18-year-old Morrowind mod project releases 60 new quests, massive new map

[erek]

Still need to play through morrow wind!

"With this latest patch, dubbed 19.12, the map is just a little closer to completion. However there’s still plenty left to add. According to the announcement post for the Aanthirin patch, the next project for the Tamriel Rebuilt team will be Thirr Valley, a region of the Nasis District. Apparently most of the exteriors for this area are completed and it’s around two thirds of the way done, so it’s possible that could be heading to the new and improved Morrowind sometime next summer."

https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/20/...rn-elder-scrolls-3-morrowind-aanthirin-update

 

[OutOfPhase]

Very special game for me. I used to escape to that weird alien world, and would like to revisit it someday.

 

[OnceSetThisCannotChange]

Best of the series.

 

[Nenu]

I tried hard a few times to enjoy Morrowind but found it clunky, dull and very repetitive unfortunately.
This was around when Skyrim was released, I wish my first encounter was much earlier, I understand the nostalgia.
Will this mod help any?

 

[OutOfPhase]

I tried hard a few times to enjoy Morrowind but found it clunky, dull and very repetitive unfortunately.
This was around when Skyrim was released, I wish my first encounter was much earlier, I understand the nostalgia.
Will this mod help any?

Oh the game itself was absolutely repetitive and clunky. Possibly the mod addresses some, but I would not expect a ton on that front. If they did, it would lose some of the charm to those clinging to old memories.

The game aspects are often wonky and unbalanced. But I really loved the main story and the world. At the end, I remember just sitting there for a while. Sad my saga had ended, and thinking back at the bazillion hours I lived in that world. I WAS the Nerevar, Moon and Star.
Really, it's hard to describe the immersion I felt for this game. I suspect I wasn't the only one, given the love folks seem to have for it still.

 

[Mode13]

I genuinely loved Morrowind as well but I too bought it at launch when it was the most immersive RPG the world had ever known... The only thing I never liked from day 1 was the odd mechanics of just plain missing attacks without any feedback, a problem daggerfall had as well... but besides that it was heaven. I can't tell you how many times I played through that game during college... Used to hole up in my dorm just to play very often.. Today it feels quite dated and I tend to go for Oblivion..

I'm also in the extreme minority that absolutely loves Oblivion as well. Combat was so polished and the graphics were so much better. I understand the gripes on that one too, especially if you want to close all the oblivion gates, super repetitive.. but eh.. That game still stands up to this day, I can play it vanilla and love it every time.. Just wish it got controller support, Steam Controller is doing ok on my new playthrough though

Skyrim didn't grab me nearly as much as Morrowind, it felt closed off and simplified, still a great game though.

/random rant

 

[Teenk9]

Best of all Elder Scrolls game. Pushed my 9500 Pro to the limit. I loved the minimal hand holding- having to actually listen to NPCs give direction or get lost made it feel like you're actually adventuring. Of course some of those NPCs give absolutely incorrect directions too, just like in the real world.

 

[Auer]

It's been 18 fucking years...???

I'm old.

Goodnight.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

All these years on Morrowind is still the best game in the series, and arguably the best CRPG ever made.

Oblivion/Skyrim aren't 'bad' games, but they're dumbed-down for consoles with crappy UIs, GPS navigation, and simplified text/voice acting for the console peasants who don't reed reel good. Apparently very few Xbox Morrowind players ever made it from Seyda Neen to Balmora to find Caius.

 

[Balkroth]

All these years on Morrowind is still the best game in the series, and arguably the best CRPG ever made.

Oblivion/Skyrim aren't 'bad' games, but they're dumbed-down for consoles with crappy UIs, GPS navigation, and simplified text/voice acting for the console peasants who don't reed reel good. Apparently very few Xbox Morrowind players ever made it from Seyda Neen to Balmora to find Caius.

Totally agree, with Daggerfall being my second favorite .

 

[N4CR]

I genuinely loved Morrowind as well but I too bought it at launch when it was the most immersive RPG the world had ever known... The only thing I never liked from day 1 was the odd mechanics of just plain missing attacks without any feedback, a problem daggerfall had as well... but besides that it was heaven. I can't tell you how many times I played through that game during college... Used to hole up in my dorm just to play very often.. Today it feels quite dated and I tend to go for Oblivion..

I'm also in the extreme minority that absolutely loves Oblivion as well. Combat was so polished and the graphics were so much better. I understand the gripes on that one too, especially if you want to close all the oblivion gates, super repetitive.. but eh.. That game still stands up to this day, I can play it vanilla and love it every time.. Just wish it got controller support, Steam Controller is doing ok on my new playthrough though

Skyrim didn't grab me nearly as much as Morrowind, it felt closed off and simplified, still a great game though.

