An Elder Scrolls Analysis - Episode One: A New Type of RPG

[Music] at the start of the last decade the elder scrolls 5 skyrim achieved the level of success most games can only dream of as well as spawning countless quickly outdated memes and winning the majority of game of the year awards in 2011 skyrim also went on to sell over 30 million copies within its first five years making it the best-selling rpg of all time that number 30 million is pretty big so big that it might start to lose some of its meaning so let me provide a bit of context here wikipedia has a list of best-selling games of all time it's not a perfect list there are sources for all figures shown but for some games exact sales might not be known and some figures may be out of date including for skyrim itself which is listed as having 30 million total sales despite reaching that milestone in 2016 and presumably continuing to sell more copies since however this list is still useful for providing some perspective and if you look at this list you'll see skyrim is the 19th best-selling game of all time not bad however if you look at the games above skyrim you'll notice that many are either multiplayer much older or are first party nintendo games and if you were to consider nintendo games and multiplayer games as separate categories and just looked at the best selling exclusively single player games not released by nintendo skyrim would suddenly go from 19th to number one so skyrim isn't just the best-selling rpg of all time it's close to being the best-selling single-player game ever made and considering how many big-budget games these days add on multiplayer meaning big-budget single-player games aren't dying out that means there's a real possibility that skyrim could end up being the best selling single player game not made by nintendo to ever be released this might seem like a bit of a long tangent to go on just to say skyrim sold a lot of copies but it's important to understand just how many copies we're talking about here there are many successful games released every single year and almost none of them can even be considered in the same league as something like skyrim and yet almost 10 years later the elder scrolls 5 skyrim stands alone in all the time since there have been no sequels from its developer bethesda no spiritual successors no rival titles from other companies attempting to recreate or ride off its success and despite the widespread proliferation of indie gaming there haven't even been any similar indie games 10 years and not a single other game like it has been released in that period there was another hugely successful fancy rpg released in 2011. dark souls sold but a fraction of the amount skyrim did and yet in the time since its release it's had two direct sequels plus two more spiritually similar titles from its developer from software plus several similar newly created titles from other big name developers plus a literal swarm of lower budget indie offerings that have so deeply infested the steam store page that some say iron pineapple will still be playing souls like games you've never heard of as he lies dying of old age of a dawn of the next century but really there have been so many games like dark souls since dark souls but it's led to the creation of an entirely new term and genre of games the souls-like and there are already so many of these games that people already seem to be getting sick of them but there's no skyrim like genre in fact since skyrim there have been no new skyrim light games at all other than 2015's fallout 4 the latest single-player entry into bethesda's other flagship role-playing series it almost shouldn't be possible for a game this financially successful to not receive at least some kind of follow-up or successor or actual competition just look at other standout success stories from the last decade minecraft league of legends half stone overwatch looter shooters battle royale take your pick the story's the same when something new comes along and makes a big splash market forces descend upon it like a flock of starving vultures upon a beached whale each desperate to claim a piece of the prize while the carcass is still fresh and profitable and this doesn't just happen with multiplayer games breath of the wild released only a few years ago but we've already got a ubisoft breath of the wild and an anime gambling breath of the wild which sounds like a strange combination but who am i to argue with the appeal of cute anime girls and predatory monetary practices the witcher 3 is another massive open world fancy rpg comparable to skyrim in several ways and yet in around half as many years its influence on the gaming landscape is far more obvious i mean ubisoft were jealous enough of its success that they immediately began to change their largest series to be as similar to the witcher 3 as possible going as far as to give up on all that assassination stuff in the process a strange choice for a series with assassin in the title but witches aren't assassins so why bother with that anymore just throw in some more rpg elements and loot drops and what does it witches do fight monsters well better throw some of them in two why not history what's that and so it goes this is a multi-billion dollar industry we're talking about and where there's money to be made there'll be people trying to make it and hey imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so where are the skyrim imitators it's been 10 years the market incentive is there and yet this game remains alone and it's not the only game in this series that lacks company the elder scrolls 3 morrowind released in 2002 and while it may not have reached sales figures quite as lofty as skyrim's 30 million this is still a game that sold very very well with the only western rpg to have outsold it at the time being diablo 2. morrowind was also one of the first fully 3d open world games ever made and its release on xbox in addition to pc meant it was able to reach a whole new generation of impressionable young players morrowind was also a good game and that combined with its many unique qualities has ensured that there are few rpgs out there remembered quite as fondly which means that in theory there is a perfect opportunity for someone to come along and offer a morrowind-like experience because if there's one thing that the last decade has proven it's that nostalgia sells after all the rise of indie gaming combined with the growth of digital distribution platforms like steam and crowdfunding options like kickstarter have led to a widespread retro revival where classic games of yore have been given a second chance at life and nostalgia has become a highly valuable commodity and nowhere has this been more obvious than rpgs we have many big names of all being dug up to provide sequels and spiritual successors of all shapes and sizes to the many warmly remembered games of our childhoods and yet morrowind one of the rpgs people hold the most nostalgia for has received nothing all these long years of waiting and if you want an experience like morrowind the only option available is still morrowind itself just like if you want an experience like skyrim the only options out there are a handful of other games created by bethesda game studios and something similar could be said about morrowind's predecessor the elder scrolls ii daggerfall which was another very memorable rpg with legions of die-hard fans that have never been catered to in this way the elder scrolls series is truly unique this is the best-selling western rpg series of all time a series that has received a huge amount of acclaim a series popular enough that a 30-second teaser trailer for the next game that shows nothing but the title is still able to generate 13 million views and a series with a massive passionate fan base hungry for more titles but despite this market incentive for someone to create something like these games it never happened for any of them this can't be because such a game wouldn't sell skyrim sales speak for themselves and the marketing for such a title would be almost effortless just tell people they can go anywhere and do anything and maybe point at a few mountains you can climb and the sails will be pretty much guaranteed it's also not because the elder scrolls approach the game design has become any less relevant in fact open world games have become more popular over the last 10 years and even some of the most established names in gaming like zelda final fantasy and metal gear solid have turned their backs on their roots to instead adopt a more open design so clearly there is a market for games like the elder scrolls and yet no one is making them which suggests the reason might have less to do with a lack of desire to make a game like this and more to do with a lack of ability over the years bethesda has received a lot of criticism for their game design particularly when it comes to their more recent titles with areas of contention including the presence of bugs the level of depth and the dated feel of their engine but despite all this it needs to be acknowledged that bethesda's attempts to create fully open and interactable virtual worlds for players to adventure in as they please is ambitious and it always has been clearly this isn't an easy thing for other developers to replicate because if it was someone would have done so and the fact no one has suggests maybe these games don't always get the credit they deserve i mean the worlds contained within these games do offer something most other video game worlds don't something that taps into our childlike sense of wonder and appeals to one of our most fundamental and primal video game desires that wish to step into a different world and experience places and people and things that we otherwise would never be able to behind each of these games lies that promise of adventure and exploration and freedom and most of all of a whole other world to lose yourself in whether these games successfully deliver on that promise is a different question and one that these videos will explore but that promise itself is still important i don't necessarily believe the elder scrolls to be the greatest rpg series ever made but i do think it might be the most interesting and if there's one series that really warrants hours of discussion and analysis it's this one because as much as these games have seemingly left little mark on the gaming industry itself in the way they failed to directly influence other titles the mark these games have left on those who play them seems almost unrivalled there are a few gaming series people get as passionate about as the elder scrolls and for many there are few gaming experiences people remember as clearly as their first time stepping out of one of these games openings and feeling the endless possibilities of their newfound freedom stretching out before them there is a magic to that experience a spark fleeting but full of significance and that means something at least it did for me nothing in gaming stands out quite as vividly as when i first played morrowind so many years ago it was the game that opened my eyes to what games could be and if you could go back in time and ask my younger self what i wanted games to be like in the future or what my dream game would be like i would have been able to give many answers and all of them would start with like morrowind but this was a game i truly loved a game that made me want to stay up late at night and wake up early the next morning just to squeeze in a few more hours of exploring and adventuring most of all though morrowind was a game that made me excited for the future it made me imagine all the other worlds i might one day get to explore worlds that would benefit from advances in technology to be bigger and more realistic and more exciting and contain even more possibilities and i couldn't wait for that future to arrive it never did though and more than anything else this is a video series about why first though before we can talk about why that spark never turned into a flame we need to look at what the appeal of these games actually is it feels like a long time ago that skyrim was too busy winning awards for bethesda to care about any of the criticism anyone had to say about it in the years since more and more discussion has centered on the failings of bethesda's game design and these days it seems hard to find anyone wanting to speak in favor of their approach to designing virtual worlds what started really as backlash over fallout 4 quickly spread backwards tainting each of their post-morrowind efforts with the sins of shallowness and casualization and suddenly we had entered a new post-enlightenment era where a flip had been switched on mainstream opinion and now none of these games were ever good and all who had praised them had simply been misled i have to admit though despite all the valid points raised against these games as times gone by i've always thought the hate they received had a little bit of ex-lover energy about it like a negative steam review of a game someone has poured over a thousand hours into that feeling that it's not just that people think these games are bad and dislike them for their failings that instead it's something deeper more personal more emotional of course the backlash against bethesda's design has deep roots originating from older rpg fans who are making their voices heard on the internet since as early as 2006. but the mid-2000s was a long time ago and it's hard not to imagine that a lot of the older disenfranchised expatriates have had enough time to let go of their disappointment and accept the direction bethesda chose to take the series instead it seems more like it's a new younger generation that has stepped in to pick up the anti-bethesda banner even if they're using many of the same rallying cries as the critics who came before them which is where my ex-lover theory comes in you see i think a big part of the reason people end up disliking these games so much is because these are games many people fall in love with or at least the idea of these games is something people fall in love with and then with time the honeymoon period wears off the illusion shatters and people are brought back round to reality with a wet fudge leaving a bitter aftertaste of disappointment not just in the game for tricking you but in yourself for being the fool that was so easily tricked but i think deep down people really do want to like these games they want them to be better than they are and the cycle of him rapture and disappointment has been repeating year after year generation after generation reaching more and more players and creating a larger and larger base of dissatisfied ex-believers the thing is if you want to know why our relationship failed you can't just focus on all the bad parts and expect that to provide you with an accurate explanation instead you have to understand why you actually fell in love in the first