What’s wrong with Morrowind?

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind is a multi-platform RPG for the PC and X-Box. Its main features are its open ended gameplay and its large, lush and fully explorable 3D world.

However compared to an exemplary RPG with a superficially less attractive gameworld like, Planescape: Torment, it falls down in a number of ways. Comparing the two may be instructive to anyone looking to create the perfect RPG.

The thrill of exploring in Morrowind is no doubt akin to the excitement many have when indulging in the MMORPG craze that has swept the world. While I myself have not indulged due partly to financial and time constraints and partly due to a few negative experiences with free trials (turns out that the stupidity of real people can ruin the atmosphere of most things). The greatest and most emotionally engaging aspect of Morrowind comes when you are exploring something new and unfamiliar, and this is a sensation you get often when playing Morrowind. Even when you have been to an area once already its likely you missed something in Morrowind's detailed, and vast, three dimensional landscape where you can fly and swim, just coming into a previously visited area from a new direction can be a fresh experience. Morrowind also makes excellent use of lighting to drive its atmosphere to greater heights, the sense of surprise and fear when suddenly attacked in almost pitch black, winding cavern is palpable. Things like the sand storms and the skies are a sight to behold and very well implemented the landscape seems almost alive. Yet somehow the rest of Morrowind squanders this initial legacy.

What's wrong is two fold, most importantly is the lack of personality and life exhibited by the NPC inhabitants of this fantastic landscape. As you wander from generic NPC number one, to generic NPC number two with their identical lines of overly-long-read-from-an-encyclopaedia-like dialogue and with visual texturing that fails to match up to the beauty exhibited elsewhere, disbelief begins to become unhinged. Perhaps worse than this is that it is impossible to distinguish between Generic NPCs like these and NPCs with something worthwhile to say, without first engaging them in hideously boring conversation. Many generic NPCs in other games (Baldur's Gate 2 springs to mind) are identifiable on sight. All this too would be forgivable if the writing for the other, non-generic NPCs was good but all too often it too is weak. Humour is very rare in characters speech, often the only lines of non-generic dialogue a character will have relate to the specific quest they are involved with. A character who genuinely has their own opinions on all the events going on is very, very rare if not non-existent. It may indeed have been a huge undertaking to inject all these character's with personalities but I would have guessed no more huge than the undertaking involved in producing the expansive game world.

The second fault lies in the difficulties the game mechanics have in adjusting to the open ended nature of play. For a start, the game mechanics themselves are flawed intrinsically, being overly biased in difficulty towards playing a fighter. The combat and general battle experiences form a large part of the game and yet are very shallow and untactical (playing a fighter amounts to getting in close and clicking the mouse until your foe is dead, drinking healing potions, rinse and repeat. An oft repeated formula in RPG's, but in 3D it feels particularly shallow and Morrowind does not contain a good battle preparation system). It also become easy to break the economy in the game due to the tendencies of the game makers to leave high value useless items lying around in the open early on in the game, even the stupidest player can easily become absolutely loaded within about an hour and a half of playing the game.

We can contrast this quite neatly with something like Planescape: Torment, a much less open ended game but bristling with character and moral dilemmas (Morrowind contains little in the way of a moral code, kill someone off in Morrowind and you can just pay a fine to clear your name and be done with it). The graphics in Planescape: Torment become immaterial as you are drawn in by the expertly told story, full of mystery and genuinely interesting choices.