Welcome back (finally) to Right Click to Zoom, the more in-depth article side of this blog. For today’s topic, we’ll be looking at Morrowind; primarily the original release, but also the more recent visit to it in Elder Scrolls Online, alongside a number of attempts to mod it into more recent game engines.
It’s said about the Elder Scrolls series that the first entry you play is likely to be your favourite. This seems to hold true of most people I’ve spoken to, with people rising to sing the praises of many games in the series but rarely able to overcome their original. Whether it’s Skyrim, Oblivion, or even Daggerfall and Arena, the series is well loved and it’s rare to find someone who doesn’t have that favourite.
In my case, my first Elder Scrolls game was Morrowind, and my favourite is Morrowind. I’ve spoken about it at length on this blog, mostly before these article types were defined, but in the time since my respect for the game and its design continues to grow. I’ve continued to discuss and debate this with multiple people, and it’s come up enough that I decided it was high time to use this article structure and space to look at aspects of the game with more focus.
So what makes Morrowind so great? It boils down to a key word: design. Allow me to elaborate.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
The scope of the Elder Scrolls series — and the scope of video games as a whole — has continued to expand over time, with each new entry proving bigger and more content packed than the last. While few would say that this is a bad thing, there has had to be some sacrifices to achieve this with each new iteration. Corners are cut on some aspects, and liberties are taken on others in order to achieve this vision, with mixed results.
A large focus for Bethesda on Oblivion and Skyrim was trying to achieve the sense of a living, breathing world. Rather than having limited paths and patterns for what they would do, many NPCs in the game will attempt to go about their lives regardless of the player’s intervention. They’ll discuss matters with one another, eat food that’s around, interact with objects and react to various stimuli around them. Granted, it’s not always well implemented, with Oblivion’s systems being the source of quite a bit of humour in retrospect, but a living world was always the intention.
This expands further into aspects that directly affect how the player will play the game. The concept of not playing the same game twice is explored in both Oblivion and Skyrim with the addition of some randomly generated encounters and quests. Asking an innkeeper for work will usually see them give you a randomly generated note asking you to clear bandits or monsters out of a cave for generic rewards. Just take a look at how quickly your Miscellaneous tab on your journal’s quest log will fill up in Skryim. Even some of the key features of both games — the Oblivion gates and dragon attacks respectively — are largely unscripted after the initial encounters, and will occur mostly at random save for a few exceptions.
While having this additional stuff to do isn’t a bad thing, it has come under fire from many players for being filler content. These aren’t specially designed quests with unique dialogue and worldbuilding, and there’s no significant choices to make in how they unfold. There’s no purpose or narrative to it in the greater scheme of things, it’s just stuff for you to do to pad out your playtime and maybe get a bit of coin. In the grand scheme of things, very little of what you do in Skyrim in particular actually matters or accomplishes anything.
Part of the reason games like The Witcher 3 receive so much praise is that there’s very little of this. Even the most minor of sidequests in that game is uniquely designed in some fashion, and can have branching options on how it unfolds based on your decisions or how well you do.
A quick example: roaming through Velen as Geralt, I heard a cry for help nearby. I ran to investigate it and found a cart under attack by ghouls, which I quickly dispatched. The cart owner thanked me for saving his life. In Skyrim, odds are that the quest or vignette would have ended there, but I had the option in Witcher 3 to chat with this guy and learn more.
The reason the ghouls attacked him was that they were drawn to the dead bodies on the cart. Turns out he was hauling the corpses of plague victims, and he does this job because he’s considered blessed to never get sick. Geralt is understandably concerned by this sentiment, and urges caution and cleanliness, as well as suggesting that the cart be burned to prevent further infection. The man is a little put off by this suggestion, but you can persuade him to do the right thing. So you’ll help him burn the cart, and then you’re finally free to move on.
This entire exchange including the fight with ghouls only took a couple of minutes of my time, and yet there’s more to this single encounter than dozens of similar ones in the recent Elder Scrolls games. It’s just a simple little vignette, but it’s well designed, flavourful, and expands the worldbuilding of the area while also giving you a unique character to interact with, albeit briefly.
The Witcher 3 is almost entirely built like this, with the vast majority of content more structured and specifically designed than the bulk of what’s available in Skyrim. But interestingly enough, Morrowind is far closer to this sentiment than its descendants; more on that shortly.
