Morrowind Analysis | A Quick Retrospective

if you click this video out of morbid curiosity about the length yes it is real i want to get the length argument out of the way first because unlike the original episodic format slowly boiling the kaguti here i'm asking for your time up front nobody is going to watch a video this long it always amazes me when people complain about videos being too long when people are perfectly willing to review bomb the second season of the boys because it didn't come out in an eight hour bingeable format i have actual objective evidence of people sitting through at least six hours of this in one sitting as its original rough series they didn't even subscribe which i thought was weird because part 7 wasn't out yet but that's their prerogative i have a limited amount of time before the average person clicks off so i'll just say this youtube rolled out an actually useful feature that they'll probably depreciate in two years time for no good reason where you can see the sections of the video you're watching and this video isn't just one long stream of consciousness from beginning to end i put a lot of effort into building a balanced structure so instead of one really long video it's more like a bunch of shorter videos put together these serve as places to stop and take breaks should you decide to watch the visual aspect of this video and that brings up another thing i have a timestamp on screen currently which will take you to the part of this introduction where i actually start talking about the game in case you're already sold on watching this and you want to skip the parts that are just about the video itself this is the only time i do this and that's because with videos like this i tend to listen to them while i work more so than actually watch them and it can be really annoying to be told to click a timestamp because it means alt tabbing back into my browser or pulling out my phone and it's usually gone by then i made this entire analysis with the thought in mind that more people are going to listen to it in the background than actually watch it as such it's fairly light on visual editing and a lot of work has gone into making it a balanced audio experience so you don't have to mess with the volume slider it was also written to rely on as few visual examples as possible but they're still present if you decide to watch these examples include written versions of names due to vardenfell being full of people such as hellerin remora and a redoran counselor residing in all drone and lord of nieces the other main type of visual examples are item descriptions and character sheets all of which have been sourced from the unofficial elder scrolls pages which is objectively the greatest wiki to ever exist for a game okay well the video is only long because you are an unskilled writer and or are dragging it out for watch time oh man you got me there i actually wrote in my first draft of this introduction over a year ago that i believed that there was a certain degree of inefficiency in my work that my enthusiasm for the game was blinding me to certain flaws in my script i no longer believe this to be the case since i wrote those words i've gone through an extensive redrafting process before i would record parts i would read through the 20 to 30 pages of a script and work on it then even as i was recording i was reworking the script adding better examples and cutting fat when i sat down in my editing software i would often realize or fact checked information and even then i kept a list of topics i didn't cover and points of improvement for the series this was all on top of again an exceptionally sturdy outline that originated before i even started playing the game as 9 index cards on a whiteboard planning out my general play through and later imported into the software plotter plotter was intended to be used by authors for the purposes of planning out novels well the scripts ended up being novel length so fair enough then when the original seven part run was done i sat down and watched it again taking even more notes and making even more improvements this is all a rather roundabout way of saying that the level of quality assurance in this video would be a massive surprise to current bethesda administration there there's your buggy bethesda game joke so no i'm not dragging this one out then how could the video possibly be so long because morrowind is an exceptionally complex game because i clocked 107 hours as someone who routinely plays the game just in the initial play through because another reviewer lore runner spent 28 hours doing a comprehensive live stream presentation on the game and while i disagree with some of the points he made i have to genuinely respect the planning and presentation that went into that series it can show how much of an ordeal it can be to cover the game if you're doing anything above surface level observations now that we're done talking about the video itself let's begin addressing some common arguments that are made during discussions of morrowind to help save some time in the comments section skyrim slash oblivion is better the world is bigger and so much easier to lose time in of the three howard games morrowind is the smallest in terms of land area however vardenfeld's design is so much more complex than cyrodiils or even skyrims which isn't a criticism of the game per se more so an observation in the geographic difference between temperate forest and volcanic wasteland bethesda also had fewer employees when they were designing morrowind and it was their first time doing a handcrafted open world as to the latter games being easier to lose time in that argument is hit and miss steam would back that claim up until you remember most of my time spent in morrowind was either on my physical copy or more recently in openmw which doesn't log hours on steam like skyrim will and well is losing time really an argument of quality in the current year given the number of games released that are effectively skinner boxes designed to keep you playing in the hope that you'll shell out a little extra cash for microtransactions a lot of people have lost time in candy crush and i don't exactly see that game making a lot of people's top 10 goat lists that said the point of the series is not to rag on the later games much i do occasionally point out when bethesda made an idea better or worse in the later games but this video is squarely focused on morrowind daggerfall was better morrowind diluted the formula down well contrary to what it may seem i'm not against games changing just against games getting worse and concepts being unexplored morrowind did take the series in a different direction and that direction left the daggerfall fans behind if you hold this opinion then it should please you to know that you share it with douglas goodall the man responsible for writing the bulk of the game's quests you could make the argument that oblivion did the same thing that this is justice but honestly oblivion is just a more accessible and poorer quality version of morrowind whereas morrowind was a largely different product entirely to daggerfall it is a shame you don't see more games like daggerfall considering the advances in procedural generation and i wish peterson left and laxman the best of luck with the wayward realms you're just being nostalrius these are just the memories of a six-year-old boy who hasn't played the game in a long time when i was six i was playing doom harry potter and jedi outcast too in that order i played morrowind when i was older in fact i played morrowind oblivion in skyrim for the first time all within a five-year time period of each other also i'm actually providing evidence to my points not just a bunch of subjective anecdotes but hey do you really want me to prove that this isn't just nostalgia fine i'll play what is objectively the worst version of morrowind in order to prove how good this game is i will play the 360 version yes morrowind came out on the original xbox back in 2003 then when microsoft made the big backwards compatibility push they released an emulated version of the game onto the 360. it actually plays worse than the original xbox copy since emulating the ogx boxes weird like that no quick saving no godly user interface played on a controller with a low draw distance low frames and in 4x3 i'll be putting some tasteful custom banner adds to fill these black bars why do this to myself because that's how good this game is if i can enjoy this you can enjoy all the luxuries of a vanilla pc copy well mostly vanilla play an open mw unless you're an absolute purist and i genuinely recommend you don't go crazy with mods your first time speaking of if you mod skyrim and oblivion you can make those games better than morrowind yeah wow a modded copy of skyrim might be better than a vanilla copy of morrowind consider me awestruck and if you work really hard in unity you could theoretically make a game even better than all three i know i just recommended using a quasi-mod to play morrowind but that mostly falls in the realm of what i consider acceptable as a reviewer in terms of modifications i use mods to fix convenience issues with games especially older ones where i draw a hard line is that mods that try and change the design philosophy of a game like for instance i would never use a mod that changes the hit chance of weapons because hit chance is a part of morrowind's design it's inappropriate to judge games based on the modded experience especially since you could just as easily make an experience worse with mods considering the hassle involved in keeping mods for bethesda games cooperative with one another and this is besides the fact that i don't even need mods to enjoy morrowind skyrim well i'll need the unofficial patch and script extender of course then alternate start to skip the long tutorial sky ui to fix the ui ordinator to fix the stack what even is patrician tier anyways you are useful strawbot because you ask all the questions i need you to i consider patrician tier to either be exceptional games in all categories or exceedingly excel in specialized categories gameplay story sound aesthetic design world building and everything specialized therein patrician cheer isn't a 10 out of 10 however they aren't 99s either since many patrician games usually have flaws that prevent them from being perfect they are good games that tried something new or did something established better than the norm that deserve to be commemorated studied and emulated honestly my hope is that one day someone makes a true sequel to morrowind i don't want to say it's the greatest game of all time i want to say that it paved the way to a generation of great games that learned lessons from it but i can't say that so with all that to do done let's get started morrowind is an open world game and the world of vardenfell is just as much a character in this story as any other if not more so morrowind is however deceptive in its name perhaps as its tradition in the elder scrolls series where arena was anything but daggerfall was just a city in a whole country oblivion was a dungeon and skyrim wasn't an elder scrolls game oh that's clever that's very clever the broader province of morrowind has been stripped away and the focus has been placed on the island of vardenfell although unlike arena this time the lack of a name change is probably down to the fact that morrowind is a better game name than vardenfell there's a certain love video games have for islands they are areas where invisible walls do not need to exist where there is no boundary or limitation that players will hit while exploring vardenfell as a game world is tight strip back the view distance or look at any map and realize that just over the crest of any hill is a rapid change in scenery you can go from low level civilization to high-level volcanic nightmare areas in less than a few hundred meters but the terrain of vardenfell is its greatest asset i have seen some theories made on this before that the slow movement speed plus the low view distance makes vardenfell feel bigger than it actually is well the slow movement speed isn't always the case and one of the more common modifications i see people using strips back the view distance limit so i don't think there is merit in this argument no the reason vardenfell feels like a big place despite its small size is that there isn't any wasted space ever play as game where you land on a planet that's procedurally generated and it's like any other spot on that planet you quickly realize that the area isn't actually that big because the entirety of the planet can be summarized in that one spot you can't go in any direction for very long without eventually running into something and oftentimes that's something maybe related to another quest line you aren't actively doing it's interesting to play one character and pass a ruin only to get a quest to visit it on the next character it's this compacted level design that makes morrowind feel larger than it really is not the illusion of movement speed the bitter coast region is the first region that new players will start in as such it's occupied by what are generally the weakest creatures on vardenfell like mud crabs kwama foragers and scribs it's a swamp alongside the island's southwest coast and its geography has not been conducive to the construction of settlements there are three towns in the region cytonin hala ode and narmak saidenin is the starting town which we'll go into more detail later hala ode and narmok are both fishing villages with diverse populations of outlanders an affectionate term for non-dunmer not native to vardenfell they're also both hubs for smuggling activity on the island given that vardenfell is currently under a quarantine for the blight and corpus disease this smuggling activity is reflected in the region with many caves being occupied by smugglers the swampy soil have not stopped daedra worshipers from building ruins in the area although the fate of boethiah's long lost shrine is an indicator of these ruins futures north of the bitter coast the west gash forms a shelf along vardenfeld's northwestern shores it's a maze of ravines and jagged terrain the lack of farms in the area suggesting the land is not as fertile as other regions this region's hosted towns such as nisis cool and old velothi operating as trade hubs between traders from the coast and ashlanders from the interior of the island the area is home to many outcast ashlander bandits and its proximity to the channel that leads towards skyrim means a fair few of the structures on the coastline seem to be built more militaristically a sign of the prior wars between the nords dunmer and kymer during the days when the land was named rezdane it makes sense then that the factions that primarily operate here are more militaristic in nature with the imperial legion recruiting aenesis while house redoran protects its settlements and the tribunal temple keeps the roads safe for pilgrims from predators like nix hounds and kaguti naturally a part of vardenfeld's volcanic ecosystem are the fertile lowlands at the base of red mountain the oscadian isles forms a breadbasket that supplies the island this is one of many things i appreciate about morrowind the fact that it painstakingly shows where the region's food supply comes from and it isn't just the odd farm large-scale plantations operate in the area such as the drin plantation khajiit and argonian slaves working the field is a common sight in the area it should be no surprise then that the abolitionists keep their headquarters in this region the region is populous with giant mushrooms providing shade and peaceful neches can often be seen floating around as well as the odd gwar grazing in the area the regions host to pelagiad on the road from saitanine to balmora it appears to have originally operated as a way station for imperials to travel from their dock to moon moth legion fort and further into the interior of the island from there pelagia now however is a community of farmers and traders capitalizing on a popular route saran borders the edge of the isles in malaga more it's a walled city of hilaru affiliation saran is notably the home of a pleasure house and serves as a launch pad for excursions into the ash wastes to the east opposite saran ebenhardt sits as the head of government operations in vardenfell housing representatives from the great houses and the duke vedem dren and of course across the water from ebonheart the great city of vivec home to the titular god of the tribunal the eastern shore of vardenfell is azura's coast its name likely attributed to the open shrine to azura at its apex owing to its treacherous terrain the coast is scarcely populated it's a series of small islands and reefs with a guarantee that the odd islands large enough to host life will host life since vardenfeld's waters are plagued with slaughter fish and drow navigating the area by swimming can be dangerous this appeals to the isolationists in telvanni who leveraged the region's dangerous nature to protect them as the telvanni once said condescendingly you can fly can't you the zapper bell bay is an often forgotten region of morrowind as its geography is fairly similar to azura's coast i actually forgot this area in my first draft and the only reason you're hearing about it now is because both the unofficial elder scrolls pages and the elder scrolls fandom wiki do not consider it to be an actual region distinct from missouri's coast well it's marked on the physical game of the year map with the same text that all the other regions are running along the eastern shores of vardenfeld the bay is primarily occupied by the telvanni with settlements at sadrath mora telmora and tell arun the grey's lands form the northeastern shore of vardenfell despite their fertility the area remains in the hands of two separate major ashlander tribes the zainab and the ahumessa while one of the younger telvani lords has taken up residence along the coast at tel vos the gracelands are bordered to the west by a perfect north to south mountain range along the foyata a geographic feature formed by lava flows during the eruptions of red mountain the area claims the largest diversity in wildlife with a range from knicks hounds and gwar to elite in kaguti the area also has more dangerous residents with daedra openly wandering the surface as there isn't really anyone here to stop them the lack of access to the region is reflected in its ruins with sparse kymer dwemer and daedric areas and filling out the final shore of vardenfeld the northern shore of the island is restricted by an archipelago named sheogorad these are the backwaters of the region a remote area with little value claimed by few people it's only settlement at dagon fell being a community of the miserable the land is difficult to farm and the waters are rough to fish there is little of value for lawful residents making the region a haven for the various sects of danger worshipers that inhabit it and speaking of undesirable areas the ashlands existing in the shadow of the volcano the ashlands are in a perpetual state of being covered in fresh coats of ash since the land is not particularly valuable it is primarily home to the ashlanders whom subsist in it bordering the ashlands is all droon capital of the great house redoran forced on the retreat through years of trouble until their backs were up against the red mountain what lives in the ashlands daedra and their worshipers vampires and their thralls sixth house cultists necromancers the undead rogue members of house tilvani the ashlands are really a home to anyone uncommon enough to be able to survive in an area where food doesn't grow where sea access is limited where trade routes change constantly due to ash storms and where everyone is a constant state of warfare with everyone else over what resources do exist and this goes doubly so for malaga more malaga more is all of those aspects that made the ashlands untenable if the ashlands also happened to be a giant maize network full of lava pools that was even farther from civilization if the people lived in the ashlands because it was remote and isolated but still close enough to civilization to buy their groceries people live in malaga more because they outright hate civilization that's likely why has been named after the daedric prince molech ball maligamor sits between the escadian isles and the graveslands there's only one settlement here malagmar which exists solely for pilgrims to prepare for pilgrimages up to mount canned it's a dangerous area only for the bravest aka highest level characters red mountain is malaga more but vertical full of monsters fenced off from the rest of arden fell by a giant wall the ghost fins and constantly in the midst of a giant blight storm what's a blight storm it's an ash storm that spreads blight the area is full of sixth house cultists and corpus beasts with the primary structures in the region being dwimmer red mountain is thusly the most dangerous of the regions i have ordered the regions of vardenfell in order of how terrible they are to be in naturally the last of these regions is vivec itself vivec is a large city separated into nine cantons the foreign quarter halau ridorin telvani the arena saint holmes saint delvin the temple and the palace of vivec these cantons are then separated by bridges from one another these cantons are large structures with multiple layers atop them is a plaza usually host to manners and wealthy businesses below that is the waste works with more average businesses and commoners and below that a canal works with services like the temple or tombs and finally sewers full of criminals vivec is unpleasant for several reasons the first is that its large scale at the time it came out on pc and to this day on xbox posed a technical challenge for the game which is surprising considering it's just a series of static cantons with the complicated parts going on inside the city itself barring the frame rate issues there are still problems the interiors of the cantons can only be reached from the second level this means you need to run up to the giant ramps just to get inside you didn't have to run around to the outside of the second level to reach the plaza or in the case of the foreign quarters around the canton up another ramp around the canton again and then up to the plaza worse still while the core four cantons redoran arena and this two saint cantons are connected to the second level the foreign quarter halau and telvani are not to travel between these cantons you need to go all the way to the bottom to cross some cantons are connected via a gondola system however these gondolas only connect the lower levels of the cantons so assuming you arrive at vivec to go to halau canton by a boat or strider you arrive at the northernmost point of the city have to run around the four and quarter bottom cross a bridge into ridooran run around it cross another bridge onto halau and then run up the ramp and either enter the waste works or run around the second level and enter the plaza the words i'm looking for here are wasted space you may have noticed if you were looking that the exteriors of the vec are not ornamented seeing npcs on the outside of the cantons are rare and there are no market stalls in fact it can be difficult to tell at any point in vivec where the hell you even are this is only natural like i said the city barely runs on the xbox and barely ran back on the day in pc i have a sneaking suspicion the plazas were originally intended to be exterior cells but had to be closed up due to performance issues god bless if you decide you want to use the merchant services in vivec there's no advantage over just going to the people you know outside the city most of them are oddly poor they have a limited selection and it's hard to just stop and go i want to go to the alchemist and figure out where the nearest one is even supposed to be like in balmora where's the alchemist probably near all the other businesses in aldrune where's the alchemist probably near all the other businesses in vivec where's an alchemist maybe it's in the wasteworks maybe it's in the canal works maybe it's in the plaza maybe it's in another canton this isn't just an issue of me not knowing the city it's an issue of the city being poorly laid out and everything looks the same since everything is made out of the same adobe material the principal colors of the vec are brown and orange interiors with dark brown exteriors while most of the game uses the same principle of using cookie cutter pieces together to build interiors nowhere did i feel the downsides of that design philosophy more than vivec is this the studio apartment of a down on his luck gay popper or is it the secret hideout of the head of a criminal organization so you know the npcs just play koi like t he don't worry player we get lost too like that's the excuse of a defeated designer it's not funny or cute when the end result is such a dreadful city and if it was known at bethesda that vivec was such a terrible end result of what was an ambitious idea then why are there still so many quests that entail navigating it it's a shame too between vivec and the imperial city over in oblivion i think bethesda became scared of trying to create large cities so they went the inverse and skyrim and had its capital be smaller than balmora to that i say big cities don't need to be full of ornamented symmetry or repetitive architectural design which create most of the problems people have when playing in them most big historical cities were chaotic messes that were poorly planned out create a capital city like that instead of assuming the city planners of tamriel share such clear common values part of what makes vardenfell feel alien is the unique wildlife inhabiting the island trade in your standard wolves and bears for a land full of strange creatures to start we have a host of two-legged creatures guar are the beast of burden of vardenfell operating as pack animals wild guar are fairly rare probably because they have canonically lost fights with mud crabs elites and kaguti on the other hand are not domestic animals elites are omnivores foraging alone while kaguti are pack hunters plaguing the roads and speaking of plagues vardenfell is full of large rats carrying the diseases endemic to the region split into common and blight okay fine cliff racers everyone loves the meme it's a perfect combination of factors from the sound they make the fact that they're surprisingly hardy and can do a lot more damage than you would think and that they live in every region across the map i believe the idea was that cliff racers were meant to be an enemy for players bypassing the roads with levitation and flying over mountains hence their hardiness but they weren't tuned right and ended up harassing every passing traveler in startling numbers but i don't think they're bad enemies largely because they're one of the few creatures that it isn't a waste of time to hunt their plumes are both valuable and light whereas most creatures either drop hides or meat that are both heavy and almost worthless it's actually surprising to me how worthless it is to hunt creatures outside of their applications in alchemy which is admittedly one of my weak points cliff racers having a valuable drop means i'm never really mad when i get attacked by a flock because i'll always be walking away just a little bit richer honestly i find random animals stopping me from resting more annoying than cliff racers since cliff racers at least make themselves fairly obvious to find this leads into vardenfell's other resident flying creatures neches basically just flying jellyfish their friendly nature means you don't really have to fight a whole lot of them although there is the odd quest to do so this leads into the aquatic creatures mud crabs and slaughterfish will be nothing new to elder scrolls regulars although they may be surprised by how big the mud crabs of vardenfell are especially the dead mud crab whose shell makes up the capital of house redoran slaughterfish are the common aquatic nuisance not really posing much of a threat even at low levels and with high numbers drow on the other hand pose a substantial threat when underwater which is fitting given their mysterious nature drow are the true descendants of aldmeris but they can be soul trapped so more likely they're just daedra larping as water elves shock or giant fire beetles which are always worth fighting because they're guaranteed to drop their valuable resin lastly nyx hounds are large insects that feast on blood and are fairly easy to beat morrowind's ost was composed by jeremy sol who has had an interesting career in the game industry did you know that morrowind's ost lost an award to a medal of honor game we've been listening to morrowind's soundtrack in the background and it creates a great ambiance but after a hundred hours of playing morrowind i have had to turn it off the soundtrack is divided into two sections explore tracks and battle tracks this is honestly the best way to refer to them see when morrowind's collector's edition came out the soundtrack was remastered complete with new titles for all the tracks most people know this song as nerevar rising [Music] well it was originally titled call of magic how about this one it's called the road most traveled or mx underscore explore underscore 3. [Music] or as it was originally titled main theme no i'm not sure why the explore tracks are mx underscore explorer but the battle tracks are mw space battle and yes battle track 6 is missing did you know that explore 7 was named the ending theme i have a theory and this isn't based on anything real that morrowind's ost was probably a slap job that was later reformatted into a more functional soundtrack after morrowind didn't flop on release i say this based on some context that will become apparent later in this video about bethesda's financial state during morrowind's development now to be clear this isn't to say it's poorly composed just that jeremy soul composed it and then sent bethesda the files and let them format the soundtrack hence the strange names and odd formatting i mean one of the songs names is trick suspense then when morrowinds was successful and people were buying the soundtrack soul quickly realized this and came in with some much needed name changes not that it matters anyway since i'm sure the average person who knows this soundtrack probably knows the dragonborn version onto the soundtrack proper call of magic is fairly well known since elements of it were later lifted for skyrim's theme food [Music] we'll handle the exploration tracks first dark cavern sounds nothing like a dark [Music] cavern [Music] piece at last has a defining melody [Music] the main theme confusing right this part has always stood out to me separation features a beautiful string piece which is fitting given the elvish setting [Music] while there are guar skin drums and you will be hearing drums in the battle themes the explore themes give that proper feeling of exploring a world much older than you are by letting the rhythm of the player's footsteps as they adventure serve as the percussion instead rise to reality thus starts with a dominant horn piece it would be interesting to know how much jeremy's soul knew about morrowind at the time he was composing the soundtrack because while it would be nice to say this is a theme for the imperials i can't love lost shows how well the soundtrack flips between a couple instruments to an orchestra and back again [Music] [Music] [Music] this element to the soundtrack is important because what you are hearing can't be allowed to overpower what you're seeing morrowind's music sounds magical because each chord is leading you through the progression like a road going through a hilly countryside this is the reason i didn't use music from the esl morrowind soundtrack because this song is called escadian idol [Music] and you can say well that's taking it out of context okay here's some more the word idol i mean you could probably guess what it means but if you can it means peaceful picturesque every time we get peaceful the composer takes another 50 milligrams of ritalin and shoves another layer into the song [Music] the theme isn't allowed to sit with the player before by pushing in another complex idea you're overworking it you're trying to make a movie score for a video game sorry i literally got off track indian theme has this playful little part that persists through the song i don't get what about this song made them title it indian theme so we go on to the battle themes which the game switches to whenever an ai detects the player interestingly desperation features a reprise of the main theme of the game [Music] unity which is an odd name for a battle theme is the answer to rise to reality [Music] you like horns well horns are the sound of battle traveling fanfare is fairly similar to the previous two tracks [Music] it should be stated that morrowind was very primitive in terms of how it incorporated music as bethesda didn't use any adaptive music solutions instead opting to switch which mp3 file is playing contingent on whether the player is in combat so if a fight lasts longer than two minutes then you need to play another combat mp3 meaning there's a lot less room to change things up between songs which makes choices made interesting because it ends with a fade out which can leave an awkward silence in the music still a good piece though [Music] trick suspense has probably the most aggressive percussive piece of the [Music] soundtrack break the cycle is the seventh battle track which should upset your brain and actually has a fitting title due to this section [Music] that's almost a reprieve of an exploration theme in the midst of a battle track but it doesn't last forever there was retitled drum beats of the dunmer for a good reason because i can imagine the banging of the ashlander guar skin drums in the background this leads into the game's special tracks introduction plays during a beginning cut scene which makes it unusual to listen to without hearing azera's voice [Music] darkened depths play during another cutscene later in the game [Music] and the prophecy fulfills played at the end of the main quest they don't really add anything they just serve a utility function finally there's a short piece that plays every time you level up there's also a death track and no please it's not my fault [Music] now that the world has been introduced we can talk about transportation there is no simple one-click fast travel option in morrowind which was in fact the exception since the game's before and after rely on it in the case of daggerfall because the world was so large in the case of oblivion because bethesda was afraid kids on the xbox would get bored instead transportation becomes a major concern in the world of vardenfell every quest once received requires the simple thought process how do i get there what do i need to get there and what will i need once i'm there to avoid needing to come back before i'm done so let's introduce some of the ways of getting around quickly silt striders are the first pillar of morrowind's transit system they are large insects with hollowed-out shells that are ridden inside they fill the bulk of the transportation needs from the west gash through the bitter coast and into the escadian isles ranging as far as the northern village of cool down to molag mar why you ride in game time passes usually only a couple hours and it counts as resting time the cara veneers can serve as information hubs for the areas you arrive in they have an independent disposition to their local factions meaning you can't alienate them accidentally boats are the second pillar of morrowind's transportation system circling the entire island and hitting all major fishing villages and ports safe side and nene the boat system is robust but is also time consuming and expensive to boot still some remote areas like dagon fell can only be reached by a boat and most of the telvanni settlements are connected only by boat like the care of an ears the ship's captains are independent of faction affiliation the mages guild serves as the third pillar in five cities a mage will facilitate instantaneous transportation these cities include each great house capital balmora aldrone and sageth mora as well as vivec and caldera while robust they do carry a downside the mages guild as a faction can be influenced by membership and deeds and other factions and can be alienated into higher prices or even denial of service to give an example house televani and the mages guild are at odds and membership in house tauvani may require you bribe admire or charm the guild guides into providing services again since transportation is instant you also don't regenerate health or magicka which is another downside that said the mages guild is the only fast travel service in caldera and also can bypass several boat trips when heading out towards sagrath mora the fourth pillar of transportation teleportation magic the mysticism skill may it rest in peace had a few handy spells that were actually really important even in non-spell casters the first two are alms of e and divine intervention these spells teleport you to the nearest shrine of their relevant god alms of eat to tribunal temples and divine to imperial shrines now while the nature of the spell sounds like it should be reserved for emergencies it shouldn't once business is finished and you are downward bound interventions get you back to civilization quick on the western half of the map alms of ease are better divines tend to take you to moon moth and buckmoth forts which while near balmora and aldrune respectively both those towns have their own tribunal temples on the flip side divine intervention is very useful when operating in the eastern side of the map since it can be used to quickly get to wolverine hall in sageth mora and from there basically anywhere on the map these spells are also available in scroll form and even as amulets for those who can't muster up the skill to cast the actual spells themselves however the stars of the show are mark and recall mark when cast sets a marker where you're standing recalled and teleports you to that marker this greatly expands your options since you can mark stuff like merchants quest givers or master trainers and quickly return to them propylenes are a neat idea but in execution are only really a reward for the sort of people that read the wiki or who install the master propylene index plugin we will be discussing the master index plugin in more detail in a couple hours when we discussed all of the downloadable content each dunmer stronghold has a pylon chamber with two teleporters if you have the index that corresponds with the teleporter you can use it to travel to the next stronghold the strongholds form a loop but if you are missing any of the indexes then you're forced to stop the indexes however are rare and i suppose the original idea was that they would serve as both a reward for long-term players but also an option for vampires and criminals to get around the index's locations are rather obscure only a few of my characters i played for this video ever actually found an index the most one character found was two the master propylene index converts a mages guild npc into a quest giver who will point you in the right direction for all 10 indexes and as a reward will give you a master index this turns caldera into its own hub where you can go to any stronghold however this itself is only circumstantially useful if you need quick access to one of the ashlander tribes or a fast way out of a remote area back to civilization i guess okay now this is a tangent but in the dawnguard expansion in the forgotten vale there were these teleporters that could quickly teleport you around the area but you needed to unlock them now i thought hey that's pretty cool maybe bethesda will go back to incorporating diegetic fast travel then fallout 4 came out and basically killed that notion travel in morrowind is itself interesting it's not just running or walking around an area to go do stuff along the way you can encounter unexpected quests like lost pilgrims or naked nords that have been tricked by witches etc you'll have to contend with monsters like cliff racers or unexpected contractions of diseases from cliff racers or even just taking the time to explore a dungeon of cliff racers you find along the way how you get there takes a good deal of planning if you are tasked to go from balmoral to old velocity you could just walk out the door and start hiking or you could stop take the guild guide to aldrune then strider to cool and walk a much shorter distance i think you can get most anywhere in about 10 minutes provided you know how to take advantage of the fast travel there are exceptions of course like the ashlands or malaga more but most of the time this rings true so why do i consider the superior to a fast travel system if in the end fast travel is more convenient and lets me get to the meaty action faster i will tell you in story form i was contracted to take care of a bounty he'd been spotted near telmora but this was old information i find out and tell mora that his hideout is in a remote part of sheogorad so i now need to plan to go up there i need water walking and cure disease potions i need to decide if i should pay boat fare to come to dagon fell or if i should go there from telmora after a short hike i'm at the spot only the bandits are not the cave itself leads into an ancestral tomb inside which is a vampire this is not an enemy i'm prepared to fight but from my perspective it's possible that my target is behind the vampire and so i need to fight her this is a tough fight and the tension builds as i know that while going back to town is a possibility that would entail preparing and performing the journey all over again i could set a mark but then i would lose the remote master trainer i have it set to even though i can save at any time that doesn't lessen the tension any because it just means i'll either be wasting my time walking back up or wasting my time save scumming until i kill her let's compare the situation with oblivion or skyrim first of all it's very rare that i would be put in a situation where i wouldn't be able to attrite an enemy down anyways but assuming this isn't the case and the enemy poses enough of a threat that i need to return to town it's as easy as one button click then when i'm ready i can instantly be back at the dungeon because not only can i teleport back to town effortlessly i can teleport to anywhere on the map as well any tension that is created as a consequence of having to repeat a journey is lost because at any time i can just fast travel to safety further tension can't be built up in the first place because i could have just fast traveled up to a nearby point on my first trip up there this also applies to housing and quest givers what's the point of carefully selecting a place to live out of if at the end of the day i can instantly fast travel there what's the point of planning how i do my quest so i can complete multiple objectives while in the same region if i can always just fast travel to my objectives instantly it's not even like in daggerfall where there are time limits on quests making the act of losing time a consequence in of itself the world is always willing to wait for you oh a hermit living in the middle of nowhere is the only person who can train you in marksman past skill level 70. well come on stupid just use a nearby cave as a fast travel point to get to him i could go on but i think i've illustrated my point diegetic travel systems in morrowind helped vardenfell feel like a real world because you understand how it was that people get around i'm not demonstrating my mastery of the systems as some freudian way of self-admitting that i secretly long for fast travel i'm demonstrating it because i want you to understand that this is a game that rewards you for learning how to navigate in the space effectively travel is an unspoken part of every single quest we'll be doing in morrowind before during and after every single story point i will be making decisions related to travel that i won't be telling you about but will play a part of the story editing can cut out what is otherwise a massive part of the role-playing experience of morrowind hence why it deserves its own section up front and center this is where they want you head down to the dock and i'll show you to the census office dedicating an entire section of one of these parts to a single town may seem somewhat unnecessary as though i'm artificially padding out the link to the video however in this case i'm only doing it because of all my playthroughs they have this one point in common cytoneen the game starts simple enough with a cutscene of azura hinting at the plot and then you awake to a shirtless man asking if you're okay and acquiring your name after this you're led onto the top deck where a guard asks where you're from selecting your race and customizing your character along certain preset faces and hairstyles you're then let inside where you're processed you're first asked about class where you can fill out a questionnaire select from a list or create your own you then select your birth sign are shown your character sheet and asked to confirm the information before being given documents and sent onwards in the next room you're given the option to swing in a free iron dagger around his practice craftier players can loot the place or even use the lockpick on the table to unlock the chest filled with a small amount of gold outside you're told to take a magic ring out of a barrel introducing magic once inside the final room you're introduced to dialogue dialogue in morrowind is almost entirely text-based beyond the odd quest most npcs have a stock vocal greeting based on race and disposition but 99 of dialogue is performed in this window morrowind is a lot of reading and i know that bothers some people particularly the people that play while sitting on a couch with their brains turned off i think if you're committed to watching the series you probably are not the sort of person now i know reading can be difficult but believe it or not there are some good reasons it is superior dialogue is split into topics you can then ask about a topic and the npc will elaborate on it wait did you say that text based dialogue is superior well that can't be true well it is and here's why first of all text based dialogue is friendlier to a low budget game modern elder scrolls may be a top dollar production but back when morrowind was coming out it was a risk that bethesda took to save the company from an eternity of producing shovelware title after battlespire and redguard underperformed and although it looks like a lot it really isn't 400 words is just over three minutes of speech for instance since i started talking about this tutorial i have said about 400 words i believe most people see a disparity between how long it takes to read the written word versus listen to it i can't knock listening versus reading entirely considering you are listening to my words not reading them but while you may look at the dialogue on screen and say yeah all that consider that something that is written is not limited by the reality of it being spoken aloud in fact a great deal of the strengths presented in morrowind's storylines owe themselves to the detailed explanations one can receive i can't help but think that morrowind is impossible to remaster for the simple fact that bethesda would have to change so much just to make the dialogue all fit on any hard drive made by man because naturally something bethesda would try to do in a morrowind remaster is voice acting however there is another reason and it has to do with logistics it is not just a coincidence that stuff like directions to the quest location disappeared around the same time voice acting came about oblivion's voice acting was a nightmare for bethesda because it meant that everything had to be written with the idea in mind that it had to be spoken aloud saved and take up file space so no longer could you have quest givers explaining how to get to a spot because they likely couldn't afford much more than the bare essentials when it came to voice acting quest markers were as much a consequence of laziness on the part of players as it was a consequence of laziness on the part of bethesda this was one of the reasons i was horrified at the prospect of player voice actors in fallout 4. not because being spoken for bothers me but because it meant that there had to be a severe limitation on what the player could now say i mean bethesda's developed games hardly ever provided more than four options in dialogue but now they really couldn't if it meant paying a voice actor for the extra words just as i said that 400 words was three minutes 400 words of written dialogue was now three minutes of voice actor pay assuming they didn't flub up the lines in the process you can't afford to have voice actors talk about the latest rumors or little secrets or advice or give directions to somewhere specific or someone in particular or casually elaborate on topics because that costs money and that is money that could be spent on hiring expensive voice actors for set-piece quests once outside into sidonine proper we're given a small stipend and directions to go to caius casati's house in balmora now of course you could just beeline it there the siltstrider in town goes straight there for much less than we got but let's talk about short form tutorials there are two kinds of tutorials long form and short form a long form tutorial gradually introduces all the mechanics how they work and make sure that there is nothing that can surprise the player because the developer is afraid they won't see it they won't engage with it short form is then naturally less insulting morrowind's tutorial does not take you aside and teach you about magic because not all characters are going to use it likewise it doesn't force you to use security because some players might see stealing as a bad thing when it introduces the plot elements it doesn't have a dragon swoop down from the sky to save you from an execution it just tells you hey the empire's releasing you on parole provided you complete these conditions that can be easily ignored it doesn't have the emperor get assassinated by mehrunes dagon cultists as he hands you the amulet that is protecting the world from invasion by demons with the instruction to find a priest at a priory and help him find his illegitimate son it's just like explore this port town and get used to how things work and it does so in a way that isn't going to hurt you in the long run cytonin has barely anything to do with anything after you leave town so hurt feelings get left behind speaking with people you can meet fargoth who mentions you lost his ring sure enough the one you found is his and returning it to him gives you a disposition booth with both him and the town trader netting better prices while at the trader you can meet a nord who wants to collect fargoth's debt who tells you you can watch from the watchtower and to see where his hiding spot is then you can take the money and leave this teaches some good lessons it teaches you that doing good things in the world even for unimportant people can get you bonuses it also teaches you that sometimes the best quest reward is the one you don't turn in another quest inside anin starts after you find a body in the swamp turns out it's a local tax collector if you're honest and turn in the money he was carrying you'll be tasked with solving the murder if not you keep the money but end up with a net lower reward asking around you find out the tax collector was in a relationship with a lady in the lighthouse who says that he got in a fight with a guy and asks you bring her ring back you can confront him and he will admit it giving you a choice kill him and get paid or spare him and get nothing so the choice is yours then should you kill him you get the ring but remember sometimes the best reward is the one you don't turn in you can leave cyanine with over 1500 gold provided you do things right quests teach lessons while introducing ideas in a safe manner that isn't going to affect your faction reputation down the line cytonin is the second best tutorial i've played in an rpg to me it can be a fast affair done quickly before i get into the meat of what i really want to do or it can be done slowly by a new player learning the ropes of the world as for the best well it rhymes with spud grings getting to balmora can be done three ways go north and follow the river go south and can go by pelagiad or take the silt strider each one has its own benefits the siltstrider is the fastest but costs money north can lead you by some valuable loot south can take you by some interesting quests once in balmora you'll be directed to the coroner club to learn where kaios kassadi's lives and there you'll be told about certain opportunities that will come up in part three and finally once you meet cosatis he says those golden words go out on your own look for freelance work or trouble then when you're ready come back and i'll have orders for you for open world games this is such a simple thing that is so often forgotten in so many of these games i wonder when am i supposed to actually engage with the world because so often they drag us quest to mission with the utmost emergency i'm the sort of person to do what is the most urgent matter first you know a reasonable person and so often i can burn through an entire game before looking back and realizing hey wait a second when was i supposed to actually engage with the world so word of advice if you're making an open world game and put some measure of effort into making the world interesting please give people an opportunity to step off the train and play tourist for a little while let's talk about character creation since i went through it seven different times both for morrowind and in general really i see lots of people spend tons of time agonizing over every detail of character creation and worrying if they have created the perfect character if they need to stop just stop here's how you create a character in morrowind step 1 create your character step two find problems step three recreate the character having addressed the issues for example if you think your movement speed is too slow take the birth sign the steed that makes you faster if you think your character is too fragile reconsider your race if you find out you like maces and not swords set blunt is one of your skills just identify a problem you have and see if you can fix it morrowind's intro is so short it can be redone fairly quickly in fact if you already know what you're going to do you can be on the world adventuring in a matter of minutes and it's not the end of the world if a character isn't perfect either if you decide later down the road you want to use a different skill all it costs is money to train that skill up to a usable level and there is plenty of opportunity to make money in morrowind morrowind has 10 races that you can play as each race has certain specialties and weaknesses and these can vary from gender to the gender as well for elves there are altmer bosmer dunmer and orsimer altmer are mages bosmer thieves orsimer or fighters dunmer are a bit of a mix of everything you can be iconoclastic making an altmer barbarian or an orc wizard and you will experience some short-term difficulties but nothing that kills it in the long term for men there are bretons imperials nords and red guards but red guards aren't actually at more in dec shut up bretons are good at magic nords and redguards are good at fighting imperials are good at conning people not quite the rpg triangle but then again morrowind was more about accurately reflecting these people to the lore and their cultures than it was about balance lastly there are two beast races argonians and khajiit races are distinguished in a few ways attributes change to favor certain specializations with certain races and some magic oriented races get a bonus to their overall magicka pool races also see bonuses as certain skills again relevant to their specialization so a bosmer who selects marksman as a major or khajiit with a major in acrobatics or red guard with a major and long sword will all have the highest of net relevant skill at the start of the game there are also resistances to consider some races claim a substantial resistance to disease others see resistance to spell effects using fire on a dunmer or frost on a nord doesn't work because logically they come from those climates altmer on the other hand boasts a substantial weakness to certain kinds of magic rather than a resistance another factor to consider is disposition members of the same race as you will have a slightly higher disposition towards you remember that the average person is a dunmer and you can see certain advantages in playing one gender can also be a factor your attributes can differ based on gender although it tends to be balanced so you're actually just trading one attribute for another with the counterpart sex there are also certain quests that go differently based on gender but i don't think there are any quests that differ outcomes based on race each race has abilities catered towards their specialization imperials have an ability that makes them more persuasive while orcs and red guards have abilities that help them fight simple stuff like that i'd usually forget they were there by the end of a play through so yeah one simple way of making a decent character would be sinking their choice in race and class to what makes sense like you know orc wizard birth signs are another part of character creation this is basically a mix of the starter gift and modifier idea from past games originally i was gonna spend a few minutes listing all the signs but it was kind of dry and boring so i'll just highlight a few the steed makes you run faster the warrior and the lover can boost your chances with hit chance the mage apprentice and atronach increase your amount of magicka with increasing downsides the more magical you get you'll do better in conversations with the lady and with the ritual you'll get a massive daily healing power which sign is objectively the best well the atranac is a bit broken and i'll demonstrate why later it's honestly hard to say because all of them besides the atronach become very circumstantial and usefulness past level 5. morrowind isn't the sort of game that makes later playstyles impossible due to early bad decision making bad decision-making mostly just impacts how quickly you'll reach the inevitable power threshold not whether or not you'll cross it but if you are somebody who has a serious stigma against morrowind because it's too slow or you dislike hit chance there are baked in solutions to the problem to help you out so i did the little survey that tells you which class to play and i got monk sounds about right the survey is a personality test that tallies your responses and compares them with the stereotypes of the class so fighting heavy responses get fighting heavy classes but since it's mostly moral choices i don't really put too much stock in it you can also pick from a list of presets and i mean the classes are going to operate about how they sound but you have to think about it like if you pick knight you have to use the weapons knights would use or you're in for a rough time this is why the class creator is the best option although it's also obviously the option that requires a bit of knowledge about the no no it doesn't require knowledge about the game if you want to use swords put longblade in the major skill box all skill names operate basically at face value specialization corresponds to the three archetypes of rpgs giving skill buffs in those fields attributes are again fairly self-explanatory you don't really need to understand the nuances of how the skills and attributes work to craft a functional class that will work for you provided you stick to the skills you select or train the new skills you have at a trainer but i will give some handy advice first off always take speech craft and mercantile this is because these two skills will be useful regardless of play style and the completion of quests and acquisition of wealth with eight skills left i generally have a hard time picking enough skills per play style no really endurance is handy in generating some extra health per level early and personality can help with the early game gold grind the rest of the attributes will raise up as you level and they aren't really a concern from any other standpoint so i hope you see that creating a character isn't really a big deal in morrowind in fact because the great houses are exclusive to one another to see all the content you have to play multiple characters barring that one glitch that lets you join two houses new game is a prevalent option in the main menu at all times because elder scrolls is meant to mirror your tabletop gaming experience where you don't just stick with the one character unlike the later games which were made literally with the design philosophy of avoiding players feeling the need to restart because of the character they created which is absurd because even if you make a bad character it's not at the end of the world in morrowind there's training and a difficulty slider if you've made it this far and you feel tempted to play morrowind i can give you three template characters that will make the game fairly easy for new players each template follows one of the three archetypes the first is a warrior who uses the most common weapon and armor with a long blade of 50 and an agility of 65 as long as you use a sword you'll be able to hit monsters and with a strength of 50 do some decent damage endurance and personality have also been selected to help with gains and conversation the second is mage again endurance and personality have been picked over intelligence and willpower resulting in a smaller magicka pool but also a less fragile character with bases touched in all the early game magical skills this class shouldn't have issues in the early game with casting magic breton plus the apprentice gives you a large pool of magicka to work with the third is a thief focus has been put into marksman and light armor this is the most fragile of the three but an agility of 75 and a marksman of 50 means that you aren't going to miss shots with a bow and shortblade has been selected as a backup weapon sneak and illusion are also selected to make stealth oriented playstyles work playing outside of these archetypes is easily possible but i recommend playing inside them for your first time just to get a handle on how skills work before trying anything crazy like orc wizard i will say up front that thievery oriented playthroughs tend to be my least favorite when it comes to morrowind partially because a little bit of thievery is expected in all playthroughs and a little bit because thievery just doesn't quite work right despite that both my thieves guild and my house hulawu characters actually ranked as my more favorite playthroughs that i did for this series steals your wallet a khajiit thief took his stipend and figured the only real goal worthy of life was the acquisition of cash cash money up front steals your wallet is a bit distinguished from the other characters as a beast race or as we say in 2019 as a furry khajiit better than lizard in particular i find it funny that since all characters start with shoes and furries can't wear shoes that steals your wallet came to vardenfell with one of his few possessions being a pair of common shoes he can't wear this isn't the only limitation placed on furries and scalies however another is the inability to wear closed masked helmets due to the structural limitations of the khajiit and argonian faces perhaps a note on beast races is the fact that vardenfell has institutional slavery although outlawed in the empire vardenfell in the broader province of morrowind were never actually conquered by tiber septim instead signing an armistice a great many things were hold over of the pre-empire morrowind as a consequence one of these was slavery now while technically any race can be enslaved including native dunmer the ones you'll generally see being used for slave labor are the two beast races i should note that it is impossible to be enslaved unless you spend time in an imperial corrections and rehabilitation center there is an abolitionist questline and you are able to free most slaves you encounter while there are sometimes different quest paths based on your character's gender it does not seem to matter much your character's race you can join and become a leader in most xenophobic factions as an argonian steals your wallet true to his name enlisted with the thieves guild now while other later games would establish the thieves guild as an ancient establishment vardenfell is quite different as i said earlier morrowind was not conquered and so the imperial thieves guild has only recently entered the scene on vardenfell now what is the function of a thieves guild in imperial society after all what government could support the existence of a faction devoted to crime well generally the thieves guild operates within certain rule sets to only really bother those with excess not the broader public they serve as a watchdog against other less nuanced criminal organizations and of course they pass on profits to imperial authorities in the form of bribe money vardenfeld's local criminal organization is the kamanitong i've heard them described as a mafia-esque organization i would say the komodo tong is closer to a cartel mafias tend to operate on crimes like protection rackets extortion and blackmail like the thieves guild whereas cartels operate on smuggling corruption monopoly and robbery the tong is also politically motivated against outlanders and the empire and curiously enough forms the backbone of the imperial aligned house halau so while the early quests of the thieves guild will have you performing general contract crime later quests typically involve taking steps to protect the guild from the kimono tong and uncover intrigue that can be used against them crime in the elder scrolls has largely been unchanged since morrowind probably the greatest of later games changes being that each county would have its own bounty and witnesses could be bribed or killed the first of crimes is theft what are you doing the value of your bounty being established by the value of the item stolen so for example an early game quest involves stealing a rador and master helmet from minor era bar of house redoran a verdora master helmet is worth three thousand gold if i were to walk up and take the helmet i would receive a 3 000 gold bounty ah another pointy-eared king of it is worth noting that murder is a 1000 gold bounty meaning that i am now as wanted as a serial killer with just one crime it is actually considered less of a crime for me to murder minor erebar and his guard and just take the helmet with zero witnesses than it is to just grab the helmet and run away theft translating value into the bounty isn't always consistent however at one point i stole a soul gem worth over 50 000 gold but did not get a 50 000 gold bounty that crime spree did end up at a 19 000 gold bounty overall after looting an enchanted merchant and an alchemy merchant of all their valuables so how does one get rid of a bounty the obvious way is to just pay it off turning yourself in can even get you a lessened price usually around 10 off and worth noting as a guard is charging to arrest you it is possible to spam the dialogue prompt and have it count as turning yourself in however you aren't often able to sell items for their full value so if you steal a 100 gold item you get paid 50 gold for it and then have to pay off a 90 gold bounty you have clearly lost money one perk of the thieves guild are certain npcs who can make bounties go away at a cost of half the value of the bounty constantly resolving bounties this way does eat into your profits quite heavily so it is better to steal stuff and not be detected i simply say all this as a way of assuaging the idea that you need to constantly save scum and avoid bounties at all costs like the later games in part this is because every guard in 5 miles will not attempt to arrest you for bounties under 1 000 gold stop for some other crimes there's trespassing which is actually not trespassing like the other games but just trying to break into an area as long as you aren't caught breaking in you're free to hang out in people's houses i would like to add in editing that since interior