Fallout: New Vegas is my definition of a diamond in the rough. I've always maintained that, had it used the original Fallout engine and given an adequate time for Obsidian to do the major things they planned (most important of which being "fleshing out the Legion") it would occupy the #1 spot as the best cRPG ever made.
I can't honestly say I've "replayed" New Vegas a lot, in the sense of "yeah I made it to the end of the game five times". In fact, I've never,
ever, finished New Vegas. I always bail out just as the Hoover Dam battle is available. Why, I can't say. The title says "Morrowind" but I'm talking about New Vegas, so why is this the case? Because even though there's an initial hurdle to overcome in New Vegas (in my personal experience, if I can get past Novac I know I'll play the hell out of the game), in Morrowind I'm going through a constant initial hurdle. And I'll explain why, giving my honest opinion on Morrowind.
Morrowind is a game that, as opposed to what its RPG label and its "open world freedom!" would lead me to believe, is a game that gets more and more boring the more I play through it. There are many reasons as to why I find Morrowind boring, but there is one in particular that outright breaks the game for me. And that is
quest design. Morrowind's quests can be divided in two:
- Non-faction quests, which rarely demand something out of your build.
- Faction quests, which are usually oriented towards your build.
We can see an immediate difference with New Vegas: whereas Morrowind's quests are separated between "incloosive" and "gatekeeping", New Vegas quests, most of the time, have specific skill checks to unlock different paths or rewards. But even Morrowind's faction quests are a
lie:
- Thieves Guild/Hlaalu: you can easily spam the Persuade or Taunt button to pass most of the quests oriented towards "smoothtalkers".
- Mages Guild/Telvanni: very few quests actually demand your magic-oriented character to use their magic, if any.
- Fighters Guild/Redoran: very few quests actually demand you to engage in opponents in physical combat, if any.
The one major exception are the stealth-oriented quests. Without high enough stealth, you will be relying on extreme chance to complete these quests. This is made even worse because of Morrowind's downright awful stealth mechanics. Whereas Skyrim's stealth is overpowered, leading everyone and their grandmother to play as stealth archers, Morrowind's are infamously bad, where trying to stealth your way around a quest without having previously honed your skills by cheesing Mudcrabs, Scribs, and feeble tavern patrons standing near a dimly lit candle, will have you raped, gently, by telepathic enemies. In fact, the stealth mechanics are SO bad that at low skills you simply can't hide at a reasonable distance from NPCs, but at high skills you can hide in front of the fucking NPCs.
The one aspect of Morrowind where skills truly come into play is your success chance to physically attack your enemies, your success chance to cast magicka, your success chance to brew potions, etc. Basically anything
but quests (stealth quests, again, being the exception). This is a huge contrast with New Vegas' quest design: without the proper skills, you are locked out of certain paths or rewards. It is also a huge contrast with New Vegas' moment-to-moment gameplay, where your skills have a less noticeable impact because the game doesn't rely on dicerolls, instead augmenting your resistance and damage: it's easier to notice the growth from missing all the time to landing all your attacks than it is to notice "hey, I'm dealing 40 damage instead of 30 now!", especially when New Vegas doesn't display damage dealt with each attack.
Earlier I said Morrowind gets more and more boring the more I play through it. And that's because it lacks replayability as an RPG.
- Most quests don't rely on your build, meaning you can effectively do them all.
- The ones that are locked behind a certain build don't actually require that build at all. We love to mock Skyrim's "you can become the Archmage of Winterhold while knowing how to cast one single spell", but how is Morrowind's "the guild requires you to have certain stats but rarely expects you to cast spells?" any different? In fact, I've taken the time to browse Morrowind's Mages Guild quests: out of 33 quests distributed among the guilds, only ONE absolutely requires you to use magic, either scroll or spell (Soul of an Ash Ghoul), while another two require either spells or having a good sneak skill, with one of these two also being easily solved by picking up a key lying around. That's right: in Morrowind's Mages Guild quests, there are absolutely no quests that absolutely demand you to be a mage, because literally any character can use a spell scroll. The faction requirements are entirely arbitrary.
When your game's RPG elements ultimately boil down to your prowess in combat, and when said combat is arguably one of the worst combats RPGs have ever seen (and this is ultimately what will get users to agree with me or not), then you have a bad RPG in your hands. Morrowind's quests are a mostly linear affair, require no particular skills, and the ones which do require skills are either "fake" (e.g. faction questlines) or require cheesing (i.e. stealth quests).
Once more, let's go back to New Vegas' quests: skill checks are necessary because they ask what is
needed. You need high Medicine skills because you are required to have Medicine skills in order for you to cure gravely injured Boomers. You require high Speech skills because you are required to have high Speech skills to convince a destruction-driven man to stop his rampage across the Mojave. New Vegas rarely pulls tricks on you in this regard; we can argue some skill checks are poorly assigned, but we can barely argue "the game demands a skill check when it has no reason to", as opposed to Morrowind's factions demanding requirements that are never asked to be put into use explicitly: play through the Mages Guild as a fighter, or play through the Redoran quests as a mage, the game doesn't give a shit. Did Bethesda truly dumb down Skyrim, or did they just accept that Morrowind's faction requirements were retarded because the quests weren't designed around those requirements in mind?
As much as I enjoyed writing modding guides for others to use, I have to come to terms Morrowind is the one RPG that may be a true "play once and be done with it", because every time I try to play it I either give up fairly early, or end up dropping the game because of boredom altogether.
