Stealth is still highly useful in Morrowind, it just requires better stats to be consistently effective. That's why every thief needs the illusion skill. Even a 20% chameleon effect massively increases your stealth abilities.
As for the "hands down best class", I don't really think there is one in Morrowind. There are certainly more powerful classes, but no "best" class. My "best" class is a homemade light armor and longsword wielding jack of all trades, capable of healing magic, enchanting, alchemy (the absolute best money maker in the game), bartering, sweet-talking, alteration, and a couple other things. My general play style is to level up END to 100 as quickly as possible for max hp, and then train everything else as it goes, occasionally using my massive piles of money to get training. Morrowind is a hard game for newcomers, but once you know the tricks, it's incredibly easy.
Honestly this is the game with the best artifacts, so for armor you can really go a lot of different ways. Enchanting makes the best shields, but cuirasses, helmets, and gauntlets? Nah. You can find superior artifacts. Max out light and heavy armor and you'll be a monster. Fists of Randagulf? Check. Cuirass of the Saviour's Hide? (dat 60% MR, though) Check. Helm of Oreyn Bearclaw? Check. And what about weapons? Well you can enchant some pretty monstrous stuff, but the artifacts will always have more base damage, no two ways about it. And I like that. Artifacts truly FEEL like artifacts.
I agree with a lot of what you said. But for me, light armor is worthless because I judge armor not by the armor rating but by the enchant value - but there is a reason I do this. Here lately all I roll is atronach and I find myself relying a lot on Drain Int 100 for 1 sec on self to restore my magicka. So Savior's Hide is no option - extra MR combined with my high Willpower and Atronach sign would pretty much ensure that I couldn't refill my magicka reliably. Am I a dirty rotten cheater? Yea, maybe. But it is what it is.
I do agree that the artifacts are better, by the way. Although there is something awesome about creating your own weapons and armor and naming them.
For instance, I have a Daedric Claymore, like I said earlier, it has Paralyze 3 seconds and 3-51 frost damage (and this is with 200+ luck so I am one shotting virtually everyone). I call it "The Cold Blooded Claymore".
When I get Vivec in Azura's star I plan to boost my enchant and create a Daedric Dai-Katana that drains heath 50 points on strike and invisibility 1 sec on self. That 1 second is just enough to keep them in permanent confusion. I shall name it "The Wrath of the Incarnate".
Just talking about these things make me wonder why in the world this feature was removed from Skyrim. It's so freaking cool.
I can't believe I missed this thread! :O We should really do some Morrowind play through threads from time to time. It's such a stunning game. Morrowind and BG are the only games I still play after so many years.
Hahahaha the bonus of having it on PC! I find it amazing how so many of my favorite games are getting rather old and I just find newer titles can't compete. Sure, they may have flashier graphics but the story just can't compete.
Think of how I feel! When I built this crossfire rig 3 years ago, as soon as I built it I spent maybe one week playing Crysis and then - whaddayaknow - I get hooked on Half-Life for crying out loud. Ever since then I have spent all my time playing old games (out of choice). Now I am saving up and getting ready to upgrade my PC again for the Witcher 3 but how much ya wanna bet that it will be another $1500 right down the toilet because as soon as I get finished with the Witcher 3 it will be back to all the good old PC games that I grew up with and cherish.
Yea I'm going to build a desktop with a Titan purely to run Flightsim X flatout. I'm sick of it not running smooth/glitching out on the current system. This laptop is glorious for Morrowind, BG and IWD which is all play at the moment but it just can't handle the scale of FSX.
On the plus side, I shouldn't have to build another one for a long long time. . .
If Morrowind had Skyrim's combat...but everything else was still Morrowind...it would be the perfect game.
IMO you shouldn't try to mix skill-based with simulation-based combat. Just don't do it. Pick one or the other. That is Morrowind's only real flaw IMO. If it was fully skill-based, it'd work fine. If it was fully simulation-based, it'd work fine. But having a FPS-ish skill-based system that also simulates combat strikes based on weapon-skill is just wrong.