npcs generally don't move around as a rule shopkeepers who have merchandise around a corner will often have a guard in their shop watching said merchandise this was a quirk notable of balmora pelagiad and caldera i don't recall many instances outside of those areas using this technique to detect crime other shopkeepers would just keep all their merchandise in view of them the problem with this which gets into the early game exposure to crime is that you have an immediate response if you try to steal from these shops and i don't really think the town would appreciate one of its merchants getting a full-time town guard dedicated to preventing theft because the merchant was too lazy to watch their stuff sleeping in an owned bed is a fun one especially when you do it accidentally trying to pick up something off the bed you violated the law pickpocketing has a lot of nuance in how it gets counted as a crime but do not worry because steals your wallet will never successfully pick a pocket in his entire career and neither will you because of a mistake in the code the skill checks for pickpocket are so punishing that there is only a 56 chance maximum of successfully picking a pocket and that is only when you're at a high skill level value play is a heavy factor as well so certain gold values are impossible to pickpocket pickpockets never really worked in elder scrolls in reality it's generally seen as a low level crime but is so reliably caught at low levels in game that i would think most people would just avoid pickpocketing entirely beyond the odd gimmick here or there like reverse pickpocketing so while oblivion onwards would fix the odds of a pickpocket they also made the penalties for pickpockets so high in the form of hyperactive guards as to make the venture completely unworthwhile for low-level criminals but worth a laugh for high-level ones which is just bass ackwards i'll get into the other two crimes of assault and murder later for now let's talk about some thieves guild quests balmora is the logical place for most players to embark on their careers in the imperial guilds being the first town they're sent to after all the player is even directed to ask at the corner club the thieves guild hides in for directions to cassady's house the first three quests of the balmora thieves guild rather elegantly display some of morrowind's problems with thievery however and very quickly i might add the first quest to the balmora's thieves guild is to steal a diamond from nalcuria of whitehaven the local alchemist who is quite wealthy as the first quest of the thieves guild this is quite a challenging proposition for new players as the diamonds in question are directly in front of her now some people are going to say some usual arguments for how these quests should be done generally involving magic i ask you then how new players tomorrow when fresh off the boat are supposed to figure these things out for this quest the reality is that this quest is a trap and teaches important lessons that work for the rest of the game the first lesson is that quest givers generally do not care that you specifically give them what they ask for a diamond is still a diamond to habasi she does not need a specific diamond and the second lesson is that purchasing a diamond from nalcaria is a perfectly acceptable solution for the quest worth noting and this is something i'm learning as of now there are diamonds upstairs above her bed in a locked chest this information is not relayed to the player and while it is my fault for not exploring plenty of people have fallen for the trap that is this quest me personally i just purchased them while selling contraband i stole from the mages guild so i made a profit anyways the second quest of the balmora thieves guild is to acquire a key to narano manor there are two keys in question one on the manor's owner andres narano and one on his manservant silvor trandel either can be pickpocketed if such a thing is possible i actually saved scum for about 15 minutes just to see if it was and not once did i actually succeed in stealing the key off of either man both can be killed for the key while there is no extra consequence for killing the manservant killing the owner does have some consequence since it's hard to get use out of a key when the owner is no longer alive however legally killing sovor is difficult because generally the only option available to players is going to be taunts which at this level take an exceptional amount of time to actually work you can also convince sovor into giving you the key either with admiration or with bribes but again since the player is new admiration may not work and bribes may quickly surpass the rewards of the quest the third quest of balmora's thieves guild is to acquire dwemer artifacts off another khajiit razid razid cannot be convinced and his tricky position makes cleanly stealing the artifacts in question a difficult proposition in attempting to do so i earned a bounty for defending myself from razid these three quests expose a massive fault in the thievery playstyle that being the extreme difficulty of leveling thief skills naturally sneak only levels when you sneak around npcs who can detect you since you aren't going to often be doing this because trespassing of the later games hasn't been implemented yet and there is no need to sneak around non-hostile npcs i never once saw sneak level up outside of trainers sneak can be leveled relatively quickly by successful pickpockets but again such things may not be possible in mortal lifetimes since you can get 1 50th of a level for every successful pickpocket and you can't level sneak on enemies very well because the second they detect you you aren't going to lose them leveling speechcraft organically will typically involve ruining dispositions with a lot of people or spending a lot on bribe money illusion magic can be a solution for hybrid classes provided you cast the magic in question quite a bit using trainers is an option but i should stress these are the newbie quests they don't pay particularly well and getting these skills high enough to be functional is more costly than the rewards given by the quests thus i view the early game thieves guild quest as likely the worst aspect of the guild it does get better much better in fact but this early part is very weak which is a surprise given the extra effort the thieves guild seemed to receive compared to some of the other factions so what can be done unlike the later games there isn't one path to completion in the guild if you find yourself unable to complete a quest you could always find a new job in a different guild hall the aldrune hall is about as forgiving it starts out innocuous the local mages guild is out on a vegas trip and is apparently empty we need to grab an enchanted tonto and while we're there we can help ourselves to anything we find only the guild hall isn't empty someone was left behind and he immediately assumes we're a thief unlike later installments of the guild there is actually not much of a penalty for killing people while on the job with exceptions where killing someone might complicate future work like with andres narano this is because the thieves guild understands that sometimes in a b e things happen and the job still needs to get done they prefer murder not be the first solution that members think of but more of a reactionary measure taken unlike a later guild who had exclaimed that they don't allow killing because they aren't the dark brotherhood second never kill anyone on the job this is not the dark brotherhood there's something not right about you maybe you should go security is another thief skill but it does not suffer the issues the other skills have you only need a security level of 40 out of 100 to unlock any chest in the game provided you have a master pick anything beyond that just means you open stuff in less attempts of course lock level 100 is fairly uncommon with the average lock being closer to around lock level 50. so this ended up being the only quest where i ran into the lock too complex message since i quickly got my hands on some master picks and out leveled all the locks i suppose i should mention the lockpick levels they follow the levels of apprentice journeyman master and grandmaster grandmasters are uncommon so i'd use them for the special occasions lockpick quality translates to effectiveness another factor in the equation that is lock picking that was cut from the later games in favor of a more universal pick lock picking is not done through a mini-game but rather by clicking on the lock while holding the pick in your hand so it's done in real time which means should you lack the skill in lock picking and consistently fail it means you have to take into consideration guard patrols and the like this is another way that skill levels differentiate the masters from the apprentices there are also traps but they all have a standard level so any probe in the game can break them magical classes can of course use alterations to unlock chests for the spell open its level directly translates to what it opens so an undissized spell will open all locks up to level 50. this may seem more effective provided you have the magicka and aptitude to cast such spells traps can be bypassed with magic provided you know the spell telekinesis since activating the trap from a distance will cause it to miss traps can range in effectiveness sometimes they instantly kill you sometimes they just cast a low level burden effect there's really no telling from the outside what any one trap is going to do in fact i don't even think that they're consistent as for fighting classes your best bet is to use a scroll of open of which there are two types undersides on hinging and ecash's lock splitting they carry the upsides of magic with the downsides of weight and monetary cost if there is a level 75 lock you'll have to use your expensive e-cash's lock splitter to open it i think a particular failure of the game is the inability of fighting classes to open a lock without a magical or thief related ability this creates a lot of situations for role-playing characters who avoid sneaky measures from opening certain chests as there's not always a key those born under the sign of the tower can use a daily ability to open a level 50 lock which is ironically more useful to fighting classes than it is to thief or mage classes since it's ridiculously easy for both to have the necessary skill level and tool set to unlock a level 50 lock it also comes with detect key and enchantment which are the saddest spells ever since the quest and level designers never created any situations where you would need those effects back on the topic of the thieves guild our next quest is to steal that rador and master helmet i mentioned earlier erabar's guard can occasionally path out of the room if you leave the door open then you can shut the door on her to keep her out what you must be choking now you're down to erebar but he's a bit politically significant to just kill luckily npcs can be distracted by getting npcs to speak towards you you can control the direction they look this isn't always reliable since sometimes npcs are positioned up against the wall but here it is necessary for our next job we're then tasked with stealing a smut book from miner erabar's daughter and oh my god this is absolutely depraved i love it now somebody has a grudge against aerobar and it's strange because this plot point doesn't come up again not even in the house or door and quest line over in sage with morrow we get a job to steal a potion recipe for the benefit of the local mages guild we can of course ask for the recipe to which we'll be told no i don't think so naturally she forgets we asked after we take it or maybe we make a copy either way this quest is actually really easy so naturally the next one is quite difficult we are to steal a rare grandmaster's retort from a traitor in telmora this is difficult as the retort is in clear view of the merchant she's willing to sell it but isn't in a selling mood until somebody deals with the health and safety violation upstairs that is a corpus monster the zombie has a good deal of health but is trapped behind some clutter so we can pick it off from a distance safely there are other retorts and they are about as difficult to acquire as this one the wiki actually suggests you kill berlin which is pretty psychopathic but he's a bit politically significant i just buy it off her and trade some contraband i'd stolen earlier to make up the capital it's it's better for everyone that way our next task is to help improve the defenses of the guild hall by hiring a battle mage we ask around the local mages guild and come to a deal four pieces of ebony for a battle mage ebony is a controlled substance in the empire which naturally poses some challenges in acquiring it at this point we're getting the beginnings of a clue that this is more than just go to x place and steal y thing if we go to the big city vivec you'll find people a lot less knowledgeable about where the thieves guild is in the east canal works below the wasteworks of the foreign quarter of avec is a bookshop belonging to simon frolinay behind a locked door inside his shop are the headquarters of the thieves guild i feel no shame in marking this position as to avoid trying to find it every time jim has two quest lines a final one for the thieves guild and one for those who've messed up the earlier quests and need the reputation we'll start with that one the bow melagmir so in dunmer culture there was a group called the balmalagmer who would steal from the unjust and give to the needy stunningly clever and original i know this faction exists like i said for rep points but also for that group of people who can only allow themselves to be criminals if they're doing it for what they perceive to be justifiable reasons there is no reward for these quests there isn't even really the opportunity to distill valuables while doing these quests and there is no ceremony at the end merely acknowledgment that you're not qualified to do good on your own still the questline is enjoyable most of them start with stacy explaining an injustice that has occurred or is in the process of occurring and the steps we can take to correct it also necessary is wearing a pair of gloves that are iconic to the group and signifying in conversation that we are acting on behalf of the baal malagmar at first nobody cares but as the deeds go on people start to recognize the name and the actions you can catch halau counselor yingling half-troll in an act of corruption accuse him and then kill him in self-defense or it can be as simple as stealing a locket and returning it to its owner perhaps most interesting about the quest line is the thought process of whether or not jim stacy is having you do this out of genuine interest in restoring the balmalachtmer or simply as a ploy to generate goodwill with the people of vardenfell it's a theme that's reflected in the main storyline as well so let's get into the end game of the thieves guild questline this starts with the process of building up the guild in balmora we free a member from prison by tricking a guard into self-admitting that she was taking bribes then we find a master of security hiding in balmora and convince him to step up and help secure the corner club after this quest habasi will perform a free wipe of your bounty which served as a fantastic opportunity to rob everyone blind and get away with it for free nineteen thousand gold bounty gone in aldrune we collect the scrap metal to build a spider centurion and collect the darts of judgment from a rador and guard the dark quest is interesting because the amount of rep and pay you get depends on how many you return they aren't really worth keeping those so it isn't really a choice now let's talk about marksman steel's your wallet preferred ranged combat but also kept short bladed weapons as backups marksman is a mostly simple affair you take a bow arrows and shoot people projectiles generally travel in a straight line and your chance of hitting is pretty much guaranteed at a marksman level greater than 50. vardenfell however sees wood at a premium and so favor bows made of chitin and laminated in resin or bows made of steel this is to say that the selection is rather weak basically jumping from bone mold to daedric some nuance does come with the arrow selection however and arrows do have travel time and enemy marksmen are actually really easy to dodge since they are easily tricked into leading their shots crossbows are another option the steel crossbow is the mass-produced imperial legion version and there is a dwemer version as well i always found it strange that the empire just forgot about crossbows and oblivion and then they were rediscovered in skyrim then again they never managed to rediscover the spear you know one of the most basic weapons in human history there are also throwing weapons but sadly they are underappreciated it's hard to appreciate a weapon that disappears after you use it especially when said weapon is one of the only ones that exists in the game using the darts of judgment isn't a wise move because you can't retrieve them if you miss and have a very low chance if they hit and even if you do hit they don't do standout damage as for lesser throwing weapons a stable supply of anything greater than steel was pretty unreliable they're actually kind of fun since they massively scale with your strength but have way too many downsides to consistently use hey this is me and post i just want to add one of the reasons throwing weapons are so much fun in morrowind is because of their slow travel time and high damage on impact so you feel like a ninja when you throw one and strafe to a side watching as the projectile you through connects with the target but a love of god please bring back the throwing weapons i get the battlemage hired and am tasked with stealing a radoran cookbook an odd sounding quest i know i feel as though the sageth mora quests were a bit out of order the final stage with maura quest is to steal an ebony staff from felon marion a televani wizard living in telbenora she's more so giving the job to satisfy a personal grudge and doesn't really care if we decline it or accept it it's actually pretty easy i just get behind the shelf and grab it this quest has two big rewards a telekinesis ring and another bounty reset telekinesis allows you to interact with objects at a distance which includes picking locks and stealing objects i think they intended the final quest of each hall to reward something useful the location of a master trainer in balmora a quote unquote powerful ranged weapon in aldrune and the tk ring and sageth mora as well as bounty resets at the end of each line the problem is that these are for the most part not that useful as rewards the master trainer might let us raise a skill up easily but said skill is security the one that does not need to be as high the darts are better off being turned in for gold and the telekinesis ring while useful is coming far too late in the quest line given how the following quests play out the bounty resets are nice but are also not telegraphed to the player when you'll get them meaning it's entirely probable players never actually get to use them the way i did this leads us into the final chain of events have you wondered why all the masters took steps to shore up the defenses of the guild halls well it's because it's known to members of the guild that the fighter's guildhead shoring hardheart is working in service of the kamanatong and is making moves against the thieves guild jim stacy starts us down the path of retribution with an investigation into the disappearance of a guild member turns out nad's theron is in his studio apartment dead a short optional investigation reveals the murderer to be a bar mate over at the elven nation's corner club arvama rathri who happens to be a halahu retainer accuse her and she'll admit it and she'll also admit that she's going to try to kill you we return to stacy and we get a bonus for taking out rothery our next objective is to speak with perseus mercies as the aldrine fighters guild he was the old guild master before joran and is more principled if you have a decent disposition with him he'll even give you some information he was the master of the fighter skill before the kimono tong made a move hirandi was the second in command and is against the tongue but might not help out the gate unless we leverage a love affair he's involved in idus firerai at the balmora fighter's guild is a competent fighter but she's a worshipper of clavicus file and impossible to blackmail shoring hardheart is in great debt to the commander tong and will likely have to be killed if you've never played an elder scrolls game before i envy you but i should also explain that the fighters guild like the thieves guild is an imperial organization that does as its namesake implies it is a joinable faction and is in the next section of this video so having a quest line where you murdered their entire upper management is to players of the later games a highly unusual affair imagine a quest where the companions are ordered to take out the college of winterhold for example to take care of itis we have to get our hands on a clavicus vile artifact the bitter cup this provides a non-lethal solution to dealing with itis at the cost of the bitter cup what does it do it raises your highest attribute by 20 points and low is your lowest by 20. not the most useful thing but it is necessary if you want to min max your health the real value of this quest however is oh no wait no hang on no okay so one naked skeleton war wizard later and uh as i was saying the real value of this quest is something the skeleton is carrying called the vampiric ring it's an enchanted ring that absorbs a massive amount of health and fatigue from enemies on touch it's quite deadly give itis the cup and she pledges her allegiance jim notes that she'll likely be troubled down the line but for now she's no longer a problem our next step is to convince harundi over in sageth sagethmora to join us he can be made amicable to the idea but can also be convinced if you figure out who he is choreographing an affair with and threatening her life to him finally before we can make our move we need to take out some top level enforcers in the commanded tong yeah this is a straight up assassination mission vardenfell's thief skilled does not around with trying to be the better man second never kill anyone on the job this is not the dark brotherhood animals and monsters can be slain if necessary of course we aren't going to go out of our way to kill orvis drin he is the duke's brother after all but his two goons that pose a threat are free game the game actually bugs out one of the brothers is supposed to teleport behind you when you start the fight but ended up teleporting inside a door this made killing the first brother easy but i was somewhat stuck i could still teleport out with magic obviously i just didn't want to eventually he got free this guy is a bastard he has a jinx blade that paralyzes for longer than it takes to swing it so he can basically score a bunch of free hits until the enchantment runs out of a charge luckily that new vampiric ring is very lethal and restores our health and finally for our end game we're tasked with taking down shoring hardheart we're warned that he's a competent fighter head on you will die you are clumsy snowman so what are the conclusions the fighters guild threat against the thieves guild have been eliminated not entirely sure who's gonna run the fighters guild now but at least it's not being run by somebody in dead to the commanded tong the tong itself has lost its top enforcers while the guilt has built up his defenses and position in vardenfell appearing more culturally relevant thanks to their bowel malagma revival than the xenophobic kimono tong stacy figures this is an adequate position to retire in having found a successor and steals your wallet and hands us the skeleton keys to the skeleton car okay i'm sorry the skeleton key works like a normal lock pick with 50 uses and 5 times the effectiveness i prefer morrowind's thieves guild line to its other incarnations it does feel like helping to maintain your criminal family without any metaphysical connotations i'm not steel's their wallet protector of the people and hero of the poor i'm steel's your wallet known criminal overlord sadly this is where the story of steals your wallet ends he never achieved his namesake and there wasn't really anything logical to do with him as a follow-up like the other characters which is a shame because i did like him apparently not enough to notice that his name was actually steel's wallet however you can't do dashes on the morrowind xbox mace was a meme character his class name of jedi knight and his propensity to bash people in head with the blunt side of his weapon didn't really help much to assuage that fact i was originally going to call him metal bat because he uses a metal bat and has the whole fighting spirit thing going on how do i get this tangent back on track the fighters guild is a rather straightforward organization you sign up you get a contract you fight you get paid what we'll typically be doing is a reflection of the area you're in i.e in balmoral you start off with normal contracts and move on to shadier business since we just covered this in the last section we have to operate with some sense of dramatic irony that says the fighter's guild isn't corrupt this does become apparent by our third contract but i get ahead of myself our first job is to take care of some rats the first one is simple enough the other two not so much these rats have a lot more health than your standard large rodent and 2v1 is a bit of a challenging proposition for early game builds luckily we have racial abilities that generally turn the tide of fights like this our next contract is to take care of some kwama egg poachers what okay so in morrowind the main food the dunmer eat is giant eggs harvested from insects living in caves that are the size of bears what and when people are desperate they poach the eggs what we make our way to the mine and some of the miners say that the egg poachers are in the back near the queen and ask that we try to avoid killing any of the kwama since they won't be used to our scent and will attack us on site i could pontificate about lessons taught in these quests or we could call them what they are filler now filler isn't bad and there could always be more generic but scripted basic level contracts to do but i'm not going to pretend it's something greater than it is when in this case it's not our third contract however is where things get interesting itis tells us to take care of some quote tilvani agents end quote of course when we ask about these telvani agents it turns out that they aren't telvani they're thieves guild perhaps working for telvani but all thieves guild nonetheless and one wonders at the need for deception it is also entirely possible that less attentive players who aren't curious enough to ask about the targets will miss the subtext of this quest entirely so it is nice that the writing isn't so on the nose as to make absolutely sure we are aware that idis is deceiving us you have to actually roleplay as somebody who asks questions to figure out that something is wrong and if you don't you get led down the limit path i go out and meet the guys their lookout greeting me friendly enough but turning hostile when he realizes i'm with the fighters guild i defend myself and figure i might as well finish the job it ain't nothing a little adrenaline rush can't handle itis next contract is even more sketchy she wants me to get my hands on a thieves guild code book from the local guildhall i figure i'll look for a different contract and meet perseus murcias he says he doesn't have any contracts for members at my rank but he does offer advice for jobs and suggests i speak with harundi over in sagrath mora for good ones he figures the code book contract might be legitimate but advises that we avoid a lethal solution i decide to go to harundi and his jobs are a lot better his first job is to provide support to a witch hunter hunting a day drought in ninjurn dams this first entails giddington insurance dams which is a remote location that takes a bit of water walking to get to although the circumstances of getting to this quest can be difficult the quest itself is quite good it's a great introduction to combat with a necessary crutch for players in the form of la riena she's a capable warrior with unique audio dialogue who is able to heal the player if they get wounded and could generally handle the creatures inside and churn dams and churn dams has early access to some dwimmer gear and ends in the mini boss of herrelvezu this is what should have been morrowind's introduction to the fighter's guild morrowind's comeback is very straightforward but i see a lot of people who pick up this game get overwhelmed and mentally overcomplicate something that can really be as basic as point and click to do damage the problem boils down to the fact that people will pick a basic class like knight then take that dagger in the census office go off to fight a mud crab miss and start immediately complaining that they should have hit the crab because the models collided hit chance is a part of morrowind playing morrowind without hit chance is not playing morrowind weapon skills are a reflection from 0 to 100 of how proficient you are with using said weapon believe it or not but swords aren't as simple as swing sword hurt person ideally if your system is set up right the footage of someone playing as an unskilled weapon user should differ from the footage of someone playing as a master in that skill right well here's what an amateur in morrowind looks like as you can see i'm having a hard time landing hits using a weapon i've never used before and here is what a master looks like as you can see i'm landing hits consistently and ending the fight quite quickly this is a proper contrast between apprentice and master let's contrast this now with oblivion's allegedly revolutionary and entertaining combat system clip 1. all right and clip two [Music] now tell me which one was the master clip and which one was the apprentice clip this is not a trick where i switch the clips or they're both the same skill level i've kept all the conditions the same same enemy same difficulty the first clip is skill level 5 the second clip is skill level 100 and yet they are practically identical because unlike in morrowind there is no progression and feel of combat only in the raw numbers of damage you do the way skills work in morrowind is that they determine your chance to hit your damage is then affected by the weapon you're using and your strength in oblivion and skyrim however all your skill effects is just a damage increase the first enemy you fight with a weapon all the way to the last enemy will be exactly the same because all you have to do is make models intersect with manual blocks parries and more intelligent ai it can be a more interesting or dynamic melee combat system but it's not a melee combat system that accurately reflects skill levels with weapons or a combat system that is reflective of an actual progression of character skill something that is important in a role playing game because there's one thing i've left out of all of this the enemy has skills too because of course they do npcs can be more or less dangerous as a result of their own backstory and training this includes their own chance to hit as well as various defensive skills that determine your chance to hit them perhaps this just comes down to a matter of preference but rather than tying our preference to nostalgia let's consider what meaningful difference there is between a hit chance oriented combat system like morrowind versus a percentage damage oriented combat system like oblivion and skyrim in the hit chance system should you be far superior to an enemy you're able to kill them quickly and efficiently there is a clear progression from the first enemy you fight to the last you're encouraged to specialize and invest in a particular weapon rather than switching arbitrarily to ones that have bigger numbers than the last in a percent damage system you cannot be superior to an enemy as scaling will eliminate your advantages increasing your skill is not a matter of gaining an advantage but keeping up with the world rather than becoming incrementally better at landing hits you are becoming incrementally better at doing slightly more damage the skill is less so a reflection of you or other characters proficiency and mastery but a stagnating progression where combat is identical for the entire game all this lost because some people complained they couldn't hit mud crabs with a weapon their character had never picked up before i hope you can forgive me but i am going to speed up particularly as a number of fighters guild quests are not noteworthy these are as simple as go to place kill or do thing one quest type i particularly like is the fact that the guild has been contracted by the empire to deliver alcohol shipments to minors in remote areas something that feels like a legitimate contract such an organization would receive our next notable mission is to rescue and escort a researcher investigating a dunmer stronghold telecero i have mixed feelings on escort quests which is quite a surprise as i and this is a fairly reasonable position vehemently dislike them in most contexts i think morrowind's escort quests work because they allow you to lead and listen to your commands to stop and let you do your job they are also fairly rare and when they do pop up they are short and designed in such a way to be painless so it turns out that the researcher her name is sandal went in ahead of us and this is a sixth house base what happens at sixth house bases she's in a side room hopped up on a table because some giant rats are harassing her i mean they're the size of dogs i'm sure they could get up there i find the sixth house hammer which is interesting because its damage can rain from a peck one might give a lover to a pair of school buses set in a head-on collision sadly it's also really heavy so i don't have any room for it in my life we're then tasked with taking care of a bounty in the local stagerth mora enger has taken up residence up until naga particularly as a prisoner of master nelloth i have to taunt the guard into attacking me which is a tall order for my speechcraft level nella thing gets rather upset when i kill engar perhaps mad i shortened his life as a prisoner but as per telvanni law it's a-okay because i managed to escape the building let's take this opportunity to talk about the ai in morrowind it's bad it prioritizes casting the worth spells like minor burdens or blind it only repositions to avoid damage if using ranged then it runs full speed backwards which makes archers in open environments a nightmare melee ai will just book it towards you until death only running away if you go invisible or start flying out of their reach ai is an area that the later games improved without question hell as early as morrowind's first expansion they had ai who could drink potions which means that for the entirety of the base game potions are a distinct advantage held solely by the player this is one of the reasons i don't like to do everything in one playthrough because morrowind reaches a point where the ai stops being a challenge when you are working within the limitations of the yearly game finding creative solutions around problems that's when morrowind is interesting some of the most fun i've had in morrowind was during a mages guild quest where i had to kill an enemy who was 10 levels higher than me and could one shot me whereas if the mage's guild was just the third faction i joined i'd already be higher level than the npc unable to take the hits while killing them in three maybe two hits anyways harundi is out of real contracts but has one mission that he believes is in all likelihood apparently there are seven eggs of gold inside a legendary mine the poudai egg mine somewhere on or around the island of sheogorad he's willing to pay quite a bit should the eggs actually exist so this entails some time exploring sheogorad and i took the chance to do some dungeon crawling i found some malaccath worshipers and got a few full sets of orcish i ended up finding an arena being used for slave fighting they weren't appreciative of me and so i got a powerful legendary sword and in one of the earlier quests i had slain a vampire who was wearing a powerful ring this is a point in every morrowind playthrough i call the power threshold if you have a graph there's a line for the progression of the difficulty and a line for the progression of the character the power threshold is when the character line intersects and becomes greater than the difficulty line once characters cross the threshold they've become powerful enough to handle the challenges of the game it's rewarding and at the same time a sad part of morrowind because it means that the challenge is over you can turn up the difficulty but all that does is make enemies hit a little harder and make you a little more fragile orkish armor is some of the best medium armor in the game the sword the ice blade of the monarch is extremely powerful even for a character that is specialized in blunt weaponry and the ring provides some serious defensive enchantments reflecting and resisting damage all turning up the difficulty really does now is push me to use my adrenaline rush ability more often i do eventually find the mine which for an abandoned mine still has lit torches i mean okay i've worked with the editor you have to place a prop a light source and a sound source so either someone created the mine unaware of what quest it would involve someone created the mine was aware of the quest and didn't see anything wrong with torches in an abandoned mine or my favorite possibility someone copied the mind from elsewhere and made the bear essential modifications for the sake of the quest down all the way at the back behind the queen are the seven eggs which all weigh 30 pounds 30 pounds so getting back is a challenge but it's a challenge that's met by magic harundi surprised we even found the cave pays us 10 000 gold for the job which is quite a big payout he is out of work for us and recommends us to perseus mercy is back in aldrune and perseus does have work for us now he wants us to help a buoyant armiger take care of a necromancer at voss said necromancer is a member of telvanni so one wonders at the political nature of the situation the armager is willing to give us a recommendation provided we don't hit her in the fight i don't but i do take an accidental swing at her ancestor ghost look i didn't even hit him it's fine but it's enough to be a problem and i get paid a lower rate our next job is to take care of a bounty of someone living in a place called sargon that's the only reason i mention this quest it's otherwise by the book we take care of some more bounty we deliver some more liquor and then i go ahead and meet the guild leader shoring who gives me 5 000 gold and instructs me to take care of the three masters of the thieves guild in balmora aldrune and sageth mora perseus on the other hand decides it's time to ask and ask we take care of a few corrupt fighters guild members itis fireeye in balmora and lore bumol grow anglac and vivec i go with perseus since he's been the more reasonable option itis fireeye attacks me as soon as i enter and grow aglock declares that he'll be guildmaster soon enough then we're tasked by perseus to take care of shoring he gives me access to full sets of orcish and glass armor and tells me that shoring is one of the toughest fighters on the an island opponent joran is one of the toughest fighters on the island and he wasn't even wearing his armor the fighter's guild fizzles out towards the end for all the intrigue behind the thieves guild relying on the fighter skill to be interesting and lasting throughout the entire storyline it's a shame that there weren't more missions in the fighters guild side of the story where you can play the other side and it's a shame that these quests were so on the nose with it it's very difficult to see anybody being tricked into going against the thieves guild unless they just aren't paying attention and thinking about what they're doing or they don't care should you side with thorin and kill the three masters he'll then task you with killing jim stacy before then attempting to kill you so in the end all roads lead to shoring hardheart's death i could say that the fighter's guilt has some appeal in that it pays but it doesn't even pay all that well for the work you go from running errands and performing contracts to decimating the leadership in one quest the shadow war with the thieves guild is only hinted at if you decide to play the stooge and the kimono tong doesn't even come up from the fighter skill perspective our mages guild character started off by picking everything from sidonine to balmora and once she got her free 200gs from caius joined up with the mages guild turns out the early balmora quests deal with picking mushrooms and flowers that i happened to grab who could have seen this coming well me because i've done this before between the collection of mushrooms and flowers we're tasked with replacing a soul gem with a fake in our boss's rival's desk slowing her research she'll come downstairs and due to her faulty ai this means i'm free to leave the cell and come back and that traps are downstairs forever which is a more convenient location i'm not sure about these early quests they aren't introducing alchemy asking the player to create a potion with the ingredients or anything like that it's just go out and fetch some ingredients as for the soul gym quest it isn't usually the case that static npcs move around during quests so that isn't introducing anything new either you also don't need to use magic it might have been handy to have a quest involve learning a low level unlock like five points to unlock her desk to perform the switch as it stands it feels like the designer is showing off that they can script npcs to move around during quests which again isn't useful information for the player since it doesn't happen again nor is it impressive from a technical standpoint since all it does is highlight the fact that npcs don't work on a schedule and just stay in the same spot all day it would be like me bragging that i can edit out all these coughs our next quest is to take 10 gold and buy a ceramic bowl this is so that the cell can reset so that when i return stolen reports will have spawned we're then tasked by a panicking azira to find said reports this is the closest the game comes to teaching a lesson and the lesson is just look around the environment and you can find stuff and that's it for now with azura i know i've been hard on these five quests but that is more from an analytical standpoint than anything else the thieves and fighters guild have you playing out these fantasies but the mages guild plays more like assistant busy work we're presented a choice work with rannis atheros in balmora or edwina elbert and aldrune ranus's quests are a bit more oriented towards the guild as a magical regulator while edwina's quests are oriented towards the guild as a researched institution ran is first asked we take care of a televanian sula pund either recruiting him to the mages guild or killing him while we're out here we're also to collect dues from a member in bunambi over and all drewn were tasked with taking 250 gold and finding a copy of the chronicles of noosh left and turns out in vivec the archmage has duties for us he wants us to solve the disappearance of the dwarves no leads or anything just solve this ancient mystery that people have been investigating for centuries and also three games the trip out to sulupund and punabi is a bit of a drastic shift in difficulty azira was really onto something when recommending us against doing ranus's tasks since we're tasked with journeying into molech amur if only there were quests prior to this that could have prepared us for combat i get to the first cave and manway the person who has been dodging their dues is performing research out here she owes 2 000 gold in dues apparently and is not willing to pay unless she likes us which can be afforded for 200 gold that's the art of the deal then we go and meet with the telvanni he's one of dozens of quote rogue unquote telvanni living out on the frontier doing their own thing i put quotes around rogue because honestly taking a place and making it your own is the telvanni way nothing roguish about that he doesn't want to join the mages guild complaining about how outlanders are ruining morrowind but naturally this means he can be bought for 200 gold morrowind's quests leave a lot to be desired in terms of convincing people through dialogue you may have noticed that in most dialogues there aren't often conversation options and when there are they tend to exist in a binary the concept of dialogue in morrowind having multiple options is actually fairly alien for the series when i discuss options for quests it tends to be in what you can do to complete it through gameplay to get different endings that have minor knock-on effects but actual dialogue tends to be rather lacking in these choices morrowind's text-based dialogue seems like the perfect place to do an in-depth conversation system yet it doesn't happen why well in part this has to do with the way quest scripting works the appropriate responses given to dialog prompts is determined by a quest stage variable however go on many quest pages on the unofficial elder scrolls pages and you'll see full bug sections that are consequences of what happens if you do something slightly wrong affecting journal stages now i never ran into the issue of bugging out the journal stages i also never ran into a situation where i needed to use console commands to progress a quest which is fortunate since i didn't have access to a console to do so but i can speak from experience outside of this review series that it does happen the journal stage system was new in morrowind and at its most primordial bethesda also seemed more concerned with filling out all the content than doing the work necessary to take full advantage of the system they had created oblivion would have been the opportunity to expand on the text-based dialogue system providing a wide swath of potential dialogue options for players and responses since it's text only you don't need voice actors but instead the decision was made to scrap the dialogue system and hire voice actors bethesda has stuck with the same engine and that means the same journal stage system although they're called quest stages now since the journal got peeled back even fallout 76 which i haven't played utilizes the system and yet its advantage of potentially providing alternate paths for quests has been used sparingly by bethesda if you want a full demonstration of its potential just look at a random fallout new vegas quest you can see alternate paths endings and rewards tied all in there and most new vegas dialogues are full of optional paths despite being voice acted bethesda even with the time and grace provided to them to create skyrim still couldn't muster the effort to improve its dialogue system in quest staging to provide options beyond yes i will do your quest and no but leave the door open so i can come back and do your quest at a later time anyways i happened to grab a copy of the chronicles of news left while i was convincing that talvani to join the mages guild and so i started doing more tasks for adueness since she seemed the most reasonable of the options she has me fedex of potion over the skink and tree's shade at the wolverine hall introducing another quest giver who teases at orders once i finish this quest edwina now wants me to steal a book called kymar vamidium and we might have to cast magic to do it just kidding we're given a scroll with the necessary effect on it bethesda if you keep holding my hand i'm gonna start to think you like me this is where i go off on a tangent because bethesda just hates the idea of magic themed quest lines requiring players actually cast magic they've learned beforehand but i just went on a huge tangent already and i'll let it slide for now so we go to the vivec guild hall sneak into a closet and steal the book don't worry we'll return it later but before we do that we need to deal with the situation developing up in marganne apparently there's a disturbance at houlin's hut sure enough we find the place trashed and a scamp's running loose an apprentice to huleen apparently summoned it to prove his worth but the scamp was only pretending to be under his control and stole his clothes and locked him in the basement i kind of like this quest edwina is less than thrilled that her time was wasted on something like that now we return the book which i just give to its owner and she's surprised at its return and that's that now we need to source a dwimmer tube from a place called darken thundsterdums she doesn't actually need any specific tube just a tube will do so while we're on the way up to the ruin let's talk about the xbox the xbox had a severe effect on the difficulty of the game turns out playing the game at a low frame rate compromises the experience who knew the biggest culprit of deaths would be when i would press a button only to not get a response because the button pressed happened to correspond with a stutter so the input would be lost and my character would just impotently stand there and take their beating another offender is weapon and magic's dancing those unaware may be used to the idea of pressing a button to draw a weapon well in morrowind you have a separate stance for casting magic this stance was removed in oblivion and i have a suspicion about why that was see among the inputs that can be lost in stutters or the transitions from your normal stance to magic stance or to your weapon or to switch between them both i got frustrated more than a couple times when my character would refuse to switch stances this would have been a standard experience on the xbox since it didn't fare much better than the 360 when running the game it's not much of a secret that the xbox copy of morrowind served as a testing ground for ideas for bethesda the new multi-panel ui being adapted into oblivion for example before being reverse ported onto pc players much to our chagrin the lack of response simply made magic stance too much of a hassle to keep in the game hence the new cast button that allowed you to use magic at any time i actually prefer skyrim's system of having two independent hands even if the magic tangent removed so what are some other quirks of the xbox well the ai stopping and taking a think happened quite a bit it seemed the game prioritized keeping itself running over the ai pathing however this wasn't consistent if the ai knew what it was trying to do and then the game stuttered the ai would continue on its collision course independent of my ability to respond button presses being ignored and of course since this is being played sub-optimally on a controller this ended in a fair few deaths that wouldn't have happened if i was playing with a keyboard and mouse i do this for love ranged combat in particular was quite difficult at a high resolution it's easy to spot enemies from the environment but squeeze that resolution in knock it down a few hundred pixels sprinkle on some aliasing and bad lighting and all of the sudden target acquisition in morrowind is quite difficult and aiming with a controller i mean my god i don't want to harp on the weaknesses of controllers this much but trying to aim with some measure of precision was a nightmare especially since the projectile trajectories and collision models were built with the idea of being used with a mouse first moreover playing with a dominant strategy is encouraged because of the loading screens loading is near instantaneous on a modern pc as is expected but on the xbox i spent probably hours of my life just waiting optimally it was a good time to take notes but sometimes when i was just forced to reload because i kept dying on difficult fights it was less than appreciated so playing in unorthodox ways was discouraged let me give you an example ever notice how every skyrim playthrough you see ends up being stealth archery at some point dominant strategy the upsides of the strategy always present themselves as an option should the downsides of the situation impede progress for morrowinds the dominant strategy is to use enchanted items with powerful on touch effects to nuke enemies to death and then run back and forth timing the enemy's attacks and swinging in between rounds as long as i had room to maneuver in morrowind victory was guaranteed the fun then came from trying to play in new or interesting ways trying unconventional magicka effects or summoning or or and then i die for the fifth time and i say looks like i'll have to get a little bit serious overall playing on the xbox made me hate this game and at the same time appreciate what exactly about morrowind would cause me to waste so much time analyzing it to me it's the ultimate testament of respect as the thoughts say if you can't handle her at your worst you don't deserve her at her best even if sometimes her best is also her worst now that we've got the tube we're tasked with checking in on a dwimmer ruin expedition this is naturally in the middle of malaga more luckily edwina gave us a couple handy intervention amulets to facilitate the travel turns out the site's guide has gone missing deeper inside the ruin and worst of all he had to report edwina once some investigation reveals the test of pattern there are three lights each with a corresponding lever two lights are broken one light is not which lever is the correct one to pull well don't worry it's the lever that is across the room from the hidden wall as shown on the minimap yeah the dunmer guide is dead but he did manage to find a book before dying the mages guild rep isn't too bothered by his death and we take the report to edwina who says the book might be useful if we knew somebody who can speak alt maris our next task is to acquire some dwemer scara plans from the ruin of musleft up in sheogorad and this is a little high level as evidenced by the fact that all the orcs can one shot me i won this fight eventually by using a paralyzed spell to freeze the orc then cast a spell that had a 50 chance of working to nuke him to death this took quite a few attempts and involved a trip back to make the nuke spell now i have the plans but and for a penny and for a pound surely there's something valuable here well there's more orcs luckily i found a use for the lock spell why do you want a spell that locks doors and creates future hassle because npcs can't unlock them and can be hit through them a tactic i discovered early on was the locked door tactic the enemy's ai pathfinding would lead it through doorways but can only account for obstacles like doors by opening and traveling through them to the ai it should be paradoxical that they can detect someone through a locked door as if the door is locked then the player can't have come in the room that's obviously not how it actually works but the point is from a design perspective what i'm doing only works thanks to an exploitation or rather a clever use of game mechanics the only other thing you can use lock for is if you care to level your security up and you really shouldn't do that however the other half of this is a ranged spell with an area of effect i always felt it was a shame what happened to spell making in the later games in oblivion it got relegated to a high level reward for mages guild members or dlc while in skyrim it was cut entirely using the spell maker allowed me to make a fire spell that was perfect for hitting through locked doors maxing out the area and setting it to low damage high duration making it magicka efficient as well then i just nuked the door until i stopped hearing footsteps on the other side it's a beautifully stupid tactic but hey it works i like to imagine i'm just heating the room up until the people inside burned to death which is brutal but hey shouldn't have been the one shotting me in addition to the scarab plans i find a book named the egg of time edwina thanks as for the plans and recommends we speak with hasfet antabulus in balmora about the book he says the book is written in aldmeris which is a dead language so we should take the book to one of the older telvanni but he doesn't have a recommendation who edwina says the miners in the nicest egg mine found a dwemer ruin in the mine and she asks us to find anything that's down there specifically you know plans i have to bribe the door guard for the key and another guard lower in the mine threatens to kill me if i don't leave so i leave in the direction of the ruin it still counts near the entrance i found some dwemer airship plans as well as a book named divine metaphysics leaving the mine i hear some ruins that nicest has a rogue telvani wizard living in town so i pay him a visit his name is baladas dem nivani and sure enough he can read aldmeris the hanging gardens was written in both aldmeris and dwemer so it's able to be used to translate the other two books the egg of time is a refutation of a theory from the time of rezdane nerevar the theory said that using the power of the heart of lorcan carried more risk than reward and the egg of time figured that the reward was worth the risks divine metaphysics is about how the dwemer tried to make a new god using kagernax tools and using sacred tones on lorcan's heart so extrapolating meaning from these two books we can conclude that the dwemer tried to make a new god using lorcan's heart that the great risk that was warned about came true and then the dwimmer disappeared thus having discovered both the plans to a functioning airship as well as solving the mystery of spontaneous extinction of the dwemer we will return for our rewards edwana has none she's disappointed because she wanted the plans to build a robot not an airship trobonius the archmage also has no reward taken aback that someone had actually managed to complete one of his missions let alone a mission that entailed solving a century's if not millennia old mystery you do get some reputation so more people know your name but scholarly work itself pays very little despite this the mystery of the dwarves is one of my favorite quests the fact that it starts off giving you zero information to use but is perfectly solvable just by paying attention while doing other quests is just it's just fantastic so where do we go from here well one rank requires we pay our dues so that's a couple hundred gold gun you'll also need a wizard staff to reach the rank of wizards so we can either pay 5 000 gold we don't have or we can ask yeah ask a former guild member for one who lives in a cave called sudd in chao gorad i don't think she'll let us ask once we got the staff we can get promoted oh but hold those horses because we have something big to talk about training one of my favorite aspects about morrowind is that factions require you have the necessary skills to properly fill your rank every faction has attributes and skills they prefer now assuming you're being a logical person and playing to the specialization of the faction these are reasonable skill requirements however this is an instance where the game is just twisting that knife into me and that is due to my format had i played the one character doing all the factions i'd have been alright it'd have been fine it'd have had two contractions when i should not have been using any point is i have seven characters and for six of them the same thing happened at least once they outquested the requirements now if you play this game like a god damn normal person you're doing stuff like adventuring freelance quest work even working for other factions that's what a reasonable person who isn't playing faction by faction in order to make a video series does we have enough faction reputation to complete the final quest and become the archmage but we're severely under leveled i need to gain 30 levels in a single skill to reach the requirements this happened to steals your wallet and to a minor extent mace as well mace was actually very close to the necessary requirements in his blunt weapon ability and that's because fighter skills tend to level really well compared to stealth and magic skills so in order to progress i need to use a trainer trainers are a bit different from the later games later games put stipulations that you can only train five times per level morrowind has no such requirement cash provided you can train from level 1 to max level whatever that should be for your character at trainers but it isn't that easy like the later games the trainers themselves have their own skill levels corresponding to their lower level of mastery you need these master trainers because only they can train you past skill level 70. most skills and mind should be paid to the word most most skills have master trainers some don't appear some do appear but don't offer training and some just don't have trainers of the ones who do exist and do work only about two-thirds of them are mentioned anywhere the rest have to be found hell some of them may only be mentioned one is hidden in a locked room another is hostile and attacks on sight having to be calmed two require a high rank in a specific faction so not only are the trainers rare people but training costs money and high level trading costs lots of it i'll talk about making money in part four when i discuss house hello just bear in mind that large stopping point in every play through besides my final main quest playthrough was stopping and setting aside time to farm money and skills in order to meet the requirements to level up again this doesn't normally happen unless you're laser focused on completing factions as fast as possible with new characters so once i finally reached destruction level 80 edwina says that i should talk with the archmage trebonius about stepping down as i'm clearly more committed to scholarship than he is i ask him and he accuses me of lusting after his position and demands we settle this via duel to the death in arena and it's a pretty cool duel turns out he had an artifact called the necromancer's amulet that made him such a powerful wizard edwina said he was a strong battle mage but he hardly met the conditions of battle mage anyways the mages guild scholarly institution settles its management disputes via trial by combat and i am now the archmage i'm not sure if i'm going to get a letter in the mail from akado telling me i'm being replaced the imperial guilds of morrowind are the bridge between the tutorial and the broader content of morrowind since caius pretty much flat out tells you to go join one which is why it is important to pay attention to the starter quests since this is likely to be the first impressions of everyone who played morrowind past the first mud crab the intrigue of the thieves guild line the fun stuff like the boude egg mine and the golden eggs or accidentally running into a powerful vampire in the fighters guild and the mystery of the dwarf's quest requiring a bit of astute problem solving or internet research to figure out despite how hard i may have gone on these guilds they actually are pretty good but when the thieves guild throws you into the deep end of crime the fighter's guild starts pitting you in unfair fights and the mages guild engages in bureaucratic busy work it colors people's impressions of the factions one thing to mention because of the non-linear approach to faction quests to morrowind my experience of the guilds is slightly different than what yours can be i mentioned skink and tree's shade but looking back i never went and did his quests or that many of rannis athera's quests either this non-linearity is what i love about morrowind and at the same time is the biggest risk in terms of personal enjoyment which is probably one of the big reasons oblivion onward focused on linear quest lines leading players by the nose into controlled experiences the imperial guilds in morrowind are a strange thing between the fighters and thieves guild war and the rather straightforward if simple mages guild you hit the three archetypes of role-playing games in the next part we'll be discussing the great houses you see those same three archetypes but a lot more political intrigue i think if love was shown to any of the factions it was the great houses still the guilds serve as a great starting point for any character especially for players new to morrowind time will give context to the name rethan he's an imperial spellblade although i jokingly named his class con man as such he went up to the largest building in balmora which turned out not to be a manor but a council hall for house hello and upon attempting to enrich myself i decided to join up with the house of the three great houses halau is the friendliest to outlanders this is not just evident in some kind of lore sense but by the fact that they are themselves the most accessible to new players who are outlanders in a way to the game of morrowind of course there is no way to not be an outlander and it plays somewhat in part in the story of radorin while telvani does not really care halau is a merchant establishment sucking up to the imperial government on one hand and engaging in a dirty war for monopoly with the other after joining you're given the sort of task that is emblematic of hello you're given the disguise of a recently deceased redorran and tasked with deceiving a redoran quest giver into giving you information not only is it a perfect representation of the sort of faction warfare that you'll be getting with halau and the lack of values that would cause them to adopt such a tactic it's a direct interplay with the redoran quest line our next objective is to take down a business rival in vivec a great deal of household can involve walking around in vivec and being at least somewhat conscious to this i chose the steed as my birth sign this gave me a 25 point boost of speed which made my character quite quick it was in fact jarring to go from a character like wiz who was very slow to one like rethan who is very fast the quest itself has a complication we are stealing an alchemy recipe from an alchemist who has stolen business from the halau alchemist in vivec it pays to do business with hello said alchemists cannot be convinced to give us the scroll and to further complicate matters she lives and works in a one-room studio apartment there are three scrolls that can be stolen the first in a locked chest the second on her person and the third on the table by the door this early in the game this job is quite difficult but on the plus side guards don't try to chase you down for sub 1000 gold bounties which naturally means i can just take the scroll off the table turn around and walk out the door and the guards aren't going to come from every corner of the vek to arrest me for it we were instructed while we were here to meet with indrano orethi she's an alternate quest giver between the two you have enough room to pick which is more convenient and still advanced in the faction orathi's missions tend to be more focused towards work as an enforcer while dorvane's missions tend to be more business focused missions can be as simple as deliver this report across the hall to the treasury or they can be like take out a rival businessman's egg mine but you can report this to him for a reward and not mess up the local economy i'll give you some highlights for this part and not detail every quest we're asked to convince a guar hyde salesman to buy highs from house alau he protests that halau hides are dried out because they have to be shipped from the mainland whereas vradoran hides come locally from vardenfell the first fedoran quest happens to involve one of the local guar herders we're putting out of business which helps set the tone of each house this is where the speechcraft system can come into play it's one of those things that most people i've seen on youtube don't realize made the big difference in how the games played in morrowind and oblivion to some extent every npc has a disposition with the player this is influenced by the player's reputation their bounty the faction relationships and some quests this disposition can influence the turn of how quests proceed npcs with low disposition do not like you and are less likely to comply with your