adventure

Seriously, the only thing I found negative about Morrowind was the fact that the graphics weren't all that magical. But everything else is fantastic! The amount of freedom in this game gives me wood. It is a great feeling to immerse oneself into an entirely different world. I haven't even finished 1/3 of the game and I've done so much. I really like the fact that I got my own house built for me. I can arrange all my cool weapons there and lock precious stuff in chests. Its the best. And now there is going to be an extra 80 hours or so added to this amazing game!! And this is my first time round!! I haven't even become a vampire yet. Now they are giving the option of becoming a werewolf. This game will last me until Fable comes out, and even then I will still be playing it. Guaranteed. And I do have a girlfriend. And she is hot. Hotter than you.

This could have been a great RPG. This could have been a fantastic RPG. This could have been THE RPG. Instead, we have this. It's buggy, it's slow, it's far too easy once you reach level 30 or so, etc. Generally, it's just too ambitious. The game world is huge; you could literally spend several hours walking from one side of the continent to another if it didn't freeze.

This brings me to the most frustrating part of this game. It freezes every 30 minutes or so! It's like the programmers had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Also, there's some sort of weird problem where NPCs drift from their normal locations over time.

I'm pretty sure Morrowind runs below 30 frames per second. This is shocking, because the graphics are blocky, the animations are unbelievably bad, and the texturing is muddy and pixelated.

Now on to the good parts of the game. The experience system is different from most RPGs; instead of just gaining experience points for killing stuff, you get better at things as you use them. There are about 30 different categories from Destruction spells to lockpicking. Every time you perform one of these actions successfully (even stuff like taking a hit while wearing heavy armor), you gain experience in that skill. When you gain ten levels in your selected major or minor skills, your character gets a level. Depending on what other stats leveled up in between character levels, you have different amounts of points to spend upgrading your character.

Combat is simplistic; you basically just keep hitting the R button until the enemy is dead. You can build up your weapon skill a lot faster if you just repeatedly chop instead of building up for a more powerful swing. Once you get to a certain level (30 or so), you become invincible. Nothing can kill you, no matter how hard they try. You don't even need your healing spells and potions.

There's a huge amount of quests for you to undertake, from running errands to escort missions to being hired as an assassin. All of these quests are kept track of in a near-worthless log that records all events in the order you experienced them; there's no way to look for a particular quest.

Morrowind is a good game. It's not great, but it's passable. The slow pace will drive some away; the freezing will drive away others. Those that stick with it will find 300-500 hours of gameplay to keep them busy for a long time. Just make sure to save often.

As an RPG player, as a video game player, I found little endearing in this title from any standpoint. While level settings gaphics are fairly well done, active graphic entities are shoddy. Further annoying is the music in this game (man, turn it off!!) and the dialougue of it's charachters, and especially the NPCs who swivel expectantly, each time you pass them as if they have greased poles in their rear ends and blurt something worthless(which reminds you again that you wish you were able to hit the MUTE button)-not very effective! Movement is stiff and clumbsy, combat is borring, incorporating the same unrealistic movements, in every situation.



It's hard to comment on plot for this game, because I never noticed one developing; any books or leaflets, etc, I came across, I had to quickly skim through without reading them-even there things were written very poorly. I found nothing compelling enough, nothing pressing or interesting enough to make me curious to try the sequential missions...I sold this game for a loss of about $10, after about a week.



Although, I think maybe some new ground was broken in this title for RPG adventure video gaming, it did not transfer over to gameplay well, at all-and the bad points of play far out weigh those things. -Again, I'd say this game is a basic annoyance.