While hardly the first open-world game of its kind, the third numbered entry in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series cemented a formula and a set of expectations that are still alive and well today in games like Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. It was an artistic and technical leap forward for mainstream role-playing games in the summer of 2002, and, for many, a beautiful and novel experience. A vast ashen landscape teeming with psychedelic flora and fauna — equal parts Jim Henson and George Lucas, with a dash of Tolkien — here was a game that resembled no other.
For the people who made it, Morrowind was the product of tough crunch, a pressure-cooker basement environment, and constant uncertainty about the company they worked for — which many felt could have shut down any day. But the island of Vvardenfell, and its unique pantheon of gods and demons, seemed to exist independent of the concerns upstairs.
Whatever the company's fate, it seemed the game was destined to find an audience. In the darkest of moments, when it seemed the writing was on the wall for Bethesda, project leader Todd Howard took the team to a nearby hotel for a private meeting. There, Howard rallied the developers' spirits, handed out personalized business cards, and assured them it would all work out, as long as they were willing to keep going.
That speech, one source says, probably saved the company.
Over the last year, we tracked down 10 former Morrowind team members, including Howard, concept artist Michael Kirkbride, and lead designer Ken Rolston. We discussed the very conception of Vvardenfell, the strangest bits of Elder Scrolls lore and the "shits-and-giggles" philosophy that informed them, and what it means to build a game world that withstands the test of time.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
Related: 40 Computer Role-Playing Games That Did Their Own Thing
The OpenMW (Morrowind) Project Has Released Version 0.39.0
How 'Baldur's Gate' Saved the Computer RPG, or Did it?
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Game history blogger Felipe Pepe is up to part three of a series on computer role-playing games (CRPGs) that did things differently. These games might not have been the best, or even really particularly good as a whole, but they did something in a way that hadn't been done before, or since.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
Most of them are fairly old - evolution is most rapid when expanding into a new niche, after all - but there are a number of newer games as well. They range from the well-known and well-regarded (Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic all have mentions) to the obscure (ZanZarah, The Magic Candle). For the old-school gamer, it's a nice trip down memory lane. For the new-school, it's an interesting look at the things game designers tried that never really caught on. And for game designers, it's a treasure trove of mechanics that might deserve a second chance at success.
What are your own suggestions for interesting RPGs? I would personally go with On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 3. It's a bit of a stretch to bundle with CRPGs, since it's much more along the lines of Final Fantasy than Ultima, but it takes a new approach to a number of common mechanics. The combat system is where it really shines - combat is turn-based with actions taking variable lengths of time, and taking a hit (as a PC or NPC) will delay your next action. Crucially, taking a hit in the period between queuing an action and taking it has a much larger "knockback" than taking a hit while recharging, which makes it a lot more strategic than your typical ATB system. It also changes up random encounters (all encounters appear on-screen, and only in the arena do they respawn) and items (your inventory of consumables refills after each battle). It simplified quite a lot, but that simplicity gave it a focus and elegance not often seen in RPGs.
OpenMW is a GPLv3 game engine that aims to be compatible with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind's assets. As it stands you can complete all of the main quest lines without issues. This release brings such exciting features as background cell loading and object shaders. You can view a complete change log on the project's website or see the progress via the release video for the engine and construction set (the construction set is a program for modding and creating plugins for the Morrowind engine).
Opinion: I'm quite excited about the future of this engine. Although any major improvements have been put off until the engine reaches 1.0.0, there's talk of what might come after such as virtual reality headset support and physically-based rendering support.
takyon: Additionally, several sites are reporting on Holds: The City Overhaul, a "better cities" mod for TES V: Skyrim that renovates many locations in the game. There's also a recent update about the progress of the XL Engine, which aims to modernize TES II: Daggerfall along with a few other games.
The product of three exhausting and exhilarating years of labor by a team of roughly 15 people who didn’t know enough to be daunted by the task they undertook, Baldur’s Gate was a genre-stretching, disc-space-testing hybrid that broke new narrative, technical, and gameplay ground and established the identity of one of the past two decades’ most storied studios. “It just redefined expectations of what a role-playing game could be,” Oster says. “I think it really relaunched the whole concept of what a Western RPG is.”