requests or questions npcs with very low dispositions may even refuse to speak with you on topics and deny you access to their services disposition can be directly influenced by a speech craft now in morrowind speechcraft takes the form of four options you can admire intimidate taunt and bribe admire and bribe both raise disposition but admirations more difficult than bribery most people in vardenfell are prepared to accept free money and the ashlanders even see it as a thoughtful gift intimidate on the other hand is rarely useful it relies on you being higher level than the person you're intimidating as such it doesn't work at lower levels and since it doesn't work it's easy to forget that it's an option when it would work there is the odd quest where intimidation can be a solution like this one it is entirely possible to intimidate the guar merchant into doing business with halau but since bribery and honey-coded words are often more reliable and easier intimidate becomes unnecessary and bethesda rather than solving the redundancy by making intimidate more valuable saw fit to remove it i won't even go off on a tangent about speechcraft in the later games although i will say in having recently replayed the game to get back into the groove of making these videos i was able to find a bit more use out of intimidate when i would pair it with calm spells in order to calm npcs who were hostile down you could intimidate them which would lower their attack value and then they would become peaceful other options for disposition are as follows charm spells can temporarily raise a disposition and since time stops for conversations in morrowind they only need to last a couple seconds to be effective imperials also have a racial ability to charm once a day which i used a bit as a money and a time saver although it becomes unnecessary later when you get better at speechcraft personality can also influence disposition so if you fortify personality with a spell or with something like talvani bug musk or just by having a high personality you can raise your disposition in the process trading is another option each time you successfully trade your disposition will go up unfortunately this is only temporary so temporary in fact that leaving the dialogue window and immediately re-entering it will lose all that disposition so merchants can be convinced into anything by selling a bunch of a single item repeatedly to them i like the idea of building a relationship with merchants based on repeat business but i would change this in two regards make the disposition boost permanent or at least longer lasting but give a cool down to transactions to avoid the cheesers who will sell one arrow at a time from becoming best friends with all the merchants back to hello there's a mission where we deliver orders to a ridor and clothier living in aldrune as a halau spy there's a quest where we have to solve a local murder of a halal noble this quest is interesting because there are two principal suspects but no effective evidence that really exonerates either suspect so the resolution can be done entirely by judgment i think most people would agree that the argonian that stands accused due to racism against the scalies would be the lesser suspect since the dunmer suspect was described by a witness but i know as a player of this game that there was no witness otherwise the suspect would have had a bounty and been arrested the second he left the manor the final question balmora entails maintaining the halau monopoly on ebony the east empire company in ebonheart is threatening to buy ebony from radorin unless we cut our prices so we have two options convince the head of the eec to renew the contract for another year or go assassinate the head of radorn's only ebony mine and shut down their operations to be thorough i did both renewing the contract is much easier since that's simply a disposition check assassinating the head of mining operations darn's tetalin is more difficult as he is a capable spellcaster our reward for being thorough though is a comfy suit of glass boots greaves and a curious glass armor is a very rare reward and i appreciate it being the rewards you get for going the extra mile on this quest on the arethi side of things in vivec our first notable quest involves reinforcing halau fighters who went to o'dornaran to kill a rogue telvani and rescue their prisoner the halau scent have messed up the situation forcing a stalemate between the two sides i will note now that the other side of this quest is to be dispatched by telvani to kill the halau fighters this can be a bit of a challenge odenaran is remote and both the telvani wizard and one of his summons a dremora can pose quite a challenge to new players to complicate matters still you can't actually rest in the tower due to there being an inaccessible room full of ghosts preventing resting it's a neat trick the wizard milan faram has a key to the prisoner's cell so once he's defeated it's simply a matter of returning the lost sister back into the halau forces hands we also get dispatched to convince the zainab ashlander camp to sell their ebony to house halau apparently they've recently entered the market with their own source while upon arriving at the camp which tended to bug out and not spawn we get directed to their gula can asha ball we can either compliment him or be direct with obvious results then we can hit them with some market logic if we both sell ebony the price will drop this is good for both hello and the xynapp as it means that more smiths would be able to access the material which would result in increase in sales and it would weaken the imperial monopoly on the resource he will agree to this if we plead we don't have enough he will simply end the conversation arathi's next quest is to find a sunken wreck and recover its valuable cargo a daedric wakazashi the rather obvious reward of this quest is the blade itself rather than the gold there is only one quest beyond this from arathi and more than enough reputation to go around to simply not turn it in and still advance so i don't as this is a decent weapon to hold onto for the time being but to advance in household past the third rank we need a sponsor this is true of all houses and since we're always an outlander this is the general response oh there is one counselor who would dare to sponsor us a man famous for riding the lusty argonian maid yes the short blade skill book he has a lesser known work a play called the three-legged war when wait what are bipeds how would they oh this man is crazy as curio and he's willing to sponsor us for a price if we strip off all our clothes he will sponsor us he doesn't explicitly want anything from us other than our nude figure so it's kind of a half me too moment anyways curio sponsors us and gives us the instruction to go to caldera and work for odrell helvey and keep curio updated on what helvey has us do this is good and all except for the fact that curio lives atop the halau canton in vivec which means we'll get a lot of trips to the city and by the way halau canton is pretty much as far from fast travel as you can get helvey's in charge over in caldera we dealt with him in the thieves guild quest line stealing his prized history book collection and donating it to charity and we'll be dealing with him in the verdoran questline his first orders are to deliver a sealed document to denisia lauradry in the halau vaults under no circumstances are we to deliver them to the head of the treasury baron allen there are a few ways about this quest the lemming route is to do as he asks as directly as possible you net a very small reward of only 100 gold you can also go to baron allen who will pay you 500 gold for reporting to him but this reflects negatively with helvey you can also report it to ravone arvell another halau counselor although how exactly you'd figure out to go to him is beyond me finally you can report it to curio as he requested initially you get the 500 gold reward and he's discreet enough not to let the news of your deception reach helvey his next task is to figure out who has stolen the caldera mining contracts from the caldera mine retrieve them and kill the thief we have two suspects but can easily narrow it down to one el musa de mori and at a high disposition she will admit the theft and give you the documents however she'll ask you let her live also if you're part of the thieves guild she will admit it to you freely curio concurs noting that demori is actually a member of the thieves guild adding intrigue to the situation he suggests i let her escape i do and i deceive helvey as to her identity he is disappointed but this does not strain our relationship with the thieves guild whose services i've used to clear bounties and the like during this playthrough helvey then asks us to replace some erroneous land deeds of the escadian isles in the hilato records office the deed is fake and can be dealt with in three ways again there's the liming option where you do the task and replace the deed you can report to curio who will have you quote by the deed unquote from baron allen for a small sum convincing helvey that she did the job while changing nothing the last option is to report it to the landowner who is ravone arvel he has the best reward an invisibility ring and also suggests we copy the real deed and deceive helvey helvey's next task is to collect rent and taxes from two farmers in the isles they both owe 50 gold each and we are to kill them if they refuse the limiting route can go one of two ways the first is that they obviously can't pay the debt they're farmers and you kill them the second is that you can accept one of the farmer's gwar corki who can then be sold to a guar herder for 200 gold which settles the debt or you can go to curiel or arvel curio will give you 500 gold to settle the matter suspecting helvey simply wants the farmers dead arvell will give you 100 gold and his appreciation lastly you can simply pay out of pocket this is the fast thing to do finally helvey has a big request he wants us to smuggle well covertly transport five pieces of raw ebony to dry nar varyon in aldrune now ebony smuggling is illegal although you can't get caught you can report it you can also go the limiting route smuggling the ebony and getting paid 500 gold curio suggests we take the ebony to sagunavus mantadius at buckmoth legion fort we have to convince him this entails giving him the ebony and implicating both varion and helvey now note here if you don't have the ebony in your inventory but give him the ebony it reduces your encumbrance by 50 points regardless the weight of the ebony this means i can still sell the ebony and become even lighter although this is obviously an exploit this is helvey's final mission as he gets sent to prison afterwards if you go the curio route i'm not really sure what happens if you go full limbing with him i guess he just sticks around and curio proceeds to give you missions disappointed at how much of a pushover you are while we're on the topic of ebony smuggling let's talk about vardenfeld's controlled substances ebony and glass smuggling are illegal as they are rare materials used by the empire for weapons and armor moon sugar and skooma are dangerously addictive substances that plague non-khajiit societies dwemer artifacts are illegal i assume to discourage the desperate from going on dangerous missions to dwemer ruins and ash statues are illegal as in vardenfell the temple is trying to curtail the spread of the sixth house some merchants will refuse to do business with you if you're in possession of moon sugar or scuma the exceptions generally being khajiit like azira the balmora mages guild who bought half of vardenfeld's moon sugar supply that i recovered in drug busts during my playthrough this was an occasional inconvenience since i would try to do business with a merchants and happen to be in possession of these substances so they would refuse i think there's a missed gameplay opportunity with these substances for instance how cool would it be if travel services like boats silt striders and teleporters would refuse to transport you if you were in possession of a controlled substance suddenly the quest to implicate helvey becomes a lot more nuanced because you actually have to smuggle ebony to complete it you could even add features like guards confronting you if you're carrying materials taking bribes to look the other way or adding a bounty if you're caught smuggling then later when you're a high-ranking member of an official organization you might be able to acquire a license to possess some of these items that would raise the restrictions although clean merchants still might not deal in them drugs and ash statues would still be illegal unfortunately later games would go in the opposite direction the idea of controlled substances was dropped likely due to players complaining about how inconvenient that merchants wouldn't do business with them while they were carrying drugs and the empire stopped enforcing its laws anyways curio's first mission involves getting an outlaw to pay smuggling fees to halau i'll speak of the devil most of the quests is finding the outlaw who is aboard his ship by halal ode and getting him to pay his protection money i've heard the argument that curio is anti-corruption if anything he is just as corrupt as the best of them he's simply better at blackmail and deception being a scheming conniving imperial after all we're in the endgame of household now first we need to stat our stronghold construction you can do this very early and i believe the idea was that you could build your stronghold concurrently while doing the quests as much of the stronghold process is simply waiting for the actual construction to be done each great house builds a stronghold and involves some basic steps first the duke vedam dren has to assign a construction contract he does this simply with the request that you have vardenfeld's best interests at heart against the threats posed to it then you'll have to pay a member of your house to oversee the project with halau you can haggle with a merchant to get the price down and even trade for it which is a mechanical demonstration in line with how the faction operates mercantile is a broken mess of a skill it's a shame too considering how prevalent it is i don't like the idea of universal skills in elder scrolls those being skills that every class has to engage with for example bypassing a lock can be done multiple ways tied to multiple different skills convincing somebody can be done through speech craft or illusion mercantile however is a bottleneck for all play styles there's no build that cannot benefit from having the skill but at the same time it's broken for instance there's a sweet spot of the skill at around level 70. past this spot and traits will actually offer less and less if they have a high disposition it's weird prices can sometimes be better for players with a low mercantile and bribes which are influenced by mercantile but instead give experience to speechcraft mercantile also levels in a backwards fashion you would think that you would get more experience turning a 2500 gold transaction into a 3000 gold one but no you get more experience proportional to the percentage change meaning that turning a two gold sale into a three gold sale is a better display of mercantilism than a 500 gold increase on an individual's sale making money is an important part of morrowind more so than oblivion or skyrim in those games you can simply play and acquire more money than you can ever spend this is primarily due to trainer costs more than anything else so how does one make money in morrowind well generally the transaction system is fairly robust every item has what is a fair value when you try to sell an item the sale price will be lower than the fair value when you try to buy an item the sale price will be higher the spread on these prices is dependent on your disposition and mercantile in addition the amount you spend or receive from a transaction can be influenced the amount you can influence is determined by your mercantile skill merchants have a fixed amount of gold to spend on transactions this amount can be temporarily increased should you use their other services like training or enchanting this is important as many items in morrowind's late game will exceed the value available to most if not all merchants in the game thus trying to get the full value on these items is tricky but possible for instance getting a custom enchantment that costs 50 000 gold than selling a daedric weapon at that price is effectively trading that daedric weapon you aren't going to use anyways for a useful enchantment but what are the two exceptions i mentioned those who've played morrowind before are likely screaming at me to mention creeper and the mudcrab merchant unfortunately i didn't get any footage of mr merchant on the xbox since he's fairly remote and i didn't want to make the journey but that's okay he's just a drunk mud crab he looks like all the others creeper is a scamp living with orcs who has 5000 gold he generally buys most items borrowing alchemy ingredients clothes and literature since he's considered a creature merchant he has no disposition and will buy and sell items at their fair value no haggling necessary the mudcrab merchant has similar stipulations but has ten thousand gold to trade his downsides being the journey across the water and non-descript appearance there isn't really an in-game reason for these characters provided barring a vague reference to the mud crab from mayik the liar so if you aren't reading the wiki chances are pretty good it could be a long time before you ever run into one of these characters assuming you didn't kill the mud crab while you were passing by i guess the museum in mournhold bears mentioning in tribunal there's a museum which can purchase certain artifacts most artifacts in the game are priced in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of gold range they are all exceptionally valuable as the base value of items is meant to signify those items rarity these are the sort of things that end up in the hands of a head of state of course you can acquire many of these items and most of my characters naturally came into a possession of a fair few of them they can be sold for half value up to 30 000 gold at the museum of artifacts 30 000 gold is generally sufficient to meet all my characters training needs although my lack of xbox footage as of writing this indicates i never did use the museum services to make money after a few days we're tasked with checking in on the stronghold this is a way of giving you the location which for hello is the odai plateau southwest of balmora it's the most convenient of the three locations after checking in with the four man and returning with the news phase one will be complete after a few more days phase two will entail solving some problem for halau it's increasing the land value by investing in a kwama mine we have to cure the queen of blight and recruit some minors after that a feud is pass and phase two is complete to complete the great house quest lines you only ever have to reach the end of phase two although phase three does have some extra benefits after phase one curio will tell us that radorin has constructed their own stronghold at balysra without getting a contract from the duke since this stronghold is an illegal expansion he sends us to deal with our counterpart in house redoran indaris at balaysra indaris isn't much of a fight he has quite a collection of valuables and his guards can be killed for even more afterwards curio figures we need more support in household and sends us to get the support of dram barrow barrow is hidden so after a small investigation we're told he's somewhere in saint olms canton a search of the plaza reveals a haunted manor inside which is a locked door concealing barrow and his guards barrow is willing to support you if we can defeat his champion guarding the bold after a fight in the arena in which guardian concedes at load health barrow supports our nomination following this and phase two of our stronghold curio has another mission this time how stelvani has constructed their own illegal stronghold again and where to eliminate it we're sent to tell uvarith to take on the wizard of the same name again this is not a tough fight although uvarith does not have as many valuables as indaris did which is weird because talvani are usually the ones with the valuable stuff we are now a house father and curio directs us to further work under the duke vadem dren thus in our professional relationship with crasius curio the duke himself a former leader of hello has some work beryl sala leader of the ordinators has been a pain to house alone so why are the ordinators harassing halau while it's not directly stated the ordinators are the militant religious branch of the temple and are members of the great house in doral house and doral has no territory on vardenfell being located entirely on the mainland and are opposed to the imperial law so while under the pretense of opposing the sixth house enduro is likely using the opportunity to try and expand into halau territory on vardenfell the duke asks that we speak to arch cannon tholer sirioni on the matter he agrees to help control the ordinator provided we recover the robe of saint auroras an artifact the ordinators themselves failed to recover the artifact is inside of assamanu which is strangely enough not the only cave or name that is a reference to the ass man curiously enough cereoni left out the fact that the cave is occupied by sixth house cultists degoth haleville here is in control of seven sleepers who will give you one rep apiece for talking to them thanks to breaking the whole dig off or has over them but there's not really a way to know who the sleepers are it's just one of those happy rewards you get for talking to everybody the robe isn't all that powerful it's slightly better than the average healing enchantment you can find it enchanters but it's not really worth trying to keep we returned the robes embarrassing the ordinators who failed in recovering it and sirioni promises to speak with beryl sala about the ordinator's relationship with house olau drin impressed says that advancement to grandmaster is contingent on control of the kimono tong due to the sway it holds over the rest of hillary's political functions it is unfortunately in the hands of orvis drin the duke's brother he would greatly prefer we find a non-lethal solution to the problem but admits it is a last-ditch effort orvis will doubt our ability to run an enterprise like the commander tong and wants to know how he can trust us i use my natural imperial ability to temporarily deceive him into a green just as tiber septim did with vivec a potential alternate solution for it the enterprising halau who somehow sucks at speechcraft which should be rare is to find a note that implicates orvis in a conspiracy to assassinate his brother for interfering with his smuggling business and use it as blackmail the last solution is to kill him which displeases the duke but he will still promote you this can potentially be a part of the thieves guild and morag tong quest lines there's quite a few quests that will correspond here even the main quest and thus we become the grand master of house hello now wrethan's story is not finished he will feature again in part 5. i'll also be going into more conclusive thoughts into halau after discussing the other two houses but until then house rhodoren was a saint he was known as saint jib the eradicator he went down in history for his feat of driving the cliff racers out of morrowind hey yeah this is me in editing i was uh planning on doing the saint jib stuff like two months before the young scrolls ep came out so serendipitous thinking i guess saint jib is a rather comical reference to the first character you meet in morrowind having been put through the skyrim reconya into becoming a hero but are cliff racers really as annoying as people claim yes they are faster than 300 speed they can block your attempts to rest they make an ungodly noise and tend to gang up on you when working around the ghost fence all the while being difficult to actually hit it's very little surprise they are hated and that a gag character was created to jokingly drive the species extinct doris is then fittingly our protagonist in the story of house rodorin the early years on his path to sainthood house redoran is in a sentence the honorhouse of morrowind although they would say this is because of their virtue i attribute this to the fact that their historical holdings are very close to the nords they are home in aldrune and thus must be traveled to from balmora in order to join our first quest working under radorin is to take care of some mud crabs that have harassed the citizens guar herd this is a quest that requires specific attention be paid to the navigational directions given since it's very easy to get lost on the way there and sure enough mud crabs have been killing and dragging guar off into the swamp we kill them and get paid by the herder and weed as for our reward from naminda our stewart nothing we get nothing our next task is to deliver a cure disease potion to ald velothi it's a remote fishing village lacking any fast travel options although it is fairly close to cool we are told while we're up there by the ranking member of radorin that he may have further work for us but for now to return to naminda our reward is again nothing while up near old velothi we find a woman who dropped her ring she offers to pay us in sexual favors if we get it for her only it's a trap and azura herself points out the folly of our actions no good deed goes unpunished outlander luckily players good enough to survive or good enough to exploit the ai are rewarded with the amulet of shadows which gives an 80-point chameleon effect basically turning us invisible when we use it a traitor went missing near marganne or nicest nobody in isis knows anything but the people in marganne do apparently a recent ash storm hit and it was bad by vardenfell standards a traitor apparently ended up going near an ancestral tomb west of town right before the storm hit sure enough we find the traitor in the tomb the door apparently had gotten stuck during the storm we take him back to marganne and get our reward nothing next we're tasked with retrieving a founder's helm stolen by alvis terry of halau he stole the helm from an ancestral tomb and has taken to wearing it at a bar we need to maintain our house honor and avoid simply murdering him in retrieving the helm i sexually assault him grabbing his ass incurring a 25 gold bounty and apparently also the legal right to murder him i don't think this normally works it's not supposed to but hey we got the helm and it didn't count as murder i even do the honorable thing of stripping his corpse of all his armor and selling it to a merchant then i turn myself in pay off the rather small bounty and walk free to claim our reward nothing the guar herder is having trouble again this time with bandits stealing guar nemenda remarks most bandits in vardenfell are outcast ashlanders but it actually turns out to be a diverse bunch of outlanders this is where i really demonstrate how broken the amulet of shadows is since the ai can't really handle dealing with an attacker who is invisible and stays invisible when in chameleon so i should explain there is invisibility and there is chameleon invisibility is a flat effect if you have it you are fully invisible however interacting with anything and i mean anything breaks the effect talking to someone going through a door picking up an item anything chameleon has a point value meaning magicka costs can vary based on the effect value chameleon improves your chances of not being detected so it's more costly than invisibility but has the benefit of allowing the effect to continue through actions an 80 point chameleon is effectively invisible most npcs in the game cannot see you with it on and it doesn't break when we attack meaning npcs can do nothing except try to run away when i use this amulet it is quite powerful although it is also limited by its charge taking a bit to recharge enough to use again so i don't solve every problem with it if we return to the herder she'll pay us in more weed nemenda doesn't pay us at all for the work let's sidetrack and go to ald vlwathy our first mission there is to take care of an old menace that has returned to plague the village old bluefin it's a slaughter fish and a tough one although its heightened abilities are still limited by the fact that while i'm on land i do not exist to aquatic creatures and get this in exchange for dealing with a threat to public safety i get paid albeit in 10 drew wax but hey drew wax is worth 100 gold a piece albeit this is a fighter character so he's not going to get anywhere near that but it's still a payment for services rendered actually redoran itself wasn't even going to pay me it was the fisherman in the village who all pitched in to reward me for taking care of a problem next we're sent to the ashumanu mine to deal with an infected shock another trip to the ass man cave it's really that simple and of course we aren't paid for the job we're then sent to deal with a kaguti den near ashamanu mine but instead of the kaguti and the din triggering the quest we have to kill a kagudi on the road near it to do it properly no reward we're asked to check in on some soldiers sent to shishi a telvanni base after a fun trip up there we meet up with the men they say they've cleared the base although the lead wizard has yet to be found you can turn the report in now although you can also ask another man who keeps hearing sounds somewhere downstairs turns out with some exploration that a breton skull reveals a hidden basement where the wizard is hiding with him taken care of we return to ald velothi for a reward of nothing at this point our path forward in the house is to seek a sponsorship lucky for us athens cerrethi is under attack from assassins we go and defend him and although there is no reward he does offer to sponsor us no no wait there is a reward we get paid the standard guard rate of 200 gold so why have i been pointing out the fact that rydoran has been so stingy in paying us for our work factions in morrowind have a requirement that the factions of later games lacked skill requirements each faction has a list of skills they favor and requirements to meet to climb those ranks the real stopper is that the highest ranks of factions require skills be higher than 80. for most people this is easily attainable just by playing the game pure mages may need to train a bit due to magic skills training slowly but for anyone using a skill that involves bashing things playing the game like a normal human being is good enough none of my characters however were played like normal human beings because of the way i took notes and the recording limitation of hard drive space each character was played generally focusing down one faction at a time this means that every character inevitably fell short when it came to skills the way you're meant to offset this in morrowind is through trainers this however is costly and i feel as though the real victors of morrowind's story are the skill trainers who became rich as a consequence what would you do if you had an eternity to do nothing but wait do you keep busy do you daydream you freak out he trained how can someone get so into something that nothing else matters some guilds provide adequate enough income to achieve this house hulawu often paid out 500 or even a thousand gold for tasks completed while the thieves and fighters guild provided plenty of opportunities to make money while questing house redoran does not the average quest for house fedoran has no reward there quickly came a very real problem where i simply could not advance in the house due to skill limitations that were caused by the fact that i wasn't being paid now the way that a normal person deals with this is to go adventure which i generally did not do due to recording or to go do another faction that does pay which i also could not do due to my note-taking so when hauser doran refused to pay me i forced them to see at a point you are recommended to go speak with feral retherin in vivec he has a decent number of quests for the house however finding retheren was a pain i wasn't given adequate directions and i searched most of rador and canton for the bastard then i found the redoran treasury it turns out they've been holding out on me they were not poor these were not hard times and i was not doing charity work they're rich like real rich and turns out in the process of getting to the treasury i had stolen a key that could unlock the door gradually the ordinators would path out and i would close the door behind them until none were left in the room then i looted it i got a free set of ebony armor and a ton of valuables went to creeper and offloaded it suddenly what was my poorest character became my richest and then i spent 25 000 gold training my skills to become high enough that i wouldn't need to worry about it again so you see it wasn't a matter of me acting dishonorably and acquiring large amounts of material possessions it was me satisfying the needs of the guild for strong leadership while compensating myself for the sweat off my back since i got my hands on a full set let's talk about ebony armor armor in morrowind is divided into three classifications light medium and heavy clothes also count as unarmored i guess but you wear those under your armor it works simply enough the better the protection offered by armor the heavier it is lighter armor meant you could carry more but it also meant sacrificing armor value medium armor was a happy medium but it was offset by the fact that it was rare to find ebony is heavy armor and it is heavy but it is also good at protecting the body provided you had the skill to wear it it's not as simple as equipping daedric armor and then being protected you had to be conditioned to wear the armor to see the benefits characters in light armor will score a higher armor value if they have a high skill compared to characters in heavy armor with a low skill ebony is also some of the best heavy armor we'll be getting daedric is better but it's also exceptionally rare equipment in morrowind isn't as simple as saying oh well this has the biggest number so i'll wear that wearing partial sets means you have more room in your inventory to carry loot it can also mean you move faster since you weren't as weighed down equipment was also made with the idea in mind that it should be appropriately rare it's a sign of mastery and danger to see an opponent wearing glass or ebony armor almost exclusively while you see guards wearing bone mold orcs wearing orcish and ordinators wearing endural armor ranks with legionaries can be told by their armor set morrwin's design philosophy towards armor seems more so geared towards lining the armor skills up with the armor that is diegetically a part of the game world rather than designing armor assets around the mechanics in tears i think this is better as it can feel a bit stilted how the world gradually escalates its usage of armor types in oblivion and skyrim while i discuss armor i should also mention durability durability in the eyes of some is an annoyance that must never again enter the design of video games i disagree durability is a factor to consider in the preparation before trips it's also an element that can introduce surprise into a situation a piece of armor or weapon breaking forces the player to adapt to what is an unexpected situation however i can understand why durability is disliked it can be seen as tedious to maintain equipment and video games aren't supposed to be more tedious than real life right i guess and to some extent morrowind does fall victim to durability falling on the side of tedium as a mechanic higher-end items are more durable as traits which in turn means a reward for good gear is not having to repair it as often if that is a reward then why have the mechanic i did like the oblivion idea of allowing skilled armorers to boost their durability above 100 percent although again that ultimately begs the question of why bother with the mechanic if the reward is to not have to deal with it to me durability should represent the prospect of potentially losing an item if it's broken this would make routine preventative maintenance more rewarding but obviously this also creates the risk of losing something valuable potentially even irreplaceable that does however reward the higher end items with high durabilities since it decreases the chance you'll lose the item since you would have such a long window to repair it think of it like this lots of games including elder scrolls games now apparently have hunger mechanics why do hunger mechanics exist like durability they are an intentional annoyance that is dealt with in an arbitrary fashion proponents however argue that hunger is a good mechanic because it rewards preparation or because it can make a tough situation where there is limited access to food or repair more tense as a consequence it also carries the consequence of death as a failure state which is more punishing than the consequence of simply losing an item even temporarily durability is an intentional annoyance but intentional annoyances are kind of the point of video games what is an enemy in a game but an intentional annoyance standing between you and hollow victory saying the durability being removed from skyrim is justifiable because it was only annoying anyways opens a rather nasty can of worms when it comes to the question of why we even play video games in the first place anyways let's get back on track with hauser doran since we should be done training by now to start we need to get our sponsorship from serethi and advance far enough to start our stronghold i learned from my last playthrough to not put it off and to start it as so i can do it while i'm also doing the quests like before we need the construction contract from the duke he has the same request our pledge to help morrowind against its enemies the person overseeing our construction also needs 5000 gold to finance the process unlike halau this is non-negotiable luckily we have plenty of cash to spare from robbing the redoran treasury so in a way it is free now that the process has started we can get to work for cerrethi he will sponsor us provided we can rescue his son from bolvin venom who has kidnapped him sure enough a note in venom's manner reveals that they are entertaining a special guest and it is serathi's son the guards get mad if we try to let him out although using chameleon kind of breaks this quest anyway sarathy reunited with his son promotes us although there is still no reward we also no longer need it our next task is to deal with the principal reason zerathi's son was kidnapped he has been accused of murder well maybe let the imperial guards handle it it's what they get paid to do athen claims that his son is innocent as the victim was friends with his son even though there is a witness athen figures his son may have been under a spell and requests we check his room sure enough we find a suspicious ash statue varva will say he's been having odd dreams since he received the statue and asks us to take it we then get directed to take the statue to lordos sorano over at the temple who asks you to arrange a meeting with him and his son and exonerates varver of murder since he was likely under the influence of the sixth house this was likely done as serethi's house is friendly to outlanders a stance the sixth house does not tolerate now that serethi's house has been sorted we can get back to the real work which is defending house redoran from slander our contact in vivec give us a similar mission and here's how they contrast andres narano a halau noble notable as he had his key stolen from him by steals your wallet has been slandering house for doran we are to honorably duel him emphasis on honorably as simply killing him would be a pr nightmare for radorin he accepts the duel but is woefully unprepared and loses contrast this with meryl helano who is accusing a radoran counselor of adultery hilano will not honorably duel anybody and is likely just saying that as he is under the influence i decide to handle the situation appropriately you will die i murder him naturally this looks bad so allow me to explain my logic the way meryl wants you to deal with the situation is to either stoke his ego until he accepts to withdraw the slander or to bribe him these are positive reinforcements for negative behavior and would only encourage other rowdy youth of halawu to join in on the slander since blood would eventually be drawn on a larger scale from such an outcome nipping this behavior in the bud is important we positively reward narano by not killing him as he abides our traditions and faces us in a duel we negatively reward hilano by murdering him as he acts dishonorably so although the reputation of radorin is hurt in the short term by this action in the long term we have saved lives and preserve our honor that's not how the game sees it i figure i'm not going to hear the end of it from wretherin for this so i just go back to sarethi next he wants me to deal with smugglers in shurinball this is an easy affair although the cave in question is remote while i'm out i check in at aldolothy virith has a new request a local daedrouth worshipper named gordal is wanted by the people of aldolothy this should be a challenge however my spear and his broken ai actually make it quite easy he's also wearing a full set of ebony i think this was intended to be the turning point in redoran where you start to gear up since the reward for this is an enchanted ebony spear a free set of ebony armor that gordal was wearing but i already have his free set of ebony armor from the redoran treasury so i know this is a bit of a non-sequitur but let's talk about my spear spears are great they allow you to do damage at a distance at the cost of being long and unwieldy to use naturally something as varied and unconventional as a spear in an rpg setting was cut from the later games for the usual swords axes and maces i suspect spears were cut from oblivion due to the skill crunch that being the reduction in the number of skills from 27 to 21. each specialization went from nine skills to seven axe and blunt were combined medium armor was cut from the game but to facilitate the cuts in stealth spec hand to hand got moved into combat while short blade was combined into blade this meant that combat specs still had one more skill to reach the desired seven so the spear was lost from the game spears as weapons are historically associated with formation fighting something that generally never came about in the elder scrolls setting due to the prevalence of destruction magic their popularity instead is owed to regions that routinely have to deal with disease valenwood and morrowind for morrowind in particular the threat of blight and corpus makes spears a popular option amongst the buoyant armatures as it allows them to stay out of reach of the sick since the imperial legions generally don't engage in formation fighting there wasn't a pressing lore reason to keep spirits around in oblivion the other argument is that spears simply were not popular although i personally disagree i can imagine that swords are handily the most popular since as a weapon they are by far the most publicized however it's a situation where bethesda engineered their unpopularity spears are uncommon and upgrades few and far between contrast this with swords which are very common with many opportunities to upgrade and with many of the game's most powerful weapons being swords it's the same story with medium armor it was given the short end of the stick in morrowind so people didn't use it so it wasn't popular so it got cut rather than try and keep spears medium armor and well throwing weapons for that matter in the game and fixing the issues they had while abandoning the ridiculous idea that each specialization needs to be balanced in a single player game the skills were simply dropped the weapon skills of morrowind provide a great deal of nuance for fighting characters you can't just pick up any weapon you find out in the world and use it like a master short blades long blades axes blunt weapons spears and hand to hand were all different skills that played almost like martial arts short blades are fast and light so they can work as backup weapons long blades are slower two-handed long blades especially slow axes are great for chopping although their historical value of breaking wood and shields and fortifications is underappreciated blunt weapons don't serve their purpose of breaking armor spears provide a longer reach and hand a hand hand-to-hand damages fatigue until knockout and then does damage you can also go straight to damage using paralyze it has the obvious upside of having no weight i think they should have expanded on hand to hand i know in oblivion they added the special attacks which is cool but i'm thinking like special techniques that work like spell creation like paralyzing fist just something that lurks like a martial arts anime but lets you use a spell maker to make your own moves instead what was the most distinct fighting style at least from its counterparts of the time was cut come morrowind i suspect it's another in the long list of victims of scaling where in an effort to fix the problems posed by scaling mobs in oblivion instead of fixing scaling they quote fixed unquote everything else just another victim of the skill crunch although for hand to hand its day came between oblivion and skyrim serethi has a new request eredora noble has gone mad and has taken up residence in a cave called milk harassing travelers and demanding tribute we need to solve the situation however the noble in question is a friend of serethis so we need to do this non-lethally if possible he suggests i speak with his father in ebonheart while i'm in ebonheart i hear a rumor about unrest in cyrodiil city something about the legitimacy of the heirs i don't think this will be relevant i meet with mandis's father who says his son went mad after his granddaughter was kidnapped by the telvanni lord divith fear he thinks finding and returning the daughter should cure his madness this entails a trip to the remote to tell fear there's no fast travel points as the man in question can't be bothered to do something so foolish once inside we meet with divis who doesn't actually care if we take mantis daughter he's far too busy we let her out and she gives us an amulet to take to her father we do making liberal use of chameleon to dodge his guards who have taken to dealing with intruders with the sharp end of the sword and when we give him the amulet he says he'll stop demanding tribute to calming the guards down sarathy says that in order to advance we need support from other councillors he suggests we start with the counselors more vain and remoran more vain or rather more vain's wife requests that we clear out her manner of corpus beasts turns out they had killed her husband after they had received an ash statue and not only did hauser doran take the time to decide to let her take his spot as counselor they haven't dealt with the manner full of corpus beasts that is drawing more to it on the edge of town our man serrano is in the temple and is willing to destroy the ash statue after we retrieve it ramoran wants a bit more he wants us to go up to nicest and collect taxes 60 gold pieces and if we pay out of pocket he'll refuse to give us support and soft lock our game so after the round trip to nicest we're then tasked with finding a girl he's lusted after for years turns out she has a similar name to his personal bodyguard who happens to be lusting after him and at that suggestion offers his support you know three paragraphs ago i was at a tower where the guy cloned himself four times and spent his days researching a cure for corpus and loki banging his clones so i'll let this slide anyways we're a counselor now and to advance we need more counselors to support us as well as phase two of our stronghold we need guards and are directed to the local fighters guild master perseus mercies to recruit them he says he's willing to waive the fee if we free his friend from prison sadly there is no option to just pay him and we end up going to vivec freeing his friend killing an ordinator and returning as for the councillors we need the support of larethy and erebar venom will never give his support due to his vehement opposition to outlanders but as long as we have the support of all the other councillors we can stand to claim the title of archmaster lorethy is willing to support us provided we can shut down the caldera mining operation this is not as simple as going and wiping it out we need to do it honorably so we start with trying to find proof of corruption odral helvey local corrupt overlord of household has some secret ledgers hidden in his room that provide such proof and with evidence in hand we can now shut down the mine we're saving the evidence in the event that duke asks any questions about why we took these actions we learned from caldera locals that if dalina a slave at the mine were to be freed or killed that the slaves would revolt i free her lorathy says it was an unconventional solution but it did end the halawu market domination as for erebar he seems preoccupied and refuses to speak on the subject of our support so rather figures he may be getting influenced by the telvanni and we need to figure this out to gain his support asking around talvani town reveals that master nelloth until naga is holding erevar's daughter hostage those damn end caps keep stealing our daughters anyways i free her and the guards take exception to this but since the non-aggression pact is at the heart of telvanni law there are no questions asked about the dead guards and since i successfully stole her she is now my property at least until we get back to her door in territory erabar gives us our support on the council and a redoran master helm well a replacement helm anyways the original was stolen and after some waiting our stronghold finishes phase two and serathi fills us in on bolvin venom bolvin was a successor to a long line of incompetent rador and leadership he was the one who after the armistice brought ridor into vardenfell he effectively brought the house back from the brink of ruin he however did so via strength of arms and a hatred of outlanders and in the modern era this has put ridor in a bad position the house's view on tradition and honor has allowed it to be taken advantage of by halau and tel vani in two instances rodorun was forced to deal with slander from halau who abused the fact that radoran took their honor seriously in two instances ridor and nobles had their children stolen by telvanni who abused the fact that ridorun followed the lost so strictly serethi hopes for someone to lead radorin who shares his quality of strong martial prowess and military leadership but better understands the modern medoran situation needs to treat its citizenship with kindness and justice rather than alienating them and as a counselor with support of all the other counselors he figures that we are fit to rule but venom will not allow an outlander to become archmaster thus we must challenge him to an honorable duel venom initiates the conversation with his own challenge to fight at the vivec arena this is the logical action as venom is likely confident that he is stronger than indaris and if he wins he can remove an outlander from the council he's a tough fight full ebony with a daedric weapon i suspect this quest involved a free full set of ebony and ebony spear were likely preparatory for this conflict it also helps them high level thanks to rank requirements did you know that radorin consider looting the bodies of those you defeat dishonorable so you don't get paid for your work theft is dishonorable looting is dishonorable and stronghold payments are non-negotiable you're just supposed to make whatever meager sum you can die pass it on to your kids who combine it to their meager some until after a thousand generations your descendants have enough to maybe get sponsored is it actually possible to maintain your honor and make it to the end of your door and questline maybe it's some kind of mechanical storytelling anyways we're archmaster as soon as we defeat venom you morrowind regulars might recognize that this playthrough did not engage in the house wars quests this is because they were subsequent to the one slander quest where i murdered the guy which was unappreciated you are able to complete redorm without fighting the other factions i believe this is also possible in halau but i'm not sure about telvani jim and doris will return in part 5. as for now uvarith was inspired by one of the characters on the xbox loading screens this guy yeah you pc players might recognize the ones with the monsters but there are a few new ones with characters on the xbox since i spent so long on loading screens i thought of a few memes that these screens are perfect for anyways i was inspired by one with an altmer vampire mage holding a daedric dye katana originally i was planning on having ubereath be a vampire vampires in morrowind are excluded from most factions on principle except telvani because end cap rules but upon further inspection some of the quest scripting gets broken due to vampirism specifically due to certain quests which rely on introductory text which gets replaced when you are diseased so sorry guys i ended up not getting any footage of vampire gameplay so i'm gonna throw this in postcom to try and explain why vampires are broken in morrowind there's a hierarchy of greetings that npcs will use when meeting the player which are either specific to them quest related or general greetings that are shared among multiple npcs this hierarchy is based on the logical importance of the greeting with stuff like locations clothes and classes having lower priority over quests factions and combat-related greetings this is why in the next part a certain quest line is broken if you approach npcs naked now when you contract vampirism most npcs will get a general hostile greeting telvani on the other hand gets a friendly greeting the problem has to do with how you progress a certain quest because one quest relies on a custom greeting that is always replaced with the vampirism greeting you will never receive it in addition the aforementioned stronghold quest that is standard for each great house is also impossible as the duke will not speak to you if you're a vampire i have zero basis to say this but i'm fairly confident that vampirism was a late stage feature that was added to the game as it is very basic and your options as a vampire are fairly limited but i am surprised that since it was supposed to be a feature that vampires could join telvani that this issue was not noticed i know it's a meme to say bethesda doesn't do qa but if you have any experience working with the construction set you'll know they would have had to have been doing some because of just how many lollipop sticks and this engine's made out of to fix this issue all you have to do is take this intro from greeting 5 and put it in greeting 1 so it takes priority over the vampirism greeting and greeting 2 although this wouldn't fix it on the xbox version since it has a special patched version and actually now they think about it they did fix the dark brotherhood glitch between the pc and xbox releases but i guess nobody had tried playing vampire and house tilvani during that time period or or if they did they didn't complain on the internet anyways back to the scheduled analysis uberus spent the short stint with the balmora mages guild getting some basic spells set up for our future plans with house tovani telvanni starts in sage with mora which is an interesting town in its own right for starters i think you're supposed to come into the town by a boat go through the gateway in and be introduced to the hospitality papers which is a scam being run on outlanders only i would wager most people get to sage with more for the first time through the mages guild at wolverine hall since it's the superior form of travel what stands out about the town is its buildings truly in the world of identical adobe structures the mushroom house is king talvani buildings are often twisted conforming to the demands of nature rather than any functional design perhaps a reflection of the more naturalistic philosophies of telvanni seeing the strengths of individuals is more important than the needs of common folk while balmora aldrune and especially vivec are heavily populated urban centers sageth mora is lacking in commoners almost every person in telvanni which is more racially diverse a faction than even halawu possesses entrepreneurial spirit or a talent of some kind you'll find that there is a surprising lack of sixth house sleepers in telvanni territory an affliction caused by a weak sense of individuality that allows the sixth house to control the sleepers in the same vein the tribunal temples of telvanni are token gestures the masters of telvani are as old as the gods themselves so the temple has little place in their society you can also perceive this as a negative since the temple does perform services for the poor but there aren't many poor in telvanni society thus tauvani's society is in fact very progressive but for how ideal it sounds it has its flaws as will be demonstrated joining telvani involves entering the council house and well the frame rate is not good in here on xbox talvani has a very unusual quest structure for morrowind most factions in morrowind will typically send you quest giver to quest giver each one have five or six tasks to complete for the early days of telvanni you simply contract through the mouths or the masters themselves members of the televani council are represented by mouths and sageth mora they represent the interests of the telvanni while their lords can continue their research in their towers tasks requested of you include things like retrieving alchemical ingredients finding artifacts and performing deliveries and the rewards for these quests rather than being gold are often spells or artifacts in fact you can learn mark and recall very early in the house i greatly appreciate that a magical faction actually teaches magic as part of its quest structure so instead of having two quest givers each giving five quests you have five quest givers each giving two quests the progression is also much more forgiving you don't really have to complete all the quests to get to the sponsorship stage early on i am asked to deliver a skirt to mistress therana of telbernora i am advised by her mouth to be prepared to use an intervention spell should anything happen this is because therona has gone crazy she keeps a naked khajiit as a pet and when you offer to give her the skirt she accuses it of being cursed and asks you to put it on to prove it is it only to then attack you for doing so you will suffer greatly ah another task entails delivering a note to tell fear and returning it sounds unremarkable until you realize that tell fear has no fast travel services water walking is an alteration spell i mean without water walking what else is there looking at you skyrim alteration looking at you it plays an especially important role in morrowind since so much of the terrain has been geared towards aquatic travel now while oblivion did have the ability it really wasn't as important since there wasn't much need for it i mean sure there was an inland sea but honestly with fast travel and the lack of need to go out on the water again you don't need it skyrim was much the same way there were some attractions out off the coast but for the most part water walking was unnecessary but lack of necessity doesn't mean the spell should just be cut speaking of cuts levitate is another good option for avoiding the swim it also performs the function of vertical access such as in telvanni towers which don't have stairs or in dungeons with secret areas levitate was cut from oblivion the reason being exterior interior hybrid cells the cities would be in cells separate from the overworld in order to help with performance and levitate would expose the fact that the cities and the countryside were not seamless i think there were better ways to handle the issue mournhold and tribunal for instance didn't allow levitation for much the same reason so perhaps there could be a magical lore reason to stop people from flying over the walls i think most players would understand the limitation the real reason they wouldn't and perhaps won't adopt this rule set is a shift in dungeon design i made a game of noting dungeons in oblivion and skyrim that would feature drop-offs near the entrance that would lead to the end of the dungeon leading to a circular loop design the need to deposit players near the entrance of the dungeon by the end quickly without giving crafty players the ability to take the back entrance simply necessitates the restriction of vertical navigation hence why jump spells and acrobatics went as well i disagree with this need i think if anything the new dungeon design could be complimented with a proper use of mark and recall to return to the dungeon entrances but then again did i make the most successful rpgs of all time i didn't think so now while i'm on the subject eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed i'm using a couple spells named efficient water walk and efficient levitate ignore the letters i just used those to organize the menu those are custom spells designed to give me a more magicka efficient version of the effects water walking is basic mostly its magic and needs translates to the duration you'll be water walking the nice thing about setting this duration to 10 seconds is that it allows me to duck under the water quickly without waiting around and it only requires one magica to cast which is very nice the levitate spell is much the same although it's a little more expensive for a little more convenience levitate's magicka costs are tied to its duration as well as its strength levitate strength affects how quickly you move a one point levitate is simply way too slow but on the flip side you can become very fast using a 100 or even a 500 point levitate scroll although casting those spells would be very demanding on magicka and as i said many televani homes have a vertical tube between you and its master levitate sort of serving as a filter in teluvani society spell creation can be quite versatile and even broken you might wonder how so i pause it fortify attribute and skill i didn't get any footage of me abusing these spells fully so let me explain lots of variables in morrowind and oblivion for that matter are tied into complex formulas since these formulas don't have any kind of cap to them you can very quickly boost your skills into the hundreds even temporarily to some amusing effects for one second you can boost your speech craft or mercantile and get a good deal or convince npcs of basically anything you can boost your speed and move very quickly perhaps the most infamous example commonly known are a trio of scrolls labeled as icarian flight which temporarily boosts acrobatics 1000 points for 7 seconds this can send you soaring across the map but the effect doesn't last long enough for the landing as evidenced by its creator's fate [Music] one of the reasons i don't mind escort quests in morrowind is the fact that i can fortify other people's speed and make them move faster with custom spells you can tailor illusion effects like frenzy or calm or other effects like command to specific humanoids also notable as custom destruction spells you can have a untouched death spell that targets all elements taylor custom spells to specific races to avoid resistances such as a frost spell for dunmer and a fire spill for nords create a spell that can snipe a specific opponent or a spell that targets a wide area and the amount of magicka spells require is the great limiting factor on a hand-to-hand character i had a spell that would damage fatigue to speed up the process or spells that would absorb other people's fatigue into my own pool spell creation tickles the wizard fantasy quite well unfortunately it was too limited in oblivion and removed in skyrim in oblivion the spells you could create and cast were hard limited in effectiveness by your skill level so for example if you create a spell that does 100 points of damage health untouched in morrowind your limitations in casting the spell are the amount of magicka it costs and your chance of casting based on your intelligence and destruction if you don't meet the magical requirement you obviously can't cast a spell unless you find a creative solution around that such as fortify magicka potions if you don't meet the skill requirement you still have a chance at casting it and barring that you can still find the ways to boost the necessary skills to create a chance in oblivion it's simply a threshold of you have met the level requirement you are now permitted to cast this spell and even that is better than skyrim's there's a handful of pre-selected spells that everyone casts and you may not deviate from that option now that we've completed the trip from sage with mora to tell fear back to stage with maura i'll tell you a bit about that note we just delivered the mouth's master arion is asking his former master divith fear to join the telvanni council due to the incompetence of the incurrent council members threatening the future of house telvanni divith notes that arion has a personal stake in the matter and mentions that it doesn't really matter telvanni does not need him to survive the note doesn't mention that divith is busy with his clone daughters although seriously he is busy with corpus which is a bigger threat to vardenfell as a whole than the collapse of hal stelvani another task is to deliver a cure blight potion to tell vos and we have to acquire the potion ourselves this is simple enough but while i'm there i follow up on a lead from master arion's mouth who in the interest of moving on in his career says that arion may be willing to sponsor us after delivering the potion i fly up to meet arion a note about tel vos it's one of the more interesting locations i've seen in an elder scrolls game since its design is a reflection of the character of its owner it's a fusion of the new imperial architectural designs with the classic telvanni tower which goes well with arion who has a telvanni who's willing to bring outlanders into the house it's also a nightmare to navigate and figure out where the services are arion says he's willing to be our patron provided we convince balladas dem nivani to join the council now funny thing after this conversation i immediately recall to the council hall and speak with ariane's mouth who apparently has already spoken with master arion about my delivery despite me actually quite literally teleporting from arion to him hmm maybe that's the reason mark and recall got removed anyways we journey to nicest what do you see kinesis outlander to meet with dim navani we start with the questions dim navani's response depends on his disposition since this is my first meeting it's actually quite low and he gives me the obstructive answers basically telling me that people like gothren who have no interest in academics really should not concern themselves with the dwarves should he like you he basically gives you some theories that get confirmed during the mages guild questline so hey we formed a nice connection we move on to the subject of him joining the council he says it wouldn't bother him provided we collect some literature for him we need three books new checks fire and faith antecedents of dwimmer law and the chronicles of noosh left i won't bore you with the details but after collecting the books he agrees to join the council and gives us on the size key and the amulet of admonition the amulet paralyzes for 30 seconds while doing one to two points of frost damage for that time this makes it quite powerful since it can paralyze so long but a double-edged sword should it reflect onto size key is a ring that opens 50 points on touch basically magically opening most locked doors and chests but not all of them i complete another task of ariane's mouth who wants me to deliver some dangerous skin to arion and get taught paralyzed for it while i'm out there arion promotes me to mouth giving me a staff and new chores i need to go cure his kwame queen of blight this is