place and work backwards from there and it's this part of the discussion about these games that i think has always been a bit lacking these games are unique they offer something you can't get anywhere else and there are important reasons for why people care so much about them that need to be understood properly before we can ever truly criticize these games for their shortcomings so what is the appeal of the elder scrolls games why haven't any other games or developers ever been able to successfully capture that appeal and how has bethesda's approach to capturing that appeal changed over time these are the questions i hope to answer i have to warn you this is a long journey i'm asking you to go on with me here there are many games to look at across many years and the result will be split across three videos for what is the first time in this channel's life but stick with me here i do know where i'm going there is a destination at the end of this journey and i promise there will be no more relationship metaphors and only minimal off-topic tangents as we analyze the best-selling and least-replicated rpg series of all time in a 2001 interview with one of the series creators ted peterson who was the lead designer on the first two games he was asked what his opinion on the first game in the series the older scrolls arena was compared to other rpgs at the time his answer was that arena was actually quite derivative saying we weren't doing anything too new we just did it bigger much much bigger if we're going to understand the appeal of these games it makes sense to first look at what sets them apart and no factor is more obvious here than size because as the previous quote showed the size and scope of these games has been one of the primary things which gave this series its identity since its very inception the role-playing video games of the early 90s were quite different to rpgs of today the influence of traditional role-playing games like dungeons and dragons was more direct and the technology more primitive meaning these experiences often focused more on fighting monsters and exploring dungeons than many of the things we've come to expect from modern rpgs one of the most important rpgs of the early 90s was ultima underworld the stigian abyss released in 1992 by looking glass studios one of the masters of early 3d first-person games who would later go on to develop the likes of system shock and thief ultima underworld was the first rpg to feature first person action in a 3d environment if it looks basic by today's standards then you should understand that for its time it was anything but and this game is the first real example of an immersive sim in short it was a technical marvel and when a handful of rpg enthusiasts at what was then bethesda softworks decided to throw their hats into the early 90s rpg ring this was their main inspiration and competition but in many ways bethesda couldn't compete with ultimate underworld its 3d environment and dungeon delving experience were more technically advanced than anything they could realistically develop themselves in the necessary time frame they had to work with so instead they made their game stand out in a different way released in 1994 the elder scrolls arena was originally envisioned as a simple party-based gladiatorial fighting game hence the name arena but over the course of its development it evolved to feature more and more rpg elements and a greater focus was placed on the size and scope of its in-game world the fictional realm of tamriel this would be the setting of every elder scrolls game but unlike later entries in the series which would take place in one particular region of tamriel arena instead allowed players to explore the entirety of its landmass so while the quests and combat and story were simplistic the scale of the experience wasn't arena used procedural generation to create a world that felt huge and contained not just a large number of towns inns and dungeons but entirely distinct provinces for the player to travel to and a massive wilderness in between areas of importance that provide a degree of realism other games may have lacked arena may not hold up by today's standards but it was ambitious and for bethesda it wasn't just the start of their iconic role-playing series it would also be the start of their obsession with size arena would be followed up by the elder scrolls to daggerfall two years later scaling back the setting daggerfall was limited to a single region around the iliac bay but that didn't mean this game was any smaller in size or ambition really daggerfall can be described many ways but small isn't one of them featuring a landmass of over 80 000 square miles with over 15 000 different settlements and dungeons it's been said that daggerfall is approximately the size of great britain and the actual time taking to walk from one end of the map to another is 69 and a half hours just as with arena this was made possible by the game's heavy reliance on procedural generation meaning the world may have had a realistic sense of scale but its wilderness was also completely empty daggerfall also relied on randomly generated quests which send you to randomly generated dungeons that like with arena before it you fast travel to going straight from settlements to the dungeon front door without any reason to ever set foot in the vast empty space in between as such this is not a game about exploration in the same way as later entries but there is still a unique appeal to this experience based purely on the size of the game bethesda had created daggerfall was a simulation of a fantasy world hugely limited in certain ways but unrivaled in its sense of scale which afforded it a unique sense of realism this combined with its robust rpg mechanics ensured daggerfall became a cult classic in the role-playing world and there are still those who believe it to be the best in the series today nevertheless the next main line entry into the elder scrolls series would go in a very different direction after two less successful games an elder scrolls legend battlespire and the elder scrolls adventure redguard which will each take the series in their own different directions bethesda then return to their more traditional rpg routes with their next effort released in 2002 after a for the time lengthy absence the elder scrolls 3 morrowind was a triumphant return to big video game worlds in other ways though it took a different approach to the games which preceded it and in doing so it lay the foundations for the type of game bethesda would come to be known for there are many things to talk about with this game but size is still up there it wasn't approximately the size of great britain not even close but compared to most other early 3d games that came before it the scale of morrowind's world was still something many players had never experienced before the final two mainline elder scrolls games oblivion and skyrim would each attempt to create worlds that were even bigger and size has continued to be an important aspect of this series to this day you only have to look at the way these games were marketed or the bold statements made in pre-release interviews or the language used in post-release reviews to see plenty of evidence of this and it's no coincidence been in the teaser trailer for the elder scrolls 6 which shows almost nothing the one thing it does try to communicate is an epic sense of scale this is a series where size matters not just in the world itself but also in the amount of content contained within the result is that these worlds do feel vast and promising experience that can seem endless when you begin one of these games you're not just going on an adventure you're stepping into an entire world of adventure and that difference is important but there are other big games and large open worlds and it's not just size which sets these games apart it's also how they use that size there's a romantic idea behind classic role-playing experiences like dungeons and dragons that within them you can be anyone and do anything your only limitation is your imagination and that's not entirely true but it's an attractive ideal who doesn't sometimes want to shed the constraints of reality to be someone else somewhere else doing something different [Music] still as appealing as the ideal might be it didn't really translate well from the abstract world of pen and paper to the cold hard ones and zeros of codes and computers where there are many more limitations than your imagination for a lot of role-playing video games they tried to adhere to this ideal through options to create your own character or party but after this the adventure you embarked on was generally predetermined and your route through these games was heavily restricted you may have some freedom in how you approach certain situations or in which order you go to certain areas but much of the experience was still linear and you tended to proceed through the game's world in the specific way the game wants you to the elder scrolls games are different though the amount of freedom they provide in where you can go and what you can do is far greater than most other games their worlds attempt to provide a genuine fantasy sandbox for you to play around in and choosing to pick up one toy while ignoring another doesn't leave you feeling like you're playing the game the wrong way or are missing out if rpgs want to provide players with a sense of adventure then there is no better way to do that than to allow players to create an experience that is their own after all as soon as the adventure you set out for feels like it's been purposefully crafted for the player it will lose some of its adventurousness it's like the difference between following a well-signed posted footpath compared to heading off into the great unknown and there's an excitement that comes from being given the freedom to forge your own path in a world so large having so much freedom over the experience also provides a sense of ownership to it it's up to you where you go what you choose to ignore and how you justify your own actions and this means the experience created can feel unique to the player in a sense you become a collaborator of the game's storytelling an active participant writing your own tale with each step you take and in this particular way these games can be closer to that role-playing ideal of living a different life in a different world than many other games of the genre of course there are sacrifices made to achieve this and there are other ways you might find these games lacking in terms of role-playing but the open-ended design abyss series where you can spend hours and hours without ever going near the main questline and can head to almost any part of the map any time you choose is fairly unique amongst rpgs and there is value to this open-ended design for a game of this type so these games impress through large open worlds in which the player is given a large amount of freedom but there's also the way the worlds are designed there was another open world game from my childhood which had a profound effect on both myself and the gaming industry grand theft auto 3 is a very different game to morrowind and i'm not going to be making a comparison between them instead i'm bringing this game up for an entirely different reason back in the early 2000s after i had played grand theft auto 3 and was waiting for its sequel by city to release somebody told me that in vice city you would be able to enter every single building in the game this was a lie but i didn't know that and the idea was enough to blow my mind it would be a whole new level of virtual world simulation this was the future of gaming and i was convinced it was going to be amazing and yeah vice city was pretty good but you could only enter a small handful of buildings looking back i have a hard time articulating exactly why the idea of being able to enter every single building in the game seemed like such a big deal to me as an adult i can recognize that going into a building that will contain nothing of interest is likely not very interesting and even today the grand fifth auto series hasn't attempted something like this and i don't think it needs to entering a stranger's house just to verify that this space actually exists isn't a necessary part of the grand fifth auto formula and it would take a lot of work to implement for little benefit but there would be a benefit in the elder scrolls games you can enter every house this was a lot of work to implement and at times that shows but it also says a lot about these games approach to creating virtual worlds and while i don't think every game should follow this approach i'm still glad that game where i can enter every building exists a lot of the appeal of the elder scrolls is that these are worlds you can believe in or at least they try to be and one of the main ways they try to achieve this is through their level of simulation there is no reason for why you need to be able to enter every building in these games as not every building interior has a purpose but being able to enter every building and just knowing that every building has an interior makes the world more believable after all in the real world buildings have interiors so it would therefore be realistic for them to have interiors in a game world as well this approach to world design can also be seen in other areas every npc in these games is unique in name and appearance stop right there criminal scum okay almost every npc in these games is unique in name and appearance with oblivion each npc also has a daily schedule with activities they'll perform in the day and a bed they'll sleep in at night many other rpgs even ones much smaller in scale will instead feature generic npcs alongside the more important named npcs which can be helpful as it tells players which npcs serve a purpose and which don't and through this players know exactly who to speak to and who to just ignore however this artificial differentiation doesn't exist within the elder scrolls here a person is a person regardless of how important they may or may not be to the player and then there's the way these games handle objects in many games you have an inventory and will acquire various items but in the elder scrolls every item is actually represented as a physical object within the game's world this started with morrowind and was then taken further by oblivion with the introduction of being able to physically manipulate objects in real time these features make the experience more immersive as items are treated as realistic objects that the player will interact with within the in-game environment rather than just existing as names in menus that are only found within chests or on enemy corpses and there are other examples of simulation seen in the elder scrolls games design as well some of which are quite common in other games like weight systems or day and night cycles and some