The Elder Scrolls’ World Is Bigger, More Beautiful, And More Customizable Than Ever In Its Latest Adventure

It’s been five long years since The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall dazzled us with its incredibly realistic fantasy world, and hopes have been high that its sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, can somehow top that. Taking place in the Dunmer land of Vvardenfell in the titular province, Morrowind promises everything Daggerfall did, but bigger and better: a bigger world, far more class customization, and hand-crafted environments with responsive physics and NPCs. Morrowind has a lot to live up to, so let’s take a look at what critics are saying to see if it comes close to being the Elder Scrolls adventure of our dreams.

If all you look at is numbers, Morrowind looks to be a smash hit almost everywhere. 9/10 from Game Informer, 8.7/10 from GameSpot, 9.4/10 from IGN, 90/100 from PC Gamer, and 89/100 from GameSpy. But if you actually read the reviews themselves, it seems like the whole of Morrowind is significantly, oddly greater than the sum of its parts, because most critics have a lot to complain about in the paragraphs above those high scores.

For GameSpy, William Abner can get us started with his criticism of the game’s very introduction and character creation. He starts by praising the tutorial, which drops you into the cargo hold of a slave ship and then asks you to define the backstory that got you there in response to various characters. “It gives you a visual and auditory sense of the gameworld,” Abner writes. “It supplies a tutorial to the interface, as each action you’re requested to perform is accompanied by subtitles revealing the appropriate command. Finally, it furnishes an excellent roleplaying vehicle for character creation, as various people you meet (a slave, an officer, a bureaucrat) require you to select a name, race, sex, birthsign, and skills configuration. You can design a character using one of three methods, answering a series of ten questions (which may bring back nostalgic memories to old Ultima game veterans), choosing one of twenty-one pre-figured classes, or completely creating your own class from scratch.”

Abner admits he finds the questions method “blunt and superficial,” but has better things to say about the game’s from-scratch character creator, though he notes you’ll want to read the manual to understand the kinds of options available to you and what they’ll mean throughout the game. There’s a lot of customization, he says, letting you be a mage with heavy armor if you’d like, or a fighter with excellent lockpicking.

That all sounds great, but let’s turn to Greg Kasavin, who has some compliments and some critiques as to how those skills develop over your time in Morrowind:

“The most interesting thing about Morrowind’s skill system is that it’s tied in with how you gain experience levels,” he writes in his 8.7/10 review. “In most role-playing games, you gain experience (and thus improve your abilities) mostly by killing stuff or solving quests. In Morrowind, you gain levels by practicing your character’s main skills. Other RPGs tend to cripple non-fighter characters by still forcing them to fight to gain levels. But in Morrowind, if you play as a thief, then you gain levels by thieving. If you play as a magic user, you gain levels by using magic, and so on. This is a clever system that makes perfect sense.

“However, it does have some problems, insofar as certain skills are much easier to improve than others. The playing field is leveled somewhat since skill improvement (through training) can simply be bought. Sadly, you might not realize until after many hours of play that some of your character’s skills just aren’t cutting it. Your options are to suck it up or start over. Some of the skills aren’t ineffective so much as they’re underdeveloped. Speechcraft, a seemingly sophisticated ability, is simplistic in practice. You have the option to try to flatter, intimidate, taunt, or bribe any of the NPCs in the game. But in reality, these are just thinly veiled dice rolls based on your speechcraft skill rating. If you fail, the other character loses affinity for you, but you can just keep trying until you succeed several times in a row. It’s as pointless (and can be as pointlessly addictive) as a virtual slot machine. It’s also rather ridiculous, since when you repeatedly try to bribe the same character, he or she will alternate between being insulted by your intentions and gladly accepting your money.”

It’s not just skills that critics are struggling with. A lot of reviews mention the clonkiness of the combat. Edge magazine, one of the few publications to give Morrowind a middling score (6/10), had plenty to say about that:

“Combat is a horrid, stodgy mess, with a presumably complicated but apparently arbitrary statistical system barely masked by random mouse-clicking – totally defeating any sense of involvement engendered by the first-person view. In order to manage the inventory and consume potions mid-battle, players are wrenched into a well-intentioned but ultimately overcomplicated set of drag-and-drop menus that further undermine any sense of engagement. Additionally, horribly simplistic AI routines conspire to sap the joy from the game, with NPCs steaming into combat with staggeringly little thought (it doesn’t occur to them to go through doors, for example).”

Edge also had criticism for the massive size of the open world, and how that size fostered confusion and a lack of purpose:

“More significantly, the vast open-endedness of the game world, combined with a totally freeform goal structure can result in long periods of aimless wandering and abject confusion, and the finer points of the game’s sociological composition can prove perplexing. Also, it’s too easy to waste time, items and effort pursuing a set-piece encounter before realising that it’s been designed with a much more experienced character in mind, and though there are quick (instantaneous in fact) modes of transport, the hours spent wandering through a largely brown and murky universe quickly become dispiriting.”

At All Game, Mark Hoogland agreed with Edge on the overwhelmingness of Morrowind in a 4/5 review:

“With so much to do, playing Morrowind can be a bewildering experience. The never ending procession of side quests can be overwhelming, with multiple guilds, temples, or factions to join, money to make, and even undocumented tasks like diving for pearls or exploring shipwrecks. A journal keeps track of the various quests your character has undertaken (and even some he turns down), but unfortunately they’re not removed or marked when completed. Having too many things to do is hardly a complaint, though, and devoted role-playing gamers will be happy for months. After the main quest is completed, the included editor allows unlimited creation of new quests and other modifications to the land of Vvardenfell.”