convenient since i'm heading out that way to on a new task from gothren's mouth to collect some plans from noosh left i collect the plans cure the queen and return to arion who gives me a skill book in return skill books are good rewards both for quests and for completing dungeons since skill ups are important to progression and elder scrolls it seems like a good way to ensure players are properly leveling up to keep up with the requirements in their faction but then again that hasn't been important in a long time arion insists i go and learn some basic wizard spells see a magical quest line that highly emphasizes and requires the usage of magic we need levitate to get to arion we had to cure the kwama queen with a spell and we have to learn recall fireball and levitate to continue progressing fireball is actually the only one i don't know while going out to learn i turn in the scarab plans and get a cephalopod helmet this is another great reward as it allows you to summon age or mora we then get another skill book as a reward for learning the spells you can probably guess that talvani is my favorite faction it's objectively the best it has competent rewards the best rule set the best quests it even has the lowest skill requirement of all the factions in the game only requiring you get a single skill up to 70. we're tasked by arion to assist milan for ram who's being attacked by halawu at odernaran i know it was a long time ago but yeah we're crossing over with wrethin right now i actually forgot this happened but it's right here in my notes my recording got cut short because i needed to charge the controller just one more reason i hate playing on the xbox so me and my new dremora clear out the tower and i do a bit of soul trapping soul trapping in morrowind is a somewhat minor thing you can use souls to recharge enchanted items which we'll talk about but also to enchant items the only problem is enchanting isn't all that great it was actually a bit busted on morrowind and not in a good way there are two ways to go about enchanting you can take out a small loan of tens of thousands of gold to enchanted a services provider or you can enchant yourself and usually fail your success of enchanting is tied to your enchant skill but even maxing out your enchant skill and intelligence still results in a high chance of failure when enchanting enchanting also requires soul gems which aren't as common as the later games especially the higher tier ones well they sort of are just not at the levels i'm recording at now when you hear about people breaking morrowind it tends to involve enchanting this involves a healthy amount of exploiting the game and grinding your soul to eventually become useful but i know i'll have the regulars sending me angry letters should i leave out the fact that yes you can create an outfit that instantly restores all damage taken in constant effect restore health and chance just as spell creation allows you to utterly break this game enchanting can take it a step further no right this section is labeled soul trapping you cast soul trap on a monster when it dies its soul fills a soul gem enchanted items are morrowind you can't have a morrowind playthrough that does not eventually make a big point about them they start out simple enough utility jewelry that can do something small like restore a little health restore some stamina maybe if you're fancy you have a recall or intervention amulet then you get something like the vampiric ring that drops enemies while healing you or the amulet of shadows that allows you to disappear and you realize enchanted items are awesome it's a perfectly viable build to just collect enchanted damage rings you can spam on enemies until they stop moving your carryaway could be nothing but rings amulets and clothes that perform these functions and the only downside is that your spell menu would look absolutely atrocious enchanted items are great rewards and more quests should give them however enchanted items are only as strong as the magic system supporting it since using an enchanted item is basically casting a spell without the magicka costs attached items have charges sure but that comes back with time so as long as you aren't spamming the items constantly you'll be fine one downside i noticed with enchanted items is that if you are wearing a constant effect ring that you might eventually take there off the ring to make way for another so it would be annoying to occasionally realize i'm no longer wearing the one ring because my character took it off to use the common ring of ironing clothes or something another thing is that it can be quite annoying to be using an enchanted weapon that has run out of charge since it will constantly make this pleasant sound while informing you that yes you have indeed run out of charge with the weapon hey morrowind you know that the upside of an enchanted sword over say an enchanted ring is that when the enchantment runs out it still has the functions of a sword right so somewhere in the plot we're tasked with ending the mages guild monopoly on magical services in redoran territory what function this serves i don't know i don't think the redorans are the type to use magical services all that often also i decided to jump the gun on that stronghold business we need a construction contract as usual and two strong souls such as winged twilights golden saints or storm atronachs this is the power of the growth of the mushroom that will become my home it just stood there holding its tail and whispering what did it say excuse me so we go to talk with zerethy at arion's recommendation and says he does not trust my intentions nor does he particularly like me and he says goodbye his tone changes at the bribe of a 100 gold which is honorable and i just feel that certain people should be impossible to bribe he sees most of the counselors barring bolvin venom will support the resolution opposing the mages guild provided i make an appeal to fairness and sure enough the wrathy and ramarin are on board once i appeal to fairness one vow to protect varden fell to the duke later and we've got the construction contract aryan gives us one of his gloves as a reward for taking care of the redoran thing and okay so arion is known for enchanting a pair of powerful gloves this is one of them and it's known as arion's dominator its effect is to control humanoids up to level 15 for two minutes sounds innocuous right however remember that npcs generally don't move from their spots and when i say command i mean follow you through doors follow you through fast travel journey with you across the map command humanoid is basically the ability to abduct people and bring them anywhere you want which is especially powerful since it can be done to people who provide services master trainers are generally around level 25 so they can't be affected but yeah don't like where the services are in a town you can now move them irian wants me to save favis andes over in shishi from redoran attacks which is another crossover quest this time with houser doran i turn in the soul gems which i appropriated from certain vendors and get my stronghold on way as you can see in this footage i'm making full use of the dominator in a tactical sense however and this point applies to summons as well it's not that effective the problem is the ai even on pc even without the slow computation speed pitting two ai against each other is a miserable affair this makes conjuration one of my least favorite skills since half of the skill is about pitting ai against ai now don't get me wrong i see the tactical advantages of summoning but relying on summons and dominated creatures to fight for me that's not happening only problem is that on occasions where i would try to use summons to distract a tough enemy the tough enemy would just prioritize killing me anyways as though it was aware that killing me ends the fight quicker so dominating and summoning while an amusing distraction was pretty rare for me it's certainly a viable play style but i'd only recommend it if you're the sort to watch like ai fights on youtube once we get to shishi we clear the place out i actually managed to crash the game here i dominated one of the redoran soldiers while using a dremora to fight another then when i tried to kill the last soldier my dominated one my dremora turned on me assuming i had betrayed the cause the second he killed me my game crashed as though it was thoroughly confused and realized that that probably should not have happened so yeah add that to the list of reasons i don't use conjuration favis now free gives me some skill books he says he studied them thoroughly which makes sense he's been in this basement for a while that does beg the question though why you wouldn't just intervention out you're a wizard this must be why you're living in shishi arion says in order to advance i need my own mouth on the council and says he's heard of a televani in balmora that was promising sure enough one of the halau guards figures fast eddie is the man and ed the man is willing to be my mouth but he needs a silver staff of peace did i mention that earlier yeah when i became a mouth i got one luckily i kept it i can imagine a few players being slightly inconvenienced after having sold theirs anyways ed becomes my mouth and i get told to check on my stronghold at ubereth's grave it's a bit macabre of a name isn't it anyways the foreman says it's going to be fine and i check out a dwimmer ruin while i'm there i find some schematics and a dwemer crossbow and spend a few days selling loot to a clavicus vile minion in caldera then my stronghold manager says i need to post 5000 gold in any schematics i find in a ruin named mezenkind just so happens i found the plan she's looking for i uh i may have looked at the wiki for this quest beforehand as a reward for finding a mouth arion gives me his other glove and i'll tell you about this one later arion is impressed we've risen so quickly which is an understatement as i've soared to the ranks of telvanni in about two weeks he figures the only way forward is to take care of some up-and-comers in the other houses a halau has constructed a stronghold without contract at the odai plateau sure enough i take on rethan at odai which was an easy fight she tries to silence me but silence doesn't work on enchanted items and behold arion's helpers yeah this right here lags my game but it is quite effective a flame frost and storm at your neck summoned simultaneously our next task is to take down another stronghold this time it bout israe and kill the redoran in darus i decide to have a little fun and treat this one like a battle his guards are willing to just let me go down and murder him but i make them fight me i steal some clutter which angers everyone in the manor then use arion's helper and the dremora summon and turn the manor into a giant just watch [Music] oh [Music] so arion is naturally impressed with this and i suppose i should talk about the house wars each great house has quest to assassinate your equivalent in the other house the rising stars who are doing the quests you get locked out of i named each character after their version so halau was wrethan rodorun was indaris and telvani was ubereath in retrospect considering how fantastically overthrows attack on wrethan and doris went i want to say it's canon but sadly it can't be because rethenin and darus are in part 5 but uvarith uvarith didn't get a follow-up teluvareth became ubereath's grave sadly wrethan killed him while indoris didn't engage in the house wars so what happens in the non-canon timeline well arion says that there are two paths we can become a master like arion and hold a spot on the council or we can become a magister which announces that i am worthy of the rank of arch magister i think there's only one choice we go to talmura and confront gothrin he has nothing to say to us and so begins the wizard duel i silence gothren send in the squad who fights gothran's own duo of gemora and kill gothran with my special mysticism technique of absorbing health it's a good fight a damn good fight fittingly there's a book titled the final lesson in his tower and with that arion names me arch magister of house tilvani this however is fanfiction gothran yet lives in ubereath sadly doesn't the grey houses of morrowind are a really great storyline emblematic of the game to contrast oblivion was originally intended to allow you to become the count of kavatch following its destruction but this was cut according to todd howard because it apparently detracted from the main quest line skyrim had the civil war a literal red versus blue fight between two factions that were both kind of right although the stormcloaks were better suck at reds the great houses though to have not one but two separate quest lines that become exclusive when you pick one i mean modern bethesda loves the whole only create one character and experience everything design philosophy even when they have multiple factions like in fallout 4 they it up by having all the factions still complete the same story beats each faction is also properly represented in their quests halawa is about being sneaky and conniving and you make a ton of money doing it redoran is about honor and honor doesn't pay domani is all about the acquisition of power and rewards you with powerful artifacts however a problem i have with the houses is that they don't quite fit with hybrid classes it makes sense for each guild to correspond to its specialization you know fighters the fighters guild thieves the thieves guild mages to mage's guilt but then the houses do the same exact thing it'd be great if for example heavy armor was a part of the philosophy of house stelvani but secretly all talvani cheat and bind theirs it certainly made divith fear fully clad in real daedric armor much cooler as a consequence or illusion magic is a part of halau or mysticism a part of radorin just something that makes tovani feel more like a faction instead of just the mages guild for dunmer hipsters if you look on most of morrowind's materials you see the three house names on them but you also see the name endural i think it was pretty smart to keep in doral out of morrowind i personally think it would have crowded the space to have a fourth great house same goes for house dress i feel if the greater mainland of morrowind had been a part of the original game than it would have fit in as a sort of competing mainland powers perhaps a story of tribunal traditionalists versus daedric worshipers as is technically already the case but as it stands house dress only gets paid lip service in morrowind which was a shame because well it was retconned into being destroyed in skyrim i mentioned enduro and dress because they helped to fill out the roster for house degoth the forbidden sixth house for years i've heard a rumor that bethesda originally intended to let the player join the sixth house researching this was difficult since there are mods that entail this that muddy the waters some have alluded to the content being in the game files but this is not the case as according to both the uesp and the cutting room floor no such quests or scripts exist in the game files i've searched around for some hints at interviews that would suggest this information or where this misconception came from but alas i couldn't find any if joining the sixth house wasn't a design document it got cut very early as for the main three a good balance i handily ranked telvani at number one while hilaru and rodor untied two for a variety of reasons radorin has some better quests but the lack of payment really dragged it down halau has some more menial quests but it has enough intrigue to entertain in this section we'll be seeing the return of a few prior characters to play through these factions for the imperial legion i chose mace the master of the fighters guild he made the most sense as a fighter and as an outsider to the great houses the imperial legion is a strange faction the only ones recruiting is the legion and nieces but you don't really join as a legionary more as an agent but the ranks in the uniform imply that we are a common soldier i mean we obviously can't spend days patrolling town as a guard while we earn our rank so we start off getting tasked by general darius himself to acquire a deed from a widow in order to open a port only it turns out the widow's husband was recently murdered and she says by a legionary no less and so we an imperial legion recruit set out to solve the murder he recently died while inside the local egg mine we get let in by the door guard and some snooping reveals an orc in the lower levels who threatens to attack us if we don't leave he threatens to count to 10 oh now please go ahead i want nothing to do with you orc i'm going to enjoy this it's your last chance run or die i eventually find a pool with a body and an axe that i somehow intuit belongs to the lug grub wait they never found the body how did they know he died then and didn't just go skip town to go to the saran house of earthly pleasures and sure enough there's a ghost of the widow's husband who is there to detail the murder the orc was sleeping on duty woke up to find him there and killed him to cover up his insubordination and general darius believes our story he even rewards us with a free broadsword for taking the initiative and solving the case no no thank you as you might be able to tell this quest is written a bit different than the other factions i've detailed in this series that's because it has a different writer and said writer clearly had a different perspective on writing to give a clear example i reference an earlier murder mystery quest we've done for house allahu we're tasked with solving a noble's murder asking locals in balmora points us to an argonian suspect asking the servant of a noble points to a dunmer man you know what doesn't enter the evidence pool a murder weapon with the name of the murderer still on it still planted in the skull of the victim and the victim's ghost certainly doesn't pop up from the grave to recount the events of the murder i mean all is fair right the murderer is an orc so he might be prideful enough to carve his name in his weapon and then dispose of it poorly and sure ghosts do exist in the setting i'm not saying the circumstances are implausible but well this is a problem with the later games too instead of creating an actual mystery that requires detective work where there is no actual way of knowing with absolute certainty who the murderer is this quest was written with the desire of creating an emotional payoff and having the ghost of the victim show up means that there is no speculation on the part of the player on why the murder happened in the first place for the halau murder you weren't actually given solid motive for either suspect there's a lot of evidence that the argonian is only suspected by people because of his race and the dunmer ends up being the more likely suspect but just as easily we could be missing out on a whole other story a story where an argonian man has an affair with a servant of a racist noble whom is killed in a conflict between the two and to cover up the crime of her lover the servant implicates a man who while still a criminal is not guilty of this crime pretty interesting right well just as easily the story could be that of a commoditang thug murdering a pro-abolition halau noble then spreading rumors that it was an argonian-free man who did the deed do you want to know why mr ghost here got murdered because he woke up in orc who was sleeping on the job and the orc didn't want to get in trouble with his boss see the problems with having the murder victim posthumously explain the crime just as easily you could solve the crime by saying 1. vabdas last known location was inside the mind looking for food two inside the part of the mind where the food is is an orc who's threatening to kill people for trespassing even his fellow members of the imperial legion and three deep inside the cave is a skeleton in an unmarked imperial weapon a weapon that the orc is missing players who fail to find point 3 might still be able to figure out that the orc has a history of violent confrontations maybe he's on strike 2 of 3 from losing his job as for motives besides being an orc he is standing right next to a bed roll in some empty mugs so you can fill in the blanks this is a very dramatic first quest for a faction that generally does not match the tone of the other factions in the game our next task is to cure the blighted kwama queen oh no do i really need to detail this one we've done this quest twice already next we need to rescue a pilgrim who's been kidnapped some outcast ashlanders are living near old velothian trying to collect ransom money unfortunately for them this is non-negotiable so i kill them and free the hostage a local tax collector went missing trying to collect taxes from a telvanni living in nisis old balladas demnivani of mage's guild and house delvani fame fun fact the wiki says that the summoning room key unlocks the dungeon cell door it doesn't at least not on the xbox you know i can't blame more when fans are not playing it on the xbox validus isn't thrilled he says that he imprisoned the tax collector because she's collecting taxes for a false empire and that he only really tolerates the people of nieses i respond that everybody pays taxes he rebuffs this presumably i mentioned that if he wants to be a sovereign he needs to have the power to back up his claims and we fight rest in peace ballot stem novani a true og don't think i ever got out of that place wow the imperial legion was not shown love or an editor all right fine i'll talk about the writer todd howard for the most part up to this point we've been working with the writing of douglas goodall seriously he wrote all three imperial guilds all three great houses as well as the morag tong and the tribunal temple questlines he also had mostly worked out the beats the imperial legion quest line but fell behind having a falling out can do that so todd howard stepped in and finished it this may be one of the big reasons the imperial legion and the imperial cult for that matter feel so different compared to the rest of the factions goodall was clearly more interested in a low fantasy writing style about mundane everyday living while writers like michael kirkbride and ken rolsten focused on the more high fantasy and esoteric concepts of the game so what's the deal with howard i mean we all know the meme of him is the liar that over-promises and under-delivers of today but turns out his favorite of the games with his name on it is morrowind he doesn't want to remaster it he wants people to play it for what it is and i certainly agree but why well that's where we get into the context behind this game daggerfall did well enough but bethesda had gotten a little mismanaged in the 90s between battle spire and redguard the company had overextended itself to little reward there was a very real threat of bethesda either becoming a shovelware company or going under so when you hear stuff like morrowind saved bethesda yeah it's true for a time bethesda was a success story in a gaming industry that tries to snuff out innovation and creativity for safer secure and exploitative designs i think part of the reason people like to rag on howard is partly because it's a fall from grace more than anything it's an unabashed greed that goes into something like fallout 76 that bothers people i think howard over promises and oversimplifies the modern games because he doesn't want his company to ever go back to its dark times of the late 90s it certainly lines up with the fact that bethesda the developer at least is one of the few aaa dev studios that doesn't abuse their employees with crunch periods howard knew what it was like to work under crunch it's part of the reason i'm interested to see starfield i mean if the claims are true and this is what howard has been wanting to make for a long time it'll either be a return to form that we've been waiting for or it'll be a disaster from a man who's lost touch with his original fan base it'll be fascinating either way as for todd's work on the imperial legion i mean the guy's talent is using orc magic to make his games work not as a writer or a designer he wants to tell exciting stories and isn't really interested in exploring the culture of the legion like did i mention the legion of nieces as mostly made up of orcs that never comes up in this questline our final quest for darius involves investigating the local talos cult rumor has it that ortidius marrow is in the cult and when bribed 200 gold he invites us to join and gives us a key to a secret shrine sure enough there's a shrine and some investigation reveals a note saying they need to strike soon if emperor uriel septim the seventh yes the big man himself is going to come to vardenfell the shrine guard doesn't appreciate me snooping and neither does mero so hey at least i get my bribe money back this is probably the fastest a literal conspiracy theory has ever been debunked and thus ends our work with general darius we're high enough ranked to operate as free agents of the legion but something feels off i think it has to do with the fact that all of these quests took place in and around nieces the quest tried to be more than just go to x and do y opening with a literal murder mystery and all but it feels superficial because this isn't the kind of work a new recruit should be doing especially in contrast with the other factions that do give you the right kind of work for new members i accidentally activated darius's bed while trying to pick up some gear earning a small bounty in a building full of guards yeah and maybe it'd be nice to the bounty triggered after you actually tried to start resting not just when i hit the bed by accident that said it means i got some good footage of me stripping down and running around naked for a while while i was wanted darius once he's calmed down about our heinous crime says for further orders i need to check with the night protectors at each fort we're told in moon moth that the buoyant armigers have challenged us to a hunt and the ordinators say they're going to get a piece of corpus weeping while we need to get a piece of scrap metal to prove our superiority to the tribunal temple okay todd those aren't all synonymous groups so i take a run up the hill and ask the nearby dwemer ruin for a cup of metal and turn up the difficulty while i'm here turning up the difficulty does breathe a little bit of new life into the playthrough since mace was starting to become unstoppable personally on the pc i find the max difficulty to be the most fun but that's with the benefit of near instant loading screens for when i die we do get paid 500 gold for the work so hey it's already better than redoran our next task is to rescue a missionary who went missing while preaching the good word of quite literal imperialism to the arabinism camp hostage situations aren't very pressing so i go look for work elsewhere over in all droon at buckmoth were tasked with finding evidence of dreinar varion being a smuggler i presume this is after wrethan implicated him in the halau questline as while he did provide evidence audral helvey was smuggling the legion only has his testimony that varion was involved varion isn't the best at hiding his shadiness he claims he is practicing pottery although i guess i could believe him since i see pots in every building but so far varion is the first potter i've met unfortunately for him i apparently don't need a warrant to search his home and hidden amongst his pottery is a dwemer tube and yeah that's enough for a conviction look him boys stop you violated the law next we're told that one of our own is being held for ransom in a daedric ruin and we need to rescue him hostage situations are a pressing matter so off we go [Music] let's talk about daedric ruins they tend to be varied having very alien names like escher nabibi with jagged architecture and a comfortable blood red color full of daedra and daedric accessories and if you see a shrine i will warn you now to leave their donations alone we don't talk about what happens if you touch the donation [Music] quests that involve actually going to daedric ruins are pretty rare though they are a source of entertainment you have to be proactive and seek out on your own the benefits of the ruins are access to valuables which can be used or sold for money and inevitably turned into training and levels which is smart up until you realize that most daedric ruins are too difficult for characters lower than level 10 which is unfortunate for me as most of the time i was playing and in need of cash for this video daedric ruins were out of the question this is assuredly a me issue a making along analysis video issue so after killing a bunch of tough orcs in daedra we find jauncis who thanks us for killing his captors and tells us he'll find his own way out of the ruin our next task from buckmoth is to recover a token of a maiden a rogue telvani at this point which ones aren't rogue a rogue telvanni verona nellis is blackmailing a buoyant armiger with an embroidered glove at first this doesn't really seem an issue for the legion until we go to the ass man k i mean asumanu and recover the glove the telvani in question has a secretary who informs me that i'll need an appointment to meet with nellis and like the brave initiative taking red guard i am i just go in anyways varon and ellis says she's only willing to discuss the glove with a friend something that will cost me the thing is mace doesn't do blackmail and the situation ends poorly as a result yeah so if you were wondering why the legion cares about this glove it's because it's embroidered with the name elemini drin who happens to be the duke's daughter sadly there is no reward nor really any intrigue about the legion covering for the duke's daughter over in ebonheart we're tasked to deal with a slanderous buoyant armager who says we lack courtesy we're told to get our hands on a red book of riddles and go correct the issue and sure enough the armager salin sarethi is willing to concede we have wit provided we can win a contest of riddles and serethi just quotes said red book of riddles verbatim kinda weird the quest giver somehow knew this book would be relevant fun fact we returned sale and serrathy's dagger to him during the thieves guild quest line next we're tasked with dealing with a traitor who is working for a den of sorcerers and daedra worshipers in a remote area what is that no no get away from me meet the greater bone walker or as they're more affectionately known why bethesda never gave an enemy a damage attribute effect ever again kind of a weird name but absolutely fitting see attributes in morrowind are important in daggerfall they were life or death but in morrowind you can live through having one knocked down to zero it just enters its equations with said value of zero only problem with that would be strength see strength in morrowind dictates how hard you hit and your encumbrance encumbrance is 5 times the value of your strength question though what is 5 times 0 next question which playstyle generally has the greatest carry weight and do they regularly come in melee range and the bone walkers are rather quick to cast the spell so unsuspecting players are going to find themselves completely unable to move in a short manner of time now the first instinct might be to reload a save i'm on the xbox so no quick saves and for reasons that don't go bearing into in this video bethesda prioritized taking feedback from the xbox players when it came to the design of oblivion which is why rather than improving the effect they just stopped using it there are two ways you're supposed to circumnavigate the problem the first is by carrying a restore strength potion in your inventory that would however make it unique as the only restorative that is completely necessary to carry to avoid soft locking your game the second is some method of getting back to town interventions recall or just dropping everything and running back naked and unarmed if i was designing it personally i would have had damaged attributes recover through resting offering a non-magical solution to dealing with damage attributes that makes sense and still carries some consequence for lack of preparedness your strength would naturally come back over time or i would have it so that the most your attributes can get damaged to say 50 so you can still feel the negative and the lasting effects of getting cursed without it trapping you completely or just have the value that represents strength be five times plus 25 so even at a value of zero you still have 25 units of weight to work with so you can carry a weapon and clothes on your walk of shame back to town back in the synopsis turns out the broken level geometry here has prevented the trader honjolf from being a threat while we're over here i decided to finally go rescue that missionary i've been putting off so the arabinism locals say they told him that the mabergash wanted to hear all about that imperial lifestyle of living in the soon-to-be retconned jungle one bribe later and he tells us that the mabragash are when their wise women leave the tribe to go off stealing men's vital essences to become more powerful so now we have to go rescue this guy from literal semen demons thankfully he left a trail of book pages to follow to the camp and on the way i meet with a lost slave who is saying he needs to get home but isn't too enthusiastic to actually ask me to help so i leave him in the middle of the wasteland he's part of a quest for the twin lamps faction that el mini drin heads that is dedicated to slave abolition i didn't play it because it's just two quests i find the camp and the situation feels very familiar to earlier in the quest line i ask what they want and this time it's not ransom they just say they need a man for their magic to work and insists that if i want josian back i'll need to replace him with a man from the tribe i decide to use the business into my sword and oh god that sounds sexual doesn't it no okay no i didn't dick down the wise woman i killed her and not metaphorically from over pleasure literally from over death josians learned nothing from this encounter as he wishes to continue trying to preach the good word good luck with affecting any measure of generational change on a society of people that live three times as long as you our next orders are to rescue another hostage from some bandit ah jeez yeah just generic bandits and either i didn't do this quest or this quest is so lackluster that i didn't take any notes on it thankfully at this point we are high enough rank to apply for a job in the knights of the garland or the order of ebonheart provided we can track down two of the order's artifacts and remember their silly name the first artifact is the lord's mail witch lord oh the armor of mora house it was being kept in a shrine in the imperial commission then it got stolen one of the folks in the shrine suggests i speak with someone named ruffinus who himself figures that it was furious achilles who stole the armor the first piece of evidence is his unfortunate name furious which is just bound for trouble the second piece of evidence was that furious was talking a lot about the armor and about a cave below the castle and recently got fired motive and opportunity in the shrine itself are track marks leading to a hidden door cool but i must be the first person investigating this case because how would you miss that we need a key because my security skill is basically nothing on this character and after spending an embarrassing amount of time looking for furious's room the hidden door reveals access into the cave where furious and his rat army are holed up one fight later and we return the armor to varus vantinius if that quest sounds short and stupid it kind of is i mean if you don't see a problem with a guy named furious stealing a precious artifact going through a hidden door feet from its shrine locked by a key a copy of which is sitting in his room so that he could live out the rest of his days starving to death in a cave below a castle in stylish plate armor then i guess you're not going to see a problem with anything good news bethesda has made two whole elder scrolls games appealing to people like you you'll also enjoy this next quest the other artifact we're tasked with grabbing is chrysomere it got stolen by another knight now it's in the hands of a rogue televani by sadrath mora that's also apparently so scary that she's frightened the televania into daring not speak her name kill her take the sword give it to varus okay first of all is there anybody in this legion who isn't a traitor oh what's that varus wants to do okay hang on dude seriously there's a tad too many quests that involve knights murdering locals knights engaging in petty faction warfare knights getting captured knights betraying the cause to go work for rogue delvania and by the way can i just say that i'm sick of hearing about rogue televani doing this or that oh no a rogue telvanni has built a stronghold in the middle of uncontested wasteland oh no the duke's abolitionist daughters being blackmailed by a rogue televoniant admitting that she had a relationship with a prominent member of a religious faction that doesn't practice abstinence their love is not forbidden fact if drama hellorin was terrorizing the city of sageth mora living a stone's throw away from multiple powerful wizards and she was hoarding powerful artifacts more than likely master nelloth arch magister gothran or lord divith fear would have at a minimum asked her to knock it off or more likely either killed her or tasked some poor of telvani player with the job we aren't talking about balmoran peasants here this is house telvanni they don't consider daggeth earth threat so why would they be scared of some witch with a giant sword and finally the duel we've been putting artifacts in the hands of varys only for him to turn around and use those artifacts to one shot me while in my adrenaline rush whatever at least this one has his armor on but yeah this guy's hitting like a monster truck at the local playground which means i used what is probably the dirtiest and most underhanded way to beat an opponent yet step 1 charm step 2 buff step 3 get in a few swings before he even reacts you might think that honor should be an aspect in this but thing is sending me out to go collect artifacts that you proceed to use against me is kind of a dick move i mean i get it i possess the ice blade of the monarch so getting your own magic sword is fine by me but not the armor of maura house i don't like the imperial legion in morrowind i realized upon reflection that it's much more misanthropic than most of the other quest lines the legion is lording over a conquered people and sending missions out to preach their lifestyle to the indigenous population we're one quest away where we hand out corpus blankets from outright commentary thing is that could have worked because unlike amerindians or the sandlanders the dunmer culture is much more capable of repelling foreign influence but i kept getting the feeling that whomever wrote this i presume todd actually wrote the quest line wanted it to be a story of the player cleaning up the legion's ill intense on their way up to the top i think that could have worked however the questline lacked a real narrative it was much more a bunch of isolated instances of demonstrating how incompetent these colonizers were or how morally bankrupt members could be and it wasn't exactly subtle from the orc killing a native man to cover up his laziness on the job to all the posturing to the armigers to the knights who abandoned their cause for self-gain i mean do i have to stress that his name was furious there is one unique aspect i have to praise and that's the uniform system legionaries even the player are expected to wear their uniforms when speaking to a superior officer and the player is given a number of different curiouses that qualify in this respect this means that heavy armor isn't just an expected skill of members it's outright mandatory to complete the quest line the order of the garlic or the duke's guard they're underexplored it's a very short time between joining the upper echelon of the faction to outright leading it so there aren't any quests where you go out and do nightly things unlike other factions where quests are reflections of the values and principles of said factions the imperial legion stands alone as the faction that could be most described by the phrase go to x and do y the imperial cult is a bit of an oddity while douglas goodall wrote most of the factions and started on the imperial legion questline that was later finished by todd howard the imperial cult questline was done by ken ralston goodall in an interview said that initially the cult was going to be a potential expansion or plug-in material i suspect this was because it was written after the main quest line was mostly finished or written concurrently with the main quest to give rolston a break from writing one project for too long and i understand that feeling believe me that said playing a questline written by somebody else gives the game an entirely different feeling but unlike the legion with howard it's a kind of a good one goodall's philosophy to quest writing was to make quests similar to daggerfall rolston on the other hand created a series of more interesting quests but the faction itself is also smaller in scale to start this is a continuation of whiz or mage's guild character i had a hard time justifying why a character would line up with the cult or with the temple for that matter so let's just say she found the divines in her research it was her ubereth and there was no way a telvanni was going to convert and i cheated a bit and did a bit of preparation prior experience with the questline tempered me to what to expect amusingly you can gain quite a bit of rank without needing to leave this room one of the first quest givers asks you to collect alchemical ingredients he will give specific directions for areas where you may collect these ingredients but as with most quests in morrowind this is entirely superfluous as any rat meat or net leather will suffice so if you purchase the necessary alchemical ingredients in advance you can quickly complete his entire questline another quest giver deals with collecting donations for the cult this is primarily gold about 2000 or so but also some brandy and a shirt again adequate preparation can blast you through this quest line in record time and all it costs is money this is mostly just time saving while the quests are interesting there isn't really any reflection to be had with them yes indeed there are quests i'm not dealing in this analysis i know it might not seem like it in addition they collected 100 scrolls of divine intervention just cause you do need to donate 50 gold to join the cult a preventative measure i suspect since certain atronac related characters can take easy advantage of the shrines otherwise but 50 gold is nothing in the grand scheme of things diseases are an intentional annoyance similar to durability and like durability it was drastically reigned in in the later games overworld enemies scale usually getting a little tougher but notably becoming more infectious presenting a chance of catching the disease i most commonly contracted common diseases i do not think in my entire history of playing this game that i have ever actually contracted a blight disease and we'll talk more about corpus in part 6. this is a mixture of becoming powerful enough to not get hit by blighted monsters and not coming in contact with too many blighted creatures outside of the main questline and i'll spoil this now there's a reward a third of the way through the main quest that provides total immunity to all diseases including blight so the main questline the chances catching blight the most will make you immune to it so if immunity is a reward why have the mechanic it's another one of those questions of intentional annoyance it's an added concern that has to be prepared for prior to an adventure and a punishment for those who came unprepared disease is also a part of the story of morrowind more so than the later games there's a canon reason you can't leave vardenfell and it's because the island has been quarantined due to the blight corpus is a biological weapon that is being used by the sixth house against the tribunal and the outlanders and many quests involve curing or providing the cure to various ailments across the island so in this case i can forgive the later games easing up on diseases making them rarer reducing them down to one category etc because their stories aren't about disease that said if the next game were to be set in say the black marsh or valenwood then i would hope special mind be paid to the disease system perhaps making spreading the disease more robust like sharing it with npcs and infecting entire towns with careless behavior and by the way this entire section was written prior to the human malware shrines can perform other jobs they can restore attributes and the tribunal shrines can provide even more functions the only problem is all the services provided by shrines are done so in a more convenient form by potions and scrolls shrines are cheaper sure but you can cure a disease or restore an attribute out in the field with a potion or a spell and i was never in such a dire financial situation as to not be able to justify buying a cure common disease potion so one of the perks of acquiring a rank in the cult free shrine usage is not a standout reason to drop everything and go do the quest line on all of your characters a quirk of the cult questline is how quest givers introduce themselves they'll often spring quests onto you as soon as you open a dialogue chastising you if you return early or haven't completed your objective yet so you can't use their services if you're presently working for them or they'll assume you've been there electing your duties but they also tend to provide a lot of choices in dialogue sure some of these choices are i have failed and must be flagellated but other choices especially with the gold collection quests give you the opportunity to go above and beyond for extra rewards i think between howard goodall and rollston rolston used the dialogue system fully coming the closest elder scrolls ever has to branching dialogue so after you get done with all your gold and ingredient collection you'll find yourself with access to the upper level of the cult you'll notice we're spending quite a bit of time here in this one room that is functionally the entire faction fits in line with the idea that this was originally going to be an expansion still this is our first real quest lilacia varian says that she has visions from the nine and wants me to solve them she says she has seen the ring of the wind upon a dark elf's hand and tells me a riddle and sends me to ask a dunmer savant and scout about it now these quests present the opportunity to use the services of savants and scouts who have unique information to share about the world this is a pure ralston idea as he uses this a lot in the main quest as well while goodall tended to just have quest givers themselves provide the directions to locations there should have been a lot more opportunities to use these services and this goes strictly for oblivion and skyrim with their quest marker philosophy that said i think it is a shame that the puzzles can't be solved by the player's own knowledge about the world especially considering the people we're directed to ask are located in vivec so we head to where she had the vision a cave called namu i had turned the difficulty up during the legion but wiz was far lower along the power threshold compared to mason was getting my ass beat but paralysis works in a cinch after a wizard duel i get the ring and meet a guy named john hawker he says he was taken hostage by the wizard to be sold as a slave and that we must have been sent by zinethar himself to save him he's actually a manifestation of xenathar another difference between goodall and rolston he asks to give him a divine intervention scroll of which there are plenty in the cave in case you came unprepared i have over a hundred or so already and indeed i give over a hundred scrolls to him every time i give him a scroll he gives me a pair of gloves and a reputation point every time so after hundreds of button presses i have 113 reputation and 104 pairs of gloves at fair value this is 412 000 gold and i can admire anyone into liking me instantly as i am the most famous person on the entire island if not all of tamriel obviously this is an exploit since hawker didn't close the dialog box after teleporting out allowing me to give him all these scrolls and i'm going to add in here that this is an exceptionally easy problem to fix as in since i started the previous sentence i've already spoken more characters than it takes to close a dialog box in the editor so i'll chalk this one up to forgetfulness and this quest having been created late in development there's actually another opportunity to do this but i'm not going to since the process of buying 100 scrolls of divine intervention and subsequently giving them to them is absolutely awful on the xbox let's just say that for all the dynamic and interesting ideas rolston had they can be tempered equally with the strange quirks of his quests speaking of varion has another vision this time of the boots the apostle they're in a dunmer stronghold named brandis which has not one not two but three winged twilights for me to fight talk about an escalation and difficulty i was here for quite a while well i mean these are flying enemies can't they just fly at me i guess there must not be any flying enemies in morrowind oh yeah yeah speaking of flying we now have the boots of the apostle the boots the big man talos wore as he descended from the throat of the world that are for some reason here in vardenfell and if you're attentive you'll notice that there are some ledges at the top of the cave with someone up there it's an aspect of mara and like hawker she wants a scroll of divine intervention it's kind of awkward that this idea was repeated but only once hawker was obvious with scrolls present if he came unprepared while amanin here is more obscure and with no scrolls nearby again i'm not sure why olson decided to have this encounter twice technically there's a third encounter in the same vein as this but it happens during the main quest let's take a break from prophecy and sears visions to do some other high-level work for the cult we're tasked with recovering a lime ware bowl that was stole okay prophecy time it is varian asks us to recover the ice blade of the monarch which mace had acquired while working for the fighter's guild so while we didn't find the blade we did manage to rescue some slaves one woman adesamsi asks us to grab her ring which casts divine intervention and she leaves with it we get that same ring as a reward later and obviously we also have the ice blade but that's not as fun the cult is a great questline early on but even from an experienced morrowind player i don't really understand how people with fresh characters are expected to match the rapid change in difficulty and significance from gathering money for charity to battling wizards winged twilights and danger worshipers thankfully our next quest from varian is a bit more of a blue milk run we're just going to recover some scroll nothing too crazy but i think varian is overcompensating for not having an actual artifact from you to recover this time i know the scroll isn't actually an artifact because a healer was sent to a daedric ruin to try and kill an old altmer with it we go to the ruin and there is a handy side passage you can sneak through to get through to the scroll first for sneaky characters who might not be able to handle the mandatory horde of daedra and highly talented warriors of mehrunes dagon you know just monk things the scroll one shots the priest not because it's any good but because he's actually really weak you'll be seeing more of him in the next part oh god i'm in summary mode at least it's the last quest to know there hasn't been a theme to any of these it's just kind of an inane list of tasks which now that i'm thinking about it might be commentary on religion food for thought while i'm poorly digesting it let's get into varian's final task long ago in a distant land the nords invaded and a smith hilben guard made a powerful warhammer named skull crutcher the hammer was lost in a buried daedric ruin and in all this time nobody has bothered to actually excavate the site okay not sure why a nord was hanging out in a daedric ruin during the days of the nordic occupation of res dane or why telvani living a stone's throw away from it never bothered to go pilfering i honestly think goodall was the only one at bethesda who understood what the telvani were all about we get directed by a scout to look for denmark tombs near the ruins through which we discover a pathway into the ruins there's some cool stuff here literally there's a patch of ice that a frost at your neck is hanging out on and the dungeon is very vertically oriented which is good as the boots of the apostle allows us the power of flight once we find the forge and i should stress that once we find it it's in a floating chest in the middle of the forge varian for some reason notes that the hammer isn't cursed and declares her questline to be finished and that's where i stopped playing the cult because i ran out of quests and really wasn't interested in doing a bunch of gotax and do y quests for the shrine sergeant the imperial cult is unique definitely in fact i'd say it's pretty well fleshed out beyond the limewear bull quest is four more interesting quests involving a witch hunt two hauntings and a really bad puzzle that said it definitely feels like a faction that was bolted onto the game towards the end the faction has little to add to the existing imperial shrines in the world and outside of one example there isn't really any instances of faction crossovers it is however another faction that lacks an overarching narrative and it's in an inconvenient location being set in the ebonheart chapel atop a castle and as i noted there is a drastic ramp up in difficulty from the first half to the second which is one of the reasons i decided to use a pre-existing character instead of creating a new one ultimately however it does not compare to the other factions and especially not with the other religious faction i'll be discussing the tribunal temple so let's get into the dunmer factions starting with the morag tong we all know the triangle of rpg specializations right you have the hulking warriors of legend the studious mages and wizards of antiquity but is the third corner a thief or an assassin there's a pretty big difference one that isn't really there for the other corners and it's not just a difference of morals either the skill set is completely different so who gets to claim to be the third corner of the triangle and where does the other one go if it's not them i say this as we're discussing the faction of the morag tong mafalo worshipers turned legal assassination administration the dunmer who historically worshipped mephala have incorporated a legal way to employ hitman i find this detailed often be the straw that breaks the camel's back when discussing the dunmer with people not familiar with elder scrolls because i mean criminal organizations all cultures have had them at some point and unique geographic features like giant mushrooms or alien creatures aren't really outside the realm of imagination but a legally recognized religious organization dedicated to the art of murder that isn't entirely made up of psychopaths that's a new one for some people sure groups have existed but usually they didn't hold residents in offices and their actions weren't immediately recognized by law enforcement and acquitted see it's a side effect of tamriel's interpretation of murder obviously murder is illegal but for whatever reason there is no crime you can't pay your way out of i suppose this is the empire's way of dealing with affluenza allowing legal murder at a hefty price or it's just a mechanical way to discourage casual murder at the cost of a small bit of immersion the morag tong is also different from other factions in terms of gaining membership most factions are over inclusive offering casual membership at the drop of a hat for the morag tong however membership is exclusive to those who can find their headquarters in vivec it's hidden in the arena just to give that canton something to do when it isn't hosting the final quest of other factions once you sign up personally with the grand master inuhalau you can get most of the jobs in any of the more egg tong offices which are conveniently in all the main towns although honestly you're just better off setting your mark here and working out of vivec since it's here that you can receive all of the major quests for the faction from one quest giver so how does the typical job for the morag tong work to test out our skills we are given a writ and a name for roo and iran he's a patron over the elven nations corner club he doesn't like the way i'm looking at him so i pull out my knife and kill him everyone in the bar is shocked i'm a wanted man and as i leave i'm confronted by a guard how does the tongue handle bounties now the more egg tongue does have it slightly easier than most when it comes to legal human extermination but let's start with the basics when you kill someone you earn a 1040 gold bounty 1000 for the murder 40 for the initial assault from then on you'll be hounded by guards presenting you with the choice of prison time paying off your bounty and samaria execution remember that in morrowind guards are only excited by bounties over one thousand bounties over 5k aren't given the option of paying their bounty off their only recourse being to use the thieves guild presuming the reason you're wanted didn't involve killing all of them however there are still ways to get away with murder in my opinion it's easier with the radiant ai systems to commit murders since in morrowind most npcs have static positions with that in mind it's still pretty easy the first recourse is to just pay the bounty this comes with a big downside namely confiscation of stolen goods if you've seen me stripped down before talking to a guard yeah that's the reason but even characters whom i generally did not steal with like mace during the imperial legion questline would still strip down and this was because what you might consider stolen and what the game considers stolen will not only differ you won't be told what the game considers stolen and this was a genuine improvement on the part of oblivion for all of these reasons the rest of these solutions are much more attractive the core of morrowind's legal system is reliant on who initiates a lethal confrontation if you're attacked you can kill people in self-defense and that's a-okay using speechcraft taunts can be used to initiate conflict it's a strange beast of a system whether or not taunts will succeed is contingent on their disposition but in a parabolic shape where it's more effective the closer to an average of 50 than it is to an extreme like zero or 100. people who loathe you and love you are less likely to be goaded into fighting you but taunts lower your disposition whether they succeed or fail and they are dice roles themselves based on your speechcraft skill very commonly attempting to taunt people to stir them into action would fail because it would grind their disposition down in a twist of common sense people can be taunted bribed and taunted repeatedly then after you kill them you get all of your bride money back this means in dunmer culture a love of money supersedes basic self-preservation instincts taunt bribing is a tedious method however especially on the xbox so let me present another option under the illusion discipline you have the frenzy spell a mostly useless spell for traditional play styles frenzy is an easy way to initiate conflicts without issue strangely casting magic to influence people is not considered a form of assault so those with the skill and magicka can make a frenzy spell 70 points for two seconds enemies violent tendencies don't drop off after those two seconds are up and those 70 points are sufficient to anger every npc in the game however for this situation i did none of these things that is because the morag tong as a function of its organization is allowed to create honorable ritz of execution which guards even non-dunmer imperial guards will recognize and remove your bounty i present the writ and walk away a free man and you can do that for the rest of the quests there is an added monetary reward for those who can perform the assassinations without needing to use the ritz and even though i am playing a character who already has enough money to buy one of the moons i actually obliged this request since rethan considers himself a professional assassin the morag tong tends to hand out writs in pairs rather than one at a time this is good because many of the ritz are just go to place kill person this makes the questline notes rather short since none of the quests are really multi-stage or complex let's make this more of a highlight reel our first two marks couldn't be more different one is living in the city of avec at topper door and plaza in a manner the other is living in a yurt in the zerafel bay the one thing they share however is that they both attack us on sight rightfully suspecting us of being morak tong assassins this is a problem i have with the later assassins questlines as well as the morag tong where everyone somehow intuits uranus ass and trying to kill them but nobody else says anything about it in your general life i could just as easily be the leader of hello reaching out to the community i mean i am the leader of household and the commoditing for that matter but whatever somehow people know because i can't just push my murder boner back down into my pants long enough to blend in our next set of targets are similar one target is living without lawson and mologamor the other two are in vivec living in telvanni plaza's temporary housing unit the televani targets won't give us the time of day posing a challenge for players who rely on speechcraft to provoke their targets this is a good progression of mechanics forcing players to seek new ways to do the work option 1 is just killing them netting a lower pay but being the easiest option option two which i don't have footage of is to strip down open the dialog to get an alternate greeting then taunt them luckily frenzy will work just fine eno figures the cave in malaga more where our targets are hiding is obscure it's actually pretty easy to find i even used a bit of stealth to get through the cave in the next phase we're tasked with killing a member of house rodorn with an influential family member this poses a new problem for the player as now targets may be members of factions risking expulsion for trying to outright murder people even if otherwise legally acceptable what i find funny is that eno mentions that the dark brotherhood is operating in morrowind i'm a god [Music] yeah you don't say so inu wants me to make contact with the brotherhood that they might come to some mutual understanding to start we're directed to meet with one guy a mehron's dagon cultist who directs me to his contact srizami a khajiit in the foreign quarter she says she won't betray the brotherhood for empty threats or gold but eventually does thanks to my uncanny ability to charm and she is totally going to survive her meeting with inu trust me so this is my target a dunmer lady wearing a robe and you're thinking how tough can she be she's only wearing full ebony armor under that robe see that's part of what makes morrowind's armor system great as you can accessorize with robes and skirts without being a pre-baked model we get another mission this time to take out the ionith boys living at the drin plantation and yes this is the third part in a row to feature a quest that involves killing these guys i kind of blew through the ritz but honestly it's just some work for you to do which fits the faction's motif nicely somehow the moray tong is one of the few factions that isn't plagued with trouble and it pays decently too as long as being a servant of mephala doesn't bother you while it is a nice progression of difficulty unfortunately it's surrounded by its fellow factions notably the thieves guild and house halau all three factions pay extremely well the factions that actually need the morag tong his supplementary income most notably house radoran make the least diegetic sense to join thankfully we're getting into the latter half of the tong and it features a good storyline to start inu requests that we track down 25 artifacts of mephala the threads of the web spinner they were actually created by sanguine but he gave him to mephala about three quarters of the artifacts can be found during the events of the morag tong questline the other half are found spread out across vardenfell you don't need to complete this quest to progress but you do have to complete it before you finish off the faction for the reward our next task from inu is to recruit an agent of the dark brotherhood movis doris should i fail i'll need to kill him honorably darius doesn't really contest the job offer saying that the dark brotherhood lacks honor and gives us a sanguine piece in a show of good faith inu now asks we deliver an ultimatum to caracalmo remember him he was in this video in an earlier part he was the mehrunes dagon worshiper we killed during the imperial cult questline i tried to chat with him which actually works since i'm invisible and he gives me some good advice suggesting i stay away from daedric ruins because daedra are nasty and daedric worshipers are even nastier yeah he says that because it's generic advice anyways i deliver said ultimatum to which he gets cocky and i kill him just as easily as i did in the imperial cult questline funny our next quest is basically the same we go to another ruin recover a ring and the guy tells us how nasty daedric ruins are next we are to kill darris marius a leader in the brotherhood who has set up a hideout in the underworks of saint olms and finally we stab at the leadership of the brotherhood going after the night mother herself savara maggia his hold up in aldsatha altsaatha is a daedric ruin right next to vivec which is just the smartest place for your faction of assassins to hide jesus these guys are so stupid i hope this is the last of the dark brotherhood we ever see six of the sanguine items are here in aldsatha i suspect this was a fallback place to put relics that couldn't find homes in broader vardenfell and with that the local dark brotherhood chapter has been destroyed inu gives us the black hands dagger which is a powerful weapon and here it comes inuhulau is going to challenge us to a duel to determine the future leadership of the morag he offers to step down while it is tradition in the tongue for power transfer by combat he actually wants to retire and sees us as a worthy successor what a pleasant surprise why is it that the faction that primarily deals in killing people ends with a peaceful transfer of power but most of the other morally better factions end with violent confrontation betrayal and slaughter i refuse him though two reasons the first is that if you accept inuhalau will disappear making the threads of the web spinner quest unable to be completed the second is that the only benefit of becoming grand master are the grand master ritz which are only handed out if you complete the main quest for some reason targets include larius vero of moon moth fort baladas dim navani of house delvani dram barrow of halau and mistress therana of telvani vero is a dirty cop who works in balmora he doesn't really have anything to do with the main quest line dem nivani dying early can break three different questlines for the mages guild telvanni and the legion drambarrow can break halau and the main quest therana doesn't really break anything seeing as she's likely to be killed in the televani quest line so why these ritz are handed out after the main quest is really anyone's guess obviously i don't have any footage of me doing them since i wasn't going to change my main quest plans which did not include rethan the morag tong is one of the more interesting factions in morrowind their main conceit a legal assassination organization that you can only join if