Elder Scrolls Why Morrowind is a bad RPG

[MerchantKing]

i just woke up and my character got 5 levels from sneaking into a wall cool

The best way to level stats in Morrowind is not to grind, but to use the trainers after getting a lot of gold.

yes, i realized that it's easier to get more levels when you already have points in this skill

It's easier to just train it up to 100 after finding the right trainer.

 

[Sunri]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

 

[Vic]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

sell to Creeper like I said above

 

[Sunri]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

sell to Creeper like I said above

i dont know who that is and i dont look things online unless i can't progress

 

[janior]

morrowind is a classic and no amount of contrarianism will change that

 

[luj1]

i just woke up and my character got 5 levels from sneaking into a wall cool

Impressive...
But can you find Caius Cosades?

even less people can find Morag Tong

 

[DJOGamer PT]

You can look at how they reduced the gun skills to just two

Completely justified
"Big Guns" from F3 was mechanical bloat and doesn't even make sense in-setting
You know, more shit choices != better game design

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

and nuanced thoughts from a recent Morrowind addict (tl;dr):

Morrowind has the probably best world building I've ever seen in a videogame. I'd put it above Ultima and Arcanum and on par with Fallout. Is it a bad RPG? In a lost of ways, yes. I've been playing it non-stop for the last month and I keep getting reminded of how much better a game Gothic (which came out around the same time) is, yet... Gothic didn't pull me in like this.

To complicate matters, there's mods, an infinity of them. There's even one that's larger than the base game(I haven't played it yet). They smooth over many of the game's flaws and bring it much closer to original vision, which is expressed in the game's lore and the concept art left by Michael Kirkbride. I can't remember a game where the perusal of the conceptual material is so central to the appreciation of the game. The people who say you can abstract the videogame from extraneous material like the cover art, the manual, the maps, etc. are wrong. At the very least, it's wrong for the RPG genre.

Basically, there's a base game you may enjoy as a neutral consumer of videogames and there's another videogame hidden underneath that reveals itself when you get into the lore, start fiddling with mods and looking attentively at the concept art. But this videogame may never reveal itself to you, first because such things don't have to happen, and second because the base game does a lot to repel the player, particularly the CRPG veteran.

I remember when I first played it many years ago. I made a character in Seyda Neen, ran around for a bit and laughed at the derpy looking Bethesda NPCs with the Wiki style conversation. Explored a little... ok, shitty combat and the dungeons look uninteresting (you go through a conspicuous door and get teleported to a different cell, Gothic is much more seamless). I got ambushed by the Dark Brotherhood while resting and barely defeated the assassin by standing still and swinging my sword really fast. Stupid and random. I also got some phat loot which broke the early economy. Isn't this typical Bethesda, I thought? Shortly after I uninstalled the game.

Many years later, in 2023, because I really like the Lizardman race in Master of Magic, I started wondering what games let you play as an amphibious lizard (I still have the thoughts of a 12 year old, despite being over 30). Not a lot came up, but there was Morrowind. And they used spears too, just like in those sketches from the Fighting Fantasy books I used to play. Well, it turned out that when you go into it with an idea of a character that actually fits the pre-existing lore the experience is completely different. My stealthy Argonian warrior found pearls on the seabeds, explored underwater caves and sunken ships, and used speed and the spear's reach to keep enemies at bay. I was basically playing a canonical Marsh hunter without knowing it, and through that perspective the world opened itself to me. The intricacies of Morrowind society, the nuance with which it treated enslavement of the beast races, the different ideologies of the Dunmer clans, their relation to the empire, etc. The aesthetics drew me in more and more. I come upon the name of Kirkbride. Wow, I'm starting to get it.

Then came the mods. I'm quite familiar with New Vegas modding, so it didn't take long to learn how to use the Construction Set. And for every gripe I had with the game, there seemed to be a mod for it on Nexus. It's like the game is begging you to rebuild it. Is this part of Bethesda's winning formula? For better and worse.

So I get it why some people hate Morrowind. I'd probably hate it too if I'd played it in 2002, coming off Gothic, and saw its explosion in popularity. But for strange reasons I'm now quite addicted to it. There's a really good RPG in there wanting to come out, you just have to go in there and lend it a hand. Then you learn to love it and ignore some of its flaws which mods can't fix. What else can you do, there's nothing else like Morrowind.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Well, it turned out that when you go into it with an idea of a character that actually fits the pre-existing lore the experience is completely different.

I tend to find that if you do this and go in with a general mood to explore and tool around in a manner consistent with that character idea, Beth games (and open world RPGs in general) are a lot more enjoyable.