/random rant

I also prefer the environment and storyline of oblivion. Skyrim was pretty meh for me especially after oblivion texture packs on my x800xt. Skyrim looked shit and played awkwardly after that experience (7970 to boot) and was disappointing. Sure was some cool new stuff but wasn't as bleak and dark as oblivion.

Mate used to play morrowind and loved it. At like 15fps on an s3 virge laptop lol.
I'll try it one day as what people have said up there sounds great, no hand holding is something I love.

 

[legcramp]

Game would be better with loot boxes and skins.

 

[Mode13]

I also prefer the environment and storyline of oblivion. Skyrim was pretty meh for me especially after oblivion texture packs on my x800xt. Skyrim looked shit and played awkwardly after that experience (7970 to boot) and was disappointing. Sure was some cool new stuff but wasn't as bleak and dark as oblivion.

Mate used to play morrowind and loved it. At like 15fps on an s3 virge laptop lol.
I'll try it one day as what people have said up there sounds great, no hand holding is something I love.

The crazy thing to think about is that 15-30 fps was pretty much normal for morrowind at launch, that was about all you could get out of a modest Pentium 4 (~2ghz).. I first played it on a Pentium III..

 

[DogsofJune]

Nice, I'll look at this when I get back home.

 

[ep0x73]

Could not get into morrowwind but oblivion was awesome and skyrim even better

 

[chameleoneel]

All these years on Morrowind is still the best game in the series, and arguably the best CRPG ever made.

Oblivion/Skyrim aren't 'bad' games, but they're dumbed-down for consoles with crappy UIs, GPS navigation, and simplified text/voice acting for the console peasants who don't reed reel good. Apparently very few Xbox Morrowind players ever made it from Seyda Neen to Balmora to find Caius.

This PC Vs. Console stuff is so tired. Majority of games nowadays have voice acting. Including all your favorite CRPG types. Even many of the actual classics.

Morrowind was a breakout success on Xbox, despite it being arguably buggier than the PC version. Console players payed their dues, plenty. Good game is worth the bug fest. And they fixed a lot of it with the GOTY edition.

Oblivion and Skyrim are the way they are, because game development has changed. Every object and asset in Morrowind was hand placed and hand tweaked. We rarely see that anymore, aside from indies and a few special projects. Oblivion was the start of assets being dynamically/proceduraly generated via various parameters and whatnot. To this day, we still see the limitations of that sort of development method (See: Dirt Rally games, Descenders, etc).
Oblivion was an early game on 360, which had cutting edge hardware in it as the first retail product with completely unified shader architecture. There's no reason it couldn't be as complex as any PC game at the time. Oblivion is the way it is, due to compressed development cycles and streamlined dev tools.

 

[Derangel]

Could not get into morrowwind but oblivion was awesome and skyrim even better

I couldn't disagree more. FO76 aside, Skyrim is the worst BGS game for me. I even liked FO4 more. Everything about Skyrim feels so lazy and dull. There's no depth to anything, most quests are worse than prior games, every single guild sucks, the dungeon design somehow seems worse than Oblivion's copypasta effort. All of Bethesda's claims of it being built on a new engine were utter BS too and it showed. Every part of Skyrim feels like a lesser version of Oblivion, which was already a lesser Morrowind. Morrowind had A LOT of problems, especially with how clunky the gameplay was, but there was so much depth to the world and a lot of the mechanics that gave the player so many options. Skyrim just...Exists, barely.

 

[chameleoneel]

I highly recommend Nehrim: At Fate's Edge total conversion for Oblvion and Enderal: Forgotten Stories for Skyrim. The first Enderal is solid, but Forgotten Stories is great.

 

[vegeta535]

I tried hard a few times to enjoy Morrowind but found it clunky, dull and very repetitive unfortunately.
This was around when Skyrim was released, I wish my first encounter was much earlier, I understand the nostalgia.
Will this mod help any?

I agree. I also believe the same extents to all of the ES games. I never could understand appeal of these games.

 

[OutOfPhase]

I couldn't disagree more. FO76 aside, Skyrim is the worst BGS game for me. I even liked FO4 more. Everything about Skyrim feels so lazy and dull. There's no depth to anything, most quests are worse than prior games, every single guild sucks, the dungeon design somehow seems worse than Oblivion's copypasta effort. All of Bethesda's claims of it being built on a new engine were utter BS too and it showed. Every part of Skyrim feels like a lesser version of Oblivion, which was already a lesser Morrowind. Morrowind had A LOT of problems, especially with how clunky the gameplay was, but there was so much depth to the world and a lot of the mechanics that gave the player so many options. Skyrim just...Exists, barely.

Agreed. Skytrim was like 0.6 * Oblivion + Snow. Modders of course went nuts, and you can cobble together a really good game with work, but I have to feel that's the job of the developer.

Skyrim's success was as a platform, not an actual game IMO.

 

[M76]

All these years on Morrowind is still the best game in the series, and arguably the best CRPG ever made.

