The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition

Morrowind was the first RPG I ever played, and it shaped my gaming baseline. Every RPG I played after it, and honestly a lot of games in general, have been measured against what Morrowind offered. It set the standard for me, and even today there aren't many games that capture the same feeling. The biggest thing that made Morrowind stand out was the amount of freedom it gave the player. You're the main character, but the game never forces you to play a certain way. You can walk in any direction and have a completely different experience than someone who went another way. Every playthrough can feel different because the game gives you choices instead of constantly pushing you toward the next objective. Your character can wear almost anything, use almost anything as a weapon, have complete control over magic, and be built however you want. If you want to become a warrior, you can. If you want to become a powerful mage and create ridiculous custom spells, you can do that too. If you want to mix everything together into your own unique build, the game lets you. It never feels like you're locked into one playstyle. You can follow the main quest if that's what you want, or ignore it completely and spend dozens or even hundreds of hours exploring. Join different factions, hunt down rare artifacts, clear out caves and ruins, or simply wander the island to see what you find. You can build a house full of treasures in a tiny mud shack, or kill the inhabitants of a manor and claim it as your own. The game lets you create your own stories instead of simply following the one it lays out for you. Looking back, I'm not sure there was another game like it when it came out. It was doing things that felt years ahead of its time. The amount of player freedom, exploration, and role-playing was unlike anything I had experienced, and that's why Morrowind has remained one of the most important games I've ever played. Even after all these years, it still sets the bar for what I want from an RPG.

epic

9 / 10 (vanilla mode) For me, it's tied with SKYRIM as the very best ELDER SCROLLS game ever. Dabbled with this game before on my CD discs copy, and having a go again this time for dozens of hours, this is still loads of fun to play today, and in some ways, it's still a beautiful game to play today. Dated graphics with lots of flat ground textures, but even with the dated graphics, the environments and creatures are incredible. Many fantasy RPGs I've played often have some of the same tropes like castles, dragons, caves, fields, wolf like creatures, giant spiders, etc. And in some ways, that is true to an extent with SKYRIM and OBLIVION where the environments were mostly conventional. But when you play MORROWIND, you really feel you are exploring a whole brand new world. Even just running around the world with the Blinding Boots of Speed (with magical resistance to my character), I kept stumbling across locations and interiors where my eyes suddenly bulged in awe. Incredibly imaginative and exotic environments, a lot of environmental designs and creatures really do look native to MORROWIND instead of copying things from other games. As for the basic gameplay, it is very playable once you get the hang of the character creation stuff, how the gameplay rules work, and it becomes much easier when you get the Blinding Boots of Speed. Combat is not as refined as SKYRIM's, but there is still decent combat gameplay anyway (with some areas that are no go areas until you are strong and endurable enough). I often have to bribe other characters in order to progress my quests without killing anyone, lol. And MORROWIND doesn't hold your hand too much like with SKYRIM. You have to really explore and figure out solutions to some problems of the quests like when characters refuse to do something. I'm only halfway through the main storyline (I'm at the point where I have to get proclaimed titles from Ashlander camps and councillor people). I previously played much of it on my CD discs copy (and I still have it for using its instruction manual and its lovely physical map). Difficulty mode has been at least Normal and upscaled it quite harder, when I started finding killing creatures in the wilderness way too easy. I do want to finish the main quest at some point, and maybe go to the additional island as part of the expansion pack. There have been various expansion mods, and I'm really looking forward to the SKYWIND mod (if it ever comes out). MORROWIND would've been 10/10 if it had the minor improvements of SKYRIM like the combat system, and if it ironed out its technical flaws such as glitching Cliff Racers and its repetitive soundtrack (which itself is very good, but repetitive).

10/10

I just completed the main story and yes it's a slow-paced game if you are playing without a guide or googling but because of this slowness Morrowind became my second beloved-doomed world. Overall it's a damn good game.

Morrowind best ES lowkey. Only matched by Enderal.

Morrowind is an absolutely crazy game. This was a game made by a studio who thought they were done for, so it's a game where they threw absolutely everything they could at it. It's a game with an insane number of quests, and more named NPCs than in Oblivion and Skyrim COMBINED. And it's not like the quests you do get are poorly thought out, or lacking depth or emotional impact. There's a quest where you're asked to escort a slave to a location. If you do that, she's immediately murdered and opened up so they can get the stash of drugs they've hidden in her body. This game has some of the DARKEST and most messed up content of possibly any mainstream game. Like puzzles? You can literally view the entirety of Morrowind as one large puzzle game. There's a series of 36 books about the life of Vivec, and every one is a skill book, so (if you min/max like me) you'll probably not collect them all until you've nearly maxed all your skills. Not only do these books tell such an insane story that it would never have been allowed in a game like this if it hadn't been hidden in actual books you have to read, but the 36 books together make one entire puzzle you can solve. (or you could just cheat and read the lore page about Vivec on the wiki) Morrowind is still a game from the tail end of an era where you'd literally use a pen and notebook to track clues and what you were doing, so the journal reflects this. This does bother a lot of people. It'll say something like "Kaye told me to go and find this item" and you'll have to remember for yourself who Kaye is, and where you met him. Directions are given in the way people would actually give directions, which lots of people find frustratingly vague. Sometimes the questgivers even get confused, and mess up a direction. One thing to be aware of is the character speed. If you don't optimise a character build for speed, you'll almost always create the slowest possible character. If you build the character for speed, they'll be over 2.5 times faster right from the start, which is a massive massive difference. Pick 'The Steed' as the star sign on a first play through. It will make the game far more fun. Preferably also a race and class with bonuses to speed and athletics. Another thing that's often said about Morrowind is that there's no fast travel. There's actually at least nine different ways to fast travel, and as you learn the world, it becomes easier and easier to get from one place to another. You even learn how to combine the different methods into a travel network, so that difficult trips in the early game become little 'micro puzzles' where you can work out quick ways to get nearly anywhere. The balance of the game is kind of interesting. As you go on, you almost break the game automatically. Even taking intended in-game mechanics, many simple potion effects just stack, so you can drink 50 potions and become game-breakingly powerful. The game presents you with examples of literally broken jump scrolls just a few steps outside the starting area that would let you jump halfway across the continent. Alchemy only needs the slightest nudge to become absurdly powerful. Enchanting is the same. There are exploits EVERYWHERE, and it's a game that's quite happy to let you use them. On top of all that, this is a game that's been getting heavily modded for decades, and one mod in particular, Tamriel Rebuilt, is a contender for the largest mod for any game ever, more or less doubling the amount of content. So when thinking about buying the game, you also have to consider that you also get access to all that as well. There's a few negatives, like lingering bugs (pickpocketing in morrowind has always been broken and never fixed) but in contrast to the depth of story, variety of creatures and areas, and amount of beautifully crafted content, it's pretty much a 'must play' if you like these types of games.