Now, if you have a middle ground area, like Mount & Blade, where your weapon skill simply allows you to strike faster and with less recovery time or tightens the spread of your reticule for ranged attacks, that works fine, since you can compensate for a lack of character experience with more player skill...or lower player skill with more character experience.
Aside from that I love Morrowind (and Daggerfall, which has possibly even more freedom, but is something of an acquired taste for more modern-ish gamers).
IMO Morrowind and Daggerfall both capture the true spirit of what set the TES series apart from other similar games. And IMO, felt almost like a Table-top RPG in terms of how the players could largely give the DM the finger and come up with their own solutions to any problem, even completely derailing the campaign's story completely if they wanted to.
I also miss having minimum requirements for guild advancement. In Morrowind you had to meet a certain level of proficiency in a particular guild's focus to advance in addition to performing enough jobs to prove your sincerity to that guild's ideals...where as in Oblivion and Skyrim it was fully possible for someone with basically no knowledge or skill in a particular area to become it's leader.
The socializing was also better IMO. Instead of Oblivion's ridiculous mini-game or Skyrim completely removing socializing completely in favor of a do them 1 favor and they're your willing love-slave forever system.
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I can directly point to why oblivion and Skyrim suck compared to Daggerfall and Morrowind. Voice acting every SINGLE line of dialog. This prevented them from being able to expand on various quests with alternate paths since it would be too expensive...and even then their corner cutting by hiring only a skeleton crew of VA's completely breaks the immersion when basically everyone sounds the friggin' same, not to mention the blatant copy-pasting taking place in the script or just general laziness you'd expect from a low budget indie with terrible management, instead of a supposed AAA company that is supposedly one of the leaders of the modern RPG market.
Morrowind was more like BG, in the area that it used VAing sparingly, and allowed for a LOT more opertunities since designing alternate paths was just adding in a few new lines of text dialog or a new script here or there, and was MUCH cheaper to do then also having to add VA work on top.
And the linearity.....not just the main quests, which were terribly linear, the areas in general are extremely linear, since you lack those abilities to seek alternate paths.
I also miss alot of the utility spells, like sense key, sense magic, sense life, sense undead, etc. And then out of no-where, they added the completely useless clairvoyance spell which would've been awesome in Morrowind, to show you the general direction of where a quest location/item was...but since Skyrim shows you EXACTLY where a quest location/object is automatically the spell is completely useless.
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Depending on your rig, IMO, the GTX 690 is the only card you need, unless you have a stupidly huge monitor or use a multi-monitor set-up. Up to 1920x1080, it runs everything superior to anything else Nvidia has (and unfortunately..they know this...which is why it's still extremely expensive).
700 class and above is mostly made with excessively large monitors, multi-monitor, or SLI support in mind. I mean the 500 and 600 series can do SLI, but they generally suffer a large diminishing return on the expensive in terms of capabilities compared to the newer series.
Wonder still anti cliffracer belt mod is avilable, if not well I do not want to go back to morrowind. It is very pleasing to see someone STILL playing that good game. I do not remeber morrowind game system well, does it have similar stat system oblivion or skyrim?
@Teflon It was like Oblivion's system. Or should I say Oblivion's system was like Morrowind? Morrowind was slightly more complex in the skills department, but the attributes worked the same way.
Skyrim doesn't even HAVE a stat system. XD Although I do like the perks. If they made "Morrowind Reborn", I honestly wouldn't mind seeing them add perks to Morrowind's classic system. I feel like that would be an awesome addition.
Oh, how I hated Oblivion's stat system. I could never forgive Bethesda for ignoring my favourite Morrowind weapons: Polearms! True, they were rather weak and could not house as much enchantment value than other two-handen weapons... but I loved them anyway! Especially the spears... those pretty, pretty spears... Dammit! And don't get me started with the Dragonborn DLC! You guys can't even imagine how disappointed I was when seeing those bloody "spear-arrows" which, of course, couldn't even be used as spears at all!
