A Morrowind Retrospective: Part Two: The World

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The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind is a hell of a game, probably one of my favorite Elder Scrolls games, and by a lot. It has an energy to it that Oblivion and Skyrim just don't really capture in the same way, and that is a shame. This Morrowind Retrospective series should sum up my feelings about whether Morrowind still holds up and how it has aged.
I am gonna be less nice than a lot of review series, but unlike most people giving more harsh critique of Morrowind, I am an actual Morrowind superfan. A lot of people are coming at Morrowind without really understanding how the game works or what the appeal is, and people who are not really passionate about the game tend to have very, very bad takes about it.
On the other hand, there is also a bit of a counter trend in the community to be overly elitist about Morrowind, and assume that being able to understand what is at it's heart a simple to understand, but very poorly explained, game makes them better than everyone else. This is not great, because in order for the community to grow and for us to generate enough demand for some sort of Morrowind throwback, we need to actually bring new blood in and talk about things like they are in the current day.
Anyway, I have a patreon at / dosbueno , and I would really appreciate any support y'all want to send me. Times are tight and my wallet is thin, so I will never miss an opportunity to beg for money.
I used to have a discord I would publicly link here, and I mentioned it in the video, but the discord is going Patron only due to a massive surge in people joining, being rampagingly homophobic, and then getting banned. I like having the discord and I like the community, but putting up a 1 dollar barrier to entry should get rid of the worse of it.
Description reading mega-goblins, now is the time to type your "Dagoth Ur really Kwaa's my Flanenzerg" in the comments below. The more we do it, the more amusing it gets.
Cool Morrowind Fun Fact: I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM I HATE SOLSTHEIM
I would like to give a bit of a Shout-out to Mandalore Gaming for that one video he did years ago on how to make video game content on youtube. Genuinely remembering that video and rewatching it gave me the motivation to do this content pivot.
I also want to thank everyone who subscribed to this random meme channel. I am hoping I can bring a better perspective to the TES community, and generally be a positive influence on the discussion. Things have been locked in some demonic echo chamber since 2016 or so and I hate it.
Also, trans rights are human rights.
Cheers.
#morrowind #theelderscrolls #theelderscrollsmorrowind #theelderscrolls3 #theelderscrolls3morrowind #theelderscrollsiiimorrowind #review #retrospective #gaming #gamereview #2023

Опубликовано:

7 сен 2024

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Комментарии : 26

@samuelbutler2566 Год назад

You touched on this a little bit, but one of the best things is that Morrowind does a surprisingly good job of having almost every single quest teach you something about the world or worldbuilding. The quest to cure a Kwama queen was awesome, because here you see how important the kwama are, the relationship between Telvanni wizards and their subjects, and how the blight is effecting everything on the island, all without being explicitly told (although there are also lots of books to do that). Anywayy, good video, these are great.

@user-zz4en7hu1m 11 месяцев назад

joining all the factions was a lot of fun, it took actual years before i realized if you started doing quests in one you could be blocked from joining certain factions.

@pendantblade6361 Год назад

It's a good listen, mate. Definitely miss the time when fast travel wasn't so prevalent. It demands the devs put way more effort into their landscaping.

@dosbueno2gud Год назад

There is so much Fast Travel in Morrowind. It is immersive fast travel, to be fair, but you still fast travel quite a lot. I should have done a better job getting this across in the video but the fast travel system works so well in Morrowind because they integrated it into the world in a way that feels very realistic and feasible. You are not required to walk back to town and to every single cross map quest, you are just required to actually adventure through the wild places to get to your quests, instead of just instant-transmissioning there.

@AxelLeJeff Год назад

Pretty fun to watch this while toodling around in Starfield because I have no financial impulse control.

@JaelaOrdo Год назад

One of (if not the) best worlds created for any video game in my opinion. Morrowind is maybe my favorite game though so I might be a bit biased.

@TylerFoxtrot Год назад

Exited to get the notification for this, thanks for putting your work out there for us to enjoy!

@YourWaywardDestiny Год назад

I am having a genuine crisis about how to pronounce swathes. All my life I've been pronouncing it "swah-ths" but recently, I've been people using that word more and pronouncing it like you; "sway-ths" so I don't know what to think about that word anymore. Have I been idiot-ing it this entire time? Could it be pronounced either way? This was not the take-away I thought I would have when clinking on a part two of a Morrowind retrospective. (I am pleased with what you produced, don't get me wrong. Very well laid out, perceptive points made, and easy to follow along with. I am simply easily distracted.)

@dosbueno2gud Год назад

I have no idea which is the correct pronunciation, I just pick one at random each time I say it

@angeredtsuzuki 8 месяцев назад

It's criminal that these videos have such few views! Looking forward to MUD GAME

@dosbueno2gud 8 месяцев назад

mud game

@FlyingManPig Год назад

Love these videos!

@dosbueno2gud Год назад

thanks king

@thepit7868 Год назад

Are the meme videos on hold for now? These videos are amazing tho.

@dosbueno2gud Год назад

yes

@joelaugustin6407 Год назад

This series is great

@MrTheta-lc8zy Год назад

3:55 Oh yeah shreddednerd did 3 videos about ADS.

@dosbueno2gud Год назад

its a bad mechanic and i hate it

@MrTheta-lc8zy Год назад

@@dosbueno2gud you’d probably like those videos, I recommend taking a look at them

@Powoga Год назад

Probably the weakest aspect of the world are the NPCs, mostly due to their limited AI. They'll spend their entire lifves standing in one place, maybe walking back and forth a bit. They have beds, but nobody uses them. The only thing they _can_ do is shield their eyes with their arms when there's a sandstorm (which is a neat detail), or fight back when somebody's attacking them. It's especially surreal when you get attacked by an assassin and no one really cares. It's alleviated by the dialogue, which gives even the most generic and pointless person a specific job and some knowledge of the world they're in, but everyone spewing exposition at some random stranger they just met isn't really all that immersive either. The fully voice acted NPCs with their own schedules of more modern games have their own issues, like how everyone doesn't have all that much to say and sounds exactly like a lot of other people, but they are much better for immersion.

