Elder Scrolls Let's fix Morrowind

Zanzoken · Jul 2, 2022

Dr1f7 You should update the OP with your mod list. Preferably broken down by type so we can pick and choose the feature sets that we care about.

I realize I'm late to the thread, but the problems with Morrowind for me are:

1) Static, lifeless world
2) Extremely dull combat unfit for an action RPG
3) Unbalanced economy (too easy to get super rich)
4) Bizarre leveling system that doesn't lend itself to good character progression
5) Way too easy to become OP without even trying
6) Boring, unrealistic faction questlines

I don't really care that much about visual mods and such. The graphics are dated but good art direction doesn't age, so after the initial shock the game looks fine. But I guess I will give them a try as long as the game is stable and performance is good.

luj1 · Jul 2, 2022

Zanzoken said:
I realize I'm late to the thread, but the problems with Morrowind for me are:

1) Static, lifeless world
2) Extremely dull combat unfit for an action RPG
3) Unbalanced economy (too easy to get super rich)
4) Bizarre leveling system that doesn't lend itself to good character progression
5) Way too easy to become OP without even trying
6) Boring, unrealistic faction questlines

1 - NPC schedules, Traveling Merchants, caravan mods, abots mods add random moving silt striders, boats and gondoliers, ashlander traders, MSWE random npcs
2 - u got Lua port of CE, Next Gen Combat...
3 - Harder Barter, Hard Trade, Hotfusions economy mod, Smart Merchants...
4 - MULE, MVL, CCCP, LAMP, Improved Vanilla Levelling.... u have bunch of good choices
5 - Morts balance mods, deleveler mods....
6 - really disagree here but there are too many choices to list... possibly anything by Lucevar, Gavrilo, Caeris and more

There is a mod for everything

explorer1911 · Jul 2, 2022

Is it possible to contact Douglas Goodall these days? I know he worked on that Daggerfall successor for a little bit, but I can't find contact info anywhere. I'm wondering because he did a ton of work on Morrowind's factions and there seemed to be a lot of depth behind the writing and implementation of them but it was kept too vague and interpretive sometimes, or was just underdeveloped. Characters like Sjoring Hard-Heart or Gentleman Jim Stacey have a good idea behind them but need more to really make them stand out. Maybe even have them move around and interact with the world a bit more and not just be quest givers (Morrowind's scripting was fairly limiting and often broke so I can imagine why most NPCs are just static, but nowadays it's a lot more reliable so NPC stuff could be improved.) I'm not a fan of fan-made writing/quest mods for RPGs, fans don't have the original team's outline and thus make mistakes or trample over subtle ideas constantly. I want to make a mod that expands the characters and ideas the original was going for, but I just can't do it without knowing what the original ideas were or else I start to lean into fanfic which I said I don't like, so I want to contact Douglas Goodall. Whether or not he would even care or remember about the stuff I ask is another question. I know he wasn't the biggest fan of Morrowind, as a game and as a developer, but I'm a fan of his writing so I really want to know this stuff. So does anyone happen to know his email or something?

I should add - I've spend so much time studying Morrowind's factions and characters I swear I've found things that no one else ever has. It's why I ended up wanting to make this mod. There was a vision here, sometimes realized sometimes not, even if some people say "Morrowind factions suck its all fetch or kill quests, boring!"

luj1 · Jul 2, 2022

explorer1911 said:
I want to make a mod that expands the characters and ideas the original was going for, but I just can't do it without knowing what the original ideas were or else I start to lean into fanfic which I said I don't like, so I want to contact Douglas Goodall.

noble quest

explorer1911 said:
should add - I've spend so much time studying Morrowind's factions and characters I swear I've found things that no one else ever has. It's why I ended up wanting to make this mod.

wow

Rincewind · Jul 5, 2022

Zanzoken said:
Dr1f7 You should update the OP with your mod list. Preferably broken down by type so we can pick and choose the feature sets that we care about.

I realize I'm late to the thread, but the problems with Morrowind for me are:

1) Static, lifeless world
2) Extremely dull combat unfit for an action RPG
3) Unbalanced economy (too easy to get super rich)
4) Bizarre leveling system that doesn't lend itself to good character progression
5) Way too easy to become OP without even trying
6) Boring, unrealistic faction questlines

I don't really care that much about visual mods and such. The graphics are dated but good art direction doesn't age, so after the initial shock the game looks fine. But I guess I will give them a try as long as the game is stable and performance is good.