of which have been lost over time like the impact of changing seasons or the in-game time limits for quests which were both seen in daggerfall but the three mentioned previously every building having an accessible interior every npc having a name and every item having a physical form are the ones that really stand out when other games create a world they only create a part of it meaning you can't see what's behind that locked door or over that horizon but that's not the approach the elder scrolls games took instead they tried to create all of the world relegating as little as they possibly could into the realm of off-limits or non-interactable and avoiding attempts to draw lines between the important and unimportant the result is worlds that feel interactive with people and places that seem like they exist independently of their specific purpose to the player and this is quite impressive the level of simulation at play here often doesn't actually need to exist but it might be because it's not necessary but they did it anyway which makes it so effective if every building an npc and dungeon and found item only existed because they serve a clear purpose for the player then it makes the world feel like it's been created for the player instead because things exist regardless of their purpose it makes the world feel like it exists regardless of the player so on some level serving no purpose becomes the purpose because it's the only way to create something that doesn't feel created the worlds of these games are far from perfect and a lot of their flaws will end up featuring in these videos but even if these aren't the most believable worlds ever created in a video game in certain ways they are often believable in a different way to other video games players are used to worlds they can't interact with worlds where you can't go anywhere and worlds that feel only as big as they need to be but the elder scrolls games represent a different approach and through breaking a lot of the rules that other games adhere to they're able to create worlds which can seem less like a video game the factors mentioned so far also serve another purpose however which brings me to my final point if you ask fans of this series why they like these games exploration is the most common answer you'll get it's the obvious reason for why people enjoy these games so much but what exactly people mean by exploration is less obvious some areas of game design are well defined we know what people mean when they refer to a game's combat or story or graphics but what someone means by exploration is less clear is it as simple as the act of moving through the world for the first time and taking in the visuals or does it require the joy of discovery or for the navigation of a virtual space to involve danger and pose some sort of challenge or to involve going to places and experiencing things that others haven't experienced before because some of these aspects aren't things the elder scrolls games always do that well and yet they still might be the first games people think of when asked to provide examples of games about exploration or for games that do exploration well or what are the best virtual worlds to explore exploration is something these videos will refer back to regularly but when it comes to what people mean when they say they enjoy these games for the exploration i think what people are referring to isn't something well defined or easily explained at all instead it's more a feeling intangible and elusive something connected to the world and the way it's designed and how it feels to be a part of ultimately the worlds in these games facilitate a feeling of exploration and for many people that's enough after all if these worlds feel more believable than many others through their level of simulation and you have the freedom to go where you like and they're big enough to provide plenty of possibilities then it's not hard to imagine why they might be fun to explore and the concept of exploring new worlds is one with deep appeal it's one of those things we can't usually do as part of our normal daily lives and so we long for video games to be able to provide it instead and these games do provide that so to put it as simply as possible size freedom and level of simulation all combined to create worlds players want to explore and therein lies the series core appeal as rpgs they might be shallow they were never games that put much focus on choice and consequence their character systems were flawed since the start their combat was weak their main stories were secondary and their presentation tended to be uneven but their worlds made you want to explore them whether through their unrivaled sense of scale or the uniqueness of their setting or the variety of adventures you could find yourself pulled into or just the artistic strength of the environmental design it's easy to take a stance against these games where you decry their flaws on the basis of other games do certain things better but doing this might lead you to fail to appreciate the things these games do well that other games don't really the elder scrolls games aren't your usual rpgs and they don't try to be because instead of trying to create an experience that relies on the depth of their role playing they try to create experiences that rely on the depth of their worlds if that's not what you want from a game then that's fine but to view these games negatively for being different to the norm seems unfair a game should be judged on the basis of how well it achieves its goals which for these games seems to be to create a world that players want to explore and to make that exploration enjoyable so that will be the primary focus of these videos meaning it's time to stop talking about these games collectively and start looking at them individually if morrowind oblivion and skyrim all share enough dna to be siblings then daggerfall is more of a distant cousin most of these videos will focus on the games that came after daggerfall but it's still important to understand where this series came from to understand how it's changed many parts of daggerfall are dated that doesn't mean it's a bad game but the fact that this game was released in 1996 does show nevertheless there are areas which still manage to be impressive today none more so than its monstrous size as said previously bethesda's obsession with creating a large virtual world is more apparent with daggerfall than any other entry in the series with the result being a landmass of realistic proportions that contains a near endless amount of content the way this was achieved was through procedural generation which was used to create most parts of the game including the cities the dungeons the npcs the side quests the faction quest lines and so on even the main quest line often one of the few exceptions to this rule will still at times send you off to a randomly generated dungeon the dungeons themselves are also impressively big which when combined with their labyrinth fine layout and the woefully underwhelming in-game map make them very easy to get lost in most quests revolve around going to a specific dungeon to find a certain item or kill a certain enemy to reach for dungeon you need only to type its name into the world map to fast travel straight to the entrance but once inside things get a lot more challenging in dungeons you'll often find yourself walking back and forth through an endless amalgamation of visually bland corridors and ramps all of which are so lacking in environmental detail that they look the same leading you to potentially spend hours and hours searching for your objective as you backtrack through the same areas over and over looking for anywhere you might not have already been you could try to use the map to assist you here but its rudimentary 3d representation often ends up looking more like an mc escher drawing than anything designed to be actually helpful and certain pathways like hidden doors won't show up on the map anyway if that's not enough the procedural generation can sometimes result in quests that are simply impossible to complete due to things like inaccessible areas you can easily spend two to three hours inside a single dungeon doing a single unimportant side quest only to find the quest was barked or to just never find the item you're looking for at all and be forced to give up and unless you made use of the markham recall spell in advance even giving up is no easy task as you'll still have to find your way back out the maze again it may sound like i hate the dungeons in this game because i do but there are some positive qualities to the daggerful dungeon delving experience firstly this game achieves something that almost no modern rpg even comes close to anymore which is that it makes dungeons feel intimidating a dungeon is meant to be a highly dangerous location after all that's the reason npcs send you into them during quests and why they contain treasure because if exploring such a location was easy npcs wouldn't need to send someone in their place and the treasure would already be gone however in many games dungeons feel about as perilous as a slow-moving merry-go-round often containing features designed to make life as easy as possible for the player like conveniently place shortcuts that show up as soon as you found the big treasure and are ready to get off the ride daggerfall on the other hand is at least successful at creating dungeons that don't feel purposefully designed around the player's wants and needs making them more immersive and believable even if the poorly designed map and unpredictable procedural generation can go too far in this regard sometimes another positive to this game's dungeons is the range of skills they take advantage of daggerfall has a robust character creation which allows players to create a fully custom class for the first time in the series amongst the many skills you can choose here are many that elder scrolls fans will be familiar with but there are some that the later games end up removing like swimming and climbing dungeons however make regular use of these skills alongside other important abilities like lock picking being able to cure diseases and poisons and having a method of escape these will make the dungeon crawling experience more enjoyable as it regularly feels like your character builds and level of preparedness have an important role to play that said daggerfall isn't very well balanced in this regard as every single thing i've just mentioned can just be taken care of by magic who needs a high swim level when you can cast water breathing and why climb when you can levitate regardless exploring dungeons is a big part of daggerfall so it's good that they're designed to test more than just the player's combat ability when not in a dungeon the majority of your time will be spent in cities selling loot to various traders sleeping in inns and picking up quests from one of the various faction halls or innkeepers here it can be hard not to be taken in by the sheer scale of daggerfall's world there are many cities and each is suitably large different cities in different parts of the world also have different visual designs and small details like the changing of seasons helps give life to these locations the number of factions is also impressive as in addition to the standard fighters mages and thieves guilds you can also sign up with the local temples and nightly orders as well as the dark brotherhood for those more inclined towards something darker faction membership brings with it access to some useful trainers and unique vendors and as you complete quests and advance up the ranks more benefits will be unlocked and this all works well to create a world of unrivaled sides with numerous different possibilities but the procedural generation used to achieve this does soon show for example if you join a faction and start completing quests for them you'll soon see the same quest start repeating because while the specifics of what you do like which npc you need to talk to or which dungeon you crawl through might change each time the actual objective and quest dialogue remains the same and the pool of quests these factions draw from isn't particularly big either meaning you'll end up doing the exact same things over and over long before you ever reach a high rank this repetitive nature is not only uninteresting it also conflicts with a believability the game otherwise tries so hard to create there are countless cities and dungeons and taverns but it can be hard to tell them apart and after a while you see the same buildings npcs and corridors everywhere you go which also means examples of interesting npcs or quests or dungeons just don't exist very often outside of the main story and really that main story is when the game is at its best it's here that you'll find an actual narrative to uncover involving magical artifacts and the intertwined political parties of the region which ultimately culminates in an impressive branching choice with seven different individuals or groups you can side with all of which have their own competing motivations still the biggest improvement the main story has over the rest of the game is its dungeons these few handcrafted areas that aren't procedurally generated feel far more cohesive and interesting to explore with a level of challenge that's more consistent and a layout that's less nonsensical making them much more enjoyable the difference in quality between these dungeons and the rest of the game's offerings really stands out which makes it hard not to question whether the heavy reliance on procedural generation was the right direction to go with in the first place it's impossible to talk about daggerfall without talking about its size and the goal of giving life to a virtual world of realistic scale is admirable but the problems this game ultimately has aren't despite its vast size they're because of it it's procedurally generated dungeons cities and quests don't feel like part of a believable world to me due to their repetition and lack of detail and never is this truer than if you decide to take a break from questing to explore on your own terms where you'll walk through endless empty environments that contain nothing if the appeal of the elder scrolls series is in exploring these virtual worlds then daggerfall doesn't really offer this because even if the world it creates is impressive it isn't one that's designed to be explored instead it's more of a container for the game's primary focus the dungeons and all other parts of the world are left feeling secondary really daggerfall and it's more rudimentary but similarly designed predecessor arena feel like an experimental mix between a first person action game and a roguelike which was another genre known for procedural generation dungeon crawling and robust rpg mechanics in that sense daggerfall seems almost like an attempt to evolve the classic roguelike taking