Yet Another Morrowind Thread

[wwsd]

Yes, that's the way you should do it if you're going with full voice acting and still want to create an illusion of actual towns rather than ghost towns. However, the dialogue in Skyrim still flows completely unnaturally, with the NPCs usually just having some retarded introductory line ("I work at Belethor's store", "I just lost my sister, have you ever lost anyone close?", "I've got ties to the Dark Brotherhood so get out of my way") followed by a few lines of random infodump. The only reason you'd want to talk to them is to get quests, and trying to cram some kind of personality into a couple of lines of text results in a bunch of ridiculous one-dimensional characters not unlike Oblivion. The characters basically spell out their personality for you, because Bethesda is completely incapable of subtlety at this point. There's the angry guy, there's the slightly silly guy, there's the senile woman, there's the supposedly very hot chick that everyone wants to marry and so on. Still better than just being able to choose between "Rumors" and "The Imperial City", but compared to any game with half-decent writing it's fucking horrible.

So basically it's the same kind of dialogue as in NES-era Final Fantasy games? "This is the westernmost town on the continent. I'm Jake. I'm a very funny guy."

 

[Turjan]

The worst part is that listening to those NPCs who do have something to say about lore in Oblivion implies having to endure line after line of cringeworthy, stilted voice acting, with the subtitles added sentence by sentence so you can't skim through them quickly and get to the point, for what feels like aeons. It makes me want to end it all. No, I'll take Excel spreadsheets any day and just read what I want.

To be fair, you can at least interrupt the voice acting and jump to the next sentence as quickly as you want.

It might postpone the moment when you break the DVD and try to slice your jugulars with two handfuls of shards too.

Think about it - you won't even be able to think "sweet oblivion" as you fade into the void.

Well, yeah, it doesn't make the text better. I just wanted to point out that you don't have to listen to the whole drivel in its full glory if you don't want to.

 

[DalekFlay]

Pity me, for I do not use subtitles.

 

[Turjan]

Pity me, for I do not use subtitles.

Choices & consequences...

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Why would I pity you, your cinematic experience must be awesome.

 

[wwsd]

I thought I'd just post this in the most recent MW thread that I could find. There are new updates to the LGNPC mod as of this month that have rekindled my love-hate relationship with it that has been going on since 2007. In typical fashion, they managed to fix some bugs, while adding new ones in the process, and now I'm climbing up the higher ranks of House Redoran without ever having to kill mudcrabs or saving Athyn Sarethi, because the regular questgivers don't give any quests. Also, their "no-lore" mod now makes all Khajjit treat you as if you were a vampire: "Please don't feed on poor Khajjit!"

They seem to have updated almost all the existing mods. Still not going to reinstall the Seyda Neen and Pelagiad ones, though. I still have enough of their banal quests and infantile dialogue in the back of my head from the time when I did still keep them around. No new mods, because they don't want to make new ones until they've perfected the existing ones. Which is going to take about 20 years given their "one bug removed, two added back" approach to "perfecting" the current mods. And yet at the same time I'm happy to see a new release and wish them all the best. It's infuriating!

I've been pondering about these big content-adding mods in general and how they're never going to be perfect. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, or I'm interested in the wrong sort of mods (i.e. I don't really care for totally new stories or anything that's too far away from the regular setting). But I've yet to find a single one that doesn't manage to break immershun within 10 minutes in one of the following ways:

- Lack of polishing in all its forms: poor dialogue, written by some 15-year-old fanboys; spelling, grammatical and stylistic errors; quest line- or even game-breaking bugs that keep you stuck in the console, or unloading and reloading mods all the time.

- The discrepancy between different mods, or between the mod and vanilla, that cannot just be handwaved away by saying "Well, it's a different village, so the people are different". For instance, in the LGNPC example, the "light-hearted" mods of SN and Pelagiad, where you get "funny" quests of helping people find love, helping a trader cope with the fact that his father is a lich and his mother is a vampire trying to convert him, etc. While in other towns you get "dark" questlines.

- When a mod adds lots of "red" dialogue options for players. E.g. you're listening to someone tell their life story and the mod only allows you a red dialogue option that makes you say something rude or dumb that you really don't want to say. What this really entails is that some spotty-faced "mod writer" has decided for you what your character's "personality" is going to be without consulting you. Or the opposite, where you get loads of different dialogue options that usually don't change anything. MW, for better or worse, is a game where "dialogue" consists of you clicking topics and the NPCs giving encyclopedic responses 90% of the time, with sometimes the option to refuse quests. These mods keep trying to insert "interactive" dialogue, which is even worse because it's usually of the Bioware variety.

