The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls games are renowned for huge game worlds and customizable character classes. DaggerFall was also known for having more bugs than student housing. Morrowind thankfully is not buggy. Nope, it's a beautiful game with a lot to enjoy. Subtract the balancing issues and the system requirements and it's not nearly as good as it could be, but I enjoyed my time with it.

Never played an Elder Scrolls game before? No problem. The game starts you off as a prisoner being released under mysterious circumstances, and walks you through everything you need to do as the basic story unfolds. It even has you generate your character like this. You can go with several quick design options, or go so far as to design your own character class. This sounds pretty cool. I remember a fellow RPG lover, Ken Scobie (rest in peace Ken), used to spend time outside the game just designing characters for DaggerFall on paper, but more on this in a sec.

The interface is as simple as it could be. Standard direction keys, space bar to open doors or activate items, and click the right mouse button to bring up your stats, inventory, and maps. I think the game's basic walking speed is a little too slow, but the interface is one of the simplest to pick up ever.

The game world is quite simply beautiful, and the geography seems as real as any I've ever seen in a game. They give you a continent to play in, and ho boy is it huge. The game has to stop to load parts of the exterior and the interior, but the layout is totally convincing. Walk from a town down a forest path towards some ruins, and the geography gradually shifts in a believable way. It works so well that you can be merrily tromping along and then suddenly realize you've marched into a bad neighborhood. Things are a decent space apart, so when someone gives you directions to a dungeon, it's not merely up the hill from the local fighters' guild. It's cross the bridge, turn right at the sign post, look for an old road...The graphics are also very good, they didn't skimp on them considering the sheer size of the environments. This is Ascension, but done right.

Remember though what a system hog Ascension was? Morrowind will command a lot of your memory too. The basic requirements are a Pentium III 500, 128 MB RAM for Window 98 (256 required for XP/2000). Recommended is 800 Mhz or better, 256 MB RAM. On my Pentium II 750 with 256 MB RAM and Windows 98, it was fairly easy to slow it down, and there were long load times for indoors and encountering new creatures. Even when I lowered the resolution. I'd say a gigahertz machine is probably a necessity for decent performance.

The trade off though are the best graphics ever in a first-person RPG. Check out those monsters. They are superbly detailed, and some of them are very, very large. And when you kill them, they die in an entertaining variety of ways. Some just keel over, others fall apart. They appear in the countryside like they belong there. Not all are hostile, some will just hang out and leave you alone if you do the same. Furthermore, the artists didn't just go for your standard RPG monsters. Most have their own distinct look, some of which could be described as what would happen if the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park had sex with the creations normally seen on the cover of H.P. Lovecraft collections.

Spell effects are also real purty, even though they make your motherboard moan and groan with the effort. I like that spellcasters tend to avoid melee combat, retreating as you advance. Yeah, it's a pain with the slow speed and system hang-ups, but it's a believable tactic. Environments have vegetation, rock formations, and reasonably detailed textures. And you're also a rarity in first-person RPGs--you're a character who can swim. Very good-looking water too, and when you're submerged the sound effects are perfect.

RPGers generally consider graphics a bonus. The real game lies in the mechanics and the game story. The story measures up quite well, as a matter of fact. Once you start down the main story path, you find yourself up to a little cloak and dagger activity, even if you're not playing a thief. Pretty thrilling, actually. As usual, you can pursue the main story thread, search for the many sidequests, or just take off and explore, going where you damn well please.

I especially like the game's conversation system. Stretches of dialogue have key subjects highlighted, like hyperlinks on a webpage. Just click on the topic to ask the speaker about it, or select it from a menu on the side of the conversation screen. Although there is too much general dialogue plugged in, especially with the non-essential NPCs, there are plenty of topics to ask about.

Game mechanics? Decent, but plenty of room for improvement, and not up to other recent RPGs. One problem is that though you might make a certain kind of character, this character is hard to distinguish from other character classes. You can choose to be, say, a fighter, this does not limit you from other skills such as magic and stealth nearly enough. Magic is especially powerful, and can be used to compensate for just about any other ability in the game too easily. Some more balancing was definitely required here.

Combat isn't so thrilling either. With a weapon in hand, you just click on a target until it's dead. Holding longer supposedly delivers a mightier attack, but it's hard to tell, since the game gives you no feedback on an opponent's state. A skeleton with full health looks identical to one that's going to fold on the next hit. There's not hit point count or anything.

The game is single-player only, but it does come with its own tools for building your levels. I tried it, and it's slightly easier than other 3D editing tools, though it will require a lot of patience to use. It crashed a few times on me as well, so save your work often. The editor comes with a basic tutorial in the help files, which is pretty easy to follow.

It's hard to visualize the perfect RPG, but I have a feeling it would have something like Arcanum's character and game mechanics, Neverwinter Nights's multiplayer options...and Morrowind's game world and graphics. So Morrowind has a third of perfection. That's not bad. As I said, the balance isn't what it could be, but if you don't mind being a high level Diablo 1-style character, the game is an entertaining journey.

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