many of their core features while modernising the experience through the change of perspective from top down to first person and the switch from fully turn based to real time all while also adding in a much more graphically impressive and expansive setting but as ambitious as this might have been the end result was also uneven eventually action roguelikes would find new life albeit in very different formats and many years later and there would even be a return to large-scale procedural generation as can be seen with minecraft no man's sky and elite dangerous but for the elder scrolls series the next main line entry would abandon many of the more rogue-like elements to instead go in a completely different direction while the changes made from morrowind to oblivion and oblivion to skyrim received most of the attention from fans of the elder scrolls it was really the change from daggerfall to morrowind that was the most radical transformation the series ever went through morrowind represented a fundamental shift in design and focus that in addition to changing many parts of its predecessors would also lay the foundation for every major bethesda studios game that would be released afterwards while forever altering the way players would perceive open world games in short morrowind was a different breed of rpg to anything that came before it gone was the use of sprites replaced instead with fully three-dimensional representations for character models and in-game items which could now be freely interacted with gone was the algorithmically generated content replaced by a hand-designed approach that would come with significant scaling back in terms of size alongside a significant increase in the level of detail and gone was the traditional high fantasy setting replaced by something a little more alien still the most important change morrowind made was the shift in focus for the series from exploring dungeons to exploring the actual world it begins with you arriving on the dhamma island of vardenfell after your recent release from prison here you are an outsider and it's from this perspective that you'll experience the world a stranger in a strange land and there are few lands more strange than this one from coasts of twisting oversized mushrooms to barren deserts of ash to the insect-like architecture morrowind setting feels wholly unique before you can experience that however you'll need to create a character which is seamlessly integrated into the game's opening sequence as you step off the boat you arrived in and proceed through the local immigration office to answer a series of questions that determine your race class and favored skills options to change your character's appearance are incredibly limited being little more than a selection of heads and hairstyles for each race without even the option to change hair colour and hair style independent of each other that's okay though because no matter how many options there are you'd still end up ugly just like everyone else in this game morrowind was a good looking game for its time but its time has come and gone and some parts of its graphics like the character models haven't aged gracefully other areas like the environment are a lot better although they were also greatly limited by the low draw distance this is a setting which can be changed if you know how and if you do up for draw distance it becomes easy to appreciate the visual style of this strange world you've found yourself in to this day i haven't experienced many other open worlds that come close to being as visually distinctive as vardhan fell although you won't really get much of an impression of that this early for now you'll find yourself in cedar neen the first small town in the game where you'll be able to familiarize yourself with the dialogue system quest design and combat the majority of dialogue in morrowind lacks voice acting this is understandable considering its budget and how much dialogue there really is in this game slightly less understandable is the topic-driven approach to dialogue which can result in the player feeling like they're interacting with an encyclopedia rather than speaking to an actual person this style of dialogue was a lot more common in older rpgs and it has the practical advantage of allowing for a large range of topics to be discussed still it's not a very interesting or natural way to navigate conversations and it does result in an overall lack of individuality for the npcs in this world it also gets very cluttered later in the game as the number of topics you have access to accumulate over time and yet you still sometimes have to find specific topics to advance quests which can end up being surprisingly hard to do amid so many options overall there's clear room for improvement with this system at the very least more attention could be given to what characters have what topics available and more effort could have been taken to ensure that conversations with important npcs felt more like real conversations anyway if you do take time to speak to the locals of cedar neen you will likely pick up your first side quest in daggerfall the only non-faction side quests came from merchants or innkeepers who gave you randomly generated objectives that were taken from a pool of quest templates in morrowind side quests are integrated into the world more naturally and are now each unique making them a lot more engaging we'll talk more about quest design later though for now it's time to head out into the world and wonder why you can't seem to hit that damn mud crab combat is probably the most criticized part of this game like many older rpgs whoever you hit with an attack is calculated by a dice roll with your chance of success being determined for your weapon skill attributes and level of fatigue this means it's common for players attacks to miss regularly in the early game particularly if the first weapon you find isn't something your character has much proficiency with as you level up your hit chance will increase but many players still take issue with this system based on the idea that if you swing a weapon into an enemy's model it would make sense for the attack to at least connect melee combat is also noticeably light on depth with blocking an evasion likewise being simply calculated through dice rolls meaning all melee combat comes down to is standing toe-to-toe of your opponent and repeatedly pressing the attack button there are directional attacks but these can be awkward to pull off consistently and aren't enough to add real depth to combat as the only impact they have is forcing you to spam a specific directional attack for your weapon ultimately morrowind just doesn't have good combat and it makes up for this in other ways but i don't think the problem most people have is to do with depth it's logical that not every attack would damage an opponent sometimes you might miss or they might parry the blow or the attack might glance harmlessly off their armor when an attack's hit chance is represented by a dice rolling games these scenarios are often taken into consideration and for some games that's fine but for morrowind it isn't because morrowind fails to visually represent what's happening in game meaning a successful attack and a miss look exactly the same this is harmful to immersion as players will see their weapon phase through enemy hitboxes over and over and if this is meant to happen because the enemy dodged the attack then the player needs to see the enemy dodge the attack the animations needed for this would be hard to implement but as a big part of this game's appeal comes from being immersed in its world the impact of attacks missing with no visual representation should have been taken into consideration so that this problem could have been avoided although as later games in the series will prove a guaranteed hit chance is not enough to guarantee a good combat system still while morrowind's combat might be a major weakness if you can look past this aspect you'll find an awful lot more to this world than just killing things i've always loved the signposts just outside cedar neen that might sound like a strange thing to hold affection for but there's something about leaving this town for the first time and seeing all the different destinations you can go to that really captures what makes these games so great there are lots of signposts in this game they can be useful for navigation particularly early on but they also act as a reminder that there's more to this world out there just waiting to be discovered when i first played this game and saw a name i was unfamiliar with on a signpost i always felt the urge to just drop what i was doing and head off immediately in that direction just to see where this path would take me and what this new name was actually like in person that feeling is a testament to the game's world design it can instill curiosity in the player with nothing more than a name on a piece of wood and if you do happen to be struck with a feeling of wanderlust this early the open design of this world does ensure you can go wherever you like at this point some places might take a while to walk to but you can always hop on board the local organic taxi service to travel to nearby settlements if you don't mind paying a small fee still if you do opt to walk you might soon notice a couple other things that you'll need to get used to the first is that there's a fatigue system represented by the green bar in the bottom right corner of the screen this drains quickly and will leave you much less likely to hit in combat luckily fatigue can be restored by resting and as magicka doesn't regenerate over time in this game and fatigue trains whenever you run resting is something you'll be doing a lot maybe too much as the resting system in this game and every later elder scrolls game is a bit too forgiving you can rest any time to fully heal as long as an enemy is not in the immediate vicinity in daggerfall quests had time requirements which were represented by in-game days this meant resting was given a drawback as too much resting could lead you to running out of time to complete your current quest it's understandable why such a system had to be removed in later games as it doesn't fit with their more open-ended nature and it would punish players for picking up too many quests although i am sad to see it removed entirely as it was the only thing which gave meaning to the passage of in-game time and time is such an important thing in reality that really it deserves greater representation in game still even if it was necessary to remove time limits for quests that still leaves a balance problem created by the resting system because it enables you to fully recover and has no real drawback other methods of recovery like potions and spells have their own costs in money or magicka and also involve more effort to purchase in advance or cast but there's no reason to use these other methods when resting can do everything they can do but quicker going to sleep after every single combat encounter also isn't very realistic and yet this is objectively the best way to play this may sound like i'm complaining a disproportionate amount for what is a really small problem but that's because there's no reason for this problem to exist in the first place the solution could not be any simpler resting should require a bed always and to rest in the wilderness or in dungeons players should have to buy a one-time use set of camping supplies all be lucky enough to find a bed while exploring this would be more balanced and more realistic as you would no longer be able to spam resting after any time you take damage and while it would slightly raise the difficulty of the game it would do so in a way that rewards players for being prepared while also adding more long-term consequence to individual combat encounters as was mentioned earlier the core combat system in this game is simplistic so adding an element of resource management could help address this and increase tension and it's not like players couldn't use restoration magic and potions as well placing a larger focus on beds could also help sell the idea that this world is a real place as you'll have to put more thought into when and where you sleep you would also need to change how fast fatigue is drained through running but that might also be a beneficial change as the current fatigue system is a little annoying but enough about resting the final thing you might notice upon leaving cedar neen and embarking on your epic adventure of a lifetime is that you walk slowly i mean you can run but you're hardly usain bolt and your overall movement speed might be lower than players are used to some people say the slow movement speed is to disguise the small size of the game's world i say it's because your speed stat is low i mean seriously have you seen what a high speed stat can do this brings me to the final part of the morrowind early game experience which is that you're weak you realize that all your life you've been coasting along as if you were in a dream but now facing the trials of the last few days you have come alive and suddenly it's obvious to you you just have to concentrate all the energy and time you've wasted it's a sin but without the experience you've gained taking risks taking responsibility for failure how could you have understood you sense yourself more aware more open to new ideas you've learned a lot about morrowind it's hard to believe how ignorant you were but now you have so much more to learn [Music] the unique level of messages in morrowind tell a story it's not the story of morrowind itself you won't find any mention of verner varin and his battle with dag of her or other such important events instead they tell a different story they tell your story not as a fictional character within this universe but as a player forced to learn and overcome and grow and it's a fine tale when you're fresh off the boat and first step foot onto the island of bardemphill you're in the dark about its culture and inhabitants but the same is true for the game's systems and rules and so just as you explore the world from a geographical point of view the same could be said about your mechanical exploration of the game this experience can be uneven but it's also rewarding and the overall sense of progression morrowind is able to bestow to players is a key part of why the game works so well but let's start with the basics as with daggerfall before it and each mainline game after it morrowind foregoes a convention and experience point system entirely instead you level up by using the various in-game skills up to 27 available you select 10 during character creation to receive a bonus in and one level is gained for every 10 increases across these selected skills to increase a skill you just have to make use of it this means advancement can occur naturally even when doing the most rudimentary of activities for example walking