Finished Morrowind
Nov. 18th, 2003 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmazeLast night I finished the main plot in Morrowind. In all, the game was well worth it for entertainment value; its biggest issue was stability, but when it crashed, it would crash cleanly, and restoring from your last quicksave was never an issue. The UI had minor issues too, but I've dealt with far worse. I thought it was very playable, and if you like fantasy RPGs and don't object to first-person interfaces, you'll probably enjoy it.
I played as an Imperial thief. Quickly discovered that people in the game are really clueless; if they're not looking, you can unlock the door to their private quarters, but once it's unlocked, they don't care if you go in or out or what. Similarly, there was a "guard" at one point who didn't react at all to my systematically searching all of the rooms in the corridor he was guarding.
The biggest problem at the end of the game, in fact, was carrying around items that were just too valuable. Finding a 10-pound glass sword worth 10,000 gold is kind of neat, until you realize that most shopkeepers have about 500 gold, and very very few have more than 2,000. (Online spoilers will tell you where they are, though.) So the most usefully valuable items in game turn out to be gems which are light (0.1-0.2 pounds) and valuable (100-250 gold, or about a thousand gold per pound), but cheap enough that you can still sell them in shops. Still, I wound up with 35,000 gold before I went on the final part of the main quest, but I had good enough equipment that there was really nothing to spend it on.
I wound up only doing the Thieves' Guild quests and the main quest, plus a bunch of local flavor things. This was still a reasonable amount of plot. I liked the point-based levelling system; a set of about a third of the available skills matter to your character, and when you get 10 points in those skills, you gain a level, and can increase your main stats (by the number of skills you've increased that have that stat as their main stat, plus one). But you can still gain (or buy) points in other stats, so I was an amateur healer and alchemist along with a professional thief.
Will I play it again? Maybe, haven't decided yet; if I do, it'll be as a dunmer (native? dark elf) sorceror or battlemage. And I'll probably run more of the side quests, join the mage's guild and the tribunal temple and maybe the fighter's guild and eventually the assassins' guild. Continuing playing with my current character really isn't that exciting, I'd just wind up wandering around killing things with ultra-splufty weapons.
Since I've complained a bit, I'll also say that the writing in the game was generally very good. The books I actually read through were interesting, and there's a lot of writing. NPCs were interestingly racist; the world was put together quite sensibly, and the main plot did eventually weave together how the emperor, tribunal temple, Sixth House, and everything else fit together. And there were a couple of places where I say to NPC 1, "I need you to help me" and the NPC says back "no, never". Then NPC 2 says "yup, he's never going to help you, so you'll have to kill him. Sucks."
...so now I need a new distraction. I could put things I already have (MoO3, MSTS) on my laptop and play those. Or actually come up with a hobby that doesn't involve computers. Shocking, that concept. :-)
I played as an Imperial thief. Quickly discovered that people in the game are really clueless; if they're not looking, you can unlock the door to their private quarters, but once it's unlocked, they don't care if you go in or out or what. Similarly, there was a "guard" at one point who didn't react at all to my systematically searching all of the rooms in the corridor he was guarding.
The biggest problem at the end of the game, in fact, was carrying around items that were just too valuable. Finding a 10-pound glass sword worth 10,000 gold is kind of neat, until you realize that most shopkeepers have about 500 gold, and very very few have more than 2,000. (Online spoilers will tell you where they are, though.) So the most usefully valuable items in game turn out to be gems which are light (0.1-0.2 pounds) and valuable (100-250 gold, or about a thousand gold per pound), but cheap enough that you can still sell them in shops. Still, I wound up with 35,000 gold before I went on the final part of the main quest, but I had good enough equipment that there was really nothing to spend it on.
I wound up only doing the Thieves' Guild quests and the main quest, plus a bunch of local flavor things. This was still a reasonable amount of plot. I liked the point-based levelling system; a set of about a third of the available skills matter to your character, and when you get 10 points in those skills, you gain a level, and can increase your main stats (by the number of skills you've increased that have that stat as their main stat, plus one). But you can still gain (or buy) points in other stats, so I was an amateur healer and alchemist along with a professional thief.
Will I play it again? Maybe, haven't decided yet; if I do, it'll be as a dunmer (native? dark elf) sorceror or battlemage. And I'll probably run more of the side quests, join the mage's guild and the tribunal temple and maybe the fighter's guild and eventually the assassins' guild. Continuing playing with my current character really isn't that exciting, I'd just wind up wandering around killing things with ultra-splufty weapons.
Since I've complained a bit, I'll also say that the writing in the game was generally very good. The books I actually read through were interesting, and there's a lot of writing. NPCs were interestingly racist; the world was put together quite sensibly, and the main plot did eventually weave together how the emperor, tribunal temple, Sixth House, and everything else fit together. And there were a couple of places where I say to NPC 1, "I need you to help me" and the NPC says back "no, never". Then NPC 2 says "yup, he's never going to help you, so you'll have to kill him. Sucks."
...so now I need a new distraction. I could put things I already have (MoO3, MSTS) on my laptop and play those. Or actually come up with a hobby that doesn't involve computers. Shocking, that concept. :-)
