Let me tell you with some examples what makes Morrowind so special, and why Oblivion and Skyrim just don't compare. This isn't to bash Oblivion or Skyrim, which in isolation are both amazing games, it is to illustrate the unique quality of Morrowind.
>Pilgrimages
So in order to join a certain faction, the Temple, you need to complete a pilgrimage to 7 shrines. Some of these are out in the middle of fricking nowhere (also keep in mind, no fast travel) and all of them require a certain offering. It's all written down in a book you're given by a priest if you want to join the faction. Now if you don't read it carefully, you might hike all the way to one shrine and not be able to activate it because you don't have the proper offering. You need to actually read the book, acquire the offerings from their proper sources (different specialized vendors you might otherwise never visit) and make your way to the shrines. Even if you just want to join the faction for its benefits and items (purely functional) you will inadvertently pick up a big chunk of lore along the way.
>Families
Morrowind has entire families, dotted around the world. You might come kill a random bandit in a cave called Derayna Llervu. Turns out she has 8 other family members like "Dronos Llervu, a blacksmith specializing in Glass Armor in Ghostgate", or "Ernse Llervu, Master Trainer of Blunt Weapon, at The Abbey of St. Delyn the Wise in Vivec" or "Guls Llervu, a Redoran priest and spell merchant in Ald'ruhn". Also, the family will have an ancestral tomb somewhere in the world you can visit, most of which will contain references to their families in the forms of some loot or lore. In some cases, you can strike up conversations with family members after you've done a quest or kill someone. Compare that to Skyrim and Oblivion where, when you go into some cave or fort you'll encounter "Bandit" or "Bandit Thug" or "Bandit Lord". It just doesn't have that magic immersive quality of Morrowind.
>Chores and faction requirements
There are 15 joinable factions in the game. Each faction has two favoured attributes and six favoured skills. Even if you do all the missions in the world for a faction, you won't be able to advance if you don't have enough points in those favoured attributes and skills. Want to become a Wizard in House Telvanni? You'll need a minimum of 32 Intelligence and 32 Willpower, one favoured skill at 60 and two at 20 (the favoured Telvanni skills are Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Enchant, Illusion and Mysticism. Want to become an Adept in the Imperial Cult? You'll need a minimum of 30 Personality and 30 Willpower, one favoured skill at 40 and two at 12. Also, different faction missions give different amounts of reputation within a faction, which you'll need to gain ranks. Pretty much every faction has its shitty little chores you can do, as well as bigger missions. Some of these interact with other factions and even require that you kill certain essential characters you would need to rank up in that other faction. Some are mutually exclusive. It's not like you can be level 2 and be Grand Champion of the Arena and Arch-Mage of the Mages Guild. You actually need to do some immersive stuff.
These are just three examples. I could go into more detail. I could tell you about all the different kind of spell effects and the unique spells associated with them, unique items with either Constant Effect or allowing you to cast certain spells, the amount of different scrolls with unique names and spell effect combinations, Scroll of Baleful Suffering is a really cute one (rather than just generic scrolls which allow you to cast just regular spells in Oblivion and Skyrim).
I'm not saying Oblivion and Skyrim particularly suck, but as successors to Morrowind they depart greatly from many of the core elements that made Morrowind so special to begin with. Morrowind is an experience, you feel like you're dropped into a living, vibrant world. Oblivion and Skyrim just revolve around you, most of the stuff is generated and scaled. You have your quest arrow pointing you everywhere and you could play both games without paying attention to a single line of dialogue or without reading any of the notes or books. You don't have to follow roads looking for obscure landmarks, taking the second fork heading south-west after taking the first fork heading south next to an odd-looking dead tree. In isolation both are amazing games, but they absolutely pale in comparison to Morrowind in terms of immersive quality.
wonderful posts
wew imagine typing all that
must suck having a depleted attention span
A readlet made this meme. Did you guys just forget how to read after high school, or was it always a struggle?
Why are you proud of being a complete fricking moron?
>wew imagine typing all that
Ashlanders do rock, I dug becoming the Ashkhan.
my favorite part of Morrowind are all the unique items used by random people and placed on literal nooks and crannies you actually have to search for
yeah you're right OP
morrowind makes (you) the player feel like you are actually on an adventure
So because the first quest for a faction is a tedious fetch/checkpoint quest and a necessary grind to meet some arbitrary stats, it's better.
No thanks. Morrowind is a fricking cancer and the worst in the series.
>tedious fetch
It would be tedious in a game where gameplay would revolve around making things easy. It's not tedious if it's an integral part of the experience to begin with
>arbitrary stats
See, that's where you're wrong again. They're not arbitrary, they suit the factions, their characteristics, the things you have to do on the quests. It fits, it clicks. Also it's not a grind, stats level up reasonably quickly in Morrowind compared to other Elder Scrolls games.