increases your athletics swinging a weapon increases your weapon skill and getting stuck in the environment and then spending the next five minutes trying to jump free of this predicament increases your acrobatics there is always a silver lining and that's one of the main benefits of this system you don't need to be completing quests or killing enemies to advance your character all your actions however small will allow you to make some kind of gradual progress which makes that progress feel logical this is like how skill advancement works in real life after all you don't gain experience points for doing menial tasks for other people but you do get better at things through practice this makes the focus on skills rather than experience points feel like a good fit for the series as it makes for a more believable system of advancement when you do level up in morrowind you're able to choose three attributes to increase out of the seven that govern your character these attributes are fairly straightforward but things get more complicated when you realize that each attribute is connected to a set of skills and that you get a bonus to the amount each attribute is raised each level based on the number of related skill level increases you had this includes any of the 27 skills not just for 10 you select on character creation to be proficient in meaning there's a large potential for min maxing to make the most out of your limited attribute increases in order to gain larger bonuses each level up the idea behind this is solid as just with skills it makes a connection between what the player's been doing and leveling up it's logical that doing activities that require physical strength like swinging a heavy weapon could lead to your character's strength attribute rising more quickly it also makes the choice of what attributes to raise on level up more interesting as you're encouraged to weigh what attributes you want to increase the most against what attributes you have the highest bonus for without this system it's quite possible players would only need to make a single decision which is what order to raise the attributes in which they would then stick to on every single level increase making progression pretty boring finally in principle min maxing itself isn't a bad thing and can lead to more interesting progression systems that said i don't think this system works that well in morrowind or its sequel oblivion for two specific reasons firstly as part of the focus of this series is on immersion and believability a design which emphasizes min maxing might be counterproductive as nothing is less immersive or believable than gaming the system to maximize each level up this changes leveling from being a natural thing which happens in the background as a result of normal play into an overly deliberate activity where the player is constantly focused on stats and timing the precise moment to trigger the level increase this is then made worse when you consider what you actually need to do to increase skills artificially which brings me to the second problem raising skills deliberately outside of normal play is boring and stupid the most obvious thing people will think of here is jumping up and down continuously or going afk with auto run turned on to increase acrobatics and athletics respectively a much less time consuming but still very tedious way to increase necessary skills is by using a trainer morrowind allows you to train skills as many times as you like per level providing you have the coin to finance this but this can still be tedious when done for every level up really the best way to play morrowind is just to ignore how efficiently you level and take the attribute increases as they come as this is more immersive and wastes less time still players shouldn't need to decide between what is more effective and what is more enjoyable in the first place i don't think attribute bonuses should have been removed entirely as they do make level ups more interesting instead the best solution would have been to adjust how the bonus is calculated to diminish the need for maximum efficiency for example on every level up you could gain a plus three bonus with the attribute you've raised the most skills for and two plus two bonuses for the two runners up this would still allow some room for min maxing but it would ensure the difference between leveling with maximum efficiency and leveling naturally would be far less as the total amount of bonus points on offer would always be the same there are other ways this could be achieved too but the point is that you could still preserve the good parts of your attribute bonuses and skill system without punishing players so heavily for not leveling efficiently the final problem with morrowind's skill system is that some aspects of skill advancement are very unbalanced the worst example of this is magic your skill level in each school of magic increases with spell use but this doesn't factor in the difficulty of the spell or the magicka required to cast it if you play the game naturally you'll want to use powerful spells in combat as they have the higher damage per cast however this is actually the worst way to increase your magic skill level as you'll perform less spell casts before running out of magicka meanwhile the best way to level magic is to create the cheapest spell possible and then just spam it repeatedly morrowind doesn't actually factor in whether the spell hits an enemy or not so you can just spam these cheap spells out of combat to level them up a more balanced system would be for magic skills to increase based on the magic are required to cast the spell and they should only increase on successful spell casts meaning when you hit an enemy if it's an offensive spell a single player rpg doesn't need to be perfectly balanced but magic skills increase so slowly when playing the game as intended that this oversight becomes a problem if you plan to rely on them still despite everything i've said just now at a fundamental level i like the skill system in this game a lot it does have its problems but nothing that couldn't be theoretically fixed in a sequel and the ideas behind morrowind systems are good not only does it make the game stand out against most other rpgs as a result of not having experience points it also feels like a system that fits with the open-ended design of the world you can go anywhere and use whatever skills you like and you'll still level up with bonuses based on the skills you use most which works well but to really understand character progression in morrowind you need to understand more than just its systems most elder scrolls games begin with the player character as a prisoner i've heard people say they dislike this premise on the basis that it limits your character's potential background their reasoning is that regardless of how you envision your character you will always be forced to start as a criminal but personally i don't see this as much of a problem good people can go to jail so can the innocent but what the prisoner opening does achieve is starting you at the very bottom of this world you are and nobody with nothing at all to your name except your recently acquired freedom in this way the player and their character start their adventure from the same position with their one possession their freedom becoming the central focus but even if the world is your oyster you still feel the weakness of your character wherever you go i mean in combat you can barely hit a slow moving oversized crustacean which means local bandits can easily be more than a match for you and your slow move speed can make even running away a bit challenging and it's not just in battle you feel weak morrowind isn't a forgiving place for a new player the world is big and full of possibilities but its expansiveness can make it very easy to get lost enemies aren't scaled to your level in this game so early expiration can lead to early deaths powerful equipment can be found even early on but only if you know where to look otherwise your equipment will be very basic the tools at your disposal like magic can be immensely useful but only if you know how to use them and if you do try to get ahead with magic a too low skill level will lead to most of your spells failing anyway meanwhile combats can damage more than just your health diseases and attribute draining effects are common and while these are very easy to remove for one who knows how if you don't they can take a heavy toll but maybe in the face of all this you try to get ahead by turning to a life of crime after all there are useful items to be had for one willing to reach out and take them but if you do you'll soon find the guards can be rather persistent meaning you can very easily land yourself in a jail cell where with time your skills will actually de-level leaving you even weaker than when you started in morrowind's narrative you begin the game as an outlander and for a new player this world will make you feel that in nearly every part of the experience still it's not levels for the most important thing the player lacks it's knowledge one of the most controversial features in the elder scrolls games is fast travel morrowind doesn't have the same fast travel system as the other games in the series but you can get around in this game through using the markham recall spell which lets you mark a location and then teleport back to it as well as the two intervention spells which take you to the nearest imperial shrine or tribunal temple you can arguably travel around in this game just as quickly as any of the others of course to do this you need to buy these spells then achieve a high enough skill level to cast them successfully and then be prepared enough to mark a location in advance or knowledgeable enough to know where each of the intervention spells will actually land you the knowledge to do this takes time to acquire but the reward is considerable meanwhile new players won't just not know how to do this they may struggle to even travel between major cities as there are so many places in this game and the way between them isn't always obvious barnum phil is easy to get around but only if you know how and this is just one example you also need to watch your fatigue to be able to hit stuff in combat avoid picking up every worthless item you see to prevent yourself from becoming over incumbent use local temples to remove diseases put your coin into training to boost your early level ups learn how to taunt and cast frenzy to make npcs you want to kill attack you first and know when to help yourself to a five finger discount and when to keep your hands in your pocket there are plenty of lessons to learn in a world so big and when this is taken into consideration alongside the more traditional advancement systems of equipment and levels it gives morrowind a very strong sense of progression the difference between your level one character and your endgame character is considerable and it feels good to slay cliff races in a single hit and teleport halfway across the map and back again just to hand in a single quest morrowind asks you to master its world and it makes you feel like a master after you've done so there is a downside to this however as you reach a high level and learn the ins and outs of morrowind systems it can all get a bit too easy this might be fine if it's at the end of your first playthrough where you feel like you've earned your power but it should be acknowledged that that memorable journey you take to get to this point isn't something you can ever experience again i mean really combat is simplistic and easy with any encounter that does pose a challenge only doing so if you purposefully avoid healing potions meanwhile the economy is flat out broken you'll acquire more money than you know what to do with playing normally and if you want to kick-start that process one of the earliest mage guild quests in balmora gives you free access to a number of high-value soul gems meaning you can get rich with little effort before leaving the game's first major town these aren't the only valuable items you can help yourself to in balmoral either and if you know to bribe npcs before you sell to them to raise their reputation or you just know a certain scamp you can end up with so much money so early but you can purchase enough training to skip over the intimidating early levels altogether and then there are the quests themselves which get most of their challenge from asking the player to find something meaning if the player already knows where their objective is there won't be much of a challenge and then there's also those completely game breaking systems like the alchemy exploit which i'm willing to give a pass to as it's difficult for players to figure such things out by themselves but even so it has to be said that while there might be a magic to morrowind's progression the first time it's lost once you know what you're doing and this does hurt the game's replayability still better to create a strong sense of progression once than never at all by skyrim those unique level up messages that tell the player's story as they grow in strength were removed and there were many more changes made to progression than this but morrowind understood that progression can mean something and that it might be worth creating an experience that is uneven in order to use character progression to tell a story not every part of morrowind was this concerned with storytelling however there's a term used to describe unengaging quests in games that most people are familiar with fetch quest i don't know if anyone has ever really defined this term usually people seem to rely on the common sense explanation that a fetch quest is just the quest that involves fetching something i've always assumed the term came from mmos which often relied on barebones quest design as a way to facilitate the large quantity of content these games needed to keep people playing with time though this term has come to be used beyond just the mmo genre as a way to criticize any quest that fails at being interesting through its basic or generic design but what actually is a fetch quest if you break most quests down in any rpg they tend to revolve around going from one place to another and either killing someone or finding something this basic foundation is present in almost every quest some might involve more steps like instead of going from a to b you go from a to b to c then back again or rather than just picking something up you need to first kill someone then interact with something and then pick something up but adding more steps isn't what determines whether a quest is good or bad nor is whether or not you actually fetch something what really matters are the specifics not the basic activity and that's the problem with viewing the term fetch quest as synonymous for bad it's an overly simplistic way of looking at things because even if describing something