Finally someone addressing the elephant in the room. Yeah, if you need a huge amount of mods to fix all these issues, you're almost creating a new game using the original engine... That's why I'm saying, don't even bother; just enjoy for what it is (good world-building), slap on some graphical improvements (if you have such inclinations, or don't), then move on.

Sigourn · Jul 7, 2022

Just thought I'd let you guys know I've updated my Morrowind guide.
Some cool releases since I left the scene, in particular Less Lame Leveled Spawns makes dungeons much harder to cheese for loot.

Jarmaro · Jul 8, 2022

Sigourn said:
Just thought I'd let you guys know I've updated my Morrowind guide.
Some cool releases since I left the scene, in particular Less Lame Leveled Spawns makes dungeons much harder to cheese for loot.

Cool, could you link it?

Sigourn · Jul 8, 2022

Jarmaro said:
Sigourn said:

Just thought I'd let you guys know I've updated my Morrowind guide.
Some cool releases since I left the scene, in particular Less Lame Leveled Spawns makes dungeons much harder to cheese for loot.

Click to expand...

Cool, could you link it?

Here you go.

Dr1f7 · Jul 19, 2022

Ok guys I've been playing with the list and it feels right. I think this list really accomplishes what I was setting out to do in the beginning, fixing all or at least many of the issues with the vanilla game. Also, the game runs smooth and I haven't noticed any problems so far. So, here's the list.

FIRST, use Sigourn 's guide to patch the game, get all of the tools, figure out whatever graphics shit you want, etc..

Now:

HARDER BARTER
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/46188
^^^^^^check comments for this mod for instructions to edit the script for compatibility with "buying game", basically multiply the algorithm by 2 otherwise it 'feels' off
BUYING GAME
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50574
WARES
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49205
SILVER TONGUE
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49086
Morrowind Anti-Cheese
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47305

LIMITED RESTING WAITING AND REGEN
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49191
MULE - Mort's Ultimate Leveling Experience
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47452
MDMD - More Deadly Morrowind Denizens
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48745
Beware the Sixth House (Sixth House Overhaul)
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/46036
Immersive Corprus
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44961
Tribunal Rebalance
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45713
Bloodmoon Rebalance
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45714

Bitter Coast
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49771
West Gash
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50109
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50161
Ashlands
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/51419
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/51060
Sheogorad
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50947
Grazelands
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49075
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/51058

Just make sure you read installation instructions for the mods, be mindful of groundcover use and load order, and there shouldn't be issues. Some need patches or require other mods as prerequisites..

luj1 · Jul 19, 2022

Not bad

Personally I would cut down on the number of mods even more, but its good that youre not getting any crashes. Really demonstrates the stability of MCP/MGE XE/MSWE based install in 2022

Btw for towns I recommend BCOM instead of individual town mods. Its super polished and has the highest level of quality

Dr1f7 are you using anything for animation? Mw really needs it and benefits from it greatly

Also, for immersion have you tried 1st Person Enhanced + dof shader? Best immersion combo I ever used

Dr1f7 · Jul 20, 2022

luj1 said:
Not bad

Btw for towns I recommend BCOM instead of individual town mods. Its super polished and has the highest level of quality

Dr1f7 are you using anything for animation? Mw really needs it and benefits from it greatly

Also, for immersion have you tried 1st Person Enhanced + dof shader? Best immersion combo I ever used

yeah it looks like BCOM is really a great catchall for town mods. there were some small things I saw in it that I didn't agree with so I went with all individual overhauls but really BCOM is probably a really good idea and it's nice that it's fewer esps.

I'm using friends and foes for adding npcs and animations, I really love it so far and it seems compatible with everything without needing patches.