Another favourite of mine back in Morrowind were the Medium Armors: not too light, no too heavy. But still sturdy enough to make it worth to specialize in them. Gotta love Bloodmoon's Ice Armor for that! So, yeah... I wan't happy at all when Oblivion axed them as well.
I love medium armor in theory, but Morrowind was kind of lacking in good medium armor. (vanilla especially, but even with the expansions it was lacking) After all, when the best stuff in the game can't be worn without people wanting you dead, it's generally not well designed. Of course that's vanilla. Expansions added superior stuff, but it still wasn't on par with light or heavy for the most part.
Spears got the... ahem, short end of the stick for most of the game, but the absolute best spear in the game (the bloodmoon one you get at the end of the bloodmoon main quest line) was pretty dang powerful.
Since I love Argonians it's probably pretty apparent that I've used spears and medium armor both, since they get bonuses to both. The first character I ever made used both of those, in fact.
@ZanathKariashi well if you go install Morrowind and Skyrim you could install the skywind mod. the mod adds the entire morrowind game into the skyrim engine, however that still has it's downfalls. they couldn't implement all those good ole Morrowind spells for one. levitate was simulated by, after casting, opening the console and making you toggle collision for the duration, making it a sort of honor thing to not abuse it. also if skyrim's engine is anything like Oblivion there may be intense lag due to the size of Morrowind in comparison, in which case I needed a cell purge mod to make sure it wasn't unplayable. i personally don't use skywind or morroblivion though as I prefer to just play it as originally imagined.
I reckon those cliff racers would have been way more popular amongst players if they actually LANDED once in a while. Or sleep. Or do anything else than to swoop down and try to eat you without warning. Not to mention the lack of baby cliff racers for the sheer "d'awww" effect.
On a side note, has anyone else watched the clip about Skywind's cliff racer model? In my opinion it looks rather promising with its arrowhead-shaped beak and little feets. Downside of course is that only the gods know when that particular mod is finished tho.
I played Morrowind once. I spent 3 hours wandering back and forth between 2 towns looking for a cave while being attacked by the pterodactyls.
I know that's not for everyone, but I like that in Morrowind you can get really lost.
No magic compass always pointing the way, so you have to ask for directions to people, and often these directions are very vague or even slightly wrong in some cases. Finally managing to find a place, after spending hours looking for it, can be very rewarding.
Morrowind was my second TES game (first being Oblivion) aaannndddd I finished the Vanilla main quest once. I tried making a new character a few months back with 2h Long Blade and Heavy Armor. I got the Ice Blade of the Monarch at level 5 and at level 7 I had the Mask of Clavicus Vile and killed Umbra with a stroke of luck on the hit rolls and frost damage. I tried doing Tribunal and I was enjoying it, but I got bored. Morrowind is still my favourite TES game, but I just can't get into it as much as I do in Skyrim for some reason. I might just uninstall the graphics overhaul I got for Morrowind and try going at it again, only this time I'll console the Athlectics and Speed numbers to a "modern RPG" running/walking speed to make it feel less of a grind. I know being a turlte early is to contrast with being a flying Sonic by the end but it just makes the beginning of the game feel too grindy for me.
You know, contrary to lot of people, I am not really looking forward to Skywind that much. It's really a subjective issue here, and I am sure I am the minority, but Skywind and Morroblivion fundamentally change the feel and aesthetics of Morrowind to a degree that it no longer seems like Morrowind...at least for me. I actually MUCH prefer, and wholeheartedly recommend, MGSO 3.0 (Morrowind Overhaul), because while it updates the graphics of Morrowind to modern standards, it still FEELS like Morrowind. Skywind feels more like Skyrim and Morroblivion feels more like Oblivion - I want it to feel like Morrowind. That's why, for me at least, MGSO 3.0 is all I will ever need.
In the spirit of fairness, however, I do compliment the team working on Skywind. Those guys are putting a TON of effort into the project, so I will by all means check it out and I encourage you guys to do the same.
So I MAY have written a "biography" for an Altmer hero who could quite feasibly be the hero of (at least) four of the games. While I'm not a big fan of the Altmer, they are the longest living race. While I believe they can live to be around 300, some sources say they could live into the 1000's. So yeah. If I ever want to Let's Play the series of games, I'm going to have one character throughout.