as a fetch quest does give some insight into what you do in the quest it fails to account for other important factors that determine a quest's quality such as the how or why all this is to say morrowind has a lot of fetch quests but that's not a bad thing or to phrase that in a more helpful way morrowind has a lot of quests where what you do isn't very interesting but it makes up for this in how you do these quests and why you do them and these are arguably more important but let's look at an example imagine you've just arrived on an island the locals don't want you here the cuisine is awful and the wildlife all seems to want to kill you but you're an ex-prisoner and there doesn't seem to be any return ships so you may as well just settle in and get used to it here what i'm describing might sound like australia but this is actually the start of morrowind and having found yourself in this situation you decide to do the one task you've been given which is to deliver a coded letter to a man in the nearby town of balmora and that's it this is all you're told welcome to the main quest line delivering a letter is not an interesting objective and there are no assassination attempts or dragon attacks along the way you really do just need to go from one location to another and find this man but you will have to find them yourself there are no quest markers in this game ever you do have a map but the information it shows is limited and it won't display places you haven't been to luckily though the officer who tasks you with making the delivery has given you a set of idiot proof directions but you will still have to read these and then follow them in order to find balmoral yourself this experience is very different from following away marker or minimap instead of always knowing exactly where to go you have to pay attention to the local topography and make sure you're following the roads while keeping an eye out for things like signposts this is much more immersive finding your way through this world is no longer automatic and so you feel more connected to the places you journey through when you do finally arrive at balmoral that first time it can be a little exciting not a lot mind you this was just a simple delivery mission but there's still a hint of excitement to this moment as you know this is somewhere you found yourself you weren't just pulled along by your leash like a good little puppy following its quest marker master instead you made it here all on your own and this is only the first quest still before getting ahead of yourself you still need to find your target which you do as you would do in real life by asking around until you find someone willing to talk to you this person will then send you to a local tavern where you might find a guy who knows more which eventually leads to a house and there you go quest complete you still aren't told what the letter is about making this a very mundane introduction to this world but this is just the first step in this story so maybe it makes sense but it should start with something ordinary and that's why this quest is a good example to look at what you do is as basic as it can possibly be and by this point you haven't even been introduced to the actual storyline and yet this quest still works because the task makes sense and completing it requires you to engage with the world through finding where to go yourself the lack of quest markers is vital to why these types of quests are successful in morrowind many times you'll be tasked to find someone or something which will take you to towns dungeons and remote corners of the wilderness and every time you'll have to find your own way there as there's no mini-map or gps to point the way you have to think about these situations as a character in this world really words are you lost on your way to a dungeon well check the horizon check your map check your journal and try to figure out what it is you've missed can't find the right npc in town well ask around figure out who might have some information to help you and think about where it makes sense for the person you're looking for to be just lost in general well try exploring discover this world's details its secrets what lies over that horizon and what's around the next corner get out there and maybe that's the key if a quest marker is telling you exactly what direction to go in at all times can you really say that following it counts as exploration i know it doesn't to me and if exploration really is the main appeal of these games and the main thing you do in them is quests then how can quests that don't involve exploration be the right choice for this series there are of course downsides to not having quest markers firstly it limits the quest designers and writers as directions have to be accounted for and objectives need to be findable secondly players can get lost and sometimes that isn't enjoyable after all no one likes having their time wasted and the line between satisfaction of finding things for yourself and frustration at not being able to find what you're looking for is thinner than many would like to admit and lastly players who don't want to read quest dialogue are effectively excluded without markers and while it's easy to not care about these players as a critic it's less easy to do for a developer that wants to reach as wide an audience as possible so there are reasons in favor of quest markers and maybe it was inevitable this series would go in that direction but morrowind does make a compelling argument for why we were better off without them anyway enough about the how of morrowind's quests what about the why well when it comes to narrative morrowind's quests are usually simplistic and it's difficult to think of examples of really good stories outside the main quest the reason for this isn't because of a failure in morrowind storytelling however instead it's because morrowind takes a different approach than most other rpgs where rather than treating each quest as an opportunity to tell an interesting self-contained story it instead uses its quest to tell the world story the focus is on believability where you're given tasks that it would make sense to be given and these aren't always interesting in fact many times they're quite mundane but so is real life and to create a believable illusion of a living world some ordinariness might be necessary that said it would be unfair to call morrowind's quests boring because even if they're not individually exciting they still do a good job of fleshing out the law after all it's through quests you come to understand the world attention is given to politics religion history economics agriculture and other issues facing the people of these lands and so these quests build the blocks of this world brick by brick adding depth to a place that could otherwise seem flat and two-dimensional in some ways there is still a missed opportunity with these quests as it should be possible to tell interesting stories while also maintaining a sense of realism and assisting with world building if you want proof of this look no further than the main story itself but in a game this large it would be difficult to ensure a high degree of narrative quality across such a vast amount of content keep in mind daggerfall's solution was procedural generation so by comparison moral and side quests simple as they might sometimes be are a big step up still even if the simplicity of their stories isn't such a big problem there is still another way these quests might disappoint there are many quests in this game but very few of them involve meaningful choice this is again a result of how much content this game has which makes it understandable why branching quest design might be less common than in other rpgs however sometimes the options that aren't available can have a big impact on player immersion there are many examples of this but i'll stick to just giving one example that feels very indicative of the problem so in an early thieves guild quest you're asked to recover a stolen dwemer artifact from a kijit named razid you're told razid is in a fishing village looking for a buyer for the item yet when you find him you can't offer to buy the item from him your only option is to steal it this doesn't make sense he's literally waiting for a buyer and here you are probably with more gold than you know what to do with and it's not like stealing it is especially easy either with many players probably resorting to murder to make it possible so by not allowing an option that many players would expect it harms immersion as you can't act in the way you might expect or want to on its own this example is minor but this type of scenario is more common than you might expect and there just hasn't been much effort in this game to allow for multiple solutions in quests even when it makes sense for them to exist so morrowind's quests aren't very good at allowing for multiple solutions which can at times harm immersion and they don't guarantee you exciting set pieces or in-depth self-contained stories either what they are good at is getting the player to feel like a part of this world they give you a reason to get out there and explore for yourself and it's a reason that always makes sense and feels believable it's as if morrowind's quests are designed first and foremost to serve the world as opposed to the world existing to contain quests and that approach makes a lot of sense because morrowind's greatest asset is undoubtedly its world one of the things i hate the most in open world games is when they divide their world into activities if you've played any modern open world games you should know what i'm referring to maps filled with evenly spaced markers showing you where to go and what to do where everything important is highlighted meaning everything else must be unimportant and space is separated into the parts that matter and the parts that don't there's a reason this approach to designing open worlds has become so popular these activities do give players something to do but in the end these activities end up being what the world is defined by and so they make it seem less like an actual place than a virtual theme park an attraction built for the player where everything needs a purpose and is designed with the player in mind here are the rides everything in between is just the cue and remember fasten your safety harness the rides are designed to be exciting maybe i sound bitter and i am because the result is that no matter how great the graphics might be i'll never be able to believe the illusion in front of my eyes these worlds are structured like a video game and you interact with them in a specifically video gamey way so that's the way i end up seeing them but not morrowind for better or worse vardenfell is a virtual world first and a video game second in fact it's strange to go back to this game after playing so many modern open world games because the approach morrowind takes is so different there are no side activities checklisted for you to work through here the world itself is the one and only attraction the towns and villages reflect the island's geography being largely concentrated along the coastal more hospitable areas of the island as opposed to being laid out evenly for the sake of player convenience most enemies you encounter seem like wildlife as opposed to being a diverse selection of epic fantasy monsters for you to conquer in fact all of the biggest creatures that do live here aren't even hostile nor are most npcs you'll encounter in the wilderness because while there are bandits and daedric cultists out there they're not around every corner waiting to provide consistent fodder for the player to defeat instead they're usually hidden away content to leave ub providing you do the same to them and then there's the design of the landscape itself a lot has been said about morrowind's alien atmosphere and there's certainly an appeal to this world's uniqueness but this isn't exactly a fantasy aesthetic that's known to sell there's a reason so many games with fantasy settings create their worlds as exaggerations of our own world with snowy mountains and enchanting forests complemented by medieval castles and dazzling sunsets this is an aesthetic that's relatable and marketable it's exactly the type of place players would want to explore and that's why we see this kind of setting so often but then you have morrowind and sure some of it seems pretty cool like the towering mushrooms and unusual architecture but a lot of the rest is ugly it's a world of ash and dirt most landscapes are barren and lifeless and the dominant colors are browns and grays it's not attractive it's not relatable it's not even visually interesting a lot of the time and if one of the main ideals of a game like this is letting players step into another world and live another life no one would choose this world to step into but by committing so thoroughly to its own unique vision morrowind gains a sense of true authenticity this is obviously not a world designed with marketability in mind and that provides it with more credibility of course this might not mean much on its own but morrowind is supported by strong world building which provides the depth that a real location should have resulting in a world that feels coherent and carefully thought out take the red mountain which dominates the island of vardenfell lying at the center of its map and the end of its story this imposing mountain isn't just a part of the geography however it's an integral piece of this world and it casts a shadow over every other part of the game for the player the red mountain is an obstacle that will obstruct your path forcing you to go around it and ensuring you're always aware of its presence even when the game's poor draw distance doesn't allow it to be visible but it's also an obstacle for the region's other inhabitants albeit in a less literal way this island is consumed by blight diseases and ash storms that come from this volcano which limits its agriculture forcing the farms of the region to be concentrated on its southeast corner while also influencing the subterranean architecture of nearby settlements and the harsh way of life for the nomadic tribes found to the north and south mountain is also a key part of the economy as the heat from the volcano has created a number of ebony and glass deposits within the rock that have since been turned to mines these valuable resources have become important exports for the region which explains the disproportionate imperial presence in this otherwise remote corner of the world but it doesn't stop there red mountain is also an area of great religious significance although its meaning is different to ashlanders finitis to the tribunal temple or even the sixth house and it's also an important part of this region's history being home to a number of key events that have great historical significance to the game's main story and have shaped the