 

[MerchantKing]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

You really ARE the MerchantKing!

 

[Sunri]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

Thanks but i already uninstalled my character was fucked up anyway i lost level up bonuses because i leveled few times in a row a got only +1 points to stats instead of 5 or whatever and picked useless skills at the start of the game like security and unarmored

 

[Vic]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

Thanks but i already uninstalled my character was fucked up anyway i lost level up bonuses because i leveled few times in a row a got only +1 points to stats instead of 5 or whatever and picked useless skills at the start of the game like security and unarmored

why do you try to powergame as a first time player

 

[Sunri]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

Thanks but i already uninstalled my character was fucked up anyway i lost level up bonuses because i leveled few times in a row a got only +1 points to stats instead of 5 or whatever and picked useless skills at the start of the game like security and unarmored

why do you try to powergame as a first time player

Because i rested and got one shooted by an assassin outside of starting village

 

[Vic]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

Thanks but i already uninstalled my character was fucked up anyway i lost level up bonuses because i leveled few times in a row a got only +1 points to stats instead of 5 or whatever and picked useless skills at the start of the game like security and unarmored

why do you try to powergame as a first time player

Because i rested and got one shooted by an assassin outside of starting village

that's a known issue, try the delay assassin mod

 

[mediocrepoet]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

Thanks but i already uninstalled my character was fucked up anyway i lost level up bonuses because i leveled few times in a row a got only +1 points to stats instead of 5 or whatever and picked useless skills at the start of the game like security and unarmored

why do you try to powergame as a first time player

Because i rested and got one shooted by an assassin outside of starting village

that's a known issue, try the delay assassin mod

Or just disable Tribunal until a bit later.

 

[antimeridian]

Yeah "GOTY editions" of games with all DLC are generally shit and unbalanced. Morrowind is one of the worst offenders because of the fucking assassins that the DLC spawns. Sad to think how many people that's probably turned off to the game when they went back to try it without any research beforehand.

In a better world the DLCs would be disabled by default, and only activate at later levels. When someone tells me they're trying a Bethesda game I always recommend disabling the DLC for a first time playthrough, and saving it for later. Always throws the games out of alignment.

Sometimes disabling DLCs in the launcher doesn't work and you have to go in and manually get rid of the DLC files.

 

[Sunri]

And i realized that you can cast spells when wearing heavy armor, so there is no reason to use unarmored skill as a mage character

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Fallout: New Vegas is my definition of a diamond in the rough.

Okay, well that was fucking retarded.

Name the perfect RPG. No, forget that: name the RPG that is nearly perfect. I will wait. You won't find one.

New Vegas is about as perfect as an RPG will ever get. And it's flawed! Very flawed! You kinda have to just take what you can get. All great RPGs are diamonds in the rough.

There are lots of metrics you can measure a game by. Different genres may go by different metrics. A good shooter doesn't have the same criteria as a good RPG.

IMO, the threshold measurements for an RPG -- once you establish that the game is, in fact, an RPG -- consist of two factors:

1. Did you have fun? As in, was the gameplay engaging?
2. Did the leveling/skills system actually matter? Did the outcome of your gameplay experience necessarily depend upon the way you built your character? Did this system provide you the opportunity to replay the game again with a different gameplay experience? Or in other words, can you replay and experience number 1 in a fundamentally different way?

And everything else (story, C&C, snappy combat, tactical combat, graphical quality, art direction, UI, menu navigation, itemization, level design, challenge, etc.) all help flesh out which RPGs are better than the others. These kinds of factors are what make PST extraordinary and D:OS "just okay". But those two threshold questions determine whether the game is even in the conversation for being a good RPG.

And Morrowind is a fantastic RPG.

Threshold questions: Yeah, I had a fucking ball; and my magic man and my warrior feel pretty different! So yeah, threshold passed.

As for the flavor, very little can compete with the weirdness and depth of Morrowind lore; the world feels more alive than most every other game to date; there's tons to explore and to discover; and it's just a very fun, replayable, comfy game. Or you can mod it into a horror game, I don't care.

Your criticisms of Morrowind are all valid. Your hatred of it makes no sense. I could tear Fallout to pieces too, if I wanted (but I won't, because I love it, even though it's obviously imperfect).

My point being: suck my dick, you're a moron.

 

[Vic]

New Vegas is about as perfect as an RPG will ever get.

an action RPG can never be a "true" RPG because there is too much reliance on the player's agility. So we have to ask ourselves, is new vegas a good action rpg? well, now the spotlight falls on the combat, which is really not that good. so what is new vegas really? diamond in the rough fits quite well

 

[TheDarkUrge]

Fallout: New Vegas is my definition of a diamond in the rough.