Oblivion/Skyrim aren't 'bad' games, but they're dumbed-down for consoles with crappy UIs, GPS navigation, and simplified text/voice acting for the console peasants who don't reed reel good. Apparently very few Xbox Morrowind players ever made it from Seyda Neen to Balmora to find Caius.

Reading has nothing to do with console vs. pc, I read books, not videogames. It's a bare minimum that speech should have voiceover in games, I don't know how can you spin that as a negative.

 

[CptCabbit]

Reading has nothing to do with console vs. pc, I read books, not videogames. It's a bare minimum that speech should have voiceover in games, I don't know how can you spin that as a negative.

Depends on the quality of the voice over. Bad voice work can more easily ruin a game than can good voice work improve it.

 

[Mode13]

Oblivion and Skyrim are the way they are, because game development has changed. Every object and asset in Morrowind was hand placed and hand tweaked. We rarely see that anymore, aside from indies and a few special projects. Oblivion was the start of assets being dynamically/proceduraly generated via various parameters and whatnot. To this day, we still see the limitations of that sort of development method (See: Dirt Rally games, Descenders, etc).
Oblivion was an early game on 360, which had cutting edge hardware in it as the first retail product with completely unified shader architecture. There's no reason it couldn't be as complex as any PC game at the time. Oblivion is the way it is, due to compressed development cycles and streamlined dev tools.

Yep.. Games are products of their times.. Morrowind surely would have had far more features and voice acting if it were just possible but it wasn't. Tech wasn't there yet AND the company practically bankrupted themselves making it. Oblivion had a vastly improved budget and massively better baseline system requirements it was developed for.. I was worried about the changes like most but kept an open mind and absolutely loved the game. Procedural generation has it's limits and it didn't feel as well crafted as morrowind in a lot of ways, but that's one con against many pros to me.

------
UI was designed with consoles in mind, that's for sure. Morrowind had the nice multi window UI that made it look like it's own OS. I can agree there and would like to see a new TES game PC release have it's own UI, but given that PC gamers are just using Xbox one controllers these days, I doubt that will happen. PCs have made a huge resurgence lately though, high refresh and good controls are in demand, so we shall see..

I won't argue which TES has the best story, but for me Oblivion holds the highest place in my memory. The graphics were mind-bogglingly insane, wonderful score, wonderful story, immersive gameplay. I almost never fast traveled in Oblivion even though it was available.. much preferred just wandering around and finding everything.

 

[Delicieuxz]

Best of the series.

Totally. Morrowind is the last RPG that Bethesda has made. Oblivion and onward are not RPGs but are Action-Adventure games which use quest markers and quest directives to always tell the player where to go and what to do. An RPG doesn't do that but instead presents the player with information and then it's up to the player to figure out and decide what to do with that information, and there can be multiple possible things to do with the information and multiple possible outcomes. With Bethesda games, the questing is on-rails and it's just 'go here and do that'. That takes the player agency out of the equation so the player just follows the quest markers and kills stuff along the way. That's the template for an Action-Adventure game.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

I read books, not videogames.

There are over 1000 in-game books altogether in Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, though the number of new lore books declined in the newer games.

It's a bare minimum that speech should have voiceover in games, I don't know how can you spin that as a
negative.

Personally, I'd rather have well-written text dialog. I don't enjoy listening to the same 5 voice actors doing all the in-game voices, and the extra time/cost/QA for voiceovers detracts from other aspects of the game. It's much more difficult to do complex, branching plots if you have to voice them all.

 

[M76]

There are over 1000 in-game books altogether in Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, though the number of new lore books declined in the newer games.

How is that related to speech? I meant I read books printed on paper, not dull conversation from a computer screen.

Personally, I'd rather have well-written text dialog. I don't enjoy listening to the same 5 voice actors doing all the in-game voices, and the extra time/cost/QA for voiceovers detracts from other aspects of the game. It's much more difficult to do complex, branching plots if you have to voice them all.

It's not an exclusive or question , the person doing studio work can't just suddenly do bugfixing. If they have the budget why shouldn't there be VO? If a game had no VO for NPCs it is an automatic deal breaker for me. In the 90s it was perhaps accepted. In that regard it doesn't matter if a game has terrible VO, or no VO the result is the same: I'm not buying. And seeing that only a few indie titles dare release without full VO these days means there is a market demand.

 

[Meeho]

It's not an exclusive or question , the person doing studio work can't just suddenly do bugfixing. If they have the budget why shouldn't there be VO? If a game had no VO for NPCs it is an automatic deal breaker for me. In the 90s it was perhaps accepted. In that regard it doesn't matter if a game has terrible VO, or no VO the result is the same: I'm not buying. And seeing that only a few indie titles dare release without full VO these days means there is a market demand.

Well, that's one of the reasons today's RPGs are bland restrictive shit compared to before.