- Adding loads of quests that are either of the fedex or escort variety, or are much too big, with disproportionate rewards. Or, again in LGNPC, where some "added" quests are just quests that already exist, but would normally not be available to you because you're not in the right faction. This basically serves to push you into the direction of even more big rewards and powerful artifacts, as if the game was too difficult otherwise.

I think that this kind of mod can easily suffer from some kind of function creep where they go well beyond their original scope and fuck some things up in the process. I've always thought a mod like LGNPC was a great idea, and I've always installed it, but I'm a bit more ambivalent about it in practice now. I think it's already pretty great if a mod simply gives some unique dialogue. Say, you ask some peasant a question, and they simply say: "I don't know, I was born in this village and I've never left it." Instead of: "Oh yeah, I know all about these Daedric shrines and all the different creatures in them."

I now basically like mods that make small tweaks of the kind where you wonder why Bethesda never thought of it. Mods that add content in a clever way, where the game is really lacking it, e.g. not having anything to do in a faction once you reach the top ranks. Also bugfixes and mods that increase the difficulty with harsher faction requirements, more expensive fast travel, more expensive training, etc. Cosmetic mods, maybe. The official plug-ins, though I don't care for them that much. That's pretty much the only stuff that's getting near my Data Files folder these days.

I would love to see something like LGNPC, but dressed down and made more manageable so that it can realistically be made for all of Morrowind. That is: give all the NPCs short backstories and more unique responses to the existing topics, filter out the ones that they couldn't logically give, but don't add any quests, don't add any storylines, except for a few unique and really good ones (e.g. the Marandus line in LGNPC Redoran), but with multiple options that actually have consequences. Add quests and dialogue like in Uvirith's Legacy, Rise of House Telvanni, LGNPC Redoran, etc. that actually give you stuff to do as Archmaster of a Great House, and where you can actually influence the political balance of power between different factions. But leave everything else alone. No new NPCs, no new fetch quests, no Hlaalu quests for Redoran characters, etc. Probably won't happen though.

 

[Caim]

I recall playing Tamriel Rebuild with a character who was the Archmagister of House Telvanni, but when I told people over in Port Telvannis that they went "You're just the lord of some backwater province of House, now do some quests for me if you want to be important."

Fair to say, I was a bit miffed.

 

[AW8]

I recall playing Tamriel Rebuild with a character who was the Archmagister of House Telvanni, but when I told people over in Port Telvannis that they went "You're just the lord of some backwater province of House, now do some quests for me if you want to be important."

Fair to say, I was a bit miffed.

Speaking of Tamriel Rebuilt, is it worthwhile? Mainland Houses being disconnected from Vvardenfell Houses aside?

 

[Utgard-Loki]

if you're archmagister on vvardenfell, mainland telvanni will make you a spellwright which is, if i remember correctly, one(or two) rank below master.

also remember the vvardenfell branch is basically a rogue operation, so port telvannis doesn't owe you shit.

it's basically more morrowind. if you liked morrowind, you will also like tamriel rebuilt. a fair warning though: all content is balanced for vanilla morrowind, so you should start a new character since all monsters, npcs, quests are pretty much designed for ~lvl. 10 characters with only a few exceptions.

 

[AW8]

it's basically more morrowind. if you liked morrowind, you will also like tamriel rebuilt.

Music for my ears. I was afraid the first reply would be "don't bother, it's shitty fanfiction".

I was going to create a new character anyway. Meeting Neloth in Dragonborn made me decide to create the Altmer House Telvanni member I've been planning since 2010.

What other mods should I use?

I've been thinking of using Galsiah's Character Development since otherwise I just end up abusing trainers for +5 multipliers. Dunno about the uncapping though, that just sounds like a port to Overpowered-land. But then, Morrowind is already no stranger to that...

I saw someone recommend Wakim's Game Improvements before. I've used BTB's version, how do they differ?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

BTB's is more restrictive then WGI (though it was inspired by it), as in he will often disable things instead of trying to "fix" them. Look up the module's description at his homepage, there's no way to know if you'll like it or just be pissed off that some things aren't available because BTB deemed them overpowered.

Basically, if you want closer to vanilla go with WGI. BTB is its own thing. I prefer it because it gives the game a modicum of difficulty.

 

[AW8]

I used BTB's GI last time and while most of the fixes were amazing I couldn't stand things like the removal of constant effect-enchanting and enchanted items recharging over time (the latter makes sense, but recharging them yourself is torture with low skill even though I had all the money in the world). There were also some annoying changes to races in the name of balance, namely giving Imperials 75% resist shock out of nowhere and completely removing Altmers' weakness to magic which is a crime not even Oblivion did commit.

