Rumination Analysis on Morrowind

sometimes when I get ready for a game I tend to write down detailed notes things I want to talk about that kind of thing especially if I happen to be playing the game prior to or within relative time to knowing that I'm going to be looking at it halflife 2 being an excellent example of that sometimes I don't take notes at all because I know the game so well and I know exactly what I want to talk about sometimes I try to do little bullet points uh like I do here uh this is actually the full extent you probably can't see this at all the full extent of my notes about marwin despite the enormity of the game that's all I have written down because all I need is bullet points it's marwi wind you know how many times I've played marwi wind no let's get a couple things out of the way right off the bat here very right very first thing slap bang okay marwi is in my opinion overall debatably one of the best of the Elder croll series it's it's a very close tie and for obvious reasons that I'll start getting into but for all the interface and graphical and difficulties within maroin that exist and all the uh irritations for the gameplay it makes up for that by being such a magnificent world and its General difference in design philosophy but I'm getting ahead of myself let's talk about tonality okay when you see a game like Oblivion uh well okay let's actually let's define something really quick okay I tend to use different definitions of high and low fantasy because I find the existing definitions to be pointless and stupid um I I I I this is this is just a matter of opinion and I tend to to make it clear when I say when I'm saying High fantasy I mean my definition not the the actual definition which applies to just about everything um but for example I tend to Define High fantasy as something that is heavily magical something that is very excessively uh of a Fantastical nature and uh to use a direct example Warcraft the setting of Warcraft In general is something that I would consider very high fantasy something I would consider low fantasy is something that is much more down toe that still has fantasy elements magic different species you know monsters that kind of thing or whatever but is overall a lot more mundane about it I consider Lord of the Rings to be a much more low fantasy in that in that sense you get where I'm going with this um actually probably a better example would be something like The Witcher series but you get the general concept here the difference between the two has to do with a a degree of severity within its tone now Oblivion is actually kind of in the middle uh I'll talk about this more when I get to Oblivion but it's very Cosmopolitan it has its high fantasy elements as I Define them but it also is very low fantasy it is very mundane very downto Earth in many aspects thereof and that's part of its charm in my opinion Skyrim is extremely low fantasy in my opinion in my definition thereof you know it is very down to earth it's very dirty virtually every form of magic in the game and and Fantastical element of the game exists on a on a day-to-day you know down to earth level if you understand where I'm going with and there are exceptions of course but the overall tonality of the entire game is down here you understand where I'm going with this all of this is to emphasize marind which is way up here marind is by far the most high fantasy of the Elder Scrolls in my opinion and that whole atmosphere which is what I'm going to start talking about here in bits and pieces is part of why I like this game so much uh someone once asked me on the Q&A what areas I would like to see in a future Elder Scrolls game uh in Elder Scrolls 6 for example or five or whatever we're up to no yeah we're up to six um we are right three four yes okay sorry I had that number confused for a long time I don't remember why but anyways I would love to see the uh I actually can't remember the name of it all of a sudden off the top of my head the area where the kajit are from and the argonians the the Southeast region which is described as being very alien and very unique in its P perception I believe that would be an interesting direction to go into especially immediately after the you know much more gritty and dirty area of the of the of Skyrim of the north of the Nords I think that would be fascinating to go into um and and it's partially because I enjoy that type of fantasy so much I enjoy that type of buildings made out of mushrooms that you grow in a specific Manner and and and giant insects that that carry you to and from different locations and a city that happens to be floating based that is being suspended by you know willpower and various other things and just so many different aspects of of marwi wind were so Fantastical and I loved that I loved the atmosphere and that's what I want to talk about first uh one of the things I'll talk about this in depth when I get to halflife 2 yes uh I I may or may not upload this after my halflife 2 video but I haven't actually done it yet but I know one of the things I'm I'm going to talk about is the idea of using lots of little details in order to to flesh out a background to give something a degree of atmosphere I'll talk about that more later then but Maro into something that does that quite well just about everything you see from the trees to the to the foliage to the to the rocks to the way the the the roads are built to the way to the