>implying every TES isn't laden with fetch quests
weak bait m8
no thanks it is still the worst in the series in most of the things, not saying its a bad game not at all but its the weakest out of the recent 3 Elder Scrolls games.
>no fast travel
>striders
>markers
>mage guilds
>Propylon chambers
>Almsivi Intervention
and the fastest
>look in the general direction of where you want to go and cast an overpowered Jump spell along with Slowfall
dis n'wah can't even enchant a ring with fortify athletics for 1 sec on self
>acrobatics
d'oh
i can't wait for SkyWind
Same here
In a modern engine the combat could be programmed so that a miss would actually look like a miss, like a bad swing of the weapon, or an actual dodge by the opponent. It would make a lot more sense and be a lot more immersive.
Same with spells, at low skill levels your hands will frick up sometimes and not do the correct movement. At higher skill levels your hands will not only do the movement correctly, but do it with more mastery. Immersive as frick.
Just making enemies do a cheeky little "side dodge" animation when your swing misses would add a lot I think. I wonder if that could be done in OpenMW.
"Hundreds of expensive animations = immersive goodness" is how we end up with cutscene-riddled garbage like BG3.
Grow an imagination.
Imagining how the fights actually happen in my head is "one of my favourite thing about Morrowind" and I struggle to do that with any other game.
It just happens to also make me feel like a complete schizo.
It's also not an argument whatsoever when it comes to judging a game's quality.
wow all of that sounds boring as frick I don't know how people play these RPGs
why?
The best part is you're not even scratching the surface, OP. There's a whole laundry list of small details that Morrowind gets right, but no other Bethesda game even attempts.
Morrowind is kind of a shockingly good game coming from such a shit developer. It was lightning in a bottle.
You're lying if you wouldn't want to live like Divayth Fyr
>Family
My favorite example is Orvas Dren, a.k.a. the Hunter Biden of Vvardenfell.
Morrowind will be relevant at least as long as there's no TES6, and probably after that too since it will inevitably suck ass and make skyrim seem deep and intricate.
Until Tamriel Rebuilt is active at least
Only people who say morrowind is bad are people who have never played it or played it for 5minutes.
Stop making these useless threads, everyone knows morrowind is the best but skyrim players avg iq is 60 there is no reason to talk to them
>skyrim players avg iq is 60
well yeah
Seethe
I'm going under the presumption that OPs image is a comment on a Bobbi Star video.
I would have played through Morrowind long ago if the combat was not pure trash translated into digital form. I mean how the frick did they frick it up so bad? Every time I've tried to play it I just punched myself in the balls as hard as I could and had a much better time. I respect the lore of the game but I'll be god damned if I ever force myself to play the fricking thing.
just get the next generation combat mod, it makes it so it functions like oblivion/skyrim where you always hit but your skills and level determine how much damage you do
Go to this cave right at the start of the game: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Addamasartus
Get the Thief ring.
Go to this guy: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ababael_Timsar-Dadisun
Get the Merisan helm.
These two items will help significantly and they are easy to acquire at the beginning of the game.
Not playing it until Skywind
someone should port OAR to morrowind
Runescape combat
>Play as a melee class
>Absolutely no points in any arcane skills
>Join mages guild
>Become the archmage
Say no more of the depth of skyrim. Morrowind is miles ahead in terms of immersion and world building.
classes and skills are so useless in skyrim, wouldn't surprise me if they do away with it entirely in TES6
You can also join the mages guild and train all of your skills and become archmage.
But it takes longer because there's a Mage's Guild in Balmora, Sadrith Mora, Vivec and Ald'Ruhn (Caldera has no quests) and in order to advance you have to visit every single one at some point or another completing quests and those quests weren't "clear out this dungeon" although almost all of Ald Ruhn were a fetch quest for dwemer stuff
>You can also join the mages guild and train all of your skills and become archmage
What are you saying? Yeah, you can raise your skills to meet the skill requirement. Like an RPG.
No I mean you don't have to cast a single spell to become Archmage in Morrowind.
I hope you understand the difference of playing the game completely normally leading to you being archmage with zero magic skill and going out of your way to look up master trainers and hoarding 100000 gold for training your skills massively to pass a skill check to become archmage
Telvanni take it a step further and you can't become the leader of the faction without learning a few new spells. You don't need to cast them, but once you go from a goon doing chores to someone on the political rise you need to learn a couple wizard spells for a quest.
To become an Archmage you need one skill at 90 and two at 35 (I'm ignoring 35 INT and WIL, most characters have this from the get-go)
It's quite easy to get to 90 with Alchemy, this leaves you with two skills you'd have to train from 5 (or higher depending on racial bonus even when not tagged) to 35.