In order to craft these bigger and more grandiose worlds, something has to be traded away. The increasingly high requirements of game development insist that even with larger development times and bigger budgets, there is only so much that can be added to a game. For The Elder Scrolls franchise, much of the progress in terms of modernising the systems has largely come at the expense of making each individual piece less intentionally designed and more processed.
Morrowind itself is, technically, smaller in landmass and area to explore than its predecessor Daggerfall. But so much less of it is procedural or left to levelled lists, meaning that despite this, it feels like there’s plenty of unique areas and events to explore. The jump to Oblivion from Morrowind saw the reverse, however, and that trend has continued on. With the rampant success of Skyrim, I see little reason that Bethesda might feel the need to backpedal for Elder Scrolls VI whenever that happens.
Everything by Design
When I first played Morrowind, I had no idea what I was getting into. Up to that point, my experience with RPGs had been largely top down affairs ranging from classic JRPGs to isometric CRPGs such as Baldur’s Gate. I borrowed a copy of Morrowind from a friend at his recommendation, and he gave me a couple of pointers to get started, but otherwise I didn’t know what I was doing. I expected the game to look something like Fallout.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I load in to a fully 3D world seen through my character’s eyes rather than an overhead camera. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed first-person perspective or played a 3D game, mind, but the notion that it would be applied to an RPG was completely alien to me. Marching through the boat and onto the dock of Seyda Neen and through the tutorial process was a brand new and eye-opening experience, but after just a few minutes that process is over. I’m then left standing with only the barest understanding of the game and how it works, in the middle of a swamp.
It was only then that my friend’s instructions kicked in, and I still remember them to this day because they’re an almost ritualistic process that I go through every time I replay. I talk to the Bosmer in front of me named Fargoth and give him his ring. I go to the tradehouse, buy a weapon of choice from Arrille, then speak to the Nord upstairs to start the quest about Fargoth’s Hiding Place. Rather than complete it immediately, I leave town and follow the path branching left up until I hear a scream and watch a robed mage plummet from the sky to his death.
I loot his body, particularly the three Scrolls of Icarian Flight (rarely using them until much later and more for hilarity than practicality), then head left again into the swamplands to find the body of a dead tax collector. I return to Seyda Neen, report that I found the body, and am given a quest to investigate. Talking around town, I’m directed to the lighthouse, but I jump from the path there into a rotting tree stump where an enchanted axe and a few coins are concealed. From there, I speak to the woman within the lighthouse and she gives the necessary hint to finding the murderer. While there, I skip time to night, climb the lighthouse, and watch Fargoth sneak through town to deposit his items in the second rotting tree stump there.
After leaving the lighthouse, I loot the stump, visit the appropriate house that contains the murderer, confront him about it and kill him after he attacks me. Handing in both quests, I’m now slightly richer, equipped with a variety of magical equipment to aid my way, and can now proceed to do whatever I want. I’ll usually clear out the nearby smuggler’s cave for additional loot, though the mage in there can give me trouble with some characters if I’m not careful.
You might think some of these details that I went into are unnecessary, but the thing is that every single time I play the game, I will be in the exact same situation. Every item I possess, every coin I gather, every person I talk to? Identical. I’ve memorised this pattern after almost 15 years because it is relevant every single time.
Contrast this to Skyrim. Without mods, the average player will proceed through the Helgen tutorial event, following either the Stormcloak or the Imperial. You’ll proceed through the same cave and equip mostly the same stuff, but you’ll eventually arrive at Riverwood. Following the tips in town will either lead you to the main story at Whiterun whereupon you’ll need to go back to Riverwood and climb up to Bleak Falls Barrow, but you have the option to follow the quest for the Golden Claw before all of that.
Here’s the thing though: by the time you complete that quest and return, the contents of your inventory are going to be different each time. You’ll be in the same ballpark, certainly, but you can’t entirely predict it. Furthermore, should you choose to ignore this quest and come back much later, the enemies within will be much tougher and equipped with very different gear appropriate to your power level.
By contrast, if I ignore all of my Morrowind advice and confront the murderer when I’m level 20? He will get one shot. His stats will never change.
Ask a long-time Morrowind player about their patterns or habits, and all of them will have something to tell you about it. I’ve heard tips to go to specific buildings early and use scrolls to unlock super hard doors in order to get ridiculously powerful equipment. Many will tell you which are the best merchants for selling to due to their high gold pool. Quite a few will be able to tell you how to get the Boots of Blinding Speed and make them usable. And then there’s the world record speedrun, which even without the glitches is a sight to behold.