Was Baldur's Gate that important, or just a reprise of Ultima?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by snufu on Thursday March 28 2019, @06:25PM (10 children)
Elder Scrolls games are well done, but nothing about them is groundbreaking. The affection is mostly due to demographics and timing, being the rpg that most millennials cut their teeth on. Similar to how a whole generation thinks Harry Potter is comparable to Tolkien.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 28 2019, @06:39PM (8 children)
There are some drastic technological differences between for example Morrowind and Ultima 1, not so with Tolkien and J.K. "Dumbledore is Gay" Rowling (both are words on paper).
The world of Morrowind was also interesting for being weirdly alien (a quality that was notably absent in the majority of TES IV: Oblivion).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @06:52PM (4 children)
Land of mushroom houses, kwamas and really distinct take on a "dark elf" race to the point this place doesn't really look much Tolkienian anymore. Very contrasting with other places in TES universe. There are good reasons to consider it the only entry in TES series that could be considered a cult classic. But the core gameplay didn't age well sadly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:05PM (3 children)
The core gameplay was extremely varied, even by today's standards.
NPCs wandered their area, with limitations. It supported multi-action attacks using a keyboard and mouse, with different styles of attacks causing different damage (and an option for 'novice mode' where it would automatically use the best attack). It had soul capture and soul stones used to infuse enchanted items with any metaspell you had knowledge of. It has a huge swath of spells possible. And it had the capability to charm/placate any npc to be favorable towards you, allowing quite a few extra possibilities including almost non-violent sandbox playthroughs. Most of the quest lines themselves required violence. I never checked if there was an available alternative path.
But the sheer breadth of non-main quest plotlines was impressive. You could become a vampire and turn back, you could do quests for minor gods. You could gather soulstones and enchant all the best equipment for yourself. It truly had a breadth most other mainstream games lacked at the time (there were other games as deep, but none in the 3d era at that point.)
Personally Cataclysm-DDA, while 2d, has replaced Morrowind as my go-to explorable RPG. It has even more variety and even more possibilities, but is also post-apocalytic instead of High Fantasy.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:45PM (1 child)
NPC wandering was greatly improved in Oblivion and Skyrim (Radiant AI). Now NPCs can sleep in their home, go to work on the other side of town, go shopping, sleep again, etc. Morrowind is kind of this eerie collection of people standing around in various locations, taking a few steps, looking around, sneezing, etc.
Melee attack was basically click to swing and that was it. This was improved in the later two games, although magic/archery are more fun IMO.
Some quest lines do have peaceful alternatives, and if you use Calm spells or pickpocketing, you can avoid killing even more NPCs. You would probably need to read the UESP wikia or a strategy guide to realize how to do that.
The enchanting, potionmaking, etc. was pretty broad in Morrowind and has since been toned down. But you still would have to essentially break the game (Fortify Intelligence) in order to reliably do constant effect enchantments that matched equipment you could find. And the spellmaking still came down to: Do you want to do X fire/cold/shock/etc. damage on target, touch, or self? And you could make the target blast up to 50 ft wide or whatever.
Efficient leveling sucks. You have to get your Endurance to 100 ASAP in order to get 10 health per level increase and carefully manage your skill increases and training every level. Probably requiring you to find some kind of cheaty source of gold in order to spend many thousands of it on training.
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(Score: 1) by Sulla on Thursday March 28 2019, @10:16PM
Morrowind had the best magic of the three. You can get close with some of the available mods in Skyrim but magic always felt lacking when vanilla.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Friday March 29 2019, @10:09AM
Upvote for Cataclysm DDA, best game ever.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @08:11PM (2 children)
You triggered bro? Got some homophobia to work out?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 28 2019, @08:49PM (1 child)
Nope. It's just funny how you can write a book series and courageously alter the characters years later in an attempt to get more media attention and ticket/DVD sales.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @05:29AM
Hermione has always been black... just like Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday March 29 2019, @12:57AM
I respectfully disagree. The first game, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, did go places others had not. Some things that still stand out for me to this day are:
- The world size. It was H.U.G.E. With much of it being procedurally generated, it eclipsed any rpg I'd played before, easily.