I LOVED Morrowind. I never got to beat it as my 2008 laptop is (and always has been) a steaming pile of poo that can't handle children/better city mods in Balmora without making my poor badass crawl to the local shops like a nixhound on two legs, but it is what it is.
If there's any reason for me to ever invest in a computer, it would be for the Elder Scrolls games, more specifically for a moddable Morrowind that can be fully prettied up without going at two miles an hour.
I want to reread the Real Story of Barenziah with a forkful of mudcrab meat in one hand, a sujamma in the other and the lakes of Vivec City sloshing below my floating rock palace, where a former god screams for mercy and my friends show him none...
So I may have just built (except for a dead on arrival graphics card, which I have a replacement being shipped to me currently) a top of a line absolute monster of a pc, and bought Morrowind GotY edition for about $5 on the steam summer sale. @CaloNord That Morrowind play-through thread we talked about may not be too far away.
@Troodon80 Self built. I could list all of the parts, but that would be a long list. =p
After taking a look to see what part a Titan X IS, exactly, I can now tell you that I got an EVGA GeForce GTX 970. Which arrived as a useless piece of junk. Now, almost two weeks later, I finally have the new one almost here. (I'm a little irked, as one might imagine.) On the other hand, I got Batman Arkham Knight and the Witcher 3 with it for free, so yay me.
Comments
I do agree that the artifacts are better, by the way. Although there is something awesome about creating your own weapons and armor and naming them.
For instance, I have a Daedric Claymore, like I said earlier, it has Paralyze 3 seconds and 3-51 frost damage (and this is with 200+ luck so I am one shotting virtually everyone). I call it "The Cold Blooded Claymore".
When I get Vivec in Azura's star I plan to boost my enchant and create a Daedric Dai-Katana that drains heath 50 points on strike and invisibility 1 sec on self. That 1 second is just enough to keep them in permanent confusion. I shall name it "The Wrath of the Incarnate".
Just talking about these things make me wonder why in the world this feature was removed from Skyrim. It's so freaking cool.
On the plus side, I shouldn't have to build another one for a long long time. . .
IMO you shouldn't try to mix skill-based with simulation-based combat. Just don't do it. Pick one or the other. That is Morrowind's only real flaw IMO. If it was fully skill-based, it'd work fine. If it was fully simulation-based, it'd work fine. But having a FPS-ish skill-based system that also simulates combat strikes based on weapon-skill is just wrong.
Now, if you have a middle ground area, like Mount & Blade, where your weapon skill simply allows you to strike faster and with less recovery time or tightens the spread of your reticule for ranged attacks, that works fine, since you can compensate for a lack of character experience with more player skill...or lower player skill with more character experience.
Aside from that I love Morrowind (and Daggerfall, which has possibly even more freedom, but is something of an acquired taste for more modern-ish gamers).
IMO Morrowind and Daggerfall both capture the true spirit of what set the TES series apart from other similar games. And IMO, felt almost like a Table-top RPG in terms of how the players could largely give the DM the finger and come up with their own solutions to any problem, even completely derailing the campaign's story completely if they wanted to.
I also miss having minimum requirements for guild advancement. In Morrowind you had to meet a certain level of proficiency in a particular guild's focus to advance in addition to performing enough jobs to prove your sincerity to that guild's ideals...where as in Oblivion and Skyrim it was fully possible for someone with basically no knowledge or skill in a particular area to become it's leader.
The socializing was also better IMO. Instead of Oblivion's ridiculous mini-game or Skyrim completely removing socializing completely in favor of a do them 1 favor and they're your willing love-slave forever system.
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I can directly point to why oblivion and Skyrim suck compared to Daggerfall and Morrowind. Voice acting every SINGLE line of dialog. This prevented them from being able to expand on various quests with alternate paths since it would be too expensive...and even then their corner cutting by hiring only a skeleton crew of VA's completely breaks the immersion when basically everyone sounds the friggin' same, not to mention the blatant copy-pasting taking place in the script or just general laziness you'd expect from a low budget indie with terrible management, instead of a supposed AAA company that is supposedly one of the leaders of the modern RPG market.