you figure out where they are is pretty interesting they pay well there's a good story in here and they got a lot of interesting quests that reward creative uses of the game's mechanics it would have been nice if the threads of the web spinner quest was able to be completed just by working for the tong now managed to find 17 of the 25 missing pieces and it kind of sucks just coming up short it also has the added detriment that the more pieces you find the harder it gets remembering which pieces you already have i also wish the grand master ritz were available prior to completing the main quest since you know murders are supposed to have consequences one complaint i have is that i have been showing off the vivec branch but the tong actually has offices in all major cities i said earlier that it didn't make sense to work out of them however as it's better to complete the quest line taking writs and assignments from eno in tandem it makes the quest line feel very small because instead of having balmora contracts on balmorans we get contracts on whoever from a singular location and the player is incentivized to work from inu because well he's the guy you have to talk to to get the job it feels more like the tong were given buildings in each of the cities in order to make sure players found out about and knew that the tong were there as an option it's a missed opportunity because the each office could have had different issues to deal with during their particular quest lines balmora could have been about deceit perhaps clients that are trying to get out of paying contracts or have the assassins whacked by other criminals or we have to compete with the komodo tong enforcers aldrun could have placed special emphasis on performing jobs honorably as the tong might be at risk of being expelled from the traditionalist and notably anti-daedra redoran sageth mora could have had the tong at its most difficult routinely getting jobs to settle grudges and televani against powerful wizards postscript hey i get why it's called that now one of the early talvani quests involved finding a ring that's in possession of somebody at the televani morag tong hall the guy who has it refuses to hand it over to you without violence but if you do outrank him in the tongue he will give it to you it wasn't a big question telvani but i thought it bears mentioning here because it's another good example of logical faction interplay but that's all irrelevant now for we must discuss our final major faction of everything i was going to cover for this video the tribunal temple is what i was most looking forward to i'd never actually done it before even though i have played morrowind a great many times there is always something new that i get to do in this game i never actually played through the tribunal temple the main reason being a role playing perspective morrowind is hostile to outlanders and your status as such is non-negotiable i find this somewhat limits role-playing but not by much hauser doran stretches the limits but i think it somewhat justifies why an outlander is allowed in an otherwise hostile faction the temple on the other hand isn't really a logical choice in my books for players especially if you go down the main quest line that said it is a very interesting and unique faction for the game it also contrasts nicely with the imperial cult the cult is a more radical group as they are a religious minority on the island most associated with outlanders and taking up residence in imperial forts on the flip side the temple is the official state religion of the dunmer the temple is given a lot of nuance sure they are an antagonistic force in the game and are guilty of religious persecution of their dissidents caius casatis himself also admits they have an admirable dedication to helping the poor which is something that is corroborated by some of the quests you do for the faction the temple also happens to be the main entity that is combating the spread of blight corpus and the sixth house and none of the main temple figures you interact with are shown in particularly malevolent lights i think it's a responsible representation of a religious organization although perhaps it should be stated that unlike the divines the tribunal temple has the benefit of having their gods personally interact with them and help to manage to protect their society and so continues the story of jib and doris archmaster of house redorne on his rise to sainthood starting out in the temple you will be tasked with completing the pilgrimages of the seven graces these are seven pilgrimages that introduced some key ideas and lore about the temple these pilgrimages are also an effective measure of filtering out commoners for the more difficult tasks done by higher echelons in the temple it's also a big part of culture on vardenfell so there are plenty of quests that involve pilgrims generally to help them out the first and by far the safest pilgrimage is to the fields of kumu at this shrine you will donate a piece of muk this is the shrine of humility where the god vivec had worked out in the field as a beast of burden for a farmer whose guar had died our next stop is the shrine of justice and nieces for this one you donate a potion of cure disease and touch the ash mask attention should be paid to the shrine itself as it turns out the real ash mask is hidden which when used teaches a cure common and the light disease spell on touch that is very magica efficient and will be useful for later quests our next stop is the coal cave near nieces which we actually visited during a side quest i didn't mention during the house redoran section this is the shrine of valor where vivek had fought the king of the drew drow it doesn't matter cause the king got killed you can get a free set of armor if you follow the vex actions at the shrine by slaying a dro in the cave which is nearly as exploitable as the divine intervention scroll exploits in the imperial cult line but i was content just donating one piece of drew wax our next stop is the shrine of pride which is located about a hundred feet inside the ghost fence of red mountain it's basically just dunmer daring each other to enter the haunted house which is being occupied by very real zombies and satanists to knowledge this is one of only a few quests that involve going inside of red mountain outside of the main questline the shrine requires a donation of a soul gem any value which includes azura's star so in a fitting twist work for the tribunal can steal your reward for working for azura and in another fitting twist azure star happens to be just big enough to steal the souls of vivek and almalexia really though the shrine accepts the permanent donation of azure star because of bad scripting there are other quests that will do this as well such as the televani stronghold quest this is because for whatever reason the game tries to take the largest value soul gem out of your inventory which is always going to be a zero star should you possess it our next few stops are in vivec itself the shrine of generosity accepts donations of 100 gold for a small boost to luck and mercantile have i talked about luck most of morrowind's skills and mechanics are reliant on complex mathematical equations this factors in a multitude of attributes skills and fatigue luck tends to be a minor influence on these equations i didn't really play any character long enough to demonstrate what difference a decent amount of luck can be for various playstyles i didn't play with high luck because luck has no skills meaning they can only be raised one point per level which also means you can't level up another attribute if i wasn't able to put multiple points in another attribute then i would default to raising my luck but i don't think i ever actually raised it past 50. if you're a safe scummer luck is the attribute for you because it tends to influence your chances with things you would save scum like alchemy speechcraft and lockpicking even stuff like hit chance both offensive and defensive another shrine in vivec is the shrine to stop the moon there's a large celestial body hanging over the city turns out long ago after the switch from rezdane to morrowind and from danger to tribunal shia gorath have you come to be of service to shaggarath shigerath threw a massive rocket forever city vivec using his divine power stopped the rock in place although spoiler alert he didn't stop the velocity of the rock just froze it in time technically he's not actually moving slower he's moving at the same speed just over a longer period of time huh it's relativistic his fist still travels at the same velocity we just view it from a faster time frame therefore it looks slowed down but theoretically it should still carry the same force force force madness this pleases me this is the best shrine both in name backstory and benefit in exchange for a levitation potion you get a 48 minute 100 point levitation effect 100 points is very fast more so the higher your speed is levitation potions range in price but the cheapest you can donate can be found for less than 50 gold and in terms of location the shrine is right next to an omniview intervention point in vivec meaning a possible navigation option for the city is the omzavi donate a cheap levitate potion and fly around the city although it's worth noting that the actual effect time can be run down if you wait like use the wait function not sit there for an hour our next shrine is in the puzzle canal a neglected area of the game despite what vefek will say the only hidden treasure here is the shrine the shrine here is the shrine of courtesy but it will only give the cryptic hint to breathe the water to make the way clear when we awake we find the room has changed there's a new shrine but to use it we have to give a silver long sword to a very very bored dramora i brought my own but he keeps a selection of swords on hand presumably because he doesn't want to have to haggle with pilgrims who come unprepared and demand to speak to his manager sadly despite how detailed the shrine is its effect does not match you get water breathing and swift swim for 48 minutes remember outside this palace in an easily accessible area is a shrine that will give you the power of flight and here we get a fairly weak swim bonus and water breathing and those were the seven graces if it seemed easy that is a consequence of me doing a little preparation and playing a character that's already been broken in so we return to tulsa's valen in aldrune who welcomes us as an acolyte in the temple a common trend when working for the temple involves several quests that will have us curing people of disease many of these quests will emphasize the need to maintain humility one of the quests even entails curing a daedra worshiper in a daedric ruin full of hostiles on the side of a cliff this is where knowing the spell the vex touch from doing the seven graces comes in handy quite a few of the quest rewards are skill books which i definitely approve of although i think having actual training as rewards might be slightly better since literature tends to also double as a monetary reward which is not in line with the temple's values also a difference between the xbox and pc copies of the game to have to do with skill books on the pc you can use the inventory screen to pick up books without reading them meaning you can stash them for later more expensive levels here's my library on my latest pc playthrough of skill books i've collected from playing every faction aside from rhodoran now is a fair point to mention the 36 sermons of evec morrowind is full of ancillary literature like for example the 2920 series which is 12 books detailing the events of the final year of the first era some of my information that i've generally sourced to the uesp is itself sourced to some of this work most of the books are short stories with some insight into the world and culture not the 36 sermons the sermons are long at 16 000 words and difficult to read in one sitting due to the various changes in prose structure and logic it also conflicts heavily with actual historical accounts which makes sense given vivek has been playing historical revisionists for over a millennia at this point what the books themselves are about is almost irrelevant it's a revised story of the origin of vivec and his relationship with enduro nerevar the nature of which will be revealed in greater detail during the main quest what is significant about the books is that they even today serve as the series primary example of its foundation on the concept of the unreliable narrator the series is an increasingly complicated web of lore and theory crafting that allows for effectively any interpretation of the setting to be correct a good example of this would be the fate of atmora the original homeland of humanity atmora is said to have been frozen over but what this actually means depends on the account one account would suggest that it literally froze over another account suggests that the dragons who represent corporeal time left at mora and the continent was subsequently frozen in time or perhaps the apocalypse hit and that moro was frozen in time in the sense that no one lives there anymore so nobody bothers to make the trip because the player is never able to visit at mora themselves it's impossible to say which interpretation is correct and that is the point because it's a reflection of human writing as well michael kirkbride wrote the 36 sermons but he wasn't alone with his philosophy as douglas goodall is quoted as saying ken rolsten wrote a dozen different accounts apparently without any personal preference to which if any was accurate and ignored the contradictions end quote i feel that far too many people attribute morrowind's writing to kirkbride which like the sermons isn't necessarily an accurate truth he wrote the sermons and while the sermons are an iconic part of morrowind they are not morrowind itself let's get back to the temple then an early quest i was tasked with was to deal with elville vidran who is claiming to be something called the nerevarine don't worry that name will never come up again we are asked to convince him otherwise but should this prove impossible to kill him sure enough he has his shirt off and is ranting in the street about the blight spreading from red mountain nothing i can say will convince him so i kill him and on his person is an ash statue we're then tasked with making another pilgrimage this time we're to go to margan and mimic the events that occurred at the temple there long ago mehreen's dagon yes that's how it was spelled mehreen's dagon was going to throw a rock at some dunmer the denmark people have had more rocks thrown at them than the dinosaurs anyways vivec taunted dagon to throw the rock at him instead well i doubt mehrunes is in the area waiting to throw around rocks at pilgrims given he's currently planning his invasion of tamriel in what seven years so i asked the local priest for help and he's the one to tell us to reenact this drama i have to taunt a drumura in the room into fighting me he threatens to rape my corpse i touch the giant rock and the ritual is complete you know i'm really starting to find faith here the tribunal temple is a very populist a very populist religion because their pilgrimages are all about physically imitating the actions of their idols when not everybody can toil at the fields of kumu or slay the drag king or stop a meteor from starting the red con year or in this case get mehrunes dagon to focus their attention on them hard left we're tasked with convincing a pilgrim tanusia velath who's popular in the city of vivec of leaving town as she's contracted corpus she's hanging out in the arena presumably watching all my characters and all their various duels and impressed with my battle with bulvin venom leaves when i ask her nicely fun fact if you kill her and search her body you contract corpus disease it's incurable and will completely break your game as npcs refuse to speak with you also for anyone in the audience who might not already know this you're completely capable of spreading diseases that you show no symptoms for do not be like tenusia veloth our next quest has us take an oath of silence and journey to the sanctus shrine let's see we're in vivec which is in the south of the map here and the shrine is uh this entailed a long journey on foot as i was not able to speak to anybody including fast travel services well on foot as in my feet were atop the air as i journey through the sky battling cliff racers yeah that shrine that gives a 48 minute levitation effect came in real handy but uh good try and an interesting quest we do get four skill books as a reward which is pretty substantial as it's maybe four tenths of a level if those skills are in your class we cure some people deliver some food lowly busy body work and finally we're tasked with making another pilgrimage this time the mount cant which is i think the second tallest mountain in vardenfeld the low draw distance makes it hard to tell up at the mount we're approached by a flame atronach who challenges us to solve a riddle a medal neither black nor red as heavy as man's golden greed what you do to stay ahead with friend or arrow or steed the correct answer is lead i think keeping the rhyming scheme is the riddle here as i don't know what color lead is supposed to be nor do i have any inkling how heavy daedric glass or ebony are compared to lead further in the cave we meet a frost atronach with another riddle if you lie to me i will slay you with my sword if you tell me the truth i will slay you with a spell i tell emil slay us with a spell catching him in a paradox and earning our passage remember people who stake life and death on riddles are entirely irrational and will likely kill you if you try to invoke a paradox on them finally we meet a storm attract with its own riddle my fellow atronach zedia soko was slain the altmer claims the dunmer is guilty the dunmer says the khajiit did it the orc swears that he didn't kill zidious soko the khajiit says the dunmer is lying if only one of these speaks the truth who killed zedia soko and i actually figured this one out without using a wiki okay basically the orc did it because that's what orcs do the actual logic is the dunmer accuses the khajiit and the khajiit says the dunmer is lying both of these people can't be right because only one person is telling the truth which means they can both be ruled out the orc and the altmer are thus lying and since the orcs lie is about the murder that makes him the suspect i like that each of these races basically summarizes how those races are characterized in this game and also this is kind of a reference to the two murder mystery quests in this game this opens the way to the shrine and completes our pilgrimage but wait we're missing the fourth challenge where's the watermelon now internet we get tasked with some real work to take out a necromancer working near molag mar guess what factions he's a part of oh oh that was supposed to be a joke because it's not in my notes or in the quest page that he was a rogue televani i mean he's the lowest rank of the faction but still saw the sill one of the priestesses has a vision of an artifact and not one of the latia varian brand visions where i need to hire a consultant to figure out what it means she knows that it's right across the pond at aldsaatha oh yeah i have an amulet that basically renders me invisible i somehow forgot about that we're then tasked with wiping out a sugar rath cult here in vivec in the re i mean the sewer level i kind of panic because i get attacked as soon as i enter and realize i haven't saved in a while but it goes okay sugarath is even thrilled to see me fetch the fork of horopolation from the mad hermit near aldradena take care with him he's not the most stable man and so i have done enough menial and perhaps not so menial labor to earn my way up to the near top where i get to meet the arch cannon thoeleur sirioni he wants to retire on the condition i make some pilgrimages to the four corners of the house of troubles so when the temple was starting out they had to pay lip service to the old gods of the dunmer who were called kymer back then the daedra the kymer were kind of unique in having their entire pantheon be daedra as opposed to most american cultures that worship aedra but like almer they do agree that lorcan was kind of a prick for pulling that whole mortality stunt the chimer pantheon were split into two groups based on temperament the good and the bad daedra the good daedra were the anticipations boethiah azura and the follow the anticipations were meant to back up the tribunal boethiah is the anticipation of almalexia she was the one who defeated the aedric god trinimac in combat and ate him mephala is the anticipation of vivec teaching the dunmer in trickery and political organization azura is the anticipation of sotha sill she is who they mistakenly attribute their change from the chimer to the dunmer as being a gift we'll get to that next episode the other side of the anticipations are the four corners of the house of troubles these are mehreen's dagon sugar rath malacath and molech ball fans will recognize why these guys have their reputations with dagon and shigerath in particular earning their reputations in this very quest line malacath is alleged to be trinimac although even he himself will admit this is a far more literal interpretation than reality he represents the ostracized which makes a great deal of sense considering much of the old dunmer culture was founded on velloth being contrary to the aldmer molec ball well let's just say there's multiple stories about mullig ball learning his title as the king of rape in more than one meaning of the word each of the daedra worshipped by the dunmer make a degree of sense in terms of their culture boethiah further martial culture mophalla for the political guile azura for prophecy mehrunes dagon for the spirit of warfare sugar wrath malacath for their history has spurned murr and molag bal for their sense of superiority over other races so why in the world are we making pilgrimages to the bad daedra i can guess a few reasons the first is that generally the temple trusts its upper echelon to be faithful enough to deal with the four corners the second guess would be that the temple only discourages danger worship as they don't trust kam and dunmer to do it safely the third guess would be that it is a necessary function of an arch cannon to know the four corners well enough prior to a situation where he would need to know them as seems to happen frequently in dunmer history our first pilgrimage is the malacath and requires the donation of four daedra hearts which are actually pretty easy to get in this game the shrine is surrounded by hostile worshippers luckily i can just avoid them and we recite a giant block of text basically the temple was built on a bad foundation four pillars of trouble or the daedra and yet the dunmer through faith still served the latter thanks to the temple next we journey to a shrine of mehreen's dagon which happens to be at aldsatha we have to kill his worshippers this time and we recite a poem then we go to molag bal who's over at baler and after clearing out the nord populace i hear the distant sound of someone getting hurt which is pretty damn spooky this one teaches me a command humanoid spell which is a slightly overpowered spell if used properly so thanks uncle molag the fourth corner is shigerath and sirioni tells us that we need to renew our pact with him kind of indicating my third guess as being correct we have to do this by locating something called the gamble putty and donating it to him at his shrine at all daedroth where a giant battle is occurring here we get to meet some ordinators and actually we've been seeing them for a while and i spoke on them last episode they're the members of house and doral serving as the militant arm of the temple they aren't to be confused with the buoyant armatures who work up at the ghost gate fighting the sixth house ordinators are the guards of avec and molag mar and apparently get to go out on missions such as this one coordinators are some of the toughest guards in the game and particularly notable ordinators become hostile if you adore their armor which is some of the best medium armor in the base game and will put you on their permanent list this their terrible attitudes we're watching you scum and their proclivity to summarily execute heretics has given them a bad reputation but that's the order of inquisition this is the order of war who are responsible for fighting daedra in the sixth house they are apparently bad at their jobs since to this point their only known mission outside of this one was to recover the robe of saint roars and they failed in that regard they aren't faring too well here either being matched in combat by sugar rath worshipers and mind you one of the works here thinks he's a cat we managed to meet the head of the cult who says we're welcome noting that the ordinators are currently trying to crash the party i hang around for a bit and then slip and work some moon sugar who tells us there's something under his pillow for us the sugar fairy sure enough there's the gamble putty always the first place you look we give it to the statue and it fortifies random attributes as a reward sirioni congratulates us on our work and has one final pilgrimage before promoting us to patriarch not arch cannon oh right you're part of the main quest so we can't replace you his final task is to recover the ebony male the male is an artifact of boethiah and is located at a shrine atop mount sarnabhibi this is levitate 1 and this is levitate 100 and this this is levitate 500. i better knock that off before the xbox crashes anyways we just activate the shrine and boom free ebony mail which is arguably the best armor in the game we even get to keep it and get our promotion to patriarch but was that really it just climb a mountain and activate a shrine no puzzle no intrigue kind of a letdown i have mixed feelings about the tribunal temple on the one hand it's a well fleshed out religion that represents the dunmer well but on the other hand it's another questline with no overarching narrative which is sad after the seven graces and the quest dealing with the false incarnate i would have hoped that the temple had been a bit more exploratory in some of its big themes like the secret authoritarian police thing or its battle with the sixth house even maybe just a questline where we try to repair the temple's presence in tel avani territory it's ironic that some of the most interesting aspects of the temple from the main quest aren't featured at all in the actual temple questline itself that said i do appreciate where the game was going with the pilgrimages i wish all of them were as intricate as the one where you had to drown yourself into display of faith the way the final pilgrimage ends no riddles no challenges just activate a shrine and get your reward there are some quests i didn't do that are combat oriented including one that is basically a ding dong ditch at dagotheur's house and another one that involves wiping out the head of the vampire clans one that involves killing the head of a sixth house cult and a final one that involves killing some danger worshipers in vivec but i got away without doing them because with how the faction is paced you'll end up getting enough rep to end up finishing the faction before you're told about them so ultimately your experience with the faction can be rather dry since the big combat quests it's building to are functionally optional the four factions i covered in this section the imperial legion the imperial cult the morag tong and the tribunal temple round off the final four of the major factions of morrowind the legion somewhat unlike the fighters guild in house redorne is a true warrior faction that requires its members dawn heavy armor the cult and the temple are for monk players providing multiple options for meaty religious factions while also being a good fit for mage characters and the tong sits as the game's only avenue for assassin characters although house who can somewhat fill in that niche there are a couple more technical factions that bear mentioning that didn't get any coverage the twin lamps is an abolitionist organization with a few quests to join you need to free 21 slaves many slaves can be found in various smuggler's caves a few in telvanni territory but the bulk of slaves can be found in halau territory while many dunmer will give their opinions on the topic of abolition it seems that either the idea wasn't able to be fully implemented into a full faction or the implication is that abolition has only recently become a cause due to how recent the empire's arrival on vardenfell was either way i think bethesda wouldn't have had to dance around the issue of slavery so much later on if they had done a proper abolitionist questline in the first place there are also three vampire clans that are functionally similar their only difference being their stat alignments they each only have two quests i was originally going to work them in but honestly i realized they would just be unnecessary wait for the analysis there's a quest line where we get a khajiit girlfriend and captain vero at moon moth fort has a couple quests where we dish out some vigilante justice in balmora i hope that at this point it becomes apparent just why i'm so disappointed in the later games faction choices douglas goodall did a good job of showing how the various factions can interplay and wrote in logical solutions to a few quests the questlines are also far less linear providing unique paths that each repeat playthrough can go down even so far as having completely alternate endings such as in the fighters guild and the sheer number of them three guilds three houses two temples a military and a cult and then you throw in the main quest on top of all that there are also no dynamic quests as they haven't been implemented into the engine yet this means each quest is handcrafted for better and for worse that said there are some quests that are pretty boring but even that can add to the experience and help with role playing not every faction should feel super high stakes in its conclusion and one thing i should note that doesn't seem to come off in my videos is that this isn't an example of morrowind being the perfect elder scrolls game just that i wish it had actually received a sequel instead of a downgrade the factions unfortunately provide little to do after conclusion this is a problem that is universal in elder scrolls once you take over the questline is over another problem is that being the leader of certain factions would provide resolution to certain issues that it doesn't the black jinx quest is a nice example of where that works but many examples where it doesn't are present in the main quest line let's just say that if you do the main quest after completing even one of these factions you will raise your eyebrow at some point in some of the problems for instance being the leader of the tribunal temple would resolve some of the stakes in the questline but the game cannot account for all the combinations of possibilities this is likely one of the reasons bethesda would strip back the number of factions in the later games for example it's doubtful that odro helvey would ask the highest ranking member of the imperial legion to smuggle ebony house tovani would not accept the membership of a prominent member of the mages guild and vice versa there's a clip on youtube where the guy that challenges you before entering saving guard will respond to some of your achievements in your playthrough and people are actually impressed that there are voice lines responding to your achievements in a game with 5 factions my dream for an elder scrolls game is one where these faction combinations would logically play out i like the idea of exclusivity between factions and i hate the idea that the main character of each game is also the character that is supposed to have completed those factions each faction should require a new playthrough so that each playthrough can fully explore a different playstyle without having to compete with already built characters that's part of the reason why i made 7 different characters for this analysis and what i definitely want are factions that you can actually lead they kind of got close with this with the arena faction and oblivion where's the ability to create and assign writs of execution at the risk of angry mephala or handle assignments in the guild or make political decision in the houses i thought the war conference scene in skyrim could have gone so much harder into faction relations if the threat of the main quest line threatens the world then all the prominent factions should be involved but i understand it's a lot of work and it's easy for me to spout ideas on the internet when i don't have much in the way of real experience in game development bethesda needs to get back to making good elder scrolls games before they can start to focus on improving their formula because what i want isn't morrowind it's a true sequel and i think with all the goddamn money they've made that it's about time we got one indaris had encounters with the daedra near the end of his journey so let's see those same daedra from the perspective of a danger worshipper in between the original release of this series and this complete edition there was a new character an orcish warrior known only as umbra morrowind has seven daedra quests rather than including the entire pantheon only daedra relevant to the dunmer culture are worshipped on vardenfell these daedra are predictably the good and bad daedra of the tribunal temple let's tackle the good daedra first azura shrine sits in the open air at the apex of the island's southeastern shoreline despite being the most visible the shrine is empty due to its distance from civilization speaking with the statue azura made a bet with sheil gorath that one of her worshippers could live in isolation for a century and retain her sanity while time's almost up and wanting to win sheogorath has gone and sent a bunch of daedra to her shack to defraud the wager you will come here though [Music] now the quest designer made this nice area where you would fight through waves of daedra up the hill to the shack except i would be willing to bet pretty much everyone who has ever done this quest came at it from the east because they traveled to the island from dagon fell anyways kill all the daedra and grab a signet ring of sheogorath you can actually fail the quest if you go inside the shack which is a good touch you get two rewards from this quest first being the signet ring like most things sheogorath it comes with an up and a downside upside is a 10 point personality fortification while the downside is a 10 point willpower penalty the ring is still useful since you can equip and unequip it dependent on the situation the other reward is azura star a versatile throwing weapon wait is that right for you our thanks and blessing our gift and token given come take this thing from the hand of god take this and use it wisely [Music] let's see what you're made of okay then azura star is actually a reusable soul gem which is especially useful in morrowind because you don't get reliable access to grand level soul gems for a long time even in general the star is useful given the high probability of failure when enchanting it's also the only soul gem capable of capturing the souls of moving on boethius quest it's an easy quest once you figure out how to start it unless you spend a lot of time swimming along the coasts the only non-internet related way to find the shrine is to meet maique the liar and chat with him most of what he says is either or is channeling the rod god todd himself except for discussion on the shrine once you find the shrine at the bottom of the ocean she'll ask you rebuild her shrine in exchange for a fancy sword [Music] her only clue is to find a sculptor in caldera which will eventually take you to the gorok manor an orcish home which happens to house the scamp creeper which is fitting since myiq name drops mr mudcrab but not creeper anyways you meet the sculptor and he says he'll need 2 000 gold in three weeks to build the shrine he's not kidding three weeks pass which i spend doing other quests and the shrine is complete the quest really is that simple as the bulk of it seems to be finding the shrine and waiting the time it's fitting that all boethiah wants is a new shrine to hand over her legendary sword gold brand you have done well the shrine is a worthy one and my power will again be felt she doesn't have any other shrines on vardenfell felon she hands over her only other notable artifact the ebony male to the patriarch of the temple just as easily for being able to treat with the bad daedra and stay loyal ordinarily boethiah is usually involved in deception i'm guessing her characterization here is meant to reflect the fact that of the three good daedra boethiah has the worst pr azura is openly worshipped by the ashlanders and mephala has an entire legal cult in the morag tong meanwhile boethius shrine has probably sat at the bottom of the ocean since the end of the first era i mean it's sitting squarely in the channel which was sunk after red mountain's eruption during the battle of red mountain finally mafallo unlike boethiah and azura her shrine is located in one of the faction hubs which makes sense given her relationship with the morag tong mafala's secretary tells us that she wants us to take care of a morag tong assassin who's been doing some unauthorized freelance work we have to break into his balmora home which doesn't show up on the map without getting within a certain distance of him and poison his kettle before a scarpering this quest is more dynamic than the average morrowind quest although it also has a hefty list of things that can go wrong if you don't do things exactly right you have done well mortal there are some things that must be done to preserve the order and it will be amusing for me when this business comes to light i look forward to it our reward is the ring of khajiit which gives a beefy 30 second invisibility and fortify speed 10 to 20 points for 30 seconds mahala's counterpart representation in the morag tong was a collection quest to find a bunch of sanguine artifacts that she had didn't given out mephala isn't much of a character since she speaks through someone else instead of speaking directly to the player the only daedra in the game to do so but she is the shadow queen this leads into the bad daedra let's handle this in the same order as the tribunal temple malacath wants a four daedra heart donation in the temple quest line while he just wants us to find his shrine at a certa rally paul this is significant because there are eight different shrines to malacath and morrowind zarganapal kasarari shash pilamat ashr nabibi ashur tarteis darshar iran and the shrine of malacath we visit in the temple quest line there's not really any clues which shrine is the one that malacath is taking calls at so you might end up killing 1 or 20 orcs before you find the right one orcs love malacath and malacath loves them back malacath requests we clear up the matter of a dunmer hero or reign bearclaw who was falsely credited with the deeds of his orcish ally and we clear this up by wiping out his bloodline he actually has two separate intros contingent on if you're an orc or not our character happens to be an orc have you come to restore the honor of your people malacath sends you to vivec which in turn leads to gnar mock turns out that ferven arraign is pretty weak and his bodyguards do the bulk of the heavy lifting like virginitor like successor even now the uranes are taking credit for others work the helm you get is a really solid heavy helm with some impressive stats to boot you have and killed there will be no more to follow you have him bring back fire to the obvious people and for that i'm glad malacath's quest here fits his characterization as an orc fetishist i'm just trying to get out premium art content to myself because i love it pal and it looks so good and i it's just that that tight green skin oh can i just say that i love orcs one of the books in the game is a story about the king of the orcs gortois grow nagorn who fought a duel against a breton prince for orsinium except one of gortwag's supporters taught the prince how to fight an orcish armor so that gortwog would have a challenge apparently gortwog believed that malacath was sabotaging the orsimer to keep them as a loyal but outcast society and officially only trinimac was recognized as the god of the orcs i mean he's absolutely right and it's oh so convenient that his orsinium fell during the oblivion crisis the next corner of the house of troubles is mehrunes dagon whose shrine is at yasemidan now i could list all the mehrunes dagon shrines but we actually came here during the morag tong questline to grab one of the threads of the web spinner mehrunes would like us to go to a tomb in malaga more and retrieve mehran's razor why do you call on me little mortal do you seek your death so soon i should crush you where you stand yet you show metal by even approaching me how ambitious are you little one my razor slayer of man and myrrh scourge of all who stand before it lies dormant stolen by an unworthy bearer an elf of little courage or consequence it lies unused gathering dust in the alaska tomb near molag mar return it to me mortal we only find a rusty dagger which we return to the shrine and it's magically transformed into the razor you found my razor good can you feel its hunger can you feel its frustration now i will make it again what it once was what it shall always be draw a line of blood across the land in the name of mehrunes dagon you might ask if that is it and the answer is yes i'm not sure why this quest is so short i mean mehrunes dagon is probably busy planning that whole invasion of tamriel thing and maybe he just wanted someone to bring the blade back into the fold but the quest propper doesn't really have anything to do with the themes or character of mehrun's dagon which is similar to the counterpart tribunal temple questline even his voice actors sound similar to a certain other demonic entity in morrowind what a fool you are perhaps they weren't quite sure what they wanted mehrunes daycon to really be molek ball is the third corner his shrine the relevant one anyways is at yam siramas his counterpart quest in the temple took place at baler a more fitting name and ended with a command humanoid spell so that's the quest to beat moloch ball says that one of his minions mintana has been obeying the temple stay-at-home order instead of going around terrorizing the population why do you summon me now i have no time for your pleadings weakling the daedroth is living in a cave in the heart of the ashlands and we go off to kill it the reward is the mace of molag bal which is a solid mid-tier weapon i mean it's the best mace in the game meaning that it's outclassed by ebony and up long swords this is a pretty simple quest that is also a missing substance the final corner is sheogorath he had the most developed of the tribunal quests as we were renewing our subscription to dunmer's sanity well the shrine we need to visit is ahina palette which we cordially visit and subsequently wiped out during the temple questline even if you kill all the worshippers sugar rath is willing to request that we go up to shea gored meet one of his guys and get the fork of horopolation in order to take out a giant bowl niche plaguing his worshipper what is it mortal have you come to be of service to shaggarath that in and of itself speaks toward your madness this pleases me this can be a bit of a challenge especially if you aren't skilled with short blade you just need to land the killing blow with the fork but it's still a bit of a challenge your reward is the spear of bitter mercy which is not a sugar rath artifact it's a hearsing artifact that was created by marines dagon perhaps you've gotten a taste of madness as well do not believe madness to be a curse mortal for some it is the greatest of blessings a bitter mercy perhaps but mercy nonetheless speaking of hearsing his artifact the savior's hide is a divith fierce tower except malacath worshipers like with all things contend the height is actually a malacath artifact in either event its properties were designed to protect the wearer from the spear of bitter mercy well don't worry because we'll be getting more here scene content in the blood moon expansion it's interesting how much of a variable the daedra quests are it feels like the core of the quests was spaced out to be filled in later and later only came for a couple of the quests of course there are only seven daedric quests compared to the typical 16 in most of the games for the purpose of filling the appropriate danger for the dunmer culture peryite just doesn't fit in but i feel like getting less than half of the daedric princes could only be validated if all of the quests were as meaty as or meatier than the shea gorith quest so let's go on a quest a real quest which doesn't have any journal entries let's get a full set of daedric armor there are only two complete sets in the game one is in the possession of telvani lord divith fear who is level 65 has the thousand health and is wearing said set of powerful daedric armor so we're off to complete the set starting with the gauntlets a pair can be found deep in the ancient dunmer stronghold of kogaroon this is one of the main dungeons of the main quest and is full of sixth house cultists onto the pauldrons the right pauldron can be found in the tower of castle karstag over on salsthyme yeah there are a couple pieces that couldn't be found in the base game outside of divithfear himself the left pauldron is found inside nora rindur a dungeon located in the city of mournhold and truly tribunal expansion this one takes the most effort because you have to do about half of the tribunal quest line in order to open up the dungeon and even then actually finding the pauldron is difficult given the low light conditions i can easily imagine a situation where players cleared this dungeon and didn't realize they were missing on some fantastic loot a pair of daedric boots can be found in the fortress of galim deus a vampire stronghold home to clan burn you are guaranteed to visit the clan during the house tovani questline and can potentially visit it during the tribunal temple questline moving on to the greaves there are three potential pairs to get the first is a reward from mistress drotha of house delvani which will be enchanted with a 50-point feather effect this could help with the immense weight of daedric equipment the second option is that just kathy the stronghold of the vampire clan quora outside of typical adventuring the player is only likely to come here if they become a vampire and either join their patron clan or work for house delvani then the third option is at the drin plantation sitting on a shelf behind komodo tong leader orvis drin a number of quests send you here so the greaves are probably the one piece of the daedric set most players have gotten their hand on it's not even that difficult to steal what with this convenient pole next to drynn the curus has two options and only one of them belong to the base game it's also a reward from mr stratha with its own 50-point feather effect covering about half of its weight the other option is inside noran and der next to where we got the left pauldron finally we have the choice of not one but three different daedric helms called faces in order of lowest to highest armor rating the face of inspiration the face of terror and the face of god the face of inspiration can be found in three places one is worn by galdo omein the leader of the buoyant armagers another can be found in mameya a large sixth house base and a third can be found in eibar dad a sorceress cave that leads into an ancient tomb the face of inspiration is a fitting reward for whichever trial you should wish to face being the second strongest face there are only two faces of terror one is worn by inaro a high-ranking boy and armager so as long as you're willing to eat the bounty of wiping out the ghost gate you could take care of two faces in one go your other option is that anonymia which is a daedric ruin we uncovered during the imperial cult quest line near sagrath mora as the strongest face there is only one face of god in exchange for some matsi a nord in the talvani canton will tell you of a first age nord who was buried in tukasha paul and will provide a key tekashipal is an impressive dungeon there's a maze which is invalidated by levitate so maybe the designer didn't know about the spell when he made the area except the face is hidden on a ledge requiring levitate to reach it's weird but just go with it it should probably be reiterated that a complete set of daedric armor is prohibitively cumbersome at just under 300 pounds you need 60 strength just to wear the armor without any weapons or additional inventory luckily our character for this run was strong enough to wear the full set daedric armor is pretty unique due to its rarity rather than armor being tiered in a vertical progression it's more so a representation of the characters wearing the armor ebony is common among noble fitting since ebony is a valuable material for crafting equipment you can find plenty of orcish armor once you start meeting sects of malacath worshippers and endural armor is plentiful if you spend time fighting the law glass is the second rarest armor in the game most easily found at the ghost gate otherwise you'll only encounter odds and ends of the set which is generally a shame as the dark brotherhood set gets delivered to the player for free so moving on we've got one more big adventure to go on but first this is umbra umbra remarks that he's traveled the world killed many creatures and people alike despite everything he has yet to die and all he wants now is a warrior's death his sword is also named umbra which is because he figures that given his accomplishments at this point he may as well be named after his weapon yagrum bagarn says the sword was enchanted by a witch to steal souls but the sword would later be retconned into being a clavicus vile artifact clavicus vile's mask is actually in the game in a random side quest up in dagon fell which is weird because it's one of the best helms for orcs since it fortifies personality anyways umbra is a powerful two-handed sword while there are other swords that can potentially do more damage umbra will consistently hit harder as its damage range starts at a minimum of 10 damage compared to a daedric daikatana's range starting at a minimum of a one while the concept of the old warrior wishing for a death he's too powerful or too skilled in combat to receive is a bit of a cliche i find it's a good fit for the elder scrolls setting umbra serves as an analog for the fate of the player character once you close the game that last time similar to the concept of halloween from dark souls in fact umbra is largely a metaphor for myself someone who has seen everything the world has to offer the world did so far as vardenfell anyways imagine you're trapped playing the same morrowind character forever you're probably a good person and you probably project an idealistic aspect into your decision making maybe in reality you don't have the power to make things right but in a fantasy world you have the opportunity to bring justice to a situation but play long enough and you'll eventually be drawn to a dark side the number of ordinary people i talked to who casually admit they killed this or that annoying npc in an elder scrolls game for no reason other than being annoying is proof enough of this concept regardless of morality and where you end up there will eventually be a point where the only thing a player character has left to do is die but hey at least we aren't simulating pain and hunger for the purposes of making more realistic video game ai and then wondering why god will allow such evils to exist in our own world let's steer this philosophical nightmare back and discuss vampirism there are three vampire clans on vardenfell and all vampires on the island belong to one of those three bloodlines thus which bloodline infects you determines which type you will become this is your standard rpg triangle fair of warriors thieves and mages and the clans are exclusive per playthrough since once you get cured you can't go back to being a vampire don't worry though unlike the great houses there isn't a wealth of content for you to choose from each clan should you try to join them will shun you and will only give you two quests with which to ingratiate yourself into their ranks i joined clan quora which suited my warrior playstyle best it should be noted that my joining required meta knowledge of the game while all vampires belong to a bloodline which bloodline is not relayed to the player so if you're trying to play while using the wiki as little as possible it's going to be a gamble if you decide to keep your poor fury hemophilia which clan you'll actually end up being aligned with vampirism is a significant change to play style travel changes completely now that siltstrider care paneers and boat captains refuse to speak with you i suddenly found myself using the propylenes to get around and complete my goals while i was a vampire this can be a problem again for the person playing without a wiki since as i've stated before the propylene indexes are fairly obscure and difficult to find i doubt players without access to the wiki or the master index plugin could find all of them that's because many of them are hidden in plain sight in the shop you pass by every time you go from the caldera mages guild to creeper for example would anybody even think to carefully inspect a tent to the wise woman of the urshilaku tribe to find the index for the stronghold closest to two of the vampire bases is this a failure in the system or is this meant to heighten the difficulty for vampires without making it tedious i suspect a certain degree of meta-knowledge is expected for vampires and morrowind because it's meant to cater to players who have already mastered the game to some extent if you're playing this game just because you're a vampire enthusiast don't this is an area where bethesda marginally improved if only by merit of not just having vampirism be an afterthought they were obligated to include because daggerfall also had vampires where bethesda succeeded with morrowind's vampires was in turning the player into a superhuman monster the player will see a significant improvement to strength speed fatigue management and a handful of combat and magicka skills immunity to paralysis and common disease a resistance to normal weapons such as iron and steel and the ability to absorb health there are downsides such as losing the ability to regenerate health when resting a weakness to fire attacks and taking damage from the sun oh yeah and almost everyone on vardenfeld will refuse to talk to you even if you managed to talk to people you'd be unable to do quests or use services now while i would understand a massive personality penalty these limitations mean that vampirism is not a meaningful choice for the player you'll never sit there and go man if i become a vampire then i can finally beat this quest which is kind of the point it's both the curse and a boon of molech ball it's nature changing based on how you interpret it sometimes it happens to people against their will being powerless as a vampire dominates you and turns you either into cattle or sires you into a vampire and sometimes people choose it thinking they can control the temptations that come with it the choice aspect simply isn't there for morrowind which is a shame that said it is still mechanically interesting it's the perfect challenge if you decide to eschew city life and just crawl morrowind's dungeons so how are the quests let's summarize you'll get one quest to kill someone who's wrong the clan and one quest to fetch an item that may involve killing someone while the vampire quests might not be worth going into detail they are somewhat interesting due to the challenges created by having to relearn how to travel this is some ingrained knowledge we're talking about here the most interesting of the vampire quests is ironically a cure for vampirism it starts with getting advised to track down the book vampires of vardenfeld 2. curiously despite its rarity the book is available in a number of familiar locations moaia from the mages guild ordnaran from halau and telvani vos from the thieves guild it seems the player is intentionally meant to encounter the book at least in some playthroughs so they know where to find it the book details a small piece of tamrielic lore regarding vampire hunters and ends with a paragraph telling of a buoyant armager who had been cured of vampirism while gal or rarathi wrote a more detailed account of this copies of which are found in the hidden archives of clan burn the sixth house and the tribunal temple vampires of vardenfeld 2 actually says enough to figure out the cure this involves going to the shrine of balor and requesting molag bal curio so you do not enjoy the blood hunger little leech do you miss the warmth of the sun i'm not sure why his other shrines don't qualify but i didn't make the rules since we've done prior freelance work for molech ball before and have a positive rating we get preferential treatment in the daedric version of fiverr and molog ball gives us a quest he has us kill his daughter mulla grunda who's run off with some atronach this simple task will see us being cured of vampirism little vampire it was not easy for me to obtain the juror but i was able to pry it from their after some discussion we lose most of our newfound power and are given a chance to reintegrate into society it's just that easy again the later games would improve the vampire experience vampires of vardenfeld notes how the cure to vampirism is kept a secret to discourage people from intentionally becoming vampires but morrowind makes the cure look easy skyrim at least made it so you had to damn someone by soul trapping them to get cured but because you can be reinfected and cured again it undercut that theme in the same breath by treating the cure for vampirism like a prescription rather than the human sacrifice it's supposed to be umbra will see a return for the blood moon expansion for now i hope you see that there is more to vardenfell than just a dozen or so faction quest lines umbra was in fact able to carve out an entire adventure out of side dungeons and random quests morrowind is a rich world to explore outside of its semi-scripted questline experiences we are finally shaking the yoke of these black bars and terrible resolutions i'm using openmw instead of playing the base pc copy partially because the base game is in 4x3 it's a stylized part of the game though right well no unlike a hand drawn art style morrowind is a 3d game it can afford to fit on my and now your screens so what do we get for playing on pc cheats that i didn't need or ever use i've had a few quests bug out over the years like a playthrough where my televani stronghold never actually appeared or common longer term playthrough issues like siltstrider guides falling off their platforms but i've honestly had a pretty stable time playing morrowind for this series i suspect this is in part because of the fact that i avoided playing a single character for everything so because none of my characters got more than 20 hours in game there wasn't enough time for any game breaking bugs to happen because remember i was not playing on an exactly stable port of the game until now i was playing on what should have been its buggiest incarnation another perk of the pc is this godly user interface and one right click and instantly all the interface you could need for any situation on the xbox there were four separate panels that you navigated with the black and white who are on more modern controllers bumper buttons that is because your average xbox player is playing from across the room sitting on their couch and needs to be able to see information on screen meaning that the smaller text and icons on the pc version won't cut it here on pc if i say i want to cast a spell i just right click no need to switch over to another panel and the screens are customizable you're able to change the size of the windows so non-magic players can diminish their magic menu you can also sticky one of them onto your screen so you can continue seeing your map while you play but of course that convenient and godlike user interface was traded in for the inefficient divided panel-based system in all bethesda games going forward because console parity we also get a steady frame rate the ai will no longer forget what they're doing for multiple seconds and i will no longer lose button presses into the void of stuttering frame rate overall we're in for an immensely enjoyable experience as i begin to try and break this game in every way i can i'll be brief because if you know anything about morrowind you know about the alchemy snowball in effect the effectiveness of any created alchemy potion is determined by a few factors one of those factors being intelligence some merchants in morrowind restock in ingredients immediately after ending dialogue with them and some of those ingredients fortify your intelligence so grabbing a free set of masters alchemy equipment sitting unsupervised in the caldera mages guild we go to work the early game will look like this i repeatedly buy 10 alchemy ingredients until i have a few hundred or so spam the create potion button sell the buy products and profit once i have a decent chunk of cash i go and buy hundreds of ashiamas and netch leather which is used to fortify intelligence fortify intelligence increases the effectiveness of potions created and the value of potions are determined based on their effect values meaning that i'm grinding these useless drain personality potions out and their value is gradually increasing decreasing the intervals between when i rest and allow nalcaria to restock her cash supply and so morrowind's market was flooded with useless drain personality potions and my pockets were flooded with cash you can go farther with this these fortify intelligence potions increase my magicka by tens of thousands in a game where a thousand magicka is close to the normal limit however the real draw is for training while doing this i gain skill points in alchemy then i go train armored skills like heavy and medium armor and a third attribute skill so every level i'm getting max points and intelligence endurance and a third attribute like speed or strength your overall health in morrowind is determined by endurance in particular however it's determined by your endurance at all levels endurance affects starting health as well as health gain per level so if you have 50 endurance you gain 5 health a level our goal is to get to 100 endurance or 10 health per level as fast as possible this comes pretty quick as i strategically decided that heavy and medium armor were not major or minor skills this meant training was cheap since i was starting at skill level 5. by the time i start playing i'm around level 20. i have several hundred hit points magicka fatigue and high levels and skill and many weapon and armor types as well as utility skills like speechcraft and mercantile and this isn't even the most you can min max in morrowind but it is pretty close so let's go a step farther with a handful of artifacts we can take our character to the next level again this isn't the most min maxed build in morrowind you can go farther depending on what you want to accomplish the first is the apprentice ring which is pretty close to where we start inside a neen this is basic stuff plus 10 to intelligence and willpower this helps the early game alchemy snowball and helps us with some magicka issues our next grab are a pair of boots going north out of caldera we meet a woman desperate for escort to nar mock you'll notice she's quite quick and sure enough after the escort she's willing to part with her magic boots what makes these boots magic are two effects fortify speed 200 points blind 100 points by default the boots will make you very fast and also make the screen look like this and your game will sound like this luckily there is a resist magicka effect which works for negative spell effects but not the positive ones meaning that if you were to reach 100 magical resistance you could resist the blind effect but 100 magic resistance must be pretty difficult to reach due to being overpowered right well no we're already at 50 by default on this character we have the atronach sign which removes our ability to naturally generate magicka but we get 2 times the max magicka and can absorb 50 percent of hostile spell effects in addition we are a breton which comes with an additive 0.5 times to our magicka and 50 magicka resistance long story short we can resist half of the effect by default dimming our screen to 50 in addition if we can cast a one second 50 point resist magic effect then put on the boots we fully resist the blind for the rest of the game and it's a cheap spell effect because the game never updates to check if the resist magicka effect still nullifies the blind effect our next stop is to the blood moon expansion doing the tim vall in the well quest it's pretty easy to dodge the higher level enemies given we have 200 plus speed and timbal is willing to see reason easily giving us the mantle of woe the mantle of woe has a great many effects it fortifies magic of five times which is additive to our 2.5 times it also fortifies conjuration 50 points in exchange we have a 20 point weakness to normal weapons 100 points drain personality setting it to zero and sun damage 20 points which turns us into a vampire but but we don't need to wear the robe all the time which means we can get in fights and access our near 1200 points of magicka then take it off the rest of the time one more artifact the necromancer's amulet which you get from march mage trebonius arturius resists normal weapons 25 percent fortifies intelligence 25 points more magicka restores health one point on self and absorbs spells 25 on cell so now we have regenerating health 75 spell absorption and a partial normal weapons resistance yeah this build wasn't worth it this is because morrowind will rarely rise up to the challenge i've issued and that's part of the charm later elder scrolls games bent over backwards to try and balance the big three specializations out morrowind was unapologetic and allowed wizards to really shine the more creative and more able to take advantage of the game's systems you are the more you're allowed to get out of the game and it's great so let's get started with this main quest [Music] they have taken you from the imperial city's prison first by carriage and now by boat to the east tomorrow wind fear not for i am watchful you have been chosen one month after our arrival we returned to caius who had given us 200 gold to start our work we're now a member of the blades a secret intelligence agency working in service of the emperor our first few tasks seem inane but from the very first quest we're going to be introducing concepts and ideas that are important throughout caius will insist you acquire some experience and i think this is going to reinforce it our first two quests will involve going to the local guilds for some information you know just in case you haven't joined them yet it's no coincidence that as most new players will commonly pick fighter characters our first task is to meet hasfat antabulus over in the fighters guild and ask him about the nerevarine in sixth house colts we've dealt a bit with the sixth house cult before but the revering cult is a new one i promised that that name wouldn't come back up and i lied unfortunately hashtag doesn't have much info on them but he can tell us about the sixth house in exchange for a small favor he wants us to get our hands on a dwemer puzzle box located in a nearby ruin of arkanthan this is a great first quest in order to find a ruin you have to pay attention to the directions given that said it's also a safe quest if you get in over your head you're right next to a legion fort with all the necessary amenities meet snowy granus or as i call him the bridge wizard he's a gear check if you try to play morrowind the same way you would play skyrim granius is your rude awakening and caius warned you on the surface he's little more than a