I looked at 1st person enhanced but that kind of mod usually makes me seasick. if you can handle it though I bet it's great

Personally I would cut down on the number of mods even more, but its good that youre not getting any crashes. Really demonstrates the stability of MCP/MGE XE/MSWE based install in 2022

yes there's definitely a good amount of unnecessary mods that people can omit. really, the economy, world rebalancing, and a few of the gameplay and immersion section mods will get most of what I was setting out to do. the other mods are just nice. The trading card mod for example can totally be skipped but it's cool to have little extra things to collect

luj1 · Jul 20, 2022

Dr1f7 said:
I'm using friends and foes for adding npcs and animations

try djoks sneak animation and one handed running animation i forgot by whom

also almalexias casting anims

anything animation related by antares is great too

Sigourn · Jul 22, 2022

I whipped up this mod list today.
It's a signifcantly trimmed down version of my normal mod list. The goal was to keep the base gameplay of the game almost intact. There are only a few major exceptions to this rule:

Reputation Fixes. For some reason, Fighter's Guild, Imperial Legion, and Thieves Guild offer no reputation gains at all. This mod addresses that.
Dungeons Rest. I don't know if it was Bethesda's intention that one could easily cheese enemies in dungeons, but this mod addresses that without fucking with anything else (such as the economy or other stuff).
Less Lame Leveled Spawns. Addresses issues with respawning enemies inside cells.
Ownership Overhaul. Again, I think how the game handles ownership of items is all over the place, so I consider this an unofficial patch of sorts.
Expansion Delay.
Expansion and main quest rebalances. These are the most notable gameplay mods in the list, but they are included because they make the expansions more cohesive.

I omitted Controlled Consumption, because that mod completely changes the gameplay experience.
Warning... the mod list is still 80 mods long. But that's better than 180. To be clear, it's meant to be a much more purist-friendly alternative to my main guide.

ferratilis · Jul 28, 2022

If any of you OpenMW users are on Radeon cards, update your drivers. The performance gains are insane with their new OpenGL optimizations. On my RX 5700 XT, FPS never dips below 100 anymore (with I Heart Vanilla modlist).

Corbin Dallas Multipass · Jul 28, 2022

This thread is relevant to my interests.

When I replayed oblivion, the level up mod did basically the same thing as MULE, so I can imagine that improves the game quite a bit. The min/max around leveling really ruined immersion.
The AI improved textures are nice in that they're just improved vanilla textures.
The economy stuff makes sense, the economy was a joke in vanilla even without meta knowledge.

Any good mods that make spellcasting work more like oblivion? I.E. separate button to cast, rather than equipping spells like weapons? Made it just not worth the hassle to cast most spells, especially in combat.

ferratilis · Jul 28, 2022

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
Any good mods that make spellcasting work more like oblivion? I.E. separate button to cast, rather than equipping spells like weapons? Made it just not worth the hassle to cast most spells, especially in combat.

Morrowind Code Patch takes care of that. You can toggle "swift casting" in the options menu. Although I like Morrowind's casting system tbh, it avoids the risk of accidentally firing a spell. MCP gives you a bunch of useful toggles you can choose from.

Hag · Jul 29, 2022

luj1 said:
Really demonstrates the stability of MCP/MGE XE/MSWE based install in 2022

Has there been updates lately ? In 2018 I was still suffering from the same random freezes that have been a time honored tradition on all my Morrowind installs.

luj1 · Jul 29, 2022

Hag said:
luj1 said:

Really demonstrates the stability of MCP/MGE XE/MSWE based install in 2022

Click to expand...

Has there been updates lately ? In 2018 I was still suffering from the same random freezes that have been a time honored tradition on all my Morrowind installs.

there have been constant updates, not just lately

after 20 years modders are working non stop, you should visit the Morrowind Modding Discord and see some amazing new mods

EDIT: ye literally an update to MGE XE/MWSE 3 hours ago

Sigourn · Aug 17, 2022

I fixed the link to the guide, and I wanted to point out this other version. It's mostly for people who don't want to spend too much time modding the game before getting into it, basically a list of the most important mods.

None · Aug 18, 2022

Something I recommend for everyone is Merlord's Right Click Menu Exit and NullCascade's Sophisticated Save System. They reduce the amount of time you spent navigating menus and are hard to play without once you've installed them.

cretin · Sep 1, 2022

I'm gonna try out the You Are Just A N'wah modlist on wabbajack.

cretin · Sep 7, 2022

So I tried YAJAN and promptly quit when it was averaging 35 fps. Sorry fags, but I don't accept 2001 titles running worse than modern AAA games just because they've crammed the aging engine full of FX and hi res textures. A shame, because YAJAN seems to have some cool ideas about really turning morrowind into a LARP canvas. The author recognizes the list's performance is a huge issue and is working on an OpenMW modlist.