While some aspects of the game such as monsters are levelled appropriately — you’ll never encounter Golden Saints or Ogrims until higher level, for example — every set dungeon, item, quest and specific NPC is in the same place every time by intentional design. And I do mean every specific NPC, as with the exception of generic guards or military forces such as Ordinators, every one of them has a name and (usually) a purpose.
Oblivion and Skyrim attempt similarly, but they still fill in gaps with more generic humanoid enemies that are simply labelled Bandit or something similar. In Morrowind, you might be attacked by a bandit, but he will have a full name that you can see on his corpse. Furthermore, if your reputation is high enough or you use magic to calm them, they might not even attack you and can have full conversations with you. Some will only attack based on quest triggers as well. They are all fully functioning NPCs that you can interact with beyond just seeing them as person-shaped loot containers with a health bar.
The individual naming can give further sense to the world, too. The Dunmer of Morrowind revere their ancestors, and you will frequently find tombs bearing a family name that you might recognise from someone you encountered. It might have even been a bandit that you killed!
It’s another example of how Oblivion and Skyrim’s greater size and scope meant that individual factors had less time and focus to be designed specifically. Morrowind didn’t have that limitation at all, so the amount of random or procedurally generated content is incredibly small by contrast. Obviously Morrowind isn’t perfect, but just about every facet of it is designed to be how it is. It’s the kind of focused and detail oriented design that you will rarely see in larger games nowadays, and certainly not the high cost to produce games of the triple-A scene.
Complexity vs. Streamlining
Alongside the specific design came Morrowind’s somewhat esoteric gameplay systems. I’ve spoken about these at length before, but I’ll touch on them again somewhat just to emphasise the points being made.
Following from Morrowind, Oblivion streamlined much of the skills and statistics of its ancestor, removing a few and condensing others. Skyrim took it a step further by removing a few more, as well as completely eliminating character stats beyond Health, Stamina and Magicka and making your power predominantly based on skill level and perks.
You could make a case for why these changes happened, and I’m not going to actively decry them or argue one way or another. The decision to narrow the functions of the skills and stats was to streamline what is definitely an aged system. Whichever you prefer to play is entirely on preference, but there’s no denying that the full extent of what was lost from Morrowind was a seriously complex yet extremely open and freeform system.
Let’s take a look at combat in Skyrim. To attack, you swing your weapon. You’re guaranteed to hit if you’re in range, and so damage dealt is a combination of weapon power, the level of your skills, your overall character level and then any bonus effects from perks or gear. Power attacks will use more stamina but deal more damage. And that’s largely the extent of it.
Now let’s contrast that with Morrowind. First, your attack is not guaranteed to hit; a deal breaker for some on principle, but bear with me. The chance to hit is based on a number of factors ranging from your stats, which weapon you’re using (as each weapon has a primary stat), the skill of the weapon (which were more numerous and included things like spears), the weapon’s durability, how much fatigue you have, further buffs and special effects from gear and magic, what kind of attack you use (thrust, chop, and slash each had different numbers), whether it’s a power attack or not…
The list is pretty considerable, and that’s entirely for your factors. The enemy’s stats and skills are also brought into the calculation, not to mention their armour stat in the place you hit, the respective armour type, what place you actually do hit, their fatigue level, and so on. All of this is just to calculate whether the attack even connects; we’ve still yet to calculate how much damage it does!
Every action in combat, spell casting, speechcraft, thieving, and more have endless amounts of factors that affect their result in Morrowind by way of these skills and stats. They are certainly convoluted, and it can be quite unintuitive for a newcomer to grasp when they first start playing the game. But through persistence, you start to learn how everything works. A little more effort, and you start figuring out how to take advantage of the game’s systems.
This means that when you’re playing Morrowind, there are countless possibilities for how you choose to best whatever challenges you take on. Some people will make use of enchanting or alchemy to become literally unkillable, while others will just tweak their stats and maximise their level ups to fine-tune their progress.
Nonetheless, if you were to pick up and play both Skyrim and Morrowind side by side, the vast majority would say that Skyrim is instantly more approachable, comfortable and sensible to play. But the skill ceiling on how to maximise what you’re doing, let alone the breadth of options available to you, is so much lower. That’s just another aspect of how Morrowind’s design makes it stand out to me so much more.
Still, that sense of immediately playability is why it can be so hard to go back and pick up Morrowind nowadays if you’re not already familiar with how it plays. As the Elder Scrolls series has progressed, each entry started off as feeling more approachable, and I think that’s why the “first game you play is your favourite” mentality tends to stick. That’s the system you first grow comfortable with, and anything on either side is either too complicated or too simplified.