@dosbueno2gud Год назад

strong disagreement. I find it completely impossible to immerse myself in Oblivion or Skyrim because the NPCs have nothing to say and just wander around pantomiming being a person. The Morrowind dialogue system is about one serious month of work (to give each NPC more to say) away from being really good. The system as implemented isn't fantastic, but the lack of voice acting and the lack of daily schedule scripting would allow someone to go in and give everyone something to say at a much, much faster rate. I'd rather have a few NPCs with a lot to say while standing perfectly in place than a few NPCs who wander around aimlessly saying the same 4 voice lines that bethesda could afford over and over and over again. Voice acting was a mistake and it damaged the series badly. The interactivity of NPCs in the world in Morrowind actually has some granularity and a few systems baked into it, but, much like all things in Morrowind, the system is massively underutilized, no one noticed it was there, and then Bethesda dropped it quietly later because no one cared. NPCs have several stats that gauge their reaction to crimes and other things happeneing around them, its just barely used and poorly set up. In addition, the specific case with the assassins is an outlier and happens due to the way the expansion is set up. In vanilla morrowind, unless the player is fucking around with spell effects NPCs can't cross through doors/load zones. This means that coding them to react to a hostile NPC jumping the player was pretty far down the list. The Intern that Bethesda assigned to implement the DB attack at the start of the expansion either didn't have time or didn't care enough to code responses from NPCs that, in a normal world, would never see a conflict in their lives. So NPCs don't react to combats because it wasn't worth the dev time. Ideally these problems would have been fixed in a sequel, where Bethesda would have cleaned up the dialogue system and added it on top of more dynamic NPCs that move around the map more, but that was hard to do and they made the correct call that the vast majority of the playerbase and the larger gaming public would not notice or care. And Oblivion sold better, and they stripped more stuff that most people wouldn't notice out of the game. Bethesda tends to just replace entire systems rather than refine the system they have or make any upgrades.

@YourWaywardDestiny Год назад

There's an argument to make for what we have now, and what we had then. If you are blasting through a city, you aren't going to notice that Morrowind NPCs mostly just wander back and forth, and you aren't really going to get terribly bothered by most Skyrim NPCs only shouting "hey, watch it!" at you. When you linger, try to learn as much as you can (as is encouraged by all Bethesda games) both modes are actually quite disconcerting in how hollow they end up for opposite reasons. Having characters preform actions and interact without your input is going to feel more alive to some, and the density of dialogue options presented is going to feel more alive to others. Yes, it is immersive to overhear how the Redguard wife of the blacksmith in Dawstar is pregnant at random when their pathing AI meets while you're taking a stroll _without having to prompt it._ Yes, it is immersive to be able to ask a shop keeper in Balmora about local events _and get three pages of their feelings on the matter._ Both those things are the stuff of reality. Other people are going to have conversations without you, and they're going to have opinions on things deeper than "ya hear about the Dawnguard? Vampire hunters or something." But sound files take up space, and so does having an NPC routine. With the tech and funds available, concessions had to be made in each case that knee-capped some part of immersion.

@Powoga Год назад

Some good points here, though I think YourWaywardDestiny summed it up pretty nicely, with all the pros and cons. And yeah, the AI in Oblivion especially is just... weird. We've all seen them eat perfectly ordinary, totally not suspicious floor apples, and wonder who could've killed the guy they killed a few seconds ago before they forget all about him and go on about their day. And the conversations between two NPCs never make any sense. The only game with worse random conversations that I can think of is Gothic 3. Though I am curious about the systems Dos Bueno mentioned. The only thing I can think of is how guards will attack monsters and maybe how disposition changes based on your race, faction, and so on.

@dosbueno2gud Год назад

@@Powoga The game has a really weirdly involved faction relations system that only really matters because it can break a few quests, and NPCs have an Alarm value that determines how likely they are to report a crime or come to the aid of someone who is reporting a crime, as well as a Fight value that determines how willing they are to fight you and how easy it is to provoke them into violence. The Faction Relation system is very interesting because it means that being part of one group can damage or help your relations/disposition with another group, and even provoke them into attacking you, but due to Morrowind's broken persuasion system it is far to easy to ignore as you can just dump 500 gold on any random person and they will be your best friend now, even if you work for their sworn enemy. Its a lot of half-cooked features that don't really do anything that they really, really could have done a lot more with in a proper sequel, but decided to cut rather than put in that effort. EDIT: All the racial reaction stuff is handled through scripts and is an entirely seperate system I forgot to mention. It was barely implemented because Morrowind just didn't have long enough to fully implement all of the fantasy life sim stuff that they wanted, so they just half assed it with a bit of dialogue scripting (which can break quests sometimes) I am most intrigued personally by the idea of NPCs having different willingness to aid victims of crimes, but in practice they kind of just end up either helping with all crimes or no crimes. Another thing to add that is an important note is that Bethesda actually did plan to implement these more intense NPCs in Oblivion, that is what the whole Radiant AI system was supposed to be. It was just a buggy, glitchy nightmare zone and they had to fit the game on a 360 in 2006 so they cut the whole thing down and lobotomized the NPCs to make the game functional. This was the correct call, but it is a massive bummer that we never really got that better NPC system. Honestly this is all motivating me to try and make a mod or something to make the NPCs suck less in Morrowind.