blizzard bandit he's only level three he knows some basic destruction spells and can summon a skeleton but because he is ostensibly the main quest's first mandatory combat encounter he's garnered a reputation obviously he's no match for the monster i've created but he deserves recognition because if morrowind had those dark souls bloodstains they'd be right about here before we enter the ruin proper we have to figure out how to open the door i could be wrong but i think has fat has a throwaway line about it this crank here opens the door arkanthan is an alright little first dungeon it's basically two dungeons the first a bandit area the second a more traditional dwemer ruin our objective and indeed the only reason you're sent here is actually right by the door tucked away in an area not immediately drawn to the eye you could explore this entire dungeon reaching the end a large vertical area and not find the puzzle box only to realize it was by the door the whole time this is owing to the fact that dungeons and morrowind are non-linear but that isn't even entirely true some dungeons in morrowind are non-linear and some dungeons in morrowind are a single hallway leading into a room dungeons and morrowind are realistic by the standards of the universe because in what world would the leader of a group of bandits put its living space as far as possible from the door and in the real world some people were buried in a mausoleum and some people were buried in the pyramids once we return the box to antibolus he gives us some notes on the sixth house and recommends we speak with sharon gramasgob you can read the notes at any time as we'll be getting them back later indeed caius's next orders are to speak with sean gramasgob a local alleged necromancer working out of the mages guild again this is bethesda subtly pushing the player towards a faction if they haven't already joined she'll tell us what she knows about the nerevarine cult in exchange for a small favor she wants us to visit an ancestral tomb grab the skull of one helival andrano and bring it to her read into this she wants us to defile a local tomb steal the skull of a native and give it to an all but confirmed necromancer yeah get used to that feeling she does give us some tools to handle the undead in the tomb which is a nice introduction to the concept of creatures who are immune to normal weapons like iron and steel as they aren't going to be going away i don't have as much to say about this quest as the other one it's more of the same go to place grab a thing the tomb is much smaller of a dungeon easier to get to and more linear i guess there is something to be said for making absolutely certain players are prepared for the coming escalation in difficulty we get some notes on the nerevarine cult and report back to caius caius as an academic wants us to corroborate her findings from the last two missions with a big and complicated mission to collect intel in the big city vivec i don't like questing in vivec and yet i like this quest first it matches the theme of the blades as an intelligence organization collecting information and doing favors second each leg of the quest follows the same format but does something unique third each leg is set in a different part of avec not just different cantons different sections of the cantons making them distinct in a way most vivec quests just aren't we're looking for three people helea edhiranier and himera milo helea is in the foreign quarter and is about to be the victim of a hate crime before we step in you can persuade them to leave helea alone or just kill them afterwards you escort helea across the canton and he gives you some notes on the revering cult and hironier is hanging out in the sewers of saint olms this isn't for fun she is actually hiding down here and finding her will entail searching the canton she's hiding due to a synthesis and excise agent looking for her we deal with the issue and she tells us that the sixth house has become a big client for smugglers but nobody knows why mehra milo is in the library up at the temple she asks we follow her into the back where it's more secluded and tells us a bit about the revering cult and suggests we find a copy of the book progress of truth she even establishes a code word we can use in the event something goes wrong like this is a proper spy story the book can be found in a variety of locations but the easiest is to just buy it at the local rare bookstore you happen to have escorted helea to its rarity is owed to the fact that it has been officially banned by the temple for heresy if you're curious where this is going don't worry we have one more quest before the big reveal caius is now interested in establishing an informant with the ashlanders nomadic tribes native to the island he suggests we find and talk to hassower zanzubani a former ashlander working as a merchant kaios notes that the ashlanders have gift-giving customs and suggest we try to learn more about that we meet up with hassaur and discuss business with him we find out that he enjoys reading poetry and the local bookstore sells three different books that qualify he already owns all three but appreciates the gesture and is willing to tell us what he knows he has some information in the revering cult and on ashlander customs mind you none of that is really signposted you don't get the words by the book on your screen with a marker pointing to the local bookstore you have to figure all this out on your own and with that we finally learn what kias's game is he isn't just collecting information for the sake of academics we were sent here by the emperor himself big u a controversial figure noted for certain seer powers we were released from cyrodiil city prison because we had met certain conditions of the nerevarine prophecy a prophecy that foreshadowed the reincarnation of saint nerevar caius admits skepticism at these claims but as time has gone on and we have gathered information he is somewhat less skeptical however caius makes an important distinction that separates this game from other chosen one-style narratives the emperor isn't just sending us over because we are the chosen one but because there is a need to stop the sixth house the temple is failing the tribunal is growing weaker and vardenfell is under quarantine for a disease that could threaten the rest of the continent whether we are actually the reverend or not is ultimately irrelevant the emperor is just hoping we can solve the situation and as an added contingency should we fail his legions are entrenched in strategic positions across the island to take over we are not the only person capable of stopping this crisis we just happen to be the cheapest at 87 gold as to the situation at present there are two cults on the island that relate to the current crisis the nerevarine cult and the sixth house the dunmer people generally believe in the idea of the revering the same way my country casually believes in revelations that is to say your average dunmer is ultimately unconcerned with the reincarnation of this ancient figure and the imminent apocalypse the nerevarine cult is more interested in this topic and in particular cataloging information forbidden by the tribunal temple at this point in the quest the motivations for the temple to discourage belief in the revering and punish false incarnates is an unknown kaios is hopeful to meet the cult and is dispatching us to meet its alleged leaders in the urshilaku camp this is a rather significant foray into hostile territory up into the ashlands in the north of the island from a story perspective it makes sense from a gameplay perspective it can cause whiplash we go from our first quest having a tough dungeon our second quest having an easier dungeon but then our third and fourth quests are about finding people and figuring out how to get them to tell you what you want and now we're on quest 5 and it's meant to be an escalation and challenge wouldn't it make more sense to start with the talkie talkie missions then move up to the easy dungeon and then the hard dungeon then the long trek north maybe people will get bored all that said the ursulako camp is one of my favorite questlines in a bethesda game you have to figure out how to work your way into this society but rather than having victory assured by presence you have to do so using knowledge of said society knowledge that is not told directly to you by the quest giver but gathered in a prior quest this is just one of many reasons players who try to play on autopilot don't like morrowind because it isn't as simple as walking up to the wise woman and declaring yourself the chosen one you are the stranger and no one here has any cause to believe in you until you prove yourself to earn your way up you have to take into consideration what you learned about thoughtful gifts but it isn't as rigid in formula other means of convincing people such as persuasion or charm spells are still just as valid a means of convincing the residents to arrange a meeting it's a direct interplay of mechanics and storytelling without any kind of arbitrary restrictions we're first directed to zabamund the second to sulmatul he needs to be convinced and there are a variety of options you can try to intimidate him which is dependent on your level you can try to boast of your deeds depending on your reputation you can offer a tribute or should you be practiced in speech craft you can speak of what you've learned on your way here this is one of the few moments where the writer ken rolsten demonstrated an understanding of just what the text-based dialogue system was capable of in terms of skill checks unfortunately it was underutilized and ironically it was douglas goodall who criticized bethesda for not using skill checks and choices in morrowind despite himself never actually using them either but i gotta cut him a break because he wrote enough material to fill two and a half hours of video zabamund once convinced sends you to meet with sule matul he says in order for him to adopt us into the tribe as a clan friend we need to pass an initiation right and recover his father's bow at the urshilaku burial caverns it's interesting to consider how the ancestral tombs are advanced versions of this tribal burial cavern concept it's the little details that make this game great the caverns are a fairly complex dungeon but you'll eventually find the ghost of soul sinopole who on his defeat drops his bow this makes us clan friend and sul matul permits us to speak with the wise woman nabani mesa and so begins a long dialogue with nabani she has a great deal of important insight that plays into the story a bit too much so much in fact that the money even offers to cut to the chase and answer if we are the nerevarine she figures that we are not at present but may become it based on some of the qualifiers and the prophecies that she knows when earth is sundered and skies choked black and sleepers served that yeah this is way too long for pretentiousness like that the big takeaway is that there are seven trials and to present we've met the first which is the one described at the start of the game in the first cutscene we're born on a certain day which day it is isn't clear but it's a reference to our birth sign we're also born to uncertain parents so the nerevarine is an orphan born under a sign trial 2 remarks on immunity to disease trial 3 refers to azura as well as moon and star the fourth trial says that three houses will call us hortator the fifth trial says that four tribes will call us nerevarine the sixth and seventh trials are not particularly clear and with both the stranger and the seven visions we have been told all nabani knows she remarks that there are lost prophecies that she doesn't know that may be in the hands of the temple with that we head back to caius caius takes our notes and informs us he has a new assignment one he warns is going to be tough this is another progression in the difficulty an expectation that the player is supposed to be out and about performing other work for the sake of self-improvement the reason this works especially compared to oblivion and skyrim is that even though this is a plot about a chosen one stopping an ancient threat said ancient threat is as dangerous now as he has been for decades and we have no basis to assume he's even in the final stages of his plans in oblivion and skyrim and actually in fallout 3 and 4 as well there's a constant drive to go from main quest to main quest there are rarely lulls in the action that allow you to disengage from the main quest and engage with the world instead whereas morrowind is more masterful in providing multiple opportunities for the player to diverge and actually play the game so to give an example in oblivion you watch the emperor die in the tutorial giving you specific directions to go to wayne and priory and when in priory you're given explicit directions to hurry to kavach to save martin once you escort martin to cloud ruler temple you're given further urgent orders to investigate the mythic dawn before they summon satan and the four horns of the apocalypse sound i can detail similar lines in each subsequent bethesda game the urgency of finding your father in fallout 3 the urgency of dealing with the dragons in skyrim the urgency of finding your son in fallout 4. urgency removes agency in an open world game and it's the mistake that is often made by writers not realizing the storytelling opportunities presented by the interactive medium instead they want to write engaging movie plots that build tension which means that the world is neglected in the process you cannot play a character that doesn't have these urgent issues in the back of their mind without undergoing some form of mental gymnastics but i understand a desire to generate tension in a storyline and morrowind begins its dramatic rise with this quest from here on it becomes much more difficult to ignore the pressing threat of the sixth house which is not a bad thing what i'm arguing for is simply early stepping off points in the story of course our broken character is more than ready for the situation according to caius a legion patrol found a sixth house base so we need to locate it take it out and see what we can learn we go to meet with rey sepulia at buckmoth and she tells us that the base is near narmock the original party was entirely wiped out with a single survivor shambling back to the base afflicted with corpus barely eking out the cavern's location at a lunaby asking the locals in narmac we managed to find the cave and it's a nice place [Music] this is degoth garris he's an ash school garrus tells us that we should go to red mountain and meet daggethury with open arms and that the sixth house will continue to be at war with us until then then he attacks us he's a tough cookie a fitting challenge to the rising escalation but with his dying breath he curses us with corpus an infectious incurable disease that will gradually deform us into a zombie caius figured this would happen and refers us to dr fear the principal researcher of corpus on the island there is a missed opportunity to have fast travel services refused to serve you diegetically reinforcing the seriousness of this infection with a mechanical inconvenience diphther is interesting he lives in a remote area with his four clone daughters and contributes to society by caring for the victims of and trying to cure corpus disease but while he hasn't cured it yet what are the odds of him curing it in time to save us i mean it'd be a bit contrived go down to the corpuscerium meet the last living dwarf ask any questions you want take some levitation potions up to divots get a potion pour it down your throat and while not getting cured the negative effects are removed rendering us immune to disease okay there's a lot going on different fear is an ancient dunmer wizard hence the skepticism of the seriousness of events he lived to see the fall of the dwemer the rise of the tribunal and the change from resident to morrowind he's seen his share of wars occupations and the occasional danger crisis we also meet jagram bergaarn who claims to be the last living dwarf he says that while he was out in oblivion at the time of the disappearance and spent a great deal of time looking for his people to no avail eventually he was afflicted with corpus and found in the full thrall of the disease by divith fear who restored him to some partial sanity the corpus affliction for both him and us is a bit advantageous while it causes less than desirable growths all over the body and mental degeneration similar to dementia it also stops the progress of aging this renders its victims effectively immortal one of the reasons despite yagram's health he is so long-lived obviously there are some questions no the treatment we are given doesn't work for others if you return to divith he will remark that it killed the other patients he tried it on even if it had our objective is to stop the source of corpus meaning that its applications as a reproducible way to become immortal are non-existent we might have gotten some more info in the years following morrowind had the redcon year never happened as to why it works for us i'm just going to assume divine intervention from azura just keep this little corpus thing in the back of your mind moving forward on our return to caius he informs us that we're being promoted to operative this is the highest rank he can afford us at this time as he's being recalled to cyridal city for events possibly related to elder scrolls iv but not to worry operative makes us the ranking blades member in vardenfell at least to caius's knowledge this marks the beginning of our operations as an independent agent this is one of the big reasons i like morrowind because as the chosen one we don't have to answer to a boss like the other games oblivion was absolutely terrible in this regard skyrim was a bit better by turning our bosses into mentors but let's be honest we still didn't have any agency kaios final standing order is to find the lost nerevarine prophecies and bring them to damani mesa our first step then should be to meet with mera milo and vivec again and share what we learned from the urshilaku ashlander tribe however mera is missing and in her quarter she has left a note to emea uh my brain's on autopilot i don't remember what amaya is supposed to mean what do well luckily we have the journal i may hype this game up to be hardcore and require some serious mental firepower to solve mysteries that only smartypants big brained boys like myself can do that's not really true the designers were generally pretty smart about using the journal to relay critical information to the player or you could just be lazy and use the wiki this creates a near constant sense of dramatic irony where the player character is remembering and intuiting information that the player might not i didn't use the journal a lot but that is owing to my experience with the game occasions when i did use the journal were immensely helpful especially since the player character often notes down directions to places in the journal one problem i do have that was introduced in a patch for morrowind is the quest log this allows you to keep an active tab on all the quests you have at any given time it's pretty ubiquitous for role-playing games right and it makes sense finding journal entries for a quest you accepted two weeks prior can be difficult but i suppose it comes down to a difference in philosophy to me i tend to play very focused characters doing quests in order of urgency and often saying no to quests that are out of my way or are uninteresting most people seem to rack up a great number of quests simultaneously accepting every quest that gets thrown at them so for most people a quest log is necessary to keep track of all that information i think it's irresponsible to promise to do quests only to just let it sit in your log for weeks if not months are you really going to let that rancher's guar get attacked by mud crabs while you work on your dissertation on the dwarves i think the topic system they also introduced in that patch was a much more effective means as it allows you to find all the information you have kept entries on in one location giving the player easy access to old information without making it too easy for players on autopilot anyways milo's missing and we need to find her her note is pretty explicit she's tied up at the ministry of truth she left a few levitation potions for me and wants me to bring some divine intervention scrolls we also get directed to speak to alvela saram which is one of the door guards so where is the ministry of truth oh it's the currently crashing meteor hovering above the city you know it's a very dunmer idea to imprison your thought criminals in a giant floating meteor instead of maybe gradually mining the thing out of the sky this is a stealth mission as indicated by the stealth equipment kaios happened to give us before he left or rather this would be a stealth mission if anyone other than me were playing it what do you want what do you want we meet up with milo she's one of the prisoners up here and she takes a scroll of divine intervention and says i need to meet her at the dissident priest monastery hello mayan and i can get there from ebonheart through a woman named belotta heteria we go fishing with blotta and arrive at the monastery which is currently closed the shield guarding haloa mayan only opens at dusk and dawn a reference to azura so we wait until it opens and head inside mehra thanks us for freeing her and directs us to speak with master baralo who heads the dissident priests he gives us three pieces of critical information the lost prophecy the seven curses and information on kagrenax tools you might recall during our mages guild investigation into the disappearance of the dwarves that kagernach and his tools had come up yeah they might be important the lost prophecy i'll let you read it and i'll discuss the big points the first refers to being born in an ancient family foreign to morrowind and dragonborn dragonborn in this case just refers to origins from somewhere in cyridil not the ret kania meaning where the dragonborn are the universal chosen one format that learn the dragon language the prophecy goes on to discuss what the outlander incarnate will do going beneath red mountain countering the seven curses his star-blessed hand wielding the blade thrice cursed to punish the unmourned or sixth house so what are the seven curses the note we're given lists them as follows the curse of fire of ash of flesh of ghosts of seed of despair and the curse of dreams fire in ash it is a volcano island flesh is corpus which we've beaten ghosts seed and despair likely to refer to curses yet afflicted and the curse of dreams refers to dreams our character as well as other people named dreamers have been afflicted with one example being elville vidron from the temple questline who mistakenly believed himself to be the revering one thing i could not mention in the tribunal temple section was that being the nerevarine is a potential solution to that particular quest as you can prove that he is not nerevar incarnate however this particular solution is rather confusing as it's a very short window where you would actually be able to complete the quest in this manner another dreamer is varvar sorethi from the radorin questline whom was corrupted by an ash statue into killing his friend there are also a host of named npcs in the world who exist as normal civilians who will gradually become dreamers as you do the main quest what about the blade cursed thrice this is in reference to one of kagernak's tools keaney he had three tools wraith guard keening and sunder keaney is probable as the blade as it kills any who wield it without wraithguard we gain some additional juicy details according to the dissident priests the dwarves disappeared at the same time as the battle of red mountain for entirely unrelated reasons at this time nerevar and dagether went into the mountain finding the tools as well as the heart of lorcan one of the aedra who was punished for creating mortality nerevar had tasked dageth with protecting the tools and went to speak with his counselors whose name may be familiar vivec omalexia and sawthasil or the tribunal when the tribunal led by nerevar went to red mountain dageth had apparently gone mad and refused to hand over the tools he was driven off and the tools were recovered each swore to never use the tools but following nerevar's timely and convenient death the tribunal went to lorcan's heart and used the tools to gain divine power daggeth eventually returned himself also having divine power and took control of the heart keening sunder and the red mountain and ever since then has fought a shadow war with the tribunal temple dagether is unable to quickly win as he does not possess wraith guard and the temple are unable to win as they can't access the heart the temple thus censors the dissident priests the revering cult and the false incarnates as there is some measure of shame felt for their inability to properly control the situation however the dissident priests are not against the temple they recognize the real enemy as still being dagether so with these three pieces of information we go to nimani mesa this is the beginning of the second act of morrowind and it begins with our return to the urshilaku tribe we tell the lost prophecies to the money until she memorizes them she then sets us down the path of completing the seven trials trials one and two are done but sulmathul is the one who knows of the third trial before he will share the third trial he wishes us to pass a warrior's test by journeying to kogaroon a sixth house stronghold we are to acquire a corpus weeping a house degoth cup and the shadow shield kogaroon is an extensive dungeon featuring three separate environments and a lot of monsters [Music] [Music] okay [Music] kogaroon is a logical progression of difficulty from a lunaby being longer more populous and far from resupply i suspect many will have given up on morrowind long before now if a luna bee was the final test kogaroon is the job you get after graduation it really is a great dungeon upon our return to silmatul he tells us the riddle of the third trial the eye of the needle lies in the teeth of the wind the mouth of the cave lies in the skin of the pearl the dream is the door and the star is the key i wish i could experience solving this riddle for the first time again unfortunately i know exactly where this riddle ends the eye of the needle is our objective the teeth of the wind refers to a coastal entry point into the island the skin of this pearl is the most obscure part but it is supposed to refer to a bright rock that can guide you this quest is one of the reasons i disagree with the sentiment people including these skywind devs have about waypoint markers in particular that if you don't like them you can simply turn them off the problem with that sentiment is that when games get frustrating if you suffer through there is an eventual sense of catharsis at solving a puzzle however if the option to have the answer shown to you is always available then when the moment of frustration arrives rather than earning that sense of catharsis you take the easy way out i know this to be true because it is something that happens to me as well i like the game dishonored a bit i know it's a non-sequitur but it took me a while to understand why people i knew didn't like the game until i realized i had made a change in the menu options that most people had not i was given a good piece of advice before starting the game to turn off the waypoints this made the game way more interesting since i was fully exploring the levels and actually finding my objectives not just following a waypoint the only reason it works for dishonored and not other games however is that dishonored is a fairly linear game that also specifies directions to locations in the game whereas most modern games rely on waypoints because there simply isn't time to do that in development now imagine morrowind with waypoints a lot of the quests i've described in this line as well as in the other parts immediately begin to suffer because of a lack of intrigue and a lack of catharsis for figuring it out not just the big quests like this where the whole point is to discern a location based on a riddle but other quests like the quest to find tell fear during the cure or how about the quest to find the informants they become a lot less interesting if you have a waypoint leading you directly to the source the cavern of the incarnate once found can only be entered at the hours of dusk and dawn a staple for azura in the dawn hour under azura's star the door is opened inside is a statue of her and a ring within her hands this triggers a cut scene nerevar reborn incarnate your first three trials are finished now two new trials lie before you seek the ashlander ashkans and the great house counsellors four tribes must name you nerevarine three houses must name you hortator my servant nabani meza shall be your guide and when you are hortator and nevereen when you have stood before the false gods and freed the heart from its prison heal my people and restore morrowind do this for me and with my blessing sadly moon and star is somewhat underpowered it's a constant effect that fortifies personality and speechcraft five points it's meant to signify two things nerevar's supernatural power of persuasion and proof of identity most people won't care or acknowledge if we wear the ring and said supernatural power pales in comparison to the power of the bribe i mean really you couldn't have afforded the legendary ring of nerevar to be absolutely ridiculous like 25 or 50 points fortified there are random items given to us by previous incarnates who were not the nerevarine with more use than moon and star like these levitation pants from here on morrowind's questline becomes non-linear the next obvious step in what i did would be to return to the urshilaku inform them of what happened and seek to be declared their nerevarine sulmatul grants us this title and the bonnie although azura labeled her our guide only really has some basic information for moving forward after which we never have to speak with her again important to note however is that from here on the temple and house for doran becomes somewhat hostile as we are being persecuted as a false incarnate thus let us begin the journey of becoming hortator and the reverine starting with household i ask about the hortator in balmora and get given a book with all the council members listed and for a 50 gold bribe i get directed specifically to uncle curio these hortator quests are going to have a lot of overlap with the house quests themselves i enjoy this aspect and appreciate the effort whether or not you are a member of one of the houses or even its leader has an impact on how these quests proceed if you are the leader of a house then you are pre-qualified to be their horitor but remember that they are also exclusive so you still have to experience the other two i go to meet crasius curio and ask to become hortator if you have a disposition of 70 something i was just too short of something i was just too short of just too short of what is it peasant i am not amused he is willing to vote for you in exchange for a kiss otherwise it costs 1 000 gold what i like about the hortator quests is that it introduces you to the cultures of the factions you're meant to be representing in a way that is consistent with the culture of the faction hello in particular will involve a great deal of bribery and political manipulation something that also happened a great deal to rethin one thing i had considered doing for this video since i was on pc and have some experience with the editor was making a small mod that put my custom characters as faction leaders who would name us hortator in order to skip any redundancies since for the most part the horgitor process is nearly identical to the endgame questlines of each great house becoming halau hortator will entail finding the counselors and gaining their vote dram barrow will vote for you if you manage to find him although at least this time we don't have to bare knuckle cage match his pet nord yingling half-troll asks for money which i oblige him the crasius suggested we kill him the remaining two councillors nirvana ooles and valanda amani are under the control of one orvis drin this part of the quest will be new material since my conversation with dren goes a bit differently than ruthen's conversation did i tell him i want to become horchatura to defeat dagether and he attacks me saying the tribunal betrayed the dunmer when they signed the armistice with the empire and that daggethur had already made him a better offer you can actually convince orvis to peacefully support you but considering orvis drain is responsible for a lot of suffering on vardenfell and he doesn't recognize that tiber septim was as powerful as the tribunal when they signed the armistice my decision was easy there is no escape die after which hulas and amani are receptive to the idea of supporting us and with that crasius names us hortator something i'll note is that each of these hortator and the revering quests give the unique magical item like the halau belt of the horch tour that gives a constant 20 point magicka bonus but a lot of them aren't really notable and i did not use them our next stop was the house doran in all droon i know it's kind of late to ask but is the correct spelling with an apostrophe or a dash in order to become rador and hortator we need to figure out if any of the counselors can get our foot in the door most will be hostile to the idea but through process of elimination you will eventually meet athens cerrethi who will say that all but one council member will support us bolvin venom but first he wants us to rescue his son varvar serethi from venom manor this is similar to the redoran version of events except i was a lot more violent than jibindaris was [Music] [Music] [Music] ah [Music] from serrathy says that if we defeat volvo and venom in an honorable duel that the other councilors will find no reason not to support us as hortator these honor games are an important part of rador and culture but they are just as willing to commit duplicitous acts serathi certainly stands to gain politically from us taking care of venom the other councilors are willing to support us as hortator despite everything because we are willing to fight dagether and thanks to serathi's good word miner erebar mentions that there were rumors of us being an imperial spy which is simply ridiculous and so after gaining the support of the councillors we confront venom and he initiates the duel challenge this means going out of our way to go to the vivec arena because why would a faction that frequently has honor duels be host to an area to have said duels and because of course this game is going to pit us one last time in the arena things go a bit differently on pc than they did on xbox [Music] ugh [Music] um anyways serathi now confirms us as hortator and gives us a sealed package the note basically says that while we are committing high acts of heresy the temple holds that if we are acting in the best interest of vardenfell and are able to become hortator nerevarine then i can present myself to arch cannon cereoni for a private meeting talvani's hortator process is a little different from its questline like the other houses the council has to unanimously agree on the appointment for the telvanni questline proper however uforath never actually had to meet the entire council as is custom without stelvani one potential solution to becoming hortator should a counselor not support me would be to simply kill them i believe you can do this in any order but master arion is the only unconditional vote and he's willing to explain the other counselors for you master nelloth has an ill-temper probably from those muck-based ointments his mouth keeps using mr sterotha hates men mistress therana is crazy and arch magister gothrin will stall indefinitely for no reason likely needing to be killed an outcome arion admits is beneficial to him five i've already said this before but each counselor lives atop a tower that can only be accessed with a levitation effect so even without doing the televaudi quests you have to engage in this quirk of tilvani society nelloth is receptive to us being hortator in exchange for a 1 000 gold bribe and also us going away therana confirms as his horchator provided we perform a party trick for her drotha even after a few thousand golden bribes isn't too receptive on account of our masculinity and with that arion gives us the useless robe of the hortator a simple quest line but fully reflective of telvani culture now we're starting on the three remaining tribes that must name us nerevarine for the trials to be complete we start with the ahamessa tribe who live in the grey's lands near the coast one of the tribesmen recommends i speak to one of the gula cans they pass me up to the wise woman apparently the ahamessa have no ashkan so she speaks for the tribe she is willing to name us nerevarine however the ehomesa are in need of a safe place whenever the ejemessa have been threatened she says they would go to alt daedroth it's worth noting that this is a low-key admission that the ihomesa are daedra worshipers but now a full-time sugar rath cult have taken up residence in the shrine i am to go to all daedrouth and make it safe what defines safe can actually vary in another elder scrolls game safe would be the complete and utter annihilation of the current population all day drought much like in the temple quest line is currently in a state of war between a group of ordinators and some sugar rath worshipers i love when the game intersects quest lines like this it just as easily could have picked another unused daedric ruin to set this quest you want another one well one of the later mages guild quests has you setting up a meeting with this same agemessa wise woman here i run into and have to talk with ordinators who want me dead what makes this quest interesting is that i can speak with the leader of the sugar rath cult and he can be convinced or coerced into allowing the ahamesa to use all daedroth as a refuge in fact all these sugar wrath worshipers are named npcs unlike other games that would simply name them cultists or bandits or what have you it was post-morrowind and tribunal that bethesda went back to using generic names for enemy npcs so begins the process of us demonstrating the safety of all daedroth now the ruin is across the water from the tribe but luckily the wise woman can water walk funnily enough she's also a spell creator and since i know fortify attribute i cook up a little fortify speed spell to make this go by quicker this proceeds to immediately backfire when she gets distracted by an underwater enemy she can never reach and goes sprinting off into the sunset at high speeds [Music] come to me and bring rava through fire [Music] after a few minutes we arrive and having proven the shrine's safety relatively at least cinema is willing to make us the hamas in the reverine deeper into the interior of the gracelands is the zainab tribe to quote one of their own tribesmen our great chief does not stand on ceremony indeed the ashkan doesn't care as much as others about going through the gula cans or thoughtful gifts we met the zainab during the halau questline he's skeptical of the idea of an outlander being the nerevarine so he dispatches us to deal with a vampire named calvario and that's that i have no more quarrel with you open in w way more stable than vanilla anyways cachad is thrilled we killed calvario and sensing the opportunity to take advantage of an unwitting hero something i'm surprised didn't happen more often gives us his most ridiculous request to mind he wants us to find him a high-born televani bride a pretty one with big hips and bring her back for marriage he suggests i go to the televani lords well the ones left anyways and inform them of the significant political opportunity of marrying off one of their daughters he wants us to consider the many daughters offered and choose for him the finest and suggests we consult the wise woman to learn of his tastes sonamoo the wise woman is realistic no telvani lord is going to marry their daughter off to an ashlander ash can or otherwise i don't think any of the telvani lords are even specified to have children instead and i want you to listen until i say otherwise instead we are to go to her friend to seville amane a slave mistress at tel arun buy a slave dress her up as a member of high society and bring her back to the camp and present her to keshad as a highborne telvani bride because he won't know the difference alright you can pause the video and leave your comments now of the more morally dubious things we've done in this questline i'd say this is about as worse as it gets and it's kind of unnecessary of the new reverend quests this tribe is the longest most intricate and pointless you already had the calvario quest just make that one more complex i guess the point is that in order to save the day we have to engage in a little local culture slavery anyways the slave in question doesn't really seem to mind the situation we get her some nice clothes until vani bug musk which fortifies personality and escort her back to the village she's happy to have nice clothes then she is technically going to be set free even if that is into a life of rearing children kashad is impressed and names us nerevarine for our work i think this is what goodall was complaining about when it came to ralston's writing being more grounded in historical parallelism generally speaking maric societies have different conceptions of personal relationships and reproduction on account of their longer life spans the dunmer are the type of culture that would focus on trying to produce higher quality children rather than a higher quantity like the races of men do this is also the game's only instance of a non-beast race being enslaved which is technically canonical the telvanni were supposed to keep slaves of all races even the dunmer but rolston was the one exploring that idea with this quest and the john hawker character while goodall seemed to maintain the idea that only the beast races were being enslaved of the four tribes the arabinism are the least plused about the nerevarine one of the tribe's people suggests we skip talking to the ashkan and gulakans and go straight to the wise woman as the khans see the prophecies as foolish superstition the wise woman says as such the ashkan uleth paul hates outlanders and she says that he is a bad leader she says that while he is the ashkan the arabinism will love war and hate outlanders so in order to change things we need to kill the leadership of the tribe and install han ammu one of the more peaceful ghoulicans as ash can i go to oolath paul who makes the mistake of attacking me when i mention the revering prophecies and so i'm forced to kill the leadership of the tribe then the wise woman has me go to han amu who accepts the artifacts i collected from the other cons and becomes ashkan and he names us the revering of the arabinism what i find funny is the bleed over of gameplay elements into the story we give him an axe that boosts his strength an amulet that boosts his willpower and a robe that boosts his intelligence and then boom he's stronger bolder and smarter that said this is also the most undercooked of the nerevarine quests its simplicity i suspect can be owed to the remoteness of the camp and the general undercookedness nature of the region the camp is in the only real crossover with the tribe is the legion quest where they let a missionary get kidnapped by the mabragash and so in a short span we have become hortator of three houses in a reverend of four tribes the hortator quests give us a taste of the houses we represent while the revering quests introduce us to the value system of each tribe it's not lost on me that the number of factions in this section is the same as the number of daedra in the traditional dunmer pantheon three houses for the anticipations and four tribes for the four corners while the houses are pretty straight forward i for the life of me couldn't tell you which tribes are meant to correspond to which daedra while the synopsis of the section was short it's important to note that the player is expected to complete all six of the other faction quests completely independently of any specified direction you have to figure out where to go who to talk to by yourself so for someone doing this for the first time assuming they aren't using any kind of guide this series of quests will genuinely take some time or if you're level 20 and have 50 reputation you can entirely skip this phase level 20 is easy a few of my xbox characters like indaris got there but 50 reputation will require playing a significant number of the factions to reach it it's actually more work to complete the quest in this way but it's nice to see the game rewarding general heroics as a potential avenue even if it's at odds with my general distaste towards characters who are used to complete all of the content and so we start the sixth trial kicking off the beginning of the third act of morrowind we start by heeding the message of the arch cannon and meeting with dansel and dulles who informs us of a method to sneak into the private quarters of the arch can and thole or cerioni the arch cannon lays out the situation the temple is duty-bound to oppose false doctrine and our association with the empire has hurt our credibility yet we have been chosen hortator in nerevarine and the temple is now in crisis with dagether failing to protect vardenfell from the growing sixth house threat this is represented by the number of dreamers across the island and the number of quests and other factions that involved the sixth house the situation is bad and sirioni informs us that the best person to talk to would be vivec himself and warns us against encounters with the ordinators keep moving as you can see open hostility thus begins our conversation with vivec and there is a lot to unpack here he starts by informing us that he is ending the persecution of the reverend in the dissident priests mentioning that it was the zeal of beryl sala that led them down that path a fact confirmed in the house halau questline vivec will proclaim us nerevar incarnate to all of morrowind and he is doing this whether we like it or not second he proposes to give us wraithguard to do with what we wish under oath we are free to break to defeat dagether and preserve morrowind vivec gives us a simplified plan we go to red mountain we acquire sunder from viminal and keaney from a drosol take keaney sunder and wraithguard to daggeth ur the location find the heart of lorcan and sever dagether's connection to the heart ending the blight to do so we have to strike the heart at least once with sunder three times with keaney while wearing wraithguard vivec is then willing to host a great deal of questions about dagether for starters he has seven brothers who share his power of immortality resurrecting after death at the heart dagether was of the same age as lord nerevar he is highly intelligent but extremely delusional able to invade dreams to influence the lower ranks after the defeat of daggeth irv avec will have a great deal to say for now he is focused on protecting vardenfell however there is another path that must be discussed morrowind has no essential npcs this means that any npc whom you desire dead or dies by some circumstance is well dead this can pose an obvious problem if quest npcs die but isn't too big an issue because it is an exceptionally rare circumstance that an npc's life is outside of the player's control this circumstance i refer to are the two instances in earlier quests where we escorted an essential npc through a hostile area when people complain about essential npcs i understand both sides of the argument there's a degree of player freedom that is lost when you're unable to kill whom you choose this is especially bad when what the player considers a valid choice are told that their choice is invalid because for the moment that npc is invincible however the other side of the issue is the more dynamic npcs of a post-moral wind elder scrolls game a lack of essential npcs worked for morrowind because again the player has total control over when npcs die this is fundamentally untrue in something like oblivion where npcs are beholden to schedules or more complicated quests such as battle scenes it is disingenuous to make the statement that oblivion fallout 3 skyrim or fallout 4 are better games with one simple fix said fix being the removal of all essential flags that said i will say that it should always be within the player's hands to choose if npcs may live even if it functionally breaks the game i would propose this be as simple as npc's being unable to be killed unless the player delivers the killing blow i can already hear the counter-argument yeah but what if the player missed a blow and accidentally killed an important npc that's what saves her for or you can live with the consequence of being terrible at the game besides such circumstances would be much much rarer than the current situation of players realizing they lack freedom when an npc is simply knocked down instead of killed however a critical piece of the design that comes with total player freedom is what i will call the quest of last resort in morrowind it is called the back door in fallout new vegas it is the yes man route in fallout 4 it is the minutemen in morrowind if an essential npc dies a message reads out with this character's death the thread of prophecy is severed restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate or persist in the doomed world you have created this is an effective means of relaying to the player that they have killed an essential character without the hard limitation of stopping the player however even if you get this message it doesn't actually mean you're locked out of ending the game in order to take the back path it starts with how much you know or can figure out about how to defeat daggeth ur we need to acquire the unique dwemer artifact off of the vex corpse the information you need to intuit deveck is in possession of wraithguard appears as late as our encounter with the dissident priests making the back path a possibility but honestly i consider it a high improbability that anybody actually figured out it even existed without the editor anyways assuming you have killed vivec and found the artifact you are not told what to do next consulting the chief dwemer expert jagram bagarn is the next step he will only help you if you have more than 20 reputation and will ask you to grab kaepernick's journal and plan book from two separate ruins inside of red mountain but what if jagram began was the one you killed in speedruns of morrowind you can see people bum rush keaney and sunder and using them without needing wraithguard if i remember correctly this works because the deadly part of these weapons are a script that requires you hold the weapon for a certain amount of time something they bypass with hotkeys another solution would be to just have so much health or active healing to mitigate the damage in any case should yagram fix wraithguard the artifact will require a permanent 225 point loss in health a significant sacrifice but will allow you to wear wraithguard without worry it's actually a glitch the health loss was meant to be a check to verify the player was an appropriate level not a sacrifice again this is another basic fix from here you will have to figure out the basics of the plan from vivec's library in a set of notes in this chamber that detail how to defeat dagether so from here both the main questline and the back door converge into the end sequence of morrowind the citadels of the sixth house is unfortunately where the game ultimately falls apart the plans involve a series of raids across red mountain to assault the sixth house and defeat the brothers of dagothur in theory each brother defeated will awaken dagether in practice the script is broken because degother has not been loaded into the game yet scripps cannot modify his stats according to the unofficial elder scrolls pages you can visit him first then kill his brothers but there are some obvious thematic and priority issues with doing that part of the speculation surrounding this game was the theory that the sixth house was going to be joinable this is alluded to in the questline when we meet degoth garris if this was the case it was cut very very early in development i suspect originally we were to have met with dagether and made a decision regarding our allegiance at some point before now in the main questline however because this never happens degather is never loaded and the script doesn't work this leaves little reason to visit the ash vampires beyond the artifacts they carry while they are somewhat varied in power none of these artifacts are so interesting that i'm tempted to drop everything to go get them the original spirit of the quest as was written in the dialogue was going to be a true war with the sixth house involving a series of excursions into red mountain and complex battles with ash vampires instead it is as simple as peeking our heads inside two dungeons then walking straight up to dagether the failure of this quest ultimately lets down the earlier sections of the game it is functionally irrelevant for us to be hortator of any house or reverene of any tribe beyond taking off an artificial box that tells vivec we are the nerevarine there is a crippling sense of isolation because not even the buoyant armagers or ordinators stationed inside the ghost gate help in our quest we are completely alone and this crushing sense of isolation coupled with a complete lack of reward for our efforts undermines red mountain entirely the entire game this entire video i have barely discussed the region that is red mountain and now that we're in the principal part of the rain quest for which this large section of the map was reserved i have almost nothing to say because i honestly spent so little time here in fact i even forgot to meet the avatar of tiber septim that shows up at the ghost gate i feel like i've automatically failed as an analyst for this yet i honestly can't fault myself because of how disappointing red mountain is if i was to propose a fix a fix i may well work on at some point i would start by giving the player the option to go to the leaders of each faction to ask for assistance you could then assign each faction to one of the citadels inside red mountain this would place a camp for each faction in front of the ghost gate and there would be parties at each stronghold strongholds would be reworked to be high level end game content and each brother of daggeth ur would be a boss fight by getting the help of each faction npcs would spawn in the stronghold to fight the forces of the sixth house and you may even get companions from each faction to fight alongside you for a boss fight killing each brother would also be essential to battle degother as i would buff him to be absurdly difficult to kill while his brothers still live i would also rework their artifacts to be more useful with these changes becoming the wartime leader of each faction actually has a functional use these are just ideas so if any morrowind fans have made it this far please propose some ideas for me down in the comment section and so we go to the mouth of the volcano to confront de gather kamnerovar [Music] where we last met countless ages ago come to me through fire and war i welcome welcome moon and star i have prepared a place for you [Music] come bring rape guard to the heart chamber together let us free them cursed false gods welcome thereof together we shall speak for the law and the land and shall drive the mongrel dogs of the empire from morrowind is this how you honor the sixth house of the tribe unmourned come to me openly and not by stealth welcome moon and star to this place where destiny is made degather is a location in addition to a god dagothur the dungeon is a sad dungeon functionally being a straight line from the entrance to the man himself after arkanthan a lunaby the urshalaku burial cavern and kogaroon it's fairly disappointing but remember that lever from arkanthan this is what it was preparing you for an entire dungeon to teach the player to use a lever to open a door given this is our only chance to converse in the magnitude of the situation degather has been given probably the broadest and longest conversation in the game in which a great many topics come up he asks if we are truly nerevar reborn how you answer is up to you when the spectrum of options is represented from true belief that we are then a reverend to skepticism of the entire notion he then asks for our intentions with the heart of lorcan and finally he asks that if he had offered to let us join him would we have surrendered kagrenax tools after which we're free to ask our questions of him his plans for the heart the sixth house and the dunmer he justifies his actions as a sovereign entity he shares that he has little knowledge of what truly happened to the dwemer and his use of the giant robot in the next room once the conversation is over dagether acknowledges us as the challenger and offers us the first blow you couldn't even get that right what a fool you are did you get the false copy of morrowind dagether is on the level of some medium tier npcs from fallout new vegas it's hard for me to be so blunt about something i like but it is true it isn't until you get to dagether with varied conversation response options and having responses to your responses that the missing potential of the tech space dialog system is fully realized there is absolutely no reason that npcs couldn't have had more dialogue options and responses baked into the game because it is easier to write out dialogue in a text box than it is to voice act it it is worth stressing that the topics in the dialogue menu are meant to indicate when the player asks something while you can ask a lot of questions it is sadly true that the nerevarine like the hero of kavach and the dovakin are another in a lineage of protagonists who are spoken to rather than using an active voice and so dagether is defeated if it seems strange for me to not comment on the boss fight it's because there isn't really one we still have to deal with the heart dagether opens up his console and types in tgm in this section so we need to focus on getting to the heart and i guess destroy it then azura comes pats us on the head while downplaying the fact that this was effectively a long-term revenge scheme on the tribunal for killing her mortal husbando she gives us the ring of azura with a constant night eye and restore fatigue effect which is an actual reward and so the main quest of morrowind is complete you no longer bear the burden of prophecy you have achieved your destiny you are free the doomed dwemers folly temptation the tribunal seduction the god's heart freed the prophecy fulfilled all faith sealed and sins redeemed if you have pity mourn the lost but let the weeping cease the blight is gone and the sun's golden honey gills the land hail savior hortator your people look to you for protection monster and villains great and small still threaten the people of vadenfell enemies and evils abound yet indomitable will might rid morrowind all its ills for you our thanks and blessing our gift and token given come take this thing from the hand of god the blight is gone the sixth house defeated the sleepers awoken and the people of vardenfell are thankful to us for saving them from dig arthur and like most games of this formula nothing to do now that you have won it's kind of a paradox with these games on the one hand the main plot should have been done last a final ultimate story saving the world you've spent so much time living in but on the other hand these main stories are usually so pervasive and urgent you can't rationally justify ignoring them morrowind being the exception for reasons i've already outlined here's a genuine question would you prefer the start of a game that did everything right but blundered feet before the finale or a game that barely stumbles its way in the beginning but competently wraps up its ending i say this because i firmly believe if morrowind had truly delivered in its third act if it had justified rallying the people of morrowind by showing them fighting alongside you against the sixth house if it had scaled up its difficulty to require becoming god-like in power and in its finale it drew into question everything you have been fighting for then i would have no hesitation in calling morrowind the greatest game of all time one of the mysteries of the game is the truth behind what really happened to nerevar the ashlanders say that he was betrayed alongside degather by the tribunal so that they may cease power from the heart vivec says that nerevar had died naturally and degather says that nerevar had betrayed him this is a solid exploration of the idea of unreliable narrators and it seems that degoth wants to go to other routes he challenges the morality of working for the empire against what he believes are the best interests of the dunmer people but at the end of the day degothar and the sixth house are so patently evil there is little justifiable reason why anyone would want to go inside with him it's clear that even in the event that degather had originally been a good man who had been betrayed all those years ago today he is insane and his desires are unconscioable the intrigue of the main quest and the questionable actions from grave robbing to slave trading do not pay off in a reasonable or satisfying manner and that is in part because despite the memes and despite the dissertations written on the topic at the end of the day we have to work with what we have and what we have is underwhelming the saddest part however is that bethesda securing their success have never taken the opportunity to deliver on the vision behind this quest rallying the people of the land undertaking ancient prophecies and making deals with people to affect the outcome of a war not a final battle that decides the fate of the world an actual war ironically the closest this has come to being realized was in fallout new vegas and that wasn't even a bethesda game i'm listening please originally i was not going to cover the plugins and the reason is that i never really played with them outside of the master index plugin but they are official bethesda content they're available for free download and there is some intrigue to be mined out of them so i booted up my main character back before we fought dig arthur two of them lefem and adamantium just add new armor sets for sale on vardenfell adamantium armor is from tribunal while lay femme is original adamantium was meant to alleviate the lack of an in-game medium armor set in morrowind i mean indoor armor is there but ordinators are scripted to get mad if you wear it even after being proven to be the reincarnation of the guy it was named after by one of their gods both tribunal and blood moon would try to make up for this problem before the idea of medium armor was ultimately abandoned to come oblivion i didn't actually get lesfem to work so you'll just see some pictures the plugin was meant to add more armor options for female characters adding two new sets as well as female versions of imperial steel imperial chain steel and netch leather but then the plugin botched it and forgot to actually implement the new models so tribunal ended up being the expansion to actually do it which is why you might recognize some of these female versions even if you haven't used the plug-in before the two new sets are dominant and gold armor we'll start with domina a new light armor set it falls below glass and the dark brotherhood set added in tribunal that every character ever will have delivered to them in the form of an assassin so unless you want your character to look like a molec ball worshipper i'd probably pass on the set considering its stats gold armor is yet another attempt to fix the issues with medium armor in the game which is admirable except it's not a full set there's only three sets of medium armor in the base game that come with greaves and for some reason gold armor came out from only the waist up one theory is that it was meant to replace the endural chest and helm that get the ordinators mad which would be fine but at that point you're just wearing the boots and arms of the endural set and it gets better the guy that's meant to sell it to you won't because whichever intern they saddled this plugin on didn't set the merchant's inventory correctly okay this takes some explaining merchants generally don't have the stuff they sell in their inventory they instead use a container that they're flagged as owning npcs will wear the best armor in their personal inventory and they won't sell anything that they are wearing so if you add a character that you want to sell say daedric armor to cytone and you put it in their inventory directly they will equip it instead of selling it to you what makes this even funnier though is that one of the goals of this plugin was to correct a previous mistake bethesda had made with the same character cirolus sakis was meant to be a master armorer trainer here on vardenfell having a reputation as a famous smith from cyrodiil but they forgot to actually make him a trainer and they didn't bundle the fix with the tribunal blood moon or game of the year edition but they did take the time to put the female armors from this plugin in like what the final armor themed plug-in is the helm of tohan which was a pre-order bonus if you bought morrowind from eb games yes a 2002 pre-order dlc and all things considered it's not bad you ask for the latest rumors up in dagon fell and you'll get a quest to go to anissarales once there you meet two brothers who have an argument that devolves into a fist fight the winner is supposed to come with you but the quest bugged out and both brothers ended up following me noticing a pattern with the bugs anyways you clear out this fairly short daedric ruin and find a chest at the end containing the adamantium helm of tohan the only point of this quest is to give you the key to this 100 point lock as far as the helm goes it's a standard adamantium helm whose sole notable property is its high end chant value higher than even the daedric faces meaning that you can make it one of the most powerful artifacts with the right enchantment the entertainer's plugin adds the ability to make a small amount of cash from providing entertainment to the patrons of the eight plates in balmoral which is the same bar where indaris killed that halal noble considering the most you get paid is 100 gold and it's dependent on your skills and items it's a neat concept but it's not really a standout bitter coast sounds adds a bunch of sound files to the bitter coast area effect arrows adds a new shoptif effect which specializes in enchanted ranged weapons that do area of effect damage and nothing else which will come in handy for the siege of fire moths plug in should you choose to use them siege of fire moth adds a new island in quests and turned around taking back an old imperial fort that's being held by a lich it's a neat concept but in execution it's a good example of the merits of restraint and level design you meet solos grabbies but cytonean who dispatches you to lead a small task force of heroes across the island chain don't get attached they're all gonna die from a literal horde of skeletons there are no less than four skeletons per pack the only challenge of this mod was avoiding the temptation to recall to go get more magicka get into the keep proper and you find this room what purpose this room served before the skeletal takeover is a mystery then there's this room with no less than 30 rats all infected with whitbain good thing we caught corpus last episode you go through the caves with a ludicrous amount of ebony before arriving at the final boss area this is an unbreakable force unstoppable wall kind of situation the lich has endless health and magicka pools and i have an absurd amount of spell absorption and magic of resistance i can't do enough damage to bypass his regeneration since all my spells were designed to damage over time and he can't consistently damage me enough to pose a substantial threat all he does is cast spells which 75 percent of the time i absorb into my magicka pool i'd then heal with alright let me break this down generally