensive loot.

These are all nice features, but the "killer app" of Tribunal is the same as what set the original game apart from the competition: phenomenal storyline and plot-writing. The plot of the original game was so detailed, immersive, and epic that I often described Morrowind as not a game but a work of fine literature, in the same league as Lord of the Rings. Morrowind's storylines were known for their ingenious and unpredictable plot twists as well generally innovative dramatic development. That said, the plot for the main quest of Tribunal exceeded even that of the original game. If only Hollywood hacks had this kind of creativity and ingenuity; Tribunal is digital poetry. You will be drawn into a web of intrigue that will gradually build in crescendo until an absolutley shocking and thrilling climax that left me speechless, staring at the screen with a gaping jaw. It's similar to the feeling one gets from watching the season finale of your favourite prime-time soap, the kind full of shocking revelations. The surprise appearance and my subsequent killing of a certain end-game character (whom I won't spoil for you) was one of the most thrilling gaming experiences of my life. If all game developers took the same effort to loving craft the plotlines of their games, the movie industry would collapse.