- The world depth. While the Ultima series had great lore and detail, Arena made the whole world seem alive. Details such as unique holidays across different world areas really drew me in.
- Custom magic spells. Wowee! I loooved this one! It was a min-maxer's dream, if you could afford it. Suffice to say, we one-shot the end boss with one of our custom little things =)
- Excellent use of positional audio. Did wonders for the sense of "uh-oh, I can hear something. It's BIG!"
And while not groundbreaking, the music was fantastic too :)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:43PM (1 child)
... and those were the best wasted hours ever. It was like a never ending summer holiday. Never finished the main quest as there was soo much to do beside it. Even running into ghostfence for the first time was a major wtf!
The only drawback.... those f*cking cliff racers... every three steps another one... or two..
That having said... for those who don't know, I've been following this for a long time: https://openmw.org/en/ [openmw.org]
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Thursday March 28 2019, @08:54PM
Ive been considering doing a run-through of morroblivion as it appears most of it is completed and debugged.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @08:22PM (3 children)
Morrowind is free, through March 31, to celebrate The Elder Scrolls’ 25th anniversary
https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/25/18280778/morrowind-free-elder-scrolls-25th-anniversary [polygon.com] will auto-link a URL
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday March 29 2019, @01:06PM (1 child)
This really super surprised me, as well as this article/headline on Soylent here...
I had purchased the Anthology back in 2013 or so, and never installed it. On the 25th (of this March), I cut open the plastic and installed Morrowind and Oblivion; I've played Oblivion and Skyrim, but none of the preceding titles in the series.
Apparently, I decided to play my purchase on the day they released it for free. I only had to wait six years after my purchase to break the shrinkwrap and defeat the CD protection in order to find the game was released. For free. By the developer. With no real strings attached.
I had no idea the anniversary was coming up or any of that. I also wouldn't have thought millenials into RPGs would have cut their teeth on this title; I guess I don't know what I expected would replace them if the Ultima and Bards Tale and Wizardry and Phantasy and Leisure Suit Larry series are where I cut mine (well.. .ok maybe he isn't applicable, and I wasn't supposed to be playing it, but it rhymed with Phantasy and worked as a pun.. right?)
(A fun fact; I built a new computer to play Oblivion at the highest settings when the game came out; 1920x1200 with every feature enabled. I saw the screenshots and decided that I was due for an upgrade anyway, so I saved and saved and built something that I've reused the parts from many times over the years... anyway, I cringe when I read about hardcore gamers complaining a video card 12 years newer not rendering 1920x1080 quickly enough, but I guess it's another thing I don't understand about millenials. I can understand people that cling to nostolgia; I can't understand people that demand 1920x1080 to be better... considering it's an inferior resolution to begin with, made for TVs! That's not elitist, that's just me pointing out that just like video tapes, the superior solution isn't the cheapest one...)
For the record, so far so good in Morrowind. It took a little getting used to, and resisting the ancient wikis and faqs, but so far my Dunmer custom adventurer class is doing fine despite not using much of any of the skills I chose as my major ones... once I found a Daedric Katana, I decided that my focus on blunt weapons had come to an end. It weighs so much less than that sixth house bell ringing mallet I found...I'm only level 11 or 12, so both had proven to be quite the boon to my inappropriate playstyle.)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 29 2019, @08:16PM
I had zero interest in the offer because it apparently required the "Bethesda launcher", sure to be some annoyance attached. I've got copies floating around and would probably use OpenMW if I felt like playing the game again, except OpenMW hasn't implemented all features AFAIK.
Originally they planned to offer it free for 1 day only, but there was so much demand that it broke their website all day long and it looks like they extended the offer in response.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @08:33PM
>> linking to polygon
You n'wah!