Fallout New Vegas is the perfect virtual outlet for the accumulated trauma of modern trans experience. (Speaking from a transfeminine perspective but I’d imagine much of this applies to other trans people as well) You can make a character, (including gender) fight against regressive facists,(sic) (Caesar’s legion) and meet plenty of other LGBT people along the way that are actually well rounded characters! Most of the LGBT people in this game, you wouldn’t even know they were LGBT unless you took the time to talk to them and get to know them. Your character can be canonically gay or bi with the use of certain perks too! Most importantly, the world and its major factions are ambivalent enough to be believable. Of course we hate the legion! They would kill us given the chance, but NCR isn’t perfect either… They exploit their workers, they’re xenophobic and imperialistic. House is a dictator just like Caesar, right? Well… maybe you hate autocracy, but House seems benevolent and has the best interest of humanity in mind. You could ultimately side with yourself and play God with the wasteland. Why not? Even in this virtual world where we are allowed to be ourselves, for many of us much more than in the everyday world, we can also be Gods! People listen to us, our actions have meaning and consequences that feel plausible. That’s why I think trans people in particular love this game. Honestly it is a work of art that all should appreciate, but trans people through our heightened need for self integration just to justify and understand our existence, develop a greater appreciation of art.

That is why trans people love New Vegas while Morrowind gives us the ick

 

[Ash]

Morrowind's quest design may often be generic and unexciting, but it doesn't treat you like an idiot, demands you think and also encourages engaging with the game systems.

The real reason Morrowind is a bad RPG and game is because the balance completely falls apart after some time, in addition to failing to introduce new and diverse content after a while. If you've explored half the island and done half the quests, there is no good reason to go do the other half as it's largely all the same shit, only now you're stupidly OP by this point so it becomes utterly braindead and tedious. It's a wonderful concept that needed another year or two in the oven. As another poster mentioned, it has potential to be one of the absolute greatest RPGs, but as it stands it's a highly flawed gem.

 

[Glop_dweller]

New Vegas is about as perfect as an RPG will ever get.

an action RPG can never be a "true" RPG because there is too much reliance on the player's agility. So we have to ask ourselves, is new vegas a good action rpg? well, now the spotlight falls on the combat, which is really not that good. so what is new vegas really? diamond in the rough fits quite well

It's a finely polished FO3... they did what they could with what they got, and the limited time that they had.

 

[octavius]

Meh grinding money is annoying too because merchants have between 150 and 800g so i can't even sell shit that i stole

Try console commands. Also the tribunal merchants have a lot more gold.

Thanks but i already uninstalled my character was fucked up anyway i lost level up bonuses because i leveled few times in a row a got only +1 points to stats instead of 5 or whatever and picked useless skills at the start of the game like security and unarmored

That's actually a good way of playing Morrowind.

 

[VerSacrum]

Fallout: New Vegas is my definition of a diamond in the rough.

Fallout New Vegas is the perfect virtual outlet for the accumulated trauma of modern trans experience. (Speaking from a transfeminine perspective but I’d imagine much of this applies to other trans people as well) You can make a character, (including gender) fight against regressive facists,(sic) (Caesar’s legion) and meet plenty of other LGBT people along the way that are actually well rounded characters! Most of the LGBT people in this game, you wouldn’t even know they were LGBT unless you took the time to talk to them and get to know them. Your character can be canonically gay or bi with the use of certain perks too! Most importantly, the world and its major factions are ambivalent enough to be believable. Of course we hate the legion! They would kill us given the chance, but NCR isn’t perfect either… They exploit their workers, they’re xenophobic and imperialistic. House is a dictator just like Caesar, right? Well… maybe you hate autocracy, but House seems benevolent and has the best interest of humanity in mind. You could ultimately side with yourself and play God with the wasteland. Why not? Even in this virtual world where we are allowed to be ourselves, for many of us much more than in the everyday world, we can also be Gods! People listen to us, our actions have meaning and consequences that feel plausible. That’s why I think trans people in particular love this game. Honestly it is a work of art that all should appreciate, but trans people through our heightened need for self integration just to justify and understand our existence, develop a greater appreciation of art.

That is why trans people love New Vegas while Morrowind gives us the ick

Some troon unironically typed this shit? Yeah we get it, RPG's are great for escapism and indulging in your fetishes like autogynephilia. That doesn't make NV unique.