Brian's Blog

Well, don't play it unless you have lots of free time. Free time is something I don't have in abundance anymore so no things that I should be doing are beginning to suffer. Let us put it this way, I've been playing since just before Christmas most every evening (much to my wife's dismay) and have advanced my character to level 6, only covered about 5% of the continent of Vvardenfell, and still haven't done the first step of the main quest. You could play this game for ages just on side quests alone. There are factions and guilds to join and quests to perform related to each one that let you advance in rank. When you advance in rank you get more perks. Not to mention the Great Houses, one of which you can join in your adventures. The game also has a generous amount of books in game that give an extreme amount of background to flesh out the world. In fact, there are so many books to read I could probably sit and read for a couple of hours in just the one book store I found.

Character development is a bit different that what I'm used to coming from a mostly D&D background. In this case you advance levels by practicing your skills. Experience points don't exist in the traditional sense. You have major skills, minor skills, and misc skills. You have to advance some combination of your major and minor skills by 10 points to gain a level. And the ones that advance depend on if you use them enough. On top of that, each level you advance gives you an opportunity to increase each of your ability scores, and the amount you can increase these scores depends on what attribute the skills you have improved are associated with. So, the more you use your sword, the better you get at it, and the more you can increase your strength when you level (up to a point).

The only thing that is bugging me is that, in typical CRPG fashion, you start out with skills so low that they are essentially useless and practically zero gold. So I figured, in order to get some money I had to "acquire" others property to sell since my combat and magic abilities sucked. But to steal stuff you have to be able to sneak, which was low to the point of uselessness. Which gets to the point of being a drag. Take a look at the picture over there. It's me behind an NPC with a screwdriver holding down the sneak key (left CTRL). I left it that way for a few hours and got the skill from 5 to 20 and can just barely sneak if I'm really lucky. To be fair, it's only a misc skill for me which makes it advance very slow but still. I could just pay a trainer to increase my skills but that is very expensive and I have (well had) no gold. This is only a pseudo-complaint since just about every RPG starts out the same way. This is really the only thing to bother me so far.

The thing that makes the game really shine though is the hundreds of game mods you can download. A quick Morrowind Mods Google give many hits. But the best place I've found though is Planet Elder Scrolls which unfortunately requires a subscription. Lucky for me though I'm grandfathered into a free account because I signed up ages ago. The number of mods available are just mind boggling and I really didn't know where to start or what to try adding since some mods are good and others are so buggy they can ruin your saved games. I tried to stick with things that aren't cheats. Most of what I've done are just improved textures to make the world look better. My chosen mods so far are:

• Better Bodies - Nice looking textures and smooth less segmented bodies
• Real Sign Posts - Changes the sign textures to have to actual text of the sign on it instead of the generic one from the original game. You used to have to hover over the sign and get the help tip to pop up so you knew where to go.
• Ingredient Retexture - Retextures alchemical ingredients
• Abot's Water Life - Adds a mess of wild life to the water ways of the game. You can even go fishing and collect alchemical incredients.
• PC Smithy - Lets you own a Smithy as a place of business and a way to make money. Like a real life business it takes much work to get going and profitable.
• Area Effect Arrows - An official add on. Lets you buy area effect arrows in Vivec.
• Better Heads - Same concept as Better Bodies, but makes the heads look better.
• Better Books - Put sharper, much nicer textures on the books.
• Bottle Replacer - Makes the bottles look really nice.
• Darker Morrowind - Retextures most everything in the game to look darker an d foreboding. By default the game looks much more fantasy. I like this look much better. Texture replacers like these are up to personal taste, a comparison and links to multiple replacement packs can be found here.
• Fair Magicka Regen - I've always hated the idea of magic user types to have to sleep when you run out of manna, spell points, magicka, or whatever it's called in your game. This adds a slow, fair regeneration of magicka points.
• Herbalism - By default you "open" flowers like a chest and collect what's inside. This adds an herbalism skill and when you pick an herb you may, or may not get something. Plus the plant disappears and grows back again in a month.
• Mori Estate - A house you can buy later. It contains no cheats as far as I know and just gives you a place to keep items you don't want to carry around. It also has a library where you can have a scribe copy the book for your personal collection as well as an alchemical ingredient sorter to help you keep track of what you have.
• Faylynns Signs and Banners - Replaces the banners and shop signs with very nice looking ones.
• Silt Striders are in Vvardenfel - Silt Striders are giant insects trained for use in long distance transport. This adds the chance to see some in the wild. Other wise they only are in towns where they have domestic, trained ones.
• Better Beasts - Just like Better Bodies, but for the beast races of the game.
• Weight Fix - Makes odd items like silverware have a more realistic weight. They were kind of heavy originally
• Wilderness Sounds - Talk about adding atmosphere to the game! This one is one of the best mods I've added.

My friend Chris warned me about Morrowind and how much of a life sucker it was, but I didn't listen. Perhaps I should have.

Oh, by the way, if you have an Xbox and are thinking about getting Morrowind for that remember you can't use any mods. What you get is what you get on the box.