In vanilla you can train 5 times per level meaning you'd need 12 training instances to get both to 35. You could be an Archmage as soon as you hit level 13.
The gold needed is pretty insignificant, really. You can sell the potions you amass from training Alchemy.
>In vanilla you can train 5 times per level meaning you'd need 12 training instances to get both to 35. You could be an Archmage as soon as you hit level 13.
>The gold needed is pretty insignificant, really. You can sell the potions you amass from training Alchemy.
Incorrect, in Morrowind you can train as much as you like as long as you have the cash for it. The arbitrary 5 per level limit was added in Oblivion and continued in Skyrim.
You can technically complete the Mage's guild at level 1 in Morrowind by making your Magic skills not related to your class so that advancing them won't level you up. However, you still need to have appropriate ranks in magic skills to advance through the ranks of the faction.
>Incorrect, in Morrowind you can train as much as you like as long as you have the cash for it. The arbitrary 5 per level limit was added in Oblivion and continued in Skyrim.
You're correct I misremembered that. It kinda makes sense to have a limit since it can be gamebreaking
>actually u can just level up in morrowind and then pass the skill check! its practically the same as having absolutely no skill check in skyrim!
Black person stop these mental gymnastics.
You don't need a single magical ability to join mage's guild and raise in ranks? It's OK as far as they treat you as a mercenary but if you can become an archmage with no clue about the arcane, that's super dogshit and badly written. My playthrough I joined the fighter's guild so I don't know exactly the inner mechanics of mage guild.
>You don't need a single magical ability to join mage's guild and raise in ranks? It's OK as far as they treat you as a mercenary but if you can become an archmage with no clue about the arcane, that's super dogshit and badly written.
Nope, in Morrowind you need at least 90 in one of the favored magical skills to reach Archmage rank of the mage's guild.
You don't need to cast any spells to do it but your character must have nearly mastered at least one of the guild's magical skills and have some degree of skill in 2 others too.
That makes more sense if the player has expertise on at least one magic skill like alteration, enchant, destruction etc.
>Pilgrimages
The pilgrimages were just a really lazy ultimate reference where it's like "bet you thought you were gunna get a real quest like in Ultima but nope haha" 7 times. This is why morrowind is for idiotic zoomers.
Do you even know what a zoomer is?
>these side quests weren't as in-depth as ultima's main quest so uh yeah game sucks zoomer
have a nice day
>praise thing that is shit
>no, that's shit don't do that
>its just a side quest, morrowind is perfect >:(
Maybe it's time to move on from RPGs before they give you worse brain rot.
just because it isn't as good as something else doesn't mean it's shit, that's shitposter homosexualry. and I've seen your homosexual anime/ultima posting ass in morrowind threads before, so stay obsessed homosexual.
Ultima is ground level, everything below it is shit, no exceptions.
>This isn't to bash Oblivion
But let's anyway. The scaling is truly agonizing. Seeing Morrowind's brilliant world and exploration become this fricking horrible so fricking quickly is depressing. The cherry on top is Oblivion fans just turn a blind eye to 95% of the game being terrible because there are 5 quests where you sneak past someone and press E on a scripted event.
It's funny because Oblivion is actually the biggest Elder Scrolls world but it feels like 3-4x smaller than Morrowind.
Also the dungeons are generic as frick. Every cave or fort is just the same fricking shit over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Oblivion gates could've been cool if there were only like 4
I feel like you're preaching to the choir here. Then again Ganker is 90% coombait and gacha garbage these days so it's possible the majority of posters here are kids whose first ES was skyrim
Something I really like in Morrowind was how your disposition with other faction members changed depending on the rank you had in a faction and it made in-game sense.
For example House Redoran is a faction of religious and honorable warriors. If you are a member of the Imperial Legion or Fighter's guild, their disposition towards you would improve because it meant you were seen not merely as yourself but also as a part of a faction.
If you were in the Thieves Guild or in Hlaalu they'd like you less because those were unworthy for the Redoran.
The feeling can be mutual, but doesn't have to be.
This is all pretty subtle, especially if you join many factions as only the Big 3 are mutually exclusive and one of the others is even mandatory to join for the main quest.
It was especially funny since Telvanni hated and was hated by nearly everyone else, so your disposition in Telvanni lands would plummet the more factions you joined unless you also joined Telvanni.
Man, that's so boring. I hate obeying rules. I wanna break rules instead. I wanna collect all sweetrolls in my home, I wanna run around naked and punch people in the face, it's so silly! And it's silly because I'm forbidden from playing with food or running around naked or punch people in the faces.
are there any differences in openmw?
Morrowind is a terrible game with a really great series of novels and an okay walking simulator hidden inside it.
No Elder Scrolls is perfect imo. not playing the devil's advocate but you can only get the perfect TES if you combined all of them