monsters that are roaming around or everything about maroin just screams that this is basically an alien world it doesn't have with some exceptions your typical fantasy creatures or stuff you know don't see too many ogres and elves and whatnot wandering around instead what you see is is things that look frankly alien and it really helps contribute to that overall feeling that this is just practically another world if you know what I'm getting at and that's even talking within within context context of the lore obviously as the gamer as the person actually sitting here playing the game you thinking that this is a whole another world which is part of the point and one of the other uh big advantages Maro has which I'll get to later on on top of that there is this wonderful design philosophy in the graphics to make things simultaneously mundane looking you know to because they were trying for that realistic look at the time the graphics of marind were nothing short of topnotch admittedly it's hard to go back to them but at the time the whole intent was to make things look relatively realistic even though what you were looking at was something completely unrealistic if that makes any sense to make the unreal look real to make things that looked like fantasy look like they existed side by side with things we know are real like people and dirt and wood and stuff like that and make it fit which was an incredible uh achievement at the time and a brilliant graphical graphical design uh philosophy to go into this I'm going to pause here to mention something that I actually probably should have mentioned first there is a mod out there uh who proper name I don't know I'm going to look it up right now as I'm talking about it that has to do with improving the marwi wind engine it's something that people have been working on for years upon years years uh maybe this is it yes this is it the marind overhaul which has which is still being worked on by the way still being updated last I checked which I suppose actually I could check the the time stamps on these right now and see if it is in fact being updated uh looks like it is not but it is basically done and it has to it's it's a way to make marrow and more playable in the modern era when I most recently played Maro wind which is just a little over a year ago now I was using the overhaul marind overhaul in order to uh enjoy it because I freely admit marind is one of those games I have a hard time going back to just because of the limitations of the UI and the graphics this is something I've talked about before the overhaul helps tremendously with all of that and that is one of the great benefits of Any Given Bethesda game is the fact that you can use mods and and the kits that are available and the knowledge we have about the game in order to improve it so you you can still enjoy it later on and uh I'll talk about that more in in depth later of course but anyways the point I'm getting to here is that I strongly recommend if you have not played Maran go ahead and pick it up uh it cannot it's not particularly expensive make sure you get the Game of the Year Edition you definitely want both expansions with it that would be blood moon and tribunal and do yourself a favor and pick up the overhaul kit so you can enjoy it with slightly improved graphics and render radius and stuff like that for me personally the render radius was one of the biggest downsides of of vanilla Mar wind I've always had a weird thing about render radiuses and it it comes from living in an era that and growing up in an era where you know we finally started doing 3D graphics and games and the way that they got around the problems with that was by having the render radius be like 100 yards in front of you which feels like you're in a dense fog to me and it always felt claustrophobic I always hated it and even to this day there are more modern games that I play and I look out in the Horizon and I see fog and it's like even though it's two miles out it still bothers me a bit that's always been a personal pet peeve of mine and so the original Maran had that problem in Spades because there were there were literally instances of circumstances where you could be you could draw your bow or your crossbow or whatever and aim at someone and hit someone who is basically just past the fog and because of the way the game was designed they couldn't actually register it if you know what I mean so you'd hit them they'd take the damage but you know nothing would happen because it's past render radius that always bothered me the overhaul kit fixes that tremendously so that that is a nice thing um in addition to Graphics one of the things I want to talk about is the music I love the music of marent of the three modern Elder Scrolls games I actually still listen to maroin music it's on my iPod it's in uh it has a whole playlist dedicated just to it uh just to maroin specifically while I like the Oblivion music and some of the Skyrim songs the Maro wind music was so incredibly atmospheric and I hate to keep banging on that word but I don't have a better word for it it helps pull you in to such a severe degree that you can really feel like you're actually roaming this other world and actually engaging yourself in this other world and it really added to the flavor to the tone to everything it felt like this the word I want to use is Adventure because that's really what it feels like to me and I know that word is used and overused