Ease of playability and how comfortable a game is to pick up is a huge factor, though. And that’s probably why efforts to revisit Morrowind are frequently at the forefront of the modding scene for later games.
Sincere Flattery, but Still an Imitation
Long before Skyrim was announced, modders had been looking at Oblivion’s quality of life upgrades and improvements over Morrowind. They saw the regenerating magicka and stamina, the guaranteed attack hit system, the active blocking… and they thought to themselves “Wouldn’t it be great if all of these elements and improved graphics were available, but it was Morrowind instead of Oblivion?”
And so, Morroblivion came to be. Or at least… it attempted to come to be. A full remaking of the entirety of Morrowind in Oblivion’s engine, with updated but still familiar graphics, places, skills and stories; that is what Morroblivion sought to be, but over a decade later it has still not seen a public release.
Even while development on this project continued, Skyrim’s release, success, and flourishing modding scene attracted a similar kind of attention. Following the notion of Morroblivion, fan developers sought to take that extra step further and rebuild the entire game in Skyrim as well.
And so, Skywind came to be. Or at least… it attempted to come to be. It’s been in development as long as Skyrim’s been released, but it’s still in very early alpha and no public release yet exists. I’ve not been able to ascertain if either project is still particularly active at a cursory glance, simply because the major website hub doesn’t look to have been updated with news or progress in almost a year.
Nonetheless, the attempts to rebuild a higher fidelity Morrowind to recapture the hearts and imaginations of Skyrim’s many players is a noble one. Unfortunately, for some of the reasons I outlined above, it’s unlikely to ever quite be the same. You might be able to visit the same alien landscapes, implement the same bizarre monsters, and include all the same highly detailed stories and quests, but it’s unlikely that you’ll ever be able to integrate the full extent of Morrowind’s complex systems.
To this day, playing Morrowind is the only game I’ve encountered that feels like, well, playing Morrowind. Even if you ported much of it into these newer games, the change of systems would almost certainly fail to fully evoke the same sense of wonder that came from fully coming to terms with the depth and complexity of the sandbox. At a certain point, you wouldn’t be playing Morrowind, you’d just be playing a game set in Morrowind that looks and sounds a lot like it.
Sadly, this is the same feeling I’ve been getting recently when playing the Elder Scrolls Online expansion set in Morrowind. Understandably (and wisely), the developers of ESO chose not to simply mimic that game; after all, Online is set many centuries before the events of Morrowind. So they’ve crafted a new story that pays homage to the original but does not completely mirror or ape it, and instead they’ve offered a tantalising glimpse of the Morrowind that once was.
The amount of love and respect they have shown the original is tangible. As I’ve said in this blog, the moment I got off the boat to the Vvardenfell district and stepped up onto the dock in Seyda Neen, I was overcome with a powerful feeling of nostalgia the likes of which I don’t experience often. It was Seyda Neen, as close as they could get in a condensed version of the world. They’ve shrunk down the full game into a single large zone in an MMORPG, and while changes are obviously necessary, they’ve done a wonderful job in evoking those memories and familiarity without relying on them so heavily as to devalue their own efforts.
ESO: Morrowind is a very enjoyable game. But… it’s not Morrowind. It never will be. Mercifully and to its credit, it doesn’t try to be either. And in a lot of ways, I feel like it serves as something of a warning sign to those developing the revisited Morrowind mods that it might be better to simply not do so.
Stand up… there you go. You were dreaming…
It’s extremely rare to find a game quite like Morrowind. I’ve likened The Witcher 3 to it in some elements, as both games are products of impeccably detailed design and developer scrutiny, but they are not at all the same game in how they play or the stories they tell. And, again, much of the acclaim The Witcher 3 generates is because it also stands head and shoulders above other modern RPGs in how well designed and immersive it can be.
With so many games focused on outdoing one another by virtue of statistics — the most explorable square land, the biggest development cost, the highest hours played requirements to complete — it’s unlikely we’ll see anything of Morrowind’s ilk ever again. The amount of care, detail, and effort put into all the specific elements of the third Elder Scrolls game seem lost or unimportant in modern triple-A game development.
That’s not to say that other games are bad, of course, and most of the games I’ve discussed are good in their own way, if not enjoyable to play. But they aren’t Morrowind… and they never will be.
I think it’s time to replay it yet again. Delf out.
Delfeir vs. the Backlog 