morrowind's level design was structured around a small number of enemies who posed a large amount of threat to the player this was to work around morrowind's mechanics stealth focused characters are going to be even more useless here than ever before spellcasters will run out of magic of fast and warrior characters will get body blocked by sheer numbers there's no items in the environment to help the player no potions no scrolls no tools fire moth is only difficult on account of the factory that's radically different in design from the rest of the game and it's more of a tedious kind of difficulty where i just started dodging and running around all the enemies instead of fighting them the end reward of this plugin is the ward of akavir which isn't even a new item it's just a dragon scale shield with a constant fortify 25 point effect this whole plugin is a waste of time no wait better its primary usage is something that can be pointed to as an example of how not to design a dungeon alright now let's turn this around with a plugin that should have been in the game of the year edition the master index plug-in is a rework of the propylene system of the base game which i talked about all the way back in part two the original idea of the system was to have circuited teleporters activated by keys found in the environment of morrowind in practice nobody ever explains the concept to the player and most characters are generally lucky to only find a couple during their adventures the master index plugin fixes this by adding a quest that will have you finding every index and creating a master propylene index that can be used to teleport to every propylene chamber it's a nice and simple quest line folm's morel and the caldera mages guild will dispatch you directly to each index's location he's a little clairvoyant and the quest could stand to have a little more instances of the player actually having to figure out their locations my other gripe is that once you turn in an index it's gone even after completing the master index so the old function of teleporting chamber to chamber will be replaced with teleporting to caldera which can be a problem for the criminally inclined this rounds out all the official bethesda content not included in the physical game of the year edition so let's get into the proper expansion content with tribunal we're back to our main character following the downfall of dig arthur i have mixed feelings on tribunal when i think about it casually that's when i have feelings of nostalgia about my time there but when i think about it more analytically i start to see the flaws really quickly the first which is an endless source of hilarity for me is the issue with the dark brotherhood assassins attacking you literally out the gate when you start at morrowind this is actually fixed somewhat on the xbox game of the year edition where the events will only happen after level 6 but on the pc copy to this day it remains unpatched but we do finally get to answer as to why the assassins are coming after us it starts with us reporting the attack to the guards who gives us some vague directions to some guy in ebonheart appellus matius is the man and he appoints to the mainland being the likely suspects though he doesn't mention that the local dark brotherhood chapter happened to get wiped out recently anyways we use a teleporter guide person who can transport us to mournhold on the mainland and you can get teleported back at no cost it's a bit of a cheap workaround to get us to the city but i'll let it slide the first striking thing about the city is the architecture it's quite different and i attributed to the changes in color palette from adobe browns to brighter teal greens and maroon reds you also notice that the city is open air interior cells something that isn't present in the base game but will become a staple of cities and subsequent elder scrolls games is tribunal an expansion or an extension i think it's a good question i would say blood moon is undeniably an expansion while some of the plug-ins like the master index or fort fire moth are dlc it would only be a few years later that bethesda would be trying to sell horse armor and have 13 different pieces of dlc for sale in oblivion but is morrowind just behind the magical distinction i certainly remember the days when this content was made available physically i actually had an original base game on pc and i remember seeing copies of tribunal and blood moon being sold in stores my current copy is a slightly older game of the year edition but yes my zoomer friends there was an internet before 2007 and yes the content was downloadable i don't think tribunal has a lot of the connotations other dlc carry even by bethesda standards we'll see though the entire dlc takes place in the city of mournhold city of light city of magic yeah that anyways the city is divided into smaller districts the main areas being god's reach the great bizarre in the temple courtyard most of the npcs have new unique dialogue in fact a lot of people have voice acting relevant to their situations veck that's strange i suppose it's possible that my master knew this man but being an ashlander and my master being of the house of telvani well if you'll pardon me for being flippant sergio i don't think they would be friends that said a lot of people also really only play one part in one quest barring some of the major players in the city i didn't really do a whole lot of side questing in tribunals so i'll be focusing on the main tribunal content and yes i am aware of the hiluck wood elf quest our main focus for now will be looking for the dark brotherhood and that leads us into the sewers one of the immediately apparent problems with tribunal is that if a quest requires or involves combat in any fashion and it can't justifiably happen on the surface then it gets relegated to the sewers and i'll be honest the sewers are just awful a detail about tribunal is rather than being scaled to vardenfell it's designed to be played by people who have beaten the main quest of morrowind this has the hilarious knock-on effect of making the people of mournhold appear to be much stronger than the people of vardenfell so not only are the common enemies on average as tough as some of the bosses in the previous part or even heads of factions from vardenfell they're also in a confusing mess of an area the sewers are darkened and closed their layout is not intuitive often the structured parts break off into repetitive cave networks it is very easy to get lost and if something involved with sewers i would just consult the wiki once you do find the dark brotherhood hideout and fight through the assassins you'll encounter dandruff volas dandrus volas is higher level and has more health than dag author let that sink in for a moment this is an example of vertical progression where rather than providing more content for the player to explore laterally it is providing a higher level of challenge for players to go through it makes a degree of sense considering tribunal is meant to be played after morrowind sure but it dare i say this justifies the scaling system of the later games azura forgive me nonetheless enemies becoming tougher isn't actually a problem enemies becoming tougher in conjunction with an ugly area that isn't fun to explore or fight in and is difficult to learn or map out is a massive problem anyways we're done flying blind now as we have found a contract that's marked with the letter h guards will direct us to tienius delician who will admit that it was the new king halau hellseth who ordered the hit and he doesn't really care the tribunal questline is a bit confusing i would say it provides options but in reality six of the quests can be skipped just by going to another quest giver early we investigate rumors surrounding the new king investigate the temple investigate the guards investigate the dead king's widow investigate some journalists then meet the queen baron zia who suggests we go up to the temple and meet federer's helier i went through these quests quickly because then i'll be blunt here there's not much substance to them i actually completed all of them in under half an hour they don't make much sense to do considering delician will blow you off for asking about the dark brotherhood attacks in any case thus begins the real quest line of tribunal up at the temple fedras hillier wants us to track down a goblin army being prepared by the king and wants us to kill two war chiefs and their altmer trainers this involves going down into the sewer our next task involves escorting a temple priest so that he may cleanse the shrine in the sewer now we need to track down a powerful lich barrel czar who has taken up residence in the sewers seriously i'm tired of this joke but we really are tasked three times back to back with going deep into the sewers the first involving a convoluted maze the second in escort quests and the third another ludicrous lich fight after a period of 24 hours the main plaza is attacked by strange mechanical creatures we go to aid the ordinators and royal guards in defending the city after which the royal guards direct us to delician and the ordinators direct us to heller both ask us to investigate a hole that has opened in the plaza inside which is a dwemer ruin where the new fabricate enemies are battling the dwemer occupants this is where a choice is presented to the player but not really the issue is in whether you chose to speak to an ordinator or a royal guard i happened to speak to an ordinator and was directed to hillary if i had spoken to a royal guard and gone to delician our next two quests would have been different this is an awkward attempt to introduce branching quest lines done very very poorly it is not a conscious decision of the player which path they want to take but a chance the player is unaware of based on the costume the guard they're speaking to is wearing i really hope that bethesda didn't shy away from writing branching quest lines because of this going to the temple has us meeting amilexia one of the tribunal gods whom wishes to squash a new cult the end of times now you guys are two centuries early its leader reveals a path to enlightenment which angers almalexia so she has us use a dwemer weather machine deep within the newly revealed ruin to create ash storms in the city now the dwemer dungeon is big and pretty alright but it's a bit of an obvious logical leap for people to assume freak weather must be a subsequent punishment for a minority of people forming a suicide cult doubt is forming about amaleksia however people in the temple are scared of her and one of her hands has become frustrated in his wandering god's reach we have to fight him and he is a tough fight because he introduces the rarely used concept of npc's utilizing health potions and almalexia rewards us with a choice of three pretty decent abilities almalexia now believing us to be nervour incarnate tells us of two blades hopes fire and true flame both blades were a gift from the king of the dwarves dumac whom nerevar had allied with against the nords hope's fire was her blade and true flame was the blade of nerevar it was lost at the battle of red mountain but she has found a piece of it she suggests we rebuild the sword one piece is at the museum of artifacts and can only be acquired if we donate two artifacts to the museum the other piece we're told is in possession of carrot one of the king's guard we dual carrod he's tough but fun then hal seth asked me to work for the temple to gather information about them yeah this branching quest line really worked out huh if you're confused the game seems to think we've just arrived from the courtyard section and is telling us to do the quests that lead to this point where we get the quest to duel carrod with both pieces found we find a craftsman this is a famous city so one yagakro gluck a master smith lives in town and he can fix the blade but he wants to also restore the enchantment we dive into the ruin meeting the ghost of radic stungan thumbs a dwimmer who asks us to get some pyroid tar for the blade we find some tar off a dremora lord deep in the ruin which was a fun little dungeon with the tar and blade we have reforged true flame and all malecia congratulates us on alexia then tells us of sothasil whom she claims has gone mad is behind the attack and has become a danger to all of morrowind true flame is capable of killing satha and it's up to us to stop him we're transported to the clockwork city stuck here until we escape and so begins the clockwork city unlike the labyrinthine sewers or repetitive dwemer ruins is actually an interesting dungeon and a suitable and logical progression and difficulty for a character who reasonably will have completed the main quest this includes the monstrous imperfect a giant mech boss fight finally we get to sawthasil and guess what he's dead here it ends this clockwork city was to be your death you were to be my greatest martyr the heroic narrator sacrificing all to protect morrowind from a mad selfless sill but you live you live fear not i will tell the tale myself when this is done i will tell my people how with your dying breath you proclaimed your devotion to me the one true god your death will end this prophecy and unite my people again unto one god one faith one rule by my divine law the puppet king will lay down his arms and bow to my will those who do not yield will be destroyed the mazed band has allowed me to travel to this place here i slew so the sill here i summon the fabricants to attack mournhold i will be the savior of my people i alone will be their salvation none may stand in my way not you and certainly not vivec he is a poet a fool i will deal with him when i have finished with you and sotha still he always thought himself our better shunning us locking himself in his hole he spoke not a word as he died not a whisper even in death he mocked me with his silence but i think you will scream mortal for now you face the one true god her loss of divinity has had a negative effect on her she's a tough cookie but once she's dead we get her sword hopes fire and use the maze band of barrel czar we got from one of the sewer quests to teleport back to mornhold you have done well mortal the death of armalexia is a boon for all of morrowind though it may take time for this to be understood she would have betrayed the dumber as surely as she had betrayed all those whom she loved this was her curse and her undoing weeped not for sothosil he shared his mortality long ago and i am certain his death was no small relief to him these gods lived with the burden of a power no mortal was meant to possess your work in morrowind is not finished nerevarine the vex still lives but i believe his time grows short protect my people defend these lands the skies of mournhold are clear once again let these people suffer no longer now go mortal embrace your destiny and go with my blessing [Music] hell seth will give us a full set of this royal guard armor for doing the job and thus ends tribunal i posed a question near the start of this about whether tribunal is an expansion or an extension tribunal is solidly an extension and there's nothing wrong with that while blood moon is an expansion and we'll get to that tribunal is unique among bethesda dlc as they generally aren't sequels to the main story almalexia was the wife of nerevar after all so her absence from the base game was somewhat strange especially considering she tends to be the one that personally handles matters of war in modern dunmer culture part 6 ended on a sour note due to the final quest at red mountain that was purposefully taken out of context of what would happen in tribunal tribunal is a continuation of morrowind providing a somewhat satisfying gameplay and even story conclusion that de gather in the sixth house was lacking however tribunal is also reliant on you having played morrowind's main quest to work play either in a vacuum and they don't function you can wave away all malexia calling you the nerevarine as part of her being mad if you haven't done the main quest but then it's hard to really care or understand elm alexia's motivations if you don't know about the mystery behind what really happened to nerevar and why she's diminished in power without tribunal morrowind just ends you never get a resolution for two of the tribunal gods and you don't really have any activities to complete his new reverend part of the reason i think most who enjoy morrowind don't have an issue with his finale is that for the most part tribunal is the real finale of morrowind's main quest even with that context however tribunal has some fatal flaws being limited to the interior of the city means that the area doesn't have a lot of options for places to send the player hence the many quests that involve going down into the sewers i think another missed opportunity would have been continuations for various factions from the base game for instance how interesting would it be to see some extra quests from ridorun and halau related to the recent succession of king healthseth or some telvanni quests where they are the political underdogs the imperial legion and cult could have had some representation and there would have been some obvious opportunities for the tribunal temple or a return of characters who left at the end of their quest lines like jim stacy and inu halau or how about some new factions like an opportunity to learn more about house dress and house and doral house dress as danger worshipers would have been a perfect opportunity to explore what would become the reformed tribunal of post-morrowind that being boethiah mephala and azura i would have preferred getting to explore their culture rather than the hellseth stuff he's mostly just here so his mom can pay lip surface to daggerfall anyways and while that's fine his presence is just annoying because he makes at least three attempts on the reverend's life and we're just supposed to be cool with it i get that the idea was that he was being proactive and taken out any potential political threats tribunal however also doesn't really work without morrowind i mean literally yes but for example you could theoretically just teleport up to solstein and start playing blood moon it'd be challenging at the start but it's possible and it makes sense tribunal's linked to morrowind in such a way that it can't stand on its own despite its best attempts i think what beautifully ties tribunal together is that after slaying almalexia every npc in the game is given a topic about her and you can inform them about her death and even you killing them and those npcs regardless of their beliefs on the matter will take offense at that yes even nibani mesa an azura worshiper who denounces the false tribunal takes offense at the notion of us having killed them all i ask for is a pair of boots how hard could it be after playing morrowind for so long coming to a more recognizable land of forests with wolves and bears feels alien and unlike tribunal this is an open land mass the solstheim itself is actually pretty small the entire island being about the size of one of morrowind's biomes even without the excessive speed i have it does not take long to traverse the island yet it feels like a wild wasteland there are only three places of refuge in between all that is a lot of wildlife that is going to try to kill you however unlike tribunal blood moon eases up on the difficulty it can still be a challenge so you'll want some experience before you jump in but blood moon isn't expecting you to have beaten or even played morrowind's main quest it's perfect for characters who may have just beaten one of the guilds or great houses and are looking for new content and this is where i discuss expansions blood moon is an expansion there's a good deal of new land to explore some new factions to play with a lot of new items and creative quests and two separate quest lines each with branching paths and clear progression that don't rely on random and unforeseen choices most of the npcs in the base game near the start will rattle off a rumor about solsteim all of them it can be kind of annoying because the thoth thyme rumors will supersede the normal rumors they'll mention that it's a miserable land and that there's boat transport up and cool that can take us there once we get there we arrive at fort frost moth both quest lines start here and we're going to focus on the main quest line first which is in my opinion the lesser of the two although it's still a solid quest line in this line we meet with captain curious who wants us to uncover the cause of the low morale in his troops lately asking the guards it becomes apparent there's some sort of ban on liquor at the fort and offering drinks reveals that the issue is that the captain ordered the fort become dry carius says it wasn't his decision the alcohol just stopped coming in he suspects the priest who denies having anything to do with it blaming the captain going to the priest's office reveals that he's been stashing alcohol for what he claims to be the benefit of the troops i tell the captain the truth and he congratulates us next carius is worried that some weapons are being smuggled out and sold back on vardenfell we have a choice of working with two of his men on the matter and so i work with cena lucius he's sort of a proto-companion that would pop up in the later games anyways lucius is useful for the investigation as he makes it easier to solve the case but he sucks in a fight we meet with the smith zeno faustus and he says he overheard soldiers talking about a weapon stash in a nearby cavern sure enough there's some legionaries in the cave who are hostile to us after a lot of attempts of trying to keep lucius alive we get to the smuggler's leader gulterius spurious what a name and he offers to leave peacefully i don't allow this however on our return to the fort we find it has been attacked carius is missing and whichever proto-companion we don't choose asks us to go to the skull tribe on the north side of the island and ask if they know anything about the attackers the skull are to the nords what the ashlanders are to the dunmer this makes them a fairly distinct entity i meet their leader thurston hartfang like the ashlanders he has issues with the imperials believing them to be corrupting the land he sends us the coursed wind eye for more information coursed gives us a copy of the story of avar stone singer and a map of the locations to various stones around the island in order to ingratiate myself into skull culture i need to complete the rituals which involves traveling almost the entire island this is obviously very similar to the pilgrimages of the seven graces a quest where i'm guided around the island of vardenfell and introduces the custom of the dunmer people what i don't understand is why bethesda doesn't emulate this style of quest more often i have mentioned the quest in the forgotten veil in the don guard extension for skyrim the quest cleansing the stones from dragonborn however is a perfect example of bethesda not understanding why this kind of quest worked for blood moon in cleansing the stones you go to each of these same stones except instead of learning about the culture of the skull you just shout at them and move on the skull test of loyalty starts with the ritual of water we touch the stone and emulate the events as they occurred for avar following a black horker through a great deal of water until we arrive at an underwater cave deep below the surface we find the waters of life bottled up and bring it back to the water stone the ritual of earth involves solving a musical puzzle inside a barrow a nord burial tomb with draugr inside it oh boy dragger the ritual of beasts has us assisting the good beast a giant polar bear fight off a pack of reichlings we either have to heal the bear or sit aside it as it heals the ritual of trees has us assassinating a rykling to acquire some strange seeds making the four spriggans escorting the right clean friendly to us and taking the seed back to the clearing so that it may grow the ritual of the sun has us encountering grawl strange ice creatures and once we acquire a flaming eye from its corpse we activate an ice wall and free the sun finally the ritual of the wind involves entering another barrow to free the winds from the greedy man's back these rituals introduce us to the skull and to self-thyme in a fantastic way i cannot understate that while the quest sounds simple and they are there are two elements to all of them that make them work the first is that you have to look at the map in your inventory rather than simply having the stones marked on your regular map this makes the quest immediately different since it relies on you cross-referencing the general layout of self-time with a hand-drawn approximation of the stone's locations the second is that you need to read the story of avar stonesinger in order to fully understand your objectives rather than following the directions of a guide character or intuiting the directions from a waypoint marker the point of the exercise is to emulate the actions of avar by actually reading the story and this contrasts nicely with the seven graces as well as the quests that introduces to each ashlander tribe in the seven graces there are enslaved daedra begrudgingly playing the parts you're meant to emulate over and over for the skull however it's much more naive and innocent like the skull culture and its circumstances align well enough that you can emulate the story perfectly you also meet many of the new enemies along the way see many dungeons and side quests that you can do and generally become more savvy to the layout of the island it feels like completing the ritual is genuinely earning our way into the tribe in ways that the ashlander and reverend quests did not we don't just learn the customs of the tribe and do them some small favor obliging these people and performing their rituals shows a level of dedication the other people who have come to this island have not which leads nicely into our next quest tharston wants us to prove our wisdom by investigating a crime rigmore halfhand claims that ingar icemane has stolen furs from his home you know how much i love investigations asking around ingar appears to not have any good motives the skull lived in a communal lifestyle and if he needed furs the tribe would have provided risi ingar's wife states ingar's innocence and claims that somebody may have framed in guard to disgrace him possibly rigmore rigmore says he doesn't know why ingar would steal his furs although you will find a note in the ice main home indicating a short affair between risi and rigmore tharston armed with this information allows us to choose we can either exile rick moore or send him to the wolves these are nords so obviously wolves are the correct option [Music] now asks we prove our strength and we meet with coursed near the lake the lake being on fire tharston believes a draugr lord is causing this phenomenon while corst believes it's a sign of the blood moon prophecy you no longer bear the burden of prophecy you have achieved your destiny you are free the lie detector determined that was a lie we go to investigate and find the dragger lord a slip he tells us he was a mage who became a draugr so that he may prevent the incursion of some frost atronachs don't you mean you became a draugr in service of the dragon priests he asks us to help and i oblige him we wipe out the atronachs and we get a cool ring from him before he embraces death having completed his goal course congratulates us on ending the threat and we return to the skull village only to find it under attack by werewolves we defend the town and upon entering the great hall we find the honor guard dead and thurston missing coursed returns informing us that we have contracted lycanthropy and in three days we'll become a werewolf how this works considering that whole corpus thing i don't know we're banned from the village until cured and this is a big choice for the quest line and unlike tribunal it's rather obviously a choice if we're cured we become bloodskull and further our relationship with the tribe if we become a werewolf we take up working for the daedric prince hirosine now while we may have cured ourselves umbra has returned to looking for more daedric work to complete outside of taking the other side of the frost moth smuggler quest his early stages are mostly the same but when he's infected with lycanthropy he chooses to become a werewolf this is the main point the player is encouraged to become a werewolf but you can also get infected by any of the werewolves who start wandering the island after this point unlike vampires werewolves are actually well designed and playable to start during the day you are your normal self but at night you transform into a werewolf with a host of set stats you are a proper one man wrecking crew as a werewolf although if anyone witnesses the transformation then your secret's out you have to kill a human that night or you'll lose a large chunk of health the next morning luckily salsteim is rife with plenty of useless bodies to feed on so it forms a nice gameplay loop wake up quest during the day settle down in a cave at night and then go out hunting then return to a cave and wake up again unfortunately because umbra was not cured we have been exiled from skull society originally i didn't have much to say about the first branching quest as i had played the skull perspective from their side the quest is just to go into a tomb and fight a bunch of werewolves to retrieve a totem go to x kill y collect z but for the werewolves here's scene dispatches us to that same cave with the objective to stop the skull hunters from retrieving the totem there are over a dozen hunters to stop they will all search the cave for the totem until they find it and will try to leave once they take it you can even fail if they manage to successfully steal it this quest is awesome probably in part because the designers had a reasonable idea of how powerful the player would be due to them being a werewolf of course it's easy to cheese if you just wait into your human form but that's not then where to perform the rice dag a ritual to try and curry favor with skull a spirit bear has been summoned and we need to slay it and return its heart to course before daybreak the hunting pack makes like a horror movie and we split up even going so far as to gradually get slaughtered i may joke but i like this quest is a tad more interesting than the prior quest where it was literally go to x kill y collect z from the werewolf perspective it's less interesting you just have to track down and kill a bunch of hunters and then kill the spirit bear ourselves it'd be cool to see the hunt from the other perspective as the horror monster that's killing the isolated hunters once we return the heart corst wants us to investigate another sign of the blood moon a bunch of dead horkers on the coastline he wants us to go ask the folks over at castle karshtag what's going on we make our way over there and the ice castle is locked up tight there's a back door underwater and we meet one of the people living in the castle krish krisch is a rykling reichlings are the true incarnation of the aldmeri p this message has been censored by the thalmor the master of the castle went missing and another reichling dulk took over chris tried to get a bunch of grawl to work with him but they isolated him to the back of the cave we start by taking out the grawl in the basement then go up to the banquet hall we meet dolk who affirms that karstag is missing horst is worried about the situation on the island and gives us a weapon he says will be useful for fighting grawl not realizing castle karstag was the final time i was going to ever fight them for umbra hirsching sends us to go clear out a bunch of rebels at castle karstag there's not really a good reason for why he cares unless the implication is that karstag was a heresian worshiper before he was a missing person anyways we meet with dulk who asks we will wipe out krish and all the grawl in the basement you don't get as clear an explanation for what's going on from the werewolf perspective probably because the writers assumed most players would align with the skull first course tells us of the blood moon prophecy the signs of which have struck the land the first is fire from the eye of glass the second is the tide of low and the third is the blood moon these signs indicate the coming of the hunter hirsching and his hounds and this event happens once an era the next time we sleep we're awoken to a bunch of broken werewolves this begins a long long long finale this area has no escape no resupply there is no escape no recaller intervention can work in this place yeah that worse the area is filled with powerful werewolves according to the uesp there are 31 werewolves inside the labyrinth all of them level 70 with 700 health contrast this with degother's immortal incarnation at level 35 with 300 health the area is an absolute gauntlet and is very difficult it is effectively the final gameplay test for morrowind to start we encounter captain karius again who wants to work together while he serves some use as a companion those who wish to keep him alive have a much harder time as you have to heal him the game quickly becomes about resource management worse for me it's a game in magic of management because i can't generate magicka through resting and because you have to kill a dozen werewolves every level to even rest at all i have to carefully manage my magicka throughout this entire sequence there are no spell casters either and i never got around to learning the ancestral ghost summon thing to cheese some magicka back carefully and slowly i have to utilize the recharge rates on my enchanted items to survive however the worst part is this awful sound that sound plays whenever armor is broken which doesn't happen often thanks to this royal guard armor except there's one piece i've been wearing this entire game that has very low maximum durability the boots of blending speed these werewolves can destroy the boots in a single hit and is a chance which piece of armor gets hit meaning my magicka enchanted items health and my repair tools have to be rationed as well the lack of space to operate in and for this first part trying to keep curious alive yeah is a challenge and it's great eventually i make it to the center carius says he's going to stay behind thurston's in the next maze and he's willing to work together he does eventually betray us though so getting him killed is not exactly a big concern the big issue of the maze is the cramped space makes movement very difficult for werewolves this area is even more difficult your stats are set rather than augmented by your affliction so even though we are high level we're far too weak to handle the hunt in our werewolf form but as a werewolf we are exceptionally fast and jump really high so we can actually just bypass all the werewolves since umbra doesn't really care about keeping karius alive otherwise you'll have to wait until you turn human again to even stand a chance of fighting your way through the area so while werewolves get a slightly more disappointing outing in the final quest their earlier quests are a lot more fun luckily the next area opens up karstags here he doesn't have much to say to us just attacks us on site once he's down here scene shows up so you are the one you have escaped my hounds and beaten back the other challengers i had rather expected the giant to prevail but no matter you have proven yourself a worthy hunter and you have earned the greatest honor that can be bestowed upon immortal you are to be my prey i ask you though what is it that makes a hunter great is it his strength the speed with which he strikes or is it his guile the ability to outwit his prey answer me mortal and decide your fate so you have chosen and so shall be your fate to face me in all my glory would be less than sporting so you shall face but one of my aspects the one you have chosen we have little time the blood moon sinks low in the sky prepare yourself mortal for now you are the hunted the whole point of this exercise was to try and determine who on south thyme is the toughest with the leaders of the imperials skull and reichlings down that leaves us a foreigner he wants to fight us now but not with his full power instead as one of his aspects shame is i could have likely taken him at full power i choose his aspect of guile and got his spear of the hunter which is a cool weapon shame amount of stuff to do with it though the more track glacier where the whole shebang took place breaks up we tell coursed of our victory and defeat of thurston and curious is back at the fort a bit of a mediocre end the mazes were a great final challenge but it's a shame they couldn't make kirsten more challenging it's also a bit of a thematic let down after the excellent quests introducing us to the skull culture the chain just kind of goes off the rail and forces us into another prophecy sequence but i said earlier this was the weaker of the two quest lines on sulzlime and i mean that now i don't want to give the impression that i did these quest lines separately rather they were intertwined with one another and done concurrently so the here scene fight was fairly close to the end of the entire playthrough back at fort frost moth when we arrived at the island i met carnius magias a member of the east empire company who is here on sol's time to set up a colony at raven rock he offers to let us join the faction and our first assignment is to escort some workers to the site it's not too far but it is through a forest we meet with falco galinis at raven rock who asks we get four samples of ebony ore to give the carnies in order to convince investors to fund the construction we get paid in stock and what follows is an interesting quest line after a few days carnius will dispatch us to deal with some nord who's raping about ruining the land which is in line with the skull we need to remove him falco wants us to just knock him out carneus doesn't care if we knock him out falco will pay us and if we kill him carnius will pay us after another three days carnius wants us to retrieve a shipping manifest falco says the ship hasn't arrived yet and when asking around we find out there was some light from the north west checking it out we find a shipwreck beset by dragger and rescuing a surviving woman who returns to the camp a few days pass and we're given a choice if we side with falco he'll want us to keep carnius in check if we side with carnius he offers to make us rich and the choice is signposted it's not based on something arbitrary like talking to guards the player also understands the mechanics of both choices unlike the skull werewolf choice which one you choose offers a different quest line i side with falco while umbra who also happens to be invested in raven rock sides with carnius now i'll be upfront unless i say otherwise the quest will have gone the same for both characters first we're asked if the new settlement should have a smithy or a trader i ask people and they vote traitor especially since there's already smiths on the island yes that is a quest and yes i think i have found some hearthfire and fallout 4 dna in here falco says that a ship captain's demanding extraordinary payment to ship our ebony or to the mainland we need to convince him to keep his side of the deal barrow here mentions his fellow ship captain albaroth apparently unaware that el bharath crashed upshore and had his ship attacked by draugr speaking with the village bicycle i rescued from said ship she gives me elbroth saber i confront barrow with the saber baro's shook by my intimidation and he backs down he seems like the type to double cross us mid-shipment but that's the company's problem someone stealing ore from the mine oh no the most interesting part of this quest is that said thief after being caught ends up committing suicide in their cell after our conversation with carnius this is the first big departure between carnius and falco falco had us discover who was stealing the ore while carnius wants us to help steal the ore we start by removing evidence from the thieves house and then distract a guard so he can steal even more after a few days wait let's talk about that a fair few of these quests require real time to pass between them i initially tried to do both questlines at the same time and i only got to the part where the quest branches before i had finished the main quest to blood moon it is kind of like a more advanced version of the stronghold quest from the base game but for an entire questline i actually like this even if it leads to my character just standing around for a few days most of my playthroughs ended with me becoming the leader of a faction in less than one month after joining said faction hell the nerevarine went from immigrant to incarnate in two months i think if done properly it can encourage people to branch out and play other content as time passes if you don't use the wait function and actually go out doing dungeons you'll probably visit most of the island by the end people focusing down quest lines can just wait through the time people role-playing can explore other content or fill in the time doing generated radiant quests between bigger missions anyways enough stalling falco says someone in the bar has been picking fights in raven rock the guy's wife is outside she asks we don't hurt her husband he attacks us gets tired out and begs us to kill him i don't i'm not as heartless as you might think but i am obligated to say i was compensated well for not killing him unlike falco carneus is still willing to pay if he killed the old man so turns out we dug too deep and have discovered a barrow we need to consult some local expert about some impenetrable ice entombing one of the bodies the uh the expert doesn't really care for us until an imperial assassin attacks for our help he pays us with an ancient dornick pickaxe and asks we bring a sample of what he calls stall rim back to him we do and he offers to create us armor and weapons from the material i kind of already have a pair of legendary blades in the royal guard armor but this is a nice opportunity to allow players who are playing blood moon independent of the main quest and tribunal to keep up with the escalation and difficulty carnia's society quest is a lot less complicated instructing us to go and kill the star room crafter and his apprentices and take his nordic pickaxe this doesn't mean you lose access to star room weapons and armor but as no one else has experienced in working with the material it will take twice as much to get the items this unfortunate consequence is unavoidable and seems like an unfair punishment really the whole concept kind of flops as we're being presented with access to stall room very late in the expansion ideally you'd want players finding and collecting star room as they cleared dungeons from the start but i'm sure many people just sat confused at this random material they couldn't collect because they weren't smart enough to give the player the pickaxe earlier our next task is to deliver a report to carnius and i only have five hours to do it and if i fail i'm permanently expelled from the east empire company what we have here is an interesting quest idea and absolutely no way of integrating it into the storyline in a way that makes sense what about this enterprise requires report be time sensitive i divide intervention back to the fort but oh no carnies is out walking along the beach and his new assistant activates a trap that's supposed to slow me down if i hadn't absorbed the effect it's a clever use of magical mechanics carnius is in one of three random locations this is a fun little quest but again it doesn't make sense unless the intended message is that falco's working with karnius to cut me out of my stock option carnia's side of the quest is interesting as it involves staging the murder of a messenger from falco to prevent his critical message from getting out this is the return of peraldar who is confirmed to have used a recall ring to escape us last time we encountered him anyways geralder can manipulate wolves to make it look like the messenger was killed by nature in turn geraldo gives us a note from carnius who requests we now eliminate heraldar i wonder if all this double-crossing is going to go anywhere go to x kill y spriggans find z roots and poison them if i sound exacerbated it's because it's like the fifth time i've had to run to the bottom of the mine and then back up to the top again next we need to hire some guards for raven rock this involves asking everyone in town i find three volunteers and after a few days they're equipped i actually appreciate this quest more than spriggan quest despite spending less time talking about it because a i don't have to go to the back of the mine again and b it involves interacting with the people of the settlement there are lots of opportunities to do this like when we figured out if we wanted a traitor or smithy and it's interesting to see how the characters have changed with time a for flakkis says that mining isn't really for him so he's willing to try out being a guard karnasuvalen says that his ambitious attitude has gotten this far and he figures it can get him farther gracie and corellius says that he was talking tough about how someone needs to protect raven rock and is willing to take responsibility these characters progress change and maybe it says a lot about how npcs were generally static in morrowind more than it has a mark of quality for bloodmen but it's the little things like that that elevate what would otherwise be in a mundane questline after a few days falco says someone's trying to kill him and asks us to protect him not long later a group of nords attack while we prevented the assassination attempt umbra was assigned to take down falco we take position in a tower and draw a bow signaling a mercenary to run up and distract the guards then we use the special arrow to kill falco days after that falco says carnius has received silver weapons likely due to the recent werewolf threat but isn't delivering them to us upon our return from the fort the settlement has apparently been attacked by the skull and the forces hold up in the mine this is in line with the skull who have complained of imperial influence on the island but it turns out that none of them are recognizable from our encounters as we clear out the mine we find a note indicating they are actually mercenaries falco has to take this information to carnius who confesses and attacks us carnius a businessman has more health than dig author that's all i have to say on that we kill him in self-defense and falco promotes us to factor of raven rock leaving us in charge of the operation in umbra's case we're tasked with supplying a merc group with weapons to appear as skull we head out to deliver the goods and pass out the equipment only for them to betray us and attack us carnius wants us out of the way unfortunately for him umbra is a lot tougher than six mercs we return and carnius surprised the cs fights us that's it for differences we get made factor of raven rock and it's all the same from here now in most games this is where it ends but we have one whole quest as leader and it's literally just deciding where we want a house to be built a house we aren't going to live out of because this is the last piece of gameplay i played for this series looking back the way i described the questline makes it sound boring raising a colony from nothing in our pre-scripted fashion sounds boring compared to the dynamic and radiant settlement system of fallout 4 but on the other hand the pre-built quest line and time investment involved including an actual stock investment that ranges in value based on how you've managed the colony makes raven rock far more interesting than any of the settlements i could not possibly name for you from fallout 4. i also like that in these two pieces of dlc that are steeped in prophecy and divine metaphysics a long quest line exists where you set aside the time to participate in an entrepreneurial venture in a land that everybody else dismissed i suspect the same way i found the royal palace quests and tribunal more interesting than the temple quests is indicative of the sort of person i am it also says something about the main quest of morrowind the primary questlines of tribunal and blood moon pertain very little to the remainder of the content in their expansion your status in raven rock or how much work you've done for hell seth ultimately has no bearing on the world compared to the nerevarine story most of the minor factions and storylines in morrowind play some part in its gwain quest line perhaps a small part but apart nonetheless you could say there simply isn't enough material in tribunal or blood moon for this to be the case and i'd have to concede bethesda was more concerned on being a launch title for the seventh consul generation than going all out on post-launch morrowind content for instance there is an entire faction of raiders living in solstheim that i didn't mention and i know some people might have an issue with me not mentioning some of the more notable quests from blood moon such as the thirst mead hall some of this content was the work of one emil pagliarullo who got his start at bethesda with this expansion working on side quests side quests that include a reference to timmy and the well beowulf and cocaine santa still we're nearing the end of the conclusion of the series here so i have to give some credit like tribunal blood moon features a great deal of unique voice acting the ambition of having multiple paths even if those multiple paths are centered around the same scripted events just in reverse is still impressive and so ends part oh i forgot about the werewolves right werewolves get an additional quest for being cured of their disease it starts with a rumor located near the dock at fort frostmoth a common travel point on the island so you're guaranteed to run into it the note simply mentions that witches have come to solstheim and have been spotted at the altar of thrawned sure enough they have a raven speaks with you offering to help cure your lycanthropy which you can refuse she'll set you on the right path and even if you kill her she'll drop a note detailing the ritual first we need to get a flower which grows atop the highest peak on the island then we find some ripened belladonna berries finally we have to sacrifice an innocent nord and take out our heart cast a spell and put the heart back in the nord will transform into a werewolf that when killed marks the end of our curse from then on the player's only option to be a werewolf will be hircine's ring which we recovered from thurston however because werewolves are weaker than high level players this is ultimately a novelty for role players and really not much else so we're finally here this has been a long time coming both in run time for first time viewers and for the subscribers who've stuck it out since the beginning of the first parts originally this was going to be my break a quick little series on a game i know and love well and then i would get back to trashing console games i didn't anticipate how much of a time investment this project would become what's funny is that at points it started to sound like i didn't like the game that's because it's a lot easier to write negativity than positivity and negativity sells that's the sad fact of what i do is morrowind patrician tier well yeah i mean what have we been doing if it wasn't if bethesda had made a true sequel to morrowind improving on the formula instead of stripping components away to broaden appeal then i probably wouldn't think so in that timeline morrowind would have been a unique little oddity that paved the way to a generation of greater games instead morrowind is best symbolized by a dwemer ruin a sign of something that was once great that ultimately usurped itself paving the way for lesser successors to come along and wonder in between bouts of bashing each other over the head with their clubs just what it was that made them so special and why did they go away the answer is more complicated than simply saying that bethesda got greedy the bethesda kneecapped their vision for the sake of achieving the highest evaluation possible for a future sale when you hear todd howard talk about morrowind it means something special to him that's because bethesda came very close to the edge when making the game howard is a driven person his persistence is what got him a job at bethesda his desire to improve the system made him a leader he stole julian lefay's series and transformed it into one of the most recognizable gaming franchises and he probably did it because he didn't want the employees under him to ever have to deal with what bethesda of the late 90s and early aughts had to deal with in a sense a compromised vision is preferable to sustained crunch periods and the looming threat of failure leading to unemployment i spent over a year working 70 to 100 hours a week gained about 50 pounds and had turned into an obnoxious vitamin d deficient zombie my health and sanity were failing i became someone i didn't like douglas goodall we've been through again a lot of people here have done it for a long time so we've been through every type of crunch you can imagine and long ago some ones that were very very difficult for a lot of us you know personally in your time and your health and things like that so let's take this section by section morrowind's combat is clunky and awkward but really only in the beginning it relays a true sense of progression to go from struggling to fight wildlife to one shotting powerful foes on the hardest difficulty but from an action perspective it leaves a lot to be desired this isn't a problem of mechanics it's a problem of tuning tune the formula to make hits just a little more frequent each percentage more frequency is 10 critics who wouldn't have noticed the system in the first place morrowind's stealth is similarly badly tuned pickpocket's impossible stealth difficult and the one thing that worked about it real-time lock-picking was replaced with a mini-game morrowind's magic system is amazing as long as you're prepared to spend a lot of money training to unlock its full potential yet another problem that a variable in an equation being properly tuned might fix not having the time and resources to finish tuning the game is the source of all its faults are the vampires and abolitionists underwhelming well there's not enough time to finish the content not enough options in the dialogue while the writer had too much other work to finish before he could flesh that out is red mountain a mess that's a cost-benefit analysis how many players are even going to get that far better to nail the lead in and have players interested in buying oblivion then nail the conclusion and be a dead company it's honestly amazing given the circumstances that we got a game as intricately woven as morrowind every single quest line has intersections and connections to other quest lines at least at the surface level i've given plenty of examples in this video even the mechanics are woven together strength and endurance may be the hallmarks of a warrior but then agility is important to hit stuff and willpower helps with stamina management and personality is important once you get back to town and then suddenly players are growing and developing themselves in ways they didn't originally anticipate because maybe they want to get better with a new weapon or use a new mechanic they originally thought they wouldn't like i really don't have to explain this because it's the series central mechanical conceit the concept that your character isn't being ramrodded into a preset class but rather developing in a free-form way the game also presents a unique aesthetic there's a reason my profile picture has always been a morrowind character even an abstract version something about the early 3d low polygon style of characters it's not a beautiful aesthetic it's rustic reflecting the rough world of vardenfell it's why i'm always bothered to see people using mods that turn characters into dolls actually no that's a pretty good metaphor for standing down the edges of morrowind vardenfell has some pretty striking scenery as well mushroom trees are the obvious go too it would have been nice to see more lava in the open world since everywhere it shows up looks really nice but they couldn't really do angled liquid surfaces yet so no flowing lava fuyatas they probably also decided against it since the fuyatas tend to be essential pathways around the island maybe at the start of the third act you could have had red mountain have a minor eruption and fill the foyadas again making a sudden navigation obstacle for the player speaking of things bethesda couldn't do yet model levels of detail now of any game morrowind was the game to do view distance fog since most regions have a decent excuse for low visibility like foggy shorelines and ashy wastelands but it's hard to appreciate red mountain outside of the imagination when you can't see it while the overworld adventure in sights that can be seen can be impressive there's a lot left to be desired once you start to notice the repetition and interior design now i'm not going to be a pleb and leave it at that morrowind's interiors are made up of many parts like lego pieces that can be put together in a variety of combinations the system was created like this because originally morrowind was going to procedurally generate much of its world but then howard saw the workflow potential of having an easy system for designers to make content in it's literally so easy a child me could use the complimentary construction set that came on a disc with the game to make a dungeon or a house except for the scripter that abomination can suck off a shotgun morrowind storytelling is fascinating it's a shame that the possibilities of a purely text-based system were squandered due once again to the nature of the game's development what's interesting is you can very easily tell the divisions and writing responsibilities based on what quest you're playing you can even tell if it's rolston goodall nelson or howard writing the quest based on how they approached certain ideas for instance rolston experimented heavily with using greetings and goodbyes in the imperial cult quest line and would also dramatically page break dialogue using the continue function goodall's quests were much simpler from a script perspective but would intertwine characters and plots which is one of the perks of having one guy writing so many quest lines since goodall was the writer of the thieves fighters guild house elio morag tong and more he could easily intersect all of them with a character like orvis drin that would also be possible if each faction had a different writer provided there was a lead writer making those connections something missing from the later games that's why later factions felt like independent puzzle pieces rather than a connected pattern of storylines todd howard was responsible for finishing the imperial legion it suffers the most from that faction distinction problem as the imperial forts feel like isolated sections of the world there is the odd crossover where you can tell goodall made the quest like the one to investigate the ebony smuggler from the house olau quest line but otherwise i've already detailed the oddities of howard's writing what i haven't mentioned is that howard is also responsible for the tutorial that thing i praised heavily yeah todd howard is the man behind it i'm not sure if his part in that ends when you walk out the door of the census office or if he is also responsible for the broader sidonine tutorial douglas goodall did say that mark nelson was responsible for fargoth mark nelson is also responsible for the daedra and vampire quests he used the least dialogue in traditional writing and used the most voice acting for his quests bill burkham was apparently a tester who also did one of the better fighters guild quests and speaking of old interviews let's go over some promotional material one of the reasons mike the liar jokes about multiplayer is the inordinate number of times bethesda got asked if morrowind was going to be multiplayer when discussing guilds rolston says the dark brotherhood was going to be joinable when actually quite the opposite ended up being the case actually rolston talks a pretty big game in this interview despite the fact that the 10 to 15 promised factions hadn't even been written yet given that their writer started at bethesda six months after the interview he also details a group of quests called the grand council resolution quests which sound like an awesome idea and are nowhere to be seen in the finished product the area and even the npcs for such an idea are all present in ebonheart but it never got made likely because it was far too ambitious for what they were capable of in another interview he states that they are going to reveal the origin story of vampires which wasn't true now in fairness bethesda at the time were trying to sell the game to both gamers and purse holders so it's not really that unreasonable for them to sell a big game howard also spends a lot of time explaining how combat was going to work which is all present in the game the chop slash thrust system is in the game and the reason i didn't talk about it is that it's completely and utterly irrelevant due to one factor they apparently didn't anticipate that there was going to be an objectively best category for each weapon there was even an option patched in to just use the best option for every swing what's funny is that this isn't a bad idea it works for mordhow they just decided it wasn't worth developing and dropped it there's also this picture which floated around every promotional article let's just take a second to admire this first magica is called spell points and it has a green bar while fatigue is blue player name is in the game at all times naturally top right says the spell name as well as showing the icon at least you can tell that's a picture of a guy walking on water bottom left says the cell name and has an auto map which isn't accurate to the area and actually gets reused in other screenshots bottom right is the inventory which besides some quality passes is actually pretty much the same as in the release version and the dialog window they certainly didn't advertise how much reading there was going to be services and persuasion are actually tabs in the release version they're just more subdued shulki ashton bobby is an npc in the release version and they are indeed a merchant in nisis although they didn't keep their gender i'm not sure what building this is it doesn't look like anything in the game i mean barring the actual merchant is a street vendor this interior is way more complex than the adobe structures in the base game very interesting overall while the interviews are interesting and provided some insight on the development process howard and rolston tended to keep their cards close to their chest when asked questions they did expose on occasion that they were promising ahead of their development but i wouldn't say there were outright lies and deceptions in morrowind's marketing is vivec visually much more complex in the promotional material yeah and i've already explained why the original vision of evec wouldn't have worked back then morrowind even had a six month delay it was originally supposed to be released in the winter of 2001 but got delayed to may of with tribunal coming in november of o2 and blood moon in june of 2003 and finally the xbox game of the year edition in october of o3 tribunal and blood moon are interesting creatures in their own right they represented bethesda still following the schema of morrowind but having learned lessons from the original game they also feature some experimentation for ideas that would become part of the quarter design of oblivion but for reasons i'll explain when you're older they learned the wrong lessons so we've reached the end of this video there's only one thing left to do near the start of the game we found some scrolls called icarian flight that will throw you across the map i figure it's fitting we step off the dock we helped to build and leap off into the horizon for a new adventure this has been a long project so forgive me for adding this little personal section at the end for everyone who made it here here's your reward if you want you can subscribe this video isn't going to be standard on this channel in fact i'm not even entirely sure i'll never do another project as long as or in depth as this video this really was a product of passion i want to thank some folks first i want to thank bethesda specifically everyone who had a hand in making the game i spent so long covering thank you i know for some of you there was a point where the process was difficult i can only hope you enjoyed making the game as much as i and many others have enjoyed our time with it a big thank you goes to the unofficial elder scrolls pages seriously if all i had was elder scrolls fandom i probably wouldn't have been able to finish the video i cannot understate how much of a gold standard the uesp should be for game wikis thanks also go out to the guys working on the openmw project even if it straddles the line of adding convenience features you guys are doing good work if you are curious i was using version 43 i think they're on 46 now the software plotter was crucial to structuring the series out go check it out if you do any kind of creative writing work i would recommend it finally i want to thank the elder scrolls community some of you guys anyways some of you have got terrible taste from the hard-working modders the people who compile information in easy formats the people who write in essays worth of material and lore conversations that are considered casual and the artists who create beautiful art rendering the world reimagining the music and making great memes seriously if any fan base deserves to be catered to and deserves a true sequel it's the morrowind fandom i hope my video has been a worthwhile addition to the community i suppose a final question comes up is this my final playthrough of morrowind at this point i may have finally drained everything out of the world my original plans were to continue on to tamriel rebuilt but i decided i would probably be too harsh on those guys it's an ambitious project and i'm looking forward to its final release in 2121 then i was going to cover the dragonborn dlc and go on to skywind eventually but no you'll have to wait until the day i cover skyrim for that i wish the skywind devs luck with their project like a lot of luck seriously finish the thing before the microsoft acquisition finalizes and you get a c d i also wanted to talk about the red year how it felt like an angry writer trying to get revenge on the evil xenophobic dunmer and of all the televani to bring back why did bethesda choose master nelloth i know divith fear is controversial but master arion was literally the perfect candidate nelloth isn't leaving vardenfeld just because the island exploded and i was going to cover the morrowind dlc for esl but that would require playing esl and i'm not thrilled with the prospect all right silence i'm out of things to say so i guess it's credits time the footage you're seeing was some videos i recorded of character resolutions i wanted to include but failed to finish so they fit in here firstly music jeremy's soul's morrowind soundtrack was of course used i also used the oblivion soundtrack during the tribunal section and the dragonborn soundtrack during the blood moon section i used the song as skadion idol from eso just to make a point in two songs from skywind their rendition of nerevar rising and a song titled zapper bell bay i also used a couple young scrolls tracks as well as the song degather fanfiction onto art yeah i'll be honest i just rated my morrowind meme folder i have no clue who made a bunch of this stuff i guess if you want to take credit for something contact me and i'll post it in the description not that anybody will read it anyways i do know this map of daedric shrines was made by someone named superstar the animation of jagram bergaarn and divith fear is titled heart and it's by zilconem there's also going to be a bulk of archive links in the description these all go to the interviews and articles i used for this video they aren't in any order of appearance but they are titled i only take sourcing half seriously and i started doing that much halfway through this project you