After that, I tried following the One Day Morrowind Modernization guide for OpenMW. First of all, that's a fucking lie, it took me two days to get this bitch installed, and then I found it there is absolutely no quality control on those fucking modlists hosted on openmw. Several missing textures I had to install other mods for, and then there were all sorts of dumb bugs introduced like floating npcs.

In the end, I ended up uninstalling everything, and going with Morrowind Enhanced Textures, Morrowind Rebirth, and the volumetric mists and fog mod thats just come out for openmw. I think I'll use this as a base and add very judiciously from here. The problem with morrowind modding scene is the labyrinthian nature of it all and the extreme specificity of the modding endeavors. I hate that shit, there's no good reason for any thinking human to waste their time like that, purely exercises in autism. There should be more mods like MR with sweeping coverage. I don't care if some g*rman thinks its less than optimal, I'm not digging through 300+ files and compatibility patches and manual edits to get some perfectly jerry-rigged balance when there is a Good Enough option that does everything.

FWIW, the nightly build of OpenMW runs great and looks great with all the various features turned on, shadows, distant terrain, water shader and so on. I can't for the life of me imagine why people want to insist on using MWSE, are the mods for it even that good? (which is putting aside the fact that the latest builds of openMW support lua)

MWaser · Sep 8, 2022

cretin said:
FWIW, the nightly build of OpenMW runs great and looks great with all the various features turned on, shadows, distant terrain, water shader and so on. I can't for the life of me imagine why people want to insist on using MWSE, are the mods for it even that good? (which is putting aside the fact that the latest builds of openMW support lua)

The LUA support of OpenMW so far is still pretty limited on the functions of the in-game engine and mechanics it can affect and not up to parity with the original. It's meant to be built up over time.
Are there mods for the original MWSE that really give it value? Yes, quite many in fact, it's crazy how many well executed mods people have made for that game over the years, especially since the modding scene is still alive.
Nonetheless, I still don't think it's worth losing the stability of the new engine. The old engine, no matter how many "stability" mods you install and how much you try to get it to work, has a major tendency to perform like shit and crash all the time.

cretin said:
After that, I tried following the One Day Morrowind Modernization guide for OpenMW. First of all, that's a fucking lie, it took me two days to get this bitch installed, and then I found it there is absolutely no quality control on those fucking modlists hosted on openmw. Several missing textures I had to install other mods for, and then there were all sorts of dumb bugs introduced like floating npcs.

Yeah I made the same observation when I installed a mod that was recommended in some modding guide for OpenMW, Caldera Mines Expansion, which also added its own questlines. The questlines had broken scripts which softlocked the game if you tried doing them (I presume because OpenMW's scripting of in-game functions engine is said to be less forgiving on badly written scripts and doesn't even run them at all, as opposed to the original engine which ran scripts with some errors in them. Change made for the sake of stability, iirc)

abot · Sep 8, 2022

I would just like to say for anybody interested that in my experience, apart form rare cases of broken meshes/crashing due to mod bugs, number 1 cause of crashes with a modern Morrowind.exe + MCP + MGE-XE + MWSE-Lua setup is simply loading too many mods and filling available memory.
Like other games, there are memory leaks while playing, and in a heavily modded setup their effect is increased by the 4GByte limit of usable memory by a 32bit application.
so TL;DR if you crash often (e.g. after a few exterior cell changes/ less than an hour playing), removing some big mods from your loading list is often one of the best things you can try.
Also fine tuning of memory threshold for MWSE-Lua Memory Monitor mod is essential to give advice in time when it is better to save and exit/restart the game/reload to clean the memory usage.

Valdetiosi · Sep 8, 2022

What mods do you need apart from OpenMW with Patch for Purists, Unofficial Morrowind Plugins, Project Atlas, Morrowind Optimization Patch and Enhanced Textures?
I browsed through bunch of MWSE mods and out of all of them foud only one convenient: a mod that allows you to filter alchemical ingredients based on what effects they give.

Elder Scrolls Let's fix Morrowind

Arcane

You're all shills

Novice

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Magister

uooh afficionado

Liturgist

uooh afficionado

Scholar

You're all shills

Scholar

You're all shills

uooh afficionado

Arcane

Learned

Arcane

Arbiter

You're all shills

uooh afficionado

Arbiter

Arcane

Arcane

Cipher

Novice

Scholar