There were some contrary opinions to Edge’s and All Game’s on the world exploration aspect, though. IGN’s Barry Brenesal has very nice things to say about exploration in his review:

“Morrowind supplies us with an enormous world where whatever you see, from a skyscraper-sized mushroom to a table fork, is a separate 3D object. The level of conceptual detail is at times remarkable for a computer game, nowhere visibly more so than when you take a little backpacking trek through the outdoors. Try swimming to the tiny islets off Vvardenfell’s coasts, dive for oysters and check for pearls, or examine shipwrecks and fight off the rapacious slaughterfish. There are more than seventy alchemical ingredients you can gather in Morrowind, most of them from plants and mushrooms growing in specialized locations. You’ll also find more than three-hundred dungeons, ranging from simple (but beautifully atmospheric) caves and tombs with a few rooms — playing host to some local bandits, or a few annoyed skeletons — to more than seventy complex prisons, shrines and mines occupied by gods, false gods, and creatures that look like they were dreamed up by Salvador Dalí after a particularly bad fried dinner. These latter dungeons are frequently multi-leveled, and can include caves within buildings within ruins. Relish the experience.”

And here’s Kasavin again, also with compliments:

“Simply exploring Morrowind is possibly the best thing about it…the environments themselves are what steal the show. Extremely impressive effects, ranging from torrential rains and raging sandstorms to bodies of water that look so real they’ll make you thirsty, all help make the world seem alive. Soft ambient lighting and atmospheric hazing is also put to excellent use. You’ll always look forward to seeing the next of Morrowind’s numerous, imaginative, beautiful areas. You’ll feel adventurous just jogging from place to place, though you’ll want to take advantage of the game’s various modes of fast transportation whenever possible. These are really convenient, though it’s too bad that all you see when you do something like ride a ship or hop aboard a giant flealike siltstrider is a completely black loading screen. Moments later you magically appear in the new location. As a consolation, Morrowind’s loading times are generally short, such as when the game pauses abruptly but briefly to bring in new scenery as you’re traveling by foot.”

However, that massiveness also comes with some problems, apparently. Xbox Nation, which calls Morrowind “perhaps the most immersive Xbox game since Halo,” notes that its “biggest selling point—its expansive scope—is also its undoing. The game is daunting, with some quests requiring huge amounts of travel, while others depend on overly complex item-swapping errands. In addition, battles are clunky exercises, weighed down by poor quality PC–style creature animations and frustratingly low hit rates.”

Abner also had a breakdown of Morrowind’s technical triumphs and bumbles, specifically honing in on the audio…

“While the graphics do a tremendous job of sucking you into Morrowind‘s world, the audio isn’t quite as impressive. The musical score is good, and the voice acting isn’t shabby, there just isn’t enough of it. You’ll talk to a lady in one city, and then weeks later talk to another woman with the same voice. Monster sounds are fair, but the game misses a few opportunities to scare the pants off of you, like when creeping through a dungeon when your torch goes out. It’s just not as thrilling as it could be.”

…and some serious issues with bugs:

“Morrowind is a terrific experience, when and if you can get it to function properly. The game warns you right in the manual that if you experience a lot of crashes to lower the hardware acceleration on your sound card. In order to even play the game for more than 15 minutes at a time this had to be done. This effectively kills the positional audio that one gets from a card like the SoundBlaster Live X-Gamer (which can be terribly important in a game such as this). Not everyone is experiencing these crash issues, but it took two days of audio and video driver reinstallations, a reinstall of DirectX 8.1, and the buying of a new video card in order to find a setup that the game liked. Even now, if audio hardware acceleration is turned up, the game dies every 30 minutes, almost on cue.

“This is also a game that brings lesser PCs to their knees. The box says that a 500 MHz PC is the minimum requirement, and that an 800 MHz PC is recommended. This is a joke. On a Pentium 3 800 MHz PC with 256 MB SDRAM and 64 MB GeForce 2 video card, Morrowind runs fairly well. Details must be turned down a bit, but it’s very playable. On a 500 MHz PC with a GeForce 256, it’s basically unplayable with any level of detail. The more horsepower you have the better, and even then you can forget about maximizing all of the bells and whistles. This is a true resource pig.”

Worth noting though, Kavasin says Morrowind’s bugs, though extensive, are “trifling when compared with those in the retail release of Morrowind’s notoriously buggy predecessor, Daggerfall.”

It may seem like I’ve pulled just the most critical sections of each of these reviews when you compare them to the overall scores, but I can’t emphasize enough how strange the dissonance was as I read between the critiques of Morrowind’s bugginess, performance, jankiness, emptiness, combat, and how much critics claimed to like the whole package.

Game Informer’s Kristian Brogger called Morrowind a “triumph” and “one of the most in-depth and cerebral role-playing games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing” in a 9/10 review. But I want to turn to the second opinion (8.75/10) by Andrew Reiner for something that may explain the disconnect between the critique and the scores on Morrowind:

“There are no ‘what ifs’ involved within Elder Scrolls III. In such, the journey you take is the journey you make. The open-ended freedom can best be described as a single-player EverQuest. The amount of time you’ll invest into developing your character, and tackling the side quests and guild missions will consume your days and nights. The expansiveness of the quest is far from perfect, however. Aggravating zone loading occurs without warning, and the combat system is void of options. Nonetheless, the adventure at hand holds a certain undeniable charm that causes you to turn a blind eye to its shortcomings. If you’ve ever complained about why you couldn’t do this or that in an RPG, there are no boundaries here to keep you from experiencing what you want, when you want it.”

The story you just read is part of the 2002 edition of Warp Week, a Kotaku series that takes readers back to gaming’s past through a mix of time-dilated reviews, retrospectives, and on-the-ground reports.