Anyone here still play the game? Is it still worth playing, compared to newer games?
I’d say so, but then again Morrowind has a lot of quirks that make it hard to get into for modern players. Like the fact that the game doesn’t have quest markers. Instead, you get directions like “follow the road and turn left at the fork, it’ll be the first cave you see” and you have to follow those directions if you want to find anything. Or how the game uses a dice roll-like system to decide if you hit with your weapon or succeed at casting a spell. At the same time, there is a lot to like about Morrowind if you give it a chance. Unlike a lot of modern RPGs, you don’t start out as anyone special. You’re a nobody and you stay as a nobody for a good chunk of the game. To advance in the various guilds you have to actually level up your various skills and do enough quests to earn a promotion. So when you do reach the rank of guild master or complete the main quest and people call you a hero it feels like you’ve really accomplished something.
So yeah. Definitely worth playing, but it’s not for everybody and you have to remember that it’s an RPG from the early 2000s. If you play it with OpenMW there’s a great site called Modding OpenMW that catalogs mods that are compatible with OpenMW.
I wish RPGs would be more RPG again, immerse us in the world with things like directions rather than a UI for everything. Make players figure things out instead of being so hand-holdy.
Stuff like quest markers are convenient, and make the game less hard to get into for sure, but yeah, it does inevitably end up losing that aspect of immersing yourself in the world. You don’t really need to pay that much attention anymore, you don’t need to learn the world, you don’t need to try to integrate yourself into it.
Ideally we would have options to play in both ways, being able to toggle those UI features at will, but game devs aren’t really willing to put in that kinda work.
But it is very rewarding having to do stuff like reading a map without a GPS style position marker, and succeeding. And stuff like that.
It’s my favorite Elder Scrolls game. The most immersive for me, and if you just throw on some textures it looks amazing. And if you like modding, you can achieve some amazing things with the available mods.
I play it every one to two years still, maybe twenty years after my first playthrough.
Could not recommend it harrrrder.
I started my very first actual play-through a two or so weeks ago. The combat mechanics take the most to get used to as it’s a weird mixture of seeing fighting animations that just don’t at all match with what’s actually happening (it’s roll-of-the-dice system, basically). But once you give yourself a bit to get used to it —and level up your super weak starting stats— it can actually be a ton of fun. I’m certainly having a blast with it, at long last :).
I play while having uesp.net open alongside the game, as I do need to take a peek to figure some stuff out every now and then. There’s great joy to be had in getting some rough route description from a person and trying to figure out how to actually get there, but at times these are so vague, inaccurate or needlessly convoluted that I just wouldn’t have been able to figure it out without the wiki’s help. It is very likely that this is a “me” problem though, I just tend to have trouble not zoning out or being confused when a simple ask for where a store is results in a Tolkien-sized description somehow involving all four compass directions(!?), while being in the town in question already.
I installed a handful of mods, but kept it to a relative minimum and “vanilla plus” setup. “The modding game” is just not something I like doing, it feels way too much like debugging, which I already do plenty of at $DAYJOB. I would recommend just picking a few before you start a real play-through though, as some might not play nicely with an existing save but their positive impact can be quite substantial to have. Mods like Tamriel Rebuilt, Patch for Purists, Expansion Delay, Remiro’s Groundcover, and and Beautiful Cities of Morrowind are ones I would personally highly recommend, along with a few voice related ones too (Idle Talk and Quest Voice Greetings are ones I am using) to get a little more variety in what is being said.
Enabling the “Real Disposition” mod is quite nice too, if you can stomach people really not quite liking you as being the “outlander” that you are. I picked the lightest “base” variant of that mod, which gives just a bit of a negative starting bias, more closely matching with how they greet you anyway.
Ultimately I’d say it’s worth trying it out, but only if you’re able to get used to its inherent jankyness. It’ll never quite feel like a modern game as some of its gameplay mechanics are just so very different from what we’d expect these days. If you’re able to look past that though, at least based on my admittedly limited (I’m about 14-15 hours in?) experience, it’s quite a beautiful and interesting world to get lost in.
Exciting stuff! Not having to manually edit the files when setting up mods is a welcome change and I’m excited that they have started implementing the Lua scripting. Obviously, there is still a long, long way to go until OpenMW reaches parity with MWSE when it comes to Lua, but it will be interesting to see what mods people come up with as the features expanded in subsequent releases.