I'll have to read through all the BTB/WGI module changes to see which ones (if any) I'll choose. And then there's that damn Economy Adjuster, and probably more mods to look through. And Morrowind isn't even installed yet.

After reading up on Galsiah's Character Development, I have decided not to use it. It sounded somewhat stupid and un-Morrowindish. Instead I will play it The Way Todd Ken Rolston Indended™, and simply put whatever number of points I get in attributes without power-leveling.
When I was looking at the alternative MADD Leveler, I stumbled upon these hilarious comments though:

I'm going to be completely honest.

I ****ing hate this mod. It's crap.

The reason I'm so mad? I played a character to above 100 strength only to find out that the mod has bugs. CRAP. WORTHLESS!

 

[hakuroshi]

What other mods should I use?

The only mods you should use is MCP and, maybe, MGE (or it's variations) without distant land. Everything else is either optional or detrimental to the game. I used to play with shitload of mods, but recently came to appreciate certain simple beauty of (almost) unmodded MW.

 

[DalekFlay]

Nothing wrong with distant land really, just don't use it to its fullest. Expand the view distance a modest amount, far enough to improve the game but not far enough to ruin immersion by seeing Vivec in Seyda Neen.

 

[Dorfen Build]

Nothing wrong with distant land really, just don't use it to its fullest. Expand the view distance a modest amount, far enough to improve the game but not far enough to ruin immersion by seeing Vivec in Seyda Neen.

Even using it a little bit makes the game feel so much more (if you'll forgive the pun) pedestrian, or that's how it was for me when I first tried messing with it.

Another fun thing I recently discovered about Morrowind is that it does not give a fuck about you doing certain things in it when you are not yet supposed to.

ES4's treatment of this (especially unclusterfucking the journal) made it more playable. Anyone who disagrees should loosen the strap on the nostalgia goggles.

 

[Jugashvili]

Tribunal pretty much fixed the journal clusterfuck, and even though it was still poorly organized at least it wasn't used as a gamey, lazy, obvious means of guiding you to the next checkpoint, with cheap tricks like adding information the Player Character "magically" knows or having the character make "choices" without player input. The TES IV Journal was all like "I'm supposed to meet my contact in the dark underpass by the abandoned railway station. Trayvon the Redguard asked me if I'd walk into his obvious trap, and I accepted, of course, because I really trust Trayvon", even though Trayvon didn't tell you where you were supposed to go, you only just met Trayvon and you were never asked if you wanted to walk into his obvious trap.

 

[Caim]

Another fun thing I recently discovered about Morrowind is that it does not give a fuck about you doing certain things in it when you are not yet supposed to.

ES4's treatment of this (especially unclusterfucking the journal) made it more playable. Anyone who disagrees should loosen the strap on the nostalgia goggles.

Oh yes, the journal is one of the few improvements in Oblivion.

 

[Dorfen Build]

Tribunal pretty much fixed the journal clusterfuck, and even though it was still poorly organized at least it wasn't used as a gamey, lazy, obvious means of guiding you to the next checkpoint, with cheap tricks like adding information the Player Character "magically" knows or having the character make "choices" without player input. The TES IV Journal was all like "I'm supposed to meet my contact in the dark underpass by the abandoned railway station. Trayvon the Redguard asked me if I'd walk into his obvious trap, and I accepted, of course, because I really trust Trayvon", even though Trayvon didn't tell you where you were supposed to go, you only just met Trayvon and you were never asked if you wanted to walk into his obvious trap.

It's by the grace of your username that I forgive this flagrant excuse for your own failure to suspend your disbelief for the sake of a smooth and exciting story experience.

 

[Jugashvili]

It's by the grace of your username that I forgive this flagrant excuse for your own failure to suspend your disbelief for the sake of a smooth and exciting story experience.

It is indeed appropriate, considering Oblivion, as a game experience, is about as smooth and exciting as a protracted stay in a Siberian labor camp

 

[Dorfen Build]

It's by the grace of your username that I forgive this flagrant excuse for your own failure to suspend your disbelief for the sake of a smooth and exciting story experience.

It is indeed appropriate, considering Oblivion, as a game experience, is about as smooth and exciting as a protracted stay in a Siberian labor camp

To what, then, may we liken Morrowind? The October Revolution - starry-eyed ambition belying untold adversities to come? But I don't believe you've ever been to a labor camp, enjoy your flawed worldview and stale videogames.

 

[Jugashvili]

To what, then, may we liken Morrowind? The October Revolution - starry-eyed ambition belying untold adversities to come? But I don't believe you've ever been to a labor camp, enjoy your flawed worldview and stale videogames.