so much in the modern era that it people tend to forget what it means uh people tend to forget the feelings that it is supposed to convey you know Adventure something that you are actually genuinely in enthusiastic about something that actually makes you engaged and excited and you're you're really into it that kind of thing this that music helps bring that alive for me in Maro especially given uh what I think I will go ahead and go into next it is in fact my next bullet point here Maro wind is the closest game I've ever played ever to D and D now let me explain that a little bit I've talked before in my D and D blogs you may not have watched those about how you can do basically anything with within a d and d game within reason you have a near total amount of Freedom depending on your GM of course because the the game in this case the GM is someone who is sensient and therefore capable of adapting to basically any type of circumstance at least with some thought right a video game by definition is always going to be limited and that's something that I have chafed against basically my whole life this is one of the reasons I uh have have been so into D and for as long as I have is because it is basically a way to engage in a societal or not soal itle a social interaction with other people while at the same time playing a game that happens to be basically totally free if you understand where I'm going with this marind is the closest I've ever seen that approaches that ideal hang on just a second there we go you are basically I mean there is a main plot line there are guidelines but the quest log in Maro wind for anybody who for example has only played Skyrim is going to seem a a little bit offputting uh they're going to go into this and be like now admittedly tribunal did clean up the quest log quite a bit added some new code which would eventually be used in Oblivion in order to help make the things a little bit more user friendly but overall the general concept is basically you'd get a quest to go to a guy on the East part Northeast part of balur and you have to go talk to him and here's his name and from that information you basically have to figure out where he is figure out where his house is or assuming he's in his house maybe he's one of the guys roaming around figure out where balora is you know all these things right you had to piece it together basically for all intense of purposes by yourself and one of the things maroin very much does is it basically drops you in the world I have had several friends of mine who have never actually successfully played Maro wind because they dislike this and this is why I'm mentioning this in kind of a neutral tone while I of course obviously do enjoy this type I freely understand the fact that it is a negative for some people Maro is is a game that is almost severe in its lack of Direction you get dropped there in the first the first little town and there's a few quests you can do there and there's some money you can make and there's a couple nearby caves and that's about the full extent of the direction you get other than the general idea to go to balora I just mentioned that and then you're left you're left to your own devices it's like let me let me give you an analogy and in fact I have done this before and I have had players complain about this before and I had to adapt my circumstance I have had campaigns in Indie where I have you know we we've set up their characters we've set up their back stories we've set up how they've met why they're in the party and then I've basically said okay here's the town you're in and then I stopped that's the attitude that's the perspective marowan takes okay here's the world and then it just looks at you because the next move is up to you you understand as I'll talk about when we get to Bioshock which is definitely coming later um gamers in general do enjoy having a degree of Direction I agreee even I myself enjoy this and there is a at the very least having some idea of you know what is there because too much openness can be overwhelming and too much openness can be over just okay I guess I'll go over here and then I'll find this and and you can work into that and work into that mindset but it is not the natural mindset of most people who are Gamers most gamers are used to things that are quite Linear by Nature even something that is a quote unquote s s box I point to the Grand Theft Autos for example is ultimately extremely patterned in its resultant you know there's a there's an icon that indicates there is a what is basically a quest over here and there's an icon over here and there's all sorts of stuff you can do randomly but that doesn't have anything to do with anything you follow me even something that builds itself as a Sandbox is ultimately still relatively linear in its presentation maroin does of course have some linearity to it duh it's still a video game but it is arguably the most most open-ended the most here is the world game I've ever seen to date I might add on top of that there's a couple other things that that tie into this philosophy uh one of the most obvious ones that I like to pull out is the fact that there's no such thing as the essential NPC that's something they came out with an oblivion for those of you who don't know what that means uh any NPC that the developers decided was too important to allow to die because it would disrupt the quests or just make make it impossible for you to complete