culture and politics of this island's many inhabitants red mountain could have just been a big volcano in the middle of the island but it's not it's so much more than this and this is how morrowind builds its world with layers and connections that always inform other parts of the experience and from its tallest peak to its most out of the way side quests this tends to remain true this is why morrowind's world works so well it's designed in a believable way and the more players believe in it the more interesting they find it which creates that desire to explore its landscapes and speak to its inhabitants and read its books which reveals its rich law and detailed world building which makes it more believable so the cycle can repeat pulling you in further and further until you're reading through all 36 lessons of vivec and telling your best friends about the importance of chimp no list of side activities carefully dotted around the map could ever do this as effectively and if a world is constructed well enough you don't need artificial checklists because the world itself will be enough morrowind is also able to explore some surprisingly mature themes through this approach like the relationship between historical events and religion or the impact of colonialism on a region's culture and through its broad scope it can look at these from different angles in different places without ever seeming like it's trying to deliver a specific message and it's great this is how you handle law and world building this is what open world should be this is the dream and this is what seems so lacking from so many other open world games if i did have one piece of criticism of the world design in this game it would be that the enemy density is excessive go in the water and there's slaughterfish walk about on land and there are rats and knicks hounds and just exist on this island for more than a few seconds and the cliff races will be coming for you and while don't get me wrong i love a good cliff racer meme as much as the next guy this is kind of a real problem everywhere you go wildlife is trying to kill you everywhere all the time and for once i'd just like to be able to walk from one side of the island to the other without feeling like i'm genociding an entire indigenous species but for the most part morrowind's world is one of gaming's best and it's a testament to what can be achieved when the world is allowed to inform the rest of the game as opposed to doing things the other way around i also haven't even mentioned the openness of morrowind's world and how liberating so much freedom can be the idea of go anywhere do anything be anyone is very appealing and while there are limitations to this that ideal is still more alive here than in most games as the next part of this video will show there are some factions in this series that show up in every game these are the fighters guild the mages guilds and the thieves guild and while these might sound rather generic their presence tells us something important they represent the three basic archetypes you find in rpgs the three basic ways to build your character and the three main playstyles in these games and the reason why a slightly generic faction exists for each of these archetypes in every game is that regardless of what character you make or how you build them or how you want to play there will still always be at least one faction that fits your character want to be a warrior a spellcaster a rogue that sticks to the shadows well you can be any of these and there will always be an in-game faction waiting for you each with a long quest line to provide you with experience equipment knowledge and maybe even a place in the world and a sense of belonging as players we may have a tendency to try to do everything in a game on a single playthrough but i don't think factions were designed with this playstyle in mind after all if they were there wouldn't really be a need to have a faction for each of these archetypes in every game nor would there be a reason to include mutually exclusive factions instead i think it was originally intended for players to only join a few of the factions that appealed to them the most and so a range of factions were created to provide choice i mean if this game is trying to allow players to do anything and be anyone then it's factions that are the game's main method of achieving this after all both the dialogue system and quest design allow only limited role-playing options but through joining factions players do get to feel like they are differentiating their character and experience in this world in a specific way they've chosen in this way morrowind gets off to a strong start by having 10 joinable factions this is double the number of oblivion or skyrim and quantity does matter as more factions means more choice while also making the world seem more alive and interactive these factions are the three already mentioned the imperial legion the imperial cult the tribunal temple the moroc tong who are the assassins guild of this game and the three great houses this means in addition to catering to those three basic rpg archetypes there are also factions that are political in nature or religious as well as some which are more mercenary compared to some which are more ideologically driven regardless the choice between so many different factions is appreciated and it's a shame later games weren't able to maintain such a rich selection of groups to join as for the factions themselves they seem to be designed primarily around making you feel like an actual member of the guild this means that when you join them you aren't sent on an exciting adventure right away but are instead given menial tasks which befit your rather lowly rank join the fighters guild and you will kill rats in a nearby basement join the mages guild and you can expect a lengthy internship under another member which will have you picking mushrooms and fetching laboratory equipment and join the tribunal temple and be prepared for a lengthy pilgrimage to seven holy sites located in different parts of the island just to prove you really are a believer i mean can't let just anyone in outlander one positive about morrowind's factions is that they aren't linear there are multiple guild tools across vardenfell and they come with multiple guild members that can assign you different tasks giving you more freedom in the order you complete quests and meaning if you do get stuck or just don't like a particular quest you can often get away with ignoring it as you complete more tasks you'll soon be able to apply for promotion which in turn can unlock more tasks that will gradually get more complex and dangerous to advance in rank you'll also need to meet a minimum skill requirement in one of the guild's favorite skills both the act of getting promoted and the skill requirements needed to do this help sell the illusion that you're an actual guild member in an actual organization with standards that said the skill requirements themselves seem poorly balanced requiring too high a level of one skill and not enough of the others and the attribute requirements are so low there's no point in them even existing in fact they are so underscaled that a new character could potentially have high enough attributes to meet the highest possible rank requirements in every single faction in the game at level 1. but regardless the idea behind skill requirements is logical as a character with no relevant ability shouldn't be able to advance in a guild as for the stories of each faction these aren't as in-depth for those of the later games and it's clear less attention was given to telling an overarching story in moral inspections at times this can make them seem less interesting by comparison particularly as you get to the end of a faction's questline where the conclusions can sometimes seem a little weak later faction quests do often reward you with valuable artifacts but considering the amount of effort required to complete a faction the lack of narrative rewards might still be disappointing despite this these factions are successful at making you feel like a part of the world as quests are allowed to be low stakes the objectives seem believable and your advancement happens at a realistic speed these factions are also good at making you care about the world's law the best examples of this and the best factions in the game are the three great dunmer houses you can join plalu radharan and telvani each represent very different viewpoints and occupy different regions of the island halalu are the most progressive house being happy to work with the imperials and looking to capitalize on diplomacy and trade rhetorian place a greater emphasis on tradition and honour valuing the way of the warrior and taking a more reluctant approach to the imperials lastly the telvani value magical aptitude and ambition beyond all else and actively despise the imperial presence on the island going as far as to ignore imperial doctrine on issues like the outlawing of slavery you can only join one of these houses and all of their quest lines are good but the telvanni might be the very best after joining you begin by working at the telvani council house where each telvani mage lord has a representative called a mouth who will assign you tasks after earning the favor of each mouth you can work for the mage lords themselves whose eccentricity makes them some of the most memorable characters in the game here you'll also have to get used to certain aspects of tilvani life like how mages live in mushroom towers that have no stairs forcing those who wish to speak to them to levitate a televani tradition which helps filter out those who lack magical ability and so are perceived as less worthy of their time eventually to advance further you'll need to get one of the lords to sponsor you and after working for them and continuing to climb the ladder of tilvani society you'll be able to recruit your own mouth who will take a seat in the council house with all the others you can then send your mouth away to do certain tasks for you and nothing makes you really feel more like a member of a venerable and noble house than getting your own lackey to order around what really makes these three questlines so good though is how they provide first-hand exposure to morrowind's law after all the best way to get players to care about the politics of the region is to allow them to participate in it and these questlines provide a taste of that overall morrowind's factions might still have benefited from having stronger overarching narratives but they do feel successful at providing choice making the world feel more in-depth and allowing the player to feel like a member of these various groups where i think these factions do go a bit wrong is what happens after you complete their quest lines there is now a long-standing tradition in the elder scrolls series of making the player the faction leader upon completion of each faction in theory there's nothing wrong with this and after everything you've done to get to the end of these questlines you could argue leadership is deserved the problem however is that if one of the best aspects of these factions is how they make you feel like a member then that needs to also be the case for being the leader but neither morrowind nor the later games ever even come close to making the player actually feel like the leader of these groups instead as soon as the quest line is complete and you've been promoted to the top spot it's over and your role as leader is to do absolutely nothing this isn't just a missed opportunity it's immersion breaking because as soon as you become the leader and realize leadership has no meaning these factions themselves also lose some of their meaning in fact by making the player of a leader these games almost feel like they're actively highlighting the superficiality of these groups and your role within them ultimately these games shouldn't make the player of a leader of a faction unless they're willing to create content that will allow the player to actually feel like the leader but at least in morrowind the player is less likely to end up the leader of every faction in the game due to the greater number of factions available so at least that second layer of absurdity that plagues the later games is often avoided that said morrowind does provide an example of how to successfully allow the player to step into the shoes of someone of great importance it just happens in a different part of the game a writer can spend hours creating the perfect backstory for their world they can create characters events conflicts and entire history stretching back decades full of depth and meaning and significance but none of that will mean much if they can't effectively communicate this backstory to their audience and therein lies the real challenge it's not how to create a good story for your world it's how to successfully tell that world story to the player morrowind's main questline starts slow after delivering a letter to caius casadez in balmora you'll be inducted into the blades an imperial intelligence organization in the service of the emperor from here you'll be tasked with gathering information about the local ashlander tribes and their prophecy of the nerevarine this will lead you to seeking out multiple experts in informants from who you will learn of the story of indirel nerevar a hero of adanma who lived hundreds of years ago and united his people and led them to victory in war before his tragic demise the prophecy of vanera varin states that a prisoner born on a certain day to uncertain parents would one day return to morrowind as nerevar reborn where he would unite the province and bring an end to the tribunal who are morrowind's free god-like rulers who have governed the land since nerevar's death it turns out as you discover from caius it just so happens that the player was born on the right day to unknown parents and this is why the empress will fit to release them and send them to caius on the island of vardenfell the emperor doesn't know whether or not you really are nerevar reborn and nor does caius or the player but in these times of uncertainty for the empire and unrest in vardenfell such a possibility couldn't be ignored because even if the player isn't the nerevarine that doesn't mean someone who meets the first part of the prophecy wouldn't be a potentially useful tool for the empire and so you set out to explore the island's culture and history as you uncover more about the story of lord nerevar and its significance to what's currently happening on the island this premise can seem like a traditional spin on the chosen one trope but by refusing to confirm whether the player really is the chosen one or not it's elevated into something more and that uncertainty over the prophecy's validity is left hanging for the game's entire duration as you continue your research you'll learn of degother