You seem to be laboring under the impression that I think Morrowind is a great game. I actually think it's an average game that managed to entertain me for all its flaws. I don't think Morrowind is great, you see -- I think Oblivion is just plain bad and a failure as a game in pretty much all aspects.

 

[wwsd]

it's basically more morrowind. if you liked morrowind, you will also like tamriel rebuilt.

What other mods should I use?

What you should of course get is the Patch Project and the EXE optimiser. The official plug-ins by Bethesda are strictly optional.

I use BTB's edit of HotFusion's Economy Adjuster. It makes the prices of ingredients more sensible, increases the penalties for crimes massively, it makes sure that you don't get great weapons from Daedric creatures as easily, it makes merchants better at Mercantile, it makes training and fast travel MUCH more expensive, it disables bartering with Creeper and Mudcrab... I'm sure I've missed a couple of things. But this makes the game slightly more challenging. Although guild guides are still cheap as fuck.

I had BTB's version of Wakim's Service Requirements, which makes joining and advancing in factions more difficult, and makes a lot of faction members refuse you services unless you're of a high enough rank with them, or pay a surcharge every time. I turned it off because I found some things a bit too harsh and implausible. For instance, having to pay a 100g surcharge to be allowed to use the guild guide for 10g, while my interpretation was always that the guild guide was "public" transport. But you might as well use this mod, since you'll always have gold in MW, even with the aforementioned Economy Adjuster. And in the regular game, services are just too easy to come by. Surely there has to be a happy medium between that and the surcharge madness. Maybe make the surcharge one-time?

I already discussed LGNPC at length; you should decide for yourself if you want something like that. I can sympathise with people who say that MW is not really about NPCs and dialogue, and how it's actually pretty cool when you get some unique dialogue from a guy like Divayth Fyr. In the same vein as LGNPC, I've got Uvirith's Legacy and Rise of House Telvanni to add a bit to that experience. But I have not yet taken the time to play a Telvanni character with these mods yet, so I can't judge.

I haven't played Tamriel Rebuilt enough yet to judge it fully, but the parts that have been completed look pretty good to me. I do think they may have gone a bit over the top with the size of cities and the buildings in them compared to Vvardenfell, but of course Vvardenfell is supposed to be a bit of a shithole, so who knows. House Telvanni's massive capital city is pretty . I like how they add their own things, without going nuts most of the time. For instance, there are many rivers in the area, so besides silt striders, you get transported by bugs that zoom through the water (well, you'll have to imagine the actual zooming!).

My computer isn't good enough for all those fancy graphics mods, but I do use stuff like Better Bodies, Better Heads, Better Clothes, Better Books, Weathered Signs, etc. These are strictly optional. If you don't mind the way these things look, or if you're worried that they might change the feel too much (some characters look totally different!), don't bother with them, because there are countless "Better [...]" mods, and before you know it you're slogging through them for hours, fixing every little thing. Weathered Signs is great though. It only makes sense that you can actually read signs from afar instead of having to walk up to them.

These are the main mods I use that I feel really modify the game. Everything else I've got are the tiny little things that you basically can't go wrong with: adding beds for rent in inns that didn't have them, being able to get yourself healed by Healer-class NPCs for a price (just because people keep telling me to "go find a healer"), flipping left gloves and pauldrons so I can tell them apart from the right ones, cutting back on "Excuse me, Nerevarine" greetings, cutting back on the "Solstheim" topic, getting rid of the message boxes when you create your character, Travelling Merchants to make the roads a bit more livelier, etc.

Basically all these little things that don't seem to do much on their own, but with make the game vastly more enjoyable simply as a combination, by fixing things that really only start bugging you when you've played for a while (e.g. every peasant in Vos knowing how to get to Solstheim). I got most of them from this list way back in 2007 or so. Many of these mods are pretty old, but I still get my favourites from this list whenever I reinstall the game. The list is probably a bit outdated; I'm willing to bet that many of the fixes have already been taken care of by things like the Patch project.

Anyway, I think these are the mods that you should look into, and I do mean "look into" as opposed to "omg, you really NEED to get these now". Just check out the mods that add cool stuff, and leave all the gothic/vampire/S&M companion mods, all the dress-up mods, all the mods that add English-style pubs offering Guar Ale or whatever, all the "here is your own enormous mansion practically placed just outside of Balmora so you can play house" mods and all the other bullshit to the retards.

Maybe someone else can tell me if those mods that let you play Sixth House are any good. I briefly tried one of them ages ago, but I never really got into it. If they're good, I might try one again in the near future.