Morrowind was more like BG, in the area that it used VAing sparingly, and allowed for a LOT more opertunities since designing alternate paths was just adding in a few new lines of text dialog or a new script here or there, and was MUCH cheaper to do then also having to add VA work on top.
And the linearity.....not just the main quests, which were terribly linear, the areas in general are extremely linear, since you lack those abilities to seek alternate paths.
I also miss alot of the utility spells, like sense key, sense magic, sense life, sense undead, etc. And then out of no-where, they added the completely useless clairvoyance spell which would've been awesome in Morrowind, to show you the general direction of where a quest location/item was...but since Skyrim shows you EXACTLY where a quest location/object is automatically the spell is completely useless.
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Depending on your rig, IMO, the GTX 690 is the only card you need, unless you have a stupidly huge monitor or use a multi-monitor set-up. Up to 1920x1080, it runs everything superior to anything else Nvidia has (and unfortunately..they know this...which is why it's still extremely expensive).
700 class and above is mostly made with excessively large monitors, multi-monitor, or SLI support in mind. I mean the 500 and 600 series can do SLI, but they generally suffer a large diminishing return on the expensive in terms of capabilities compared to the newer series.
It is very pleasing to see someone STILL playing that good game.
I do not remeber morrowind game system well, does it have similar stat system oblivion or skyrim?
Skyrim doesn't even HAVE a stat system. XD Although I do like the perks. If they made "Morrowind Reborn", I honestly wouldn't mind seeing them add perks to Morrowind's classic system. I feel like that would be an awesome addition.
For example, Axes in Morrowind aren't Blunt weapons, so you don't have to hold them by the blade and hit foes with the shaft
Another favourite of mine back in Morrowind were the Medium Armors: not too light, no too heavy. But still sturdy enough to make it worth to specialize in them. Gotta love Bloodmoon's Ice Armor for that! So, yeah... I wan't happy at all when Oblivion axed them as well.
Spears got the... ahem, short end of the stick for most of the game, but the absolute best spear in the game (the bloodmoon one you get at the end of the bloodmoon main quest line) was pretty dang powerful.
Since I love Argonians it's probably pretty apparent that I've used spears and medium armor both, since they get bonuses to both. The first character I ever made used both of those, in fact.
On a side note, has anyone else watched the clip about Skywind's cliff racer model? In my opinion it looks rather promising with its arrowhead-shaped beak and little feets. Downside of course is that only the gods know when that particular mod is finished tho.
No magic compass always pointing the way, so you have to ask for directions to people, and often these directions are very vague or even slightly wrong in some cases. Finally managing to find a place, after spending hours looking for it, can be very rewarding.
In the spirit of fairness, however, I do compliment the team working on Skywind. Those guys are putting a TON of effort into the project, so I will by all means check it out and I encourage you guys to do the same.
I LOVED Morrowind. I never got to beat it as my 2008 laptop is (and always has been) a steaming pile of poo that can't handle children/better city mods in Balmora without making my poor badass crawl to the local shops like a nixhound on two legs, but it is what it is.
If there's any reason for me to ever invest in a computer, it would be for the Elder Scrolls games, more specifically for a moddable Morrowind that can be fully prettied up without going at two miles an hour.
I want to reread the Real Story of Barenziah with a forkful of mudcrab meat in one hand, a sujamma in the other and the lakes of Vivec City sloshing below my floating rock palace, where a former god screams for mercy and my friends show him none...
I haven't tried Morrowind yet with my new card, but reckon that the enhanced visuals mod should have no trouble running. :D
After taking a look to see what part a Titan X IS, exactly, I can now tell you that I got an EVGA GeForce GTX 970. Which arrived as a useless piece of junk. Now, almost two weeks later, I finally have the new one almost here. (I'm a little irked, as one might imagine.) On the other hand, I got Batman Arkham Knight and the Witcher 3 with it for free, so yay me.