Channel: PatricianTV

Views: 1,691,030

Keywords: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, Morrowind 2020, Morrowind Review, Morrowind Analysis, Morrowind Retrospective, Morrowind Retro Analysis, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind Retrospective, Elder Scrolls Analysis, Elder Scrolls Retrospective, Elder Scrolls Retro Analysis, Tribunal Review, Bloodmoon Review, Master Index Morrowind, Morrowind Gameplay, Morrowind Mages Guild, Morrowind Review 2020, Morrowind Review 2021, Game Analysis, Game Review, PatricianTV, Patrician

Id: VZ9u8S26tGk

Length: 473min 0sec (28380 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FuzzyLittlePenguin]

I'm a little over an hour in at this point, and I have to say, this is really well made. I agree with the points, especially about fast travel, character creation, the tutorial (and introductory quests) and thieving.

I started listening in the background, but now have it on the big screen because the editing is relevant and despite playing literally the worst version of Morrowind, his play style is pleasing to me for some reason.

Edit: That was an awesome ride. I'm perpetually amazed by how much depth there is in the different story arcs. Highly recommended.

[u/Vernon_Trier]

Ah, yes, a quick 8 hour retrospective.

[u/dovetc]

I watched this over the past week piece by piece. It's a bit of a slog, but honestly the creator does a good enough job sprinkling in humor and insight that I didn't always notice in my playthroughs that it didn't feel like a waste of time (which it objectively was).

[u/Teralitha]

They didnt watch it. They just started the video and needed something to fall asleep to.