 

[AW8]

What other mods should I use?

The only mods you should use is MCP and, maybe, MGE (or it's variations) without distant land. Everything else is either optional or detrimental to the game. I used to play with shitload of mods, but recently came to appreciate certain simple beauty of (almost) unmodded MW.

Nothing wrong with distant land really, just don't use it to its fullest. Expand the view distance a modest amount, far enough to improve the game but not far enough to ruin immersion by seeing Vivec in Seyda Neen.

My first TES was Draw Distance IV: Oblivion and I've used MGE with distant land set to ridiculous amounts since the beginning in Morrowind. I like seeing other cities and Dwemer ruins in the distance, it doesn't ruin anything for me and to me this is the default way to play. I understand and respect your decision to play it wrong the way you want, though.

LGNPC

LGNPC sounds scary, with the added quests and stuff, so I'll skip that.

My computer isn't good enough for all those fancy graphics mods, but I do use stuff like Better Bodies, Better Heads, Better Clothes, Better Books, Weathered Signs, etc. These are strictly optional. If you don't mind the way these things look, or if you're worried that they might change the feel too much (some characters look totally different!), don't bother with them, because there are countless "Better [...]" mods, and before you know it you're slogging through them for hours, fixing every little thing.

I'll probably not use any grafix mods other than MGE. I used Better Bodies, Better Heads and Better Clothes before, but it changed the style of stuff!!!1 My Redguard's cool haircut was raped, and an Orc I often visited suddenly sported war tattoes on his face.

I tried the graphics overhaul (ran like crap) and most stuff looked great. But they ruined the best-looking helmet in the game, Glass Helmet, by replacing the green eye-coverings with holes! Unforgivable! The overhaul will run much better on my new computer, but shit like that puts me off and when they clearly change stuff instead of improving it, it's not worth the hassle to find and remove every little mesh and texture that puts you off.

Weathered Signs is great though. It only makes sense that you can actually read signs from afar instead of having to walk up to them.

These are the main mods I use that I feel really modify the game. Everything else I've got are the tiny little things that you basically can't go wrong with: adding beds for rent in inns that didn't have them, being able to get yourself healed by Healer-class NPCs for a price (just because people keep telling me to "go find a healer"), flipping left gloves and pauldrons so I can tell them apart from the right ones, cutting back on "Excuse me, Nerevarine" greetings, cutting back on the "Solstheim" topic, getting rid of the message boxes when you create your character, Travelling Merchants to make the roads a bit more livelier, etc.

Basically all these little things that don't seem to do much on their own, but with make the game vastly more enjoyable simply as a combination, by fixing things that really only start bugging you when you've played for a while (e.g. every peasant in Vos knowing how to get to Solstheim). I got most of them from this list way back in 2007 or so. Many of these mods are pretty old, but I still get my favourites from this list whenever I reinstall the game. The list is probably a bit outdated; I'm willing to bet that many of the fixes have already been taken care of by things like the Patch project.

Those mods are the best. I especially like the Healer mod, every RPG should have NPC's that offer healing services. Buying a potion from a healer doesn't feel right.

Anyway, I think these are the mods that you should look into, and I do mean "look into" as opposed to "omg, you really NEED to get these now". Just check out the mods that add cool stuff, and leave all the gothic/vampire/S&M companion mods, all the dress-up mods, all the mods that add English-style pubs offering Guar Ale or whatever, all the "here is your own enormous mansion practically placed just outside of Balmora so you can play house" mods and all the other bullshit to the retards.

The only major mods I'm gonna use are Tamriel Rebuilt, the Game Improvements and Economy Adjuster.

The rest will be a couple of small mods like corrected icons or lanterns doesn't run out after 5 minutes. Morrowind mods are a fucking jungle and it's better to start unmodded vanilla than to never start at all.

 

[DalekFlay]

My first TES was Draw Distance IV: Oblivion and I've used MGE with distant land set to ridiculous amounts since the beginning in Morrowind. I like seeing other cities and Dwemer ruins in the distance, it doesn't ruin anything for me and to me this is the default way to play. I understand and respect your decision to play it wrong the way you want, though.

It just makes the world seem smaller.

 

[AW8]

My first TES was Draw Distance IV: Oblivion and I've used MGE with distant land set to ridiculous amounts since the beginning in Morrowind. I like seeing other cities and Dwemer ruins in the distance, it doesn't ruin anything for me and to me this is the default way to play. I understand and respect your decision to play it wrong the way you want, though.

It just makes the world seem smaller.

It makes this Emperor's dick hard!!

http://www.somethingfornobody.com/blog/tamriel-rebuilt/