and the sixth house who follow him dagoff resides at the heart of the red mountain and is responsible for the spreading of the blight diseases that ravage the land he is opposed by the tribunal yet the two groups have reached the stalemates where the tribunal are unable to defeat decoffer without the power of red mountain and so have instead looked to contain his threat through the creation of the ghost gate which seals this area off from the rest of the province despite this the power of the tribunal is waning and the influence of degoth er's sixth house is growing as he spreads his message to his followers through their dreams and bides his time while the tribunal grow weaker as the player continues to gather information they're eventually led to a sixth house base where you'll contract a specific polite disease called corpses an incurable affliction that causes cancerous growths and insanity in its victims wanting to avoid this fate the player heads to the only place that might offer assistance an asylum for corpses victims called the corpses aerium which is run by a tilvani wizard who aimed to provide at least one place of sanctuary for the victims while also researching the unusual disease this section of the game shows morrowind at its best the player being the one afflicted with the disease raises the story's stakes while also making these events feel very personal and the negative reactions of other npcs you try to talk to who recoil from you in horror really hammers this point home by the time you finally reach the corp cesarean there's a real sense of tension which the atmosphere of this strange location only adds to the asylum is more prison than sanctuary and you're tasked with travelling through it but aren't allowed to harm the victims who in their insanity will try to harm you giving it a more traditional horror vibe than most other dungeons as your only method of defending yourself is running away this location also has some rather unique inhabitants and speaking to them will shed light on one of the series greatest mysteries the disappearance of the dwemer still the really interesting thing about this questline is how it concludes after convincing the talvani lord to try to help you you're given an experimental cure he's been developing this cure is yet to work successfully and might be potentially lethal but with no alternative you're left with little choice luckily when you consume this cure you find it works meaning you're saved from the cancerous growths and insanity that debilitates victims however corpses also has a number of other effects such as total immunity to other diseases and an end to the natural aging process yet the cure was only designed to treat the negative symptoms not remove corpses entirely meaning these other effects remain and it just so happens that the second line of the prophecy reads neither blight nor age can harm him meaning this has now been fulfilled there are five more parts of the prophecy none of which apply to you yet but all of which can be achieved and these then represent your next objectives and so this is how you shall come to satisfy the conditions of the never in prophecy not through being born as the chosen one but by actively making the prophecy come to bear through your own actions over the course of the main questline to complete these final steps you'll have to travel the island and unite the three great houses and the various ashlander tribes to your cause this involves learning about their culture and then winning their favor in order to convince them you really are nerevar reborn during this lengthy task you'll eventually cross paths with the tribunal temple themselves who view the nerevarine prophecy as heresy as it undermines the authority of their three rulers this will lead you to meeting one of those rulers vivec and confronting the history that has set everything happening into motion history is something morrowind handles very well rather than laying its entire timeline down as absolute events you instead have to piece together various fragments from different sources to try to form a complete picture and some of these sources contradict each other leaving a level of ambiguity over what really happened as is the case with the death of indirel nerevar and the founding of the tribunal many years ago the dunmer didn't exist and morrowind was instead inhabited by the golden skin chimer and the dwemer or dwarves these two groups often fought but after nerevar united the chima people he forged the lasting peace with the dwemer through his friendship with their ruler eventually this piece broke down after the dwemer sought to use an ancient artifact called the heart of lorkhan an item that contained the power of divinity and was discovered within red mountain the threat this represented was too great for the chimer to ignore and so nerevar led his people to war here he was accompanied by his friends and closest advisors vivec and sopha sil as well as his wife almalexia and his high councillor degoth er the chimer were victorious but what happened next remains unclear all that is known for sure is that the dwemer race disappeared from tamriel entirely nerevar was killed and vivek sophasil and almalexia fought with dagoff before using the heart of lorkhan themselves to grant them godlike powers they then formed the tribunal temple and ruled morrowind as god kings although as punishment for their use of this artifact the daedric prince azura cursed the kyma race turning their eyes to fire and their golden skin to ash thus creating the dhanma she also foretold the prophecy of nerevar's return and the tribunal's full which is the prophecy of the nerevarine eventually degotha would reawaken within red mountain where he would use the heart of lorcan on himself to grow his power which leads to the events of the game so who killed lord nerevar well that depends on which source you follow some historical records say he died in battle with the dwemer but tribunal records say it was actually degother who killed nerevar due to dagoff coveting the power of the heart of lorkhan which nerevar wanted only to destroy ashlander records on the other hand detail a different version of events where it was actually the tribunal who sought the heart's power and so struck down nerevar to gain it for themselves while degoth remained loyal to nerevar and so tried to avenge him by attacking the tribunal you can also ask vivek himself who will recount his own version of events and justify his actions in great detail although he remains suspiciously vague about nerevar's actual depth and you can even speak to dagoff er who seems to suggest it was nerevar that actually betrayed him and so the past is a complicated tale full of ambiguity and competing accounts much like it is in real life this is how fictional history should be presented history isn't neat and tidy sources only provide partial images and those images are coloured by bias and stories always have more than one site and so by treating its history this way morrowind's backstory feels more real these events are also made more interesting by the player not actually being told what to believe and instead having to try to work the truth out for themselves and find their own interpretation which allows you to participate in this narrative beyond just being told where to go and what to do and how you interpret these events will completely change the way you view certain characters like vivec and dagofur still regardless of your own interpretation of events the story will end with the player heading to red mountain to confront dagoffer and end the threat he represents to the land and with that done the world is changed there are no more blight storms the sixth house members awaken from their dreams the people of vardenfell regard you as their savior the heart of lorkhan is finally destroyed and the unquestioned divinity of the tribunal is over that last point is something further explored in the first expansion also titled tribunal which takes place to the city of mournhold on morrowind's mainland where you'll meet the last two tribunal members sofa seal and almalexia in what can be thought of as a final chapter to the nerevarine story the other expansion blood moon instead focuses more on allowing players to explore a new location the snowy island of seoul's time and focuses on a new culture and new story i've often regarded morrowind's main story as one of my favorites in gaming but really it can be hard to draw a line between where the law and world building end and the main story actually begins without the strong law to support it morrowind's main questline could often come off as slow and a bit dry but with it it's able to take a series of often basic quests and turn them into a truly epic tale it's a story that spans countless years and innumerable lives telling of the birth of the dunma people and the fall of their god-kings events of such significance that you play a key part in bear at the end of this era as you act to change the future of this world it isn't difficult to create an interesting backstory for your world but it is difficult to tell that backstory to the player in a way that makes them interested in it and there are few back stories in gaming i've ever walked away from being as interested in as this one morrowind understood something that many other open world games don't which is that the world is more important than the game a lot of the reason behind why the elder scrolls series became so popular was that these games were able to successfully sell that idea of this whole other world for players to step into in order to do this properly however the world has to be made the priority and morrowind does this in almost all aspects of its design from the lack of weigh markers in quests to the interconnectivity and depth of the world design to the large number of believable factions to the main story centered around the island's law and history when this focus on the world before all else is combined with the size freedom and level of simulation that this series is known for the end result is very impressive no gaming experience stands out to me quite so vividly as when i first played morrowind so many years ago it changed the way i view games it made my mind race with possibilities and it shaped what i wanted from the future i have played many games many rpgs many open worlds many bethesda games released both before and after this one but i've never truly explored another world not really not in the way i've always wanted to since the first time i lost myself in vardenfell i've never explored an entire history and culture just through playing i've never been able to truly believe in the world there's a place independent of the game that takes place there and i haven't been able to explore with the freedom to do so on my own terms in my own way morrowind is unique there are many games many rpgs many open worlds which may do things that morrowind does and maybe even does them better better graphics better combat less cliff races and so on but the things morrowind does well are things so few games manage its world is one of the greatest that video games have ever produced and the experience of entering this place is a journey like few others going from outlander to savior of vardenfell from a character who can't hit a mud crab to one with the power to challenge a god and from someone who knows nothing of this world or its people to someone that has immersed themselves in its history politics religion and more morrowind is special and none of its many flaws change how well realized its world is or how beneficial this is to a series about immersion freedom and exploration and if all this could be achieved on the budget and technology of 2002 how could the future not seem incredible i've already said how much this game meant to me when i was younger so it will probably come as no surprise but there was no game i looked forward to as much as its sequel the elder scrolls for oblivion but oblivion would change more than just the setting it would take the thing that made morrowind so successful the overwhelming focus on the world before all else and move that focus somewhere different and with this the series would be changed forever [Music] this is the first of three videos and the next one shouldn't be too far off if you're watching this before those next two videos are uploaded and you do want to watch them you might want to consider subscribing because youtube recommendations are unreliable anyway thank you to all my patrons and a big thank you to abdullah alfani for the support you've provided i haven't had a chance to thank you out loud so i hope you see this but enough from me i suppose i've got two more videos to finish up i do feel like i've been doing nothing but playing thinking and writing about elder scrolls games for months now and that this series is slowly consuming my soul but actually i i don't have a butt i genuinely think this series is consuming my soul until next time

Channel: NeverKnowsBest

Views: 664,645

Keywords: elder scrolls, elder scrolls series, morrowind, oblivion, skyrim, daggerfall, morrowind review, morrowind retrospective, morrowind analysis, morrowind critique, elder scrolls review, elder scrolls analysis, elder scrolls retrospective, elder scrolls critique, the elder scrolls, the elder scrolls morrowind

Id: 1_y0Iaq3k_Q

Length: 123min 15sec (7395 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Fructdw]

Very neat analysis video, I like what he doesn't shy away from criticism of Daggerfall / Morrowind, in retrospect it's fascinating how devs try to solve problems what they created themselves by trying to solve other problems. So you end up with cascade of changes though series what goes all way back to roots.

Dream about gta scale city where you can enter every building is something what I remembered from own childhood when playing Cyberpunk 2077. Even knowing basic logistics of gamedev explains how unfeasible it, but it's still videogame holy grail for me.

Stuff about Morrowind quests being navigation puzzles because of lack of questmarkers and fast travel is interesting, I can't think of many big budget games where terrain / travel is actual challenge besides Dragon Dogma, Death Stranding.

[u/ParsonsProject93]

I haven't finished watching the video yet, overall I'm enjoying it, although I must say that I kind of disagree with the premise that there are no games that have replicated a Skyrim-like world. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is somewhat similar imo; although it doesn't deal with magic and dragons; the way in which the game plays reminds me quite a bit of Skyrim.

I think the other contributing factor to the lack of Skyrim competitors is probably not because of lack of ability but because many of them are simply mods of Skyrim, Enderal for example is very expansive, but at the end of the day still just a mod.