Morrowind
What is it?
It took Bethesda six years to come up with a true sequel to Daggerfall. They released two other games in the meantime that were set in the same universe, but differed in gameplay: Redguard is an adventure game, while Battlespire is more action-oriented and nearly a first person shooter.
The game world of Morrowind is smaller than the one in Daggerfall, just as the world of Daggerfall was already smaller than the one in Arena, where you could travel through all of Tamriel. But there are more races to choose: your character can hail from the Imperial Province, and Orcs are now a playable race, too.
In an August 2003 poll on alt.games.daggerfall, 50% voted for Daggerfall as their favorite game in the Elder Scrolls series, and 50% for Morrowind. Since only four votes were cast, it may not be too relevant, but I have the feeling it is not unrepresentative.
When Morrowind came out, the system requirements were a serious issue. Four years later they hardly will be, but do not believe that just because this is an aging game it will play well on an aging computer.
The official system requirements are quite low. A 500MHz CPU, we read, 800MHz recommended. Morrowind supports some ancient chipsets like the nVidia TNT2 (came out first, IIRC, on 16MHz AGP 4× cards), the ATI Rage 128 (introduced in 1999), and the Matrox G400, as long as the card has 32MB. It seems to be geared towards a system that would have been fairly high-end but still affordable in 2000.
So basically what I had when I first tried out Morrowind, an AMD Duron 1100, 320MB RAM, Windows 98, and a brand new MSI FX5600 128MB (which Morrowind came bundled with), should have done fine. It was not so. At first, it started fine, but tended to crash without visible reason. After I installed the patch, which took care of the crashes, the game required quitting all other processes before it would even run. Mind: not programs, processes. In the end, this annoyed me so much that I gave up on it.
So I would guess you should have a 1.5–2GHz CPU for a good performance. It's a good idea to have an ATI card (Radeon 8500 or above) to be able to utilize the TruForm support of the FPS Optimizer (see below). TruForm adds a lot to the curved, organic world of Morrowind.
As a final note, since Morrowind requires DirectX 8.1, you cannot run it on Windows 95, but you did not intend to do this, did you?
This is a tweaker utility by Vasya Stepanets that can do three things:
When the patch came out, (2) and (3) were mutually exclusive. Thanks to the TripleHead2Go adapter, you can now have both. However, with an ATI chipset, you get only 1920×480. But the improvements thanks to TruForm are probably worth the lower resolution.
| Silt Strider mesh without TruForm | Silt Strider mesh with TruForm |
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In case you are wondering which other games support TruForm: not very many. Support was so low that ATI never bothered to put a list of games on their website, and they stopped advertising it for later models of their Radeon cards. Here are a few games that support it, usually with a later patch:
TruForm is designed to render organic shapes more realistically. The problem is that if objects aren't properly flagged, which they won't be if the game wasn't designed with TruForm in mind, this will be applied to objects that are supposed to be angular as well. Since Morrowind contains lots and lots of organic shapes and few others, it is probably the one game where the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages.
Vasya Stepanets' Morrowind page (tes.lanior.ru, later tes.vasya.stepanets.info) is gone. I have no idea where you can download his FPS Optimizer now.
The ability to change nearly everything in the game is the most interesting aspect in Morrowind. It is something most gamers love and, strangely, developers have always been reluctant to admit.
The makers of Wolfenstein 3D still considered fan-made levels a copyright infringement; with DOOM, they had wisened up and announced that if players figured out how to edit maps, they could do so with their blessing. But they did not yet provide the means to do so, Duke Nukem 3D, I think, was the first FPS to be released with the in-house editor.
Morrowind mods are something entirely different from Diablo mods, for example, and more similar to the many, many add-ons to The Sims. They add locations or companions, change equipment or the amount of money a merchant has. Theoretically it would be possible to create a whole new game with the editor, but this has not happened yet.
If you wanted to make your character incredibly powerful, it’s easy to do. If you wanted to delete key game characters vital to quests, that’s easy to do also. But that’s also the beauty of the editor. It leaves the game experience completely up to the user. The game can be as challenging or as easy as you want it. Also, because of the editor’s plug-in architecture, the user can choose at any time which plug-ins he or she wants to use. If one is causing problems you can simply unload it. In the end, it’s up to the player. If you want to spend $50 on a game, then create a god weapon and beat it in two days with no challenge, that’s your perogative.
This attitude is fairly new. Most game designers still think they have to have the last say in everything. Let's just hope it spreads.
the only Morrowind link you will ever need.
This site is intended to provide a useful collection of suggestions, lists of plugins and utilities, links to mods and mod advice, and tools and resources for the Morrowind gamer.
Let's face it: the head and body meshes that Bethesda shipped just don't look good. Do yourself a favor and replace them.
(or Rhedds Heads or Rhedd's Heads) are really astounding
heads and faces by B. E. Griffith, who's homepage is now unfortunately
gone.
While looking a whole lot better than the Bethesda originals, they have
a lower polygon count, too. Unfortunately there are still no Redguards,
they have always been my favorite race in Daggerfall.
B. E. Griffith is a professional freelancer
who worked mainly for Unreal Tournament. Let's
hope Bethesda hires this guy.
From here you may download mods for this exceptional game authored by the staff at Endhome Productions. In addition, we will also be linking and hosting quality mods which have been playtested and/or modified by the staff. No mods here will contain any cheesy unbalancing objects/gameplay but strive to preserve the spirit of the game.
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The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind continues the series' tradition of non-linear gameplay, and combines it with the best graphics current technology can create. These eye-popping visuals leap out at you from the moment you fire up the game. Moving around Morrowind in either a first-person or third-person view, you'll find that there has never been a world rendered in such exquisite detail. Rolling hills, jagged rock barrens, steaming swamps, and dusty grey ashlands all appear crisp and clean to the eye and have an amazing amount of variety. The water effects, especially, have to be seen to be believed.
If you enjoy genuine roleplaying games and you have the computer to cope with it I think you will thoroughly enjoy Morrowind. It really feels like another world to visit and you can play the game however you like…be a mage, thief, acrobat, pearl diver, bodyguard or warrior. Or like myself, be a little bit of each.
The NPC's are flat and characterless, and there is absolutely no sense of life or activity in the countryside. Not a single butterfly or bird flits about in the sunshine. There is only lifeless landscape dotted with the occasional out-of-place looking "monster" (I put "monster" in quotes because none of them are particularly frightening). You'll be hard-pressed after a few days of repetitious slogging through Morrowind's environments to convince yourself that you're in anything like a realistic, living world.