the main story line or stuff like that that you can't you can bring them down to zero health and they'll pass out and then they'll get back up usually there's some kind of indication of the fact that they are essential any given time at which you uh see that it's it's basically meant to be a sign to you the gamer that oh okay maybe I shouldn't mess with this guy but in marwi wind that didn't exist in morrowwind if you walked up to cadus whatever his name is the the blade agent in in balur you had the option to kill him the first time you saw him now of course the the question I feel like has to be asked is why you know and and you may be wondering why it is I'm in favor of such a thing especially given the kind of characters I tend to play which are what I like to call the Marios you know good people in other words sorry someone I haven't talked to recently but the reason I'm in favor of that kind of openness I'm going to explain in two two mannerisms here okay there's a game called Guild Wars you may have heard of it I have spoken Praises of it before and there's a scene that I that I I remember distinctly you've just gone through this whole jungle and you come across the people you've been following and and you're trying to rescue and they have been captured by a bunch of spiders so you save them from the spiders and you go up and you say you better explain what's going on before we cut you down right now and then the NPC then surrounds you with a bunch of low-l goons maybe like eight of them and says I think you should be the one to say this the same thing now one of the things I have found true throughout gaming history and this is this might be juvenile of me I don't actually know I will freely admit that I consider this to be something of a flaw in my in my in my mentality is I have this thing called oh yeah and it only happens when someone irritates me if I am supposed to be intimidated by a given enemy or a given NPC if it's done properly I tend to be intimidated I tend to treat them with some degree of respect or reverence or you know please don't kill me but when someone is just irritating all I want to do is smack them upside the fa the head and in marwi wind I can do that now let me let me keep going with this analogy here uh in guild war she you know I could have destroyed those eight guys that she surrounded me with and then looked her and be like okay now what you know because you're trying to threaten me and intimidate me like a child would on a on a school ground no I am a hardened Warrior who has just survived survived escaping the Char and just got over the the hi hideous mountains of Doom surviving the Hostile xenophobic dwarves and then the undead and now you're coming up here with oh we're going no smack let me give you an example of what I'm talking about and uh two examples if I am I mate I I hate to segue like this but I just if you if you'll forgive me two of the most satisfying examples of actually being able to do what I'm talking about come from Fallout 3 and Chrono Trigger respectively in Chrono Trigger I have just defeated maggus the big man you know the guy who everyone thought was the last boss until we revealed that we're only about halfway through the game and then you go to the past and you fight a Aela nisb Bel 2 the black Toronto and you have all these epic awesome battles now I mentioned all those to point out that all of those were properly intimidating all of those even on new game plus it's like yes I'm ready because you know I have the proper it's they're not irritating they're they're supposed they're threatening me and they're intimidating me properly rather than being irritating as I mentioned earlier then I get to the most awesome place in the world the kingdom of zeal and uh get up to Dalton who says allow me to deal with these guys and he summons the gollum I make it a point whenever I'm New Game Plus thing to destroy Gollum because because he irritates me and even when I am not New Game Plus thing it is actually not that hard to defeat the golum if if you're prepared for it you can actually basically manipulate his AI in order to never be able to kill you and yeah no screw you I I I don't have a better way of of displaying that mentality because he just irritates me and it's not it's not intimidating it's not imposing it's not anything it's just it's not dramatic it's just it's like some little kid walks up in the middle of this very serious drama and walks up and says and pulls pulls like a a letter opener and says I have you now and I just want to smack him not the kid obviously but you get you get the general concept here the other example is Fallout 3 right about the time when you rescue your dad and he convinces what's her face to start up the project again and ever and you're at a point in time in which you have to save the survivors from the conclave okay most of the guys there are at the very least despite how how horrified they are of the situation they're at the very least grateful for the help you're giving them one of them is not one of them does nothing but badmouth you and it was getting kind of on my nerves and it got to the point where he finally was like look I don't want everything to do with you any any cusses me out and he turn and he ends the dialogue on me and I just looked at him for a moment and I was like okay and I happen to have uh I forget what they're actually called but it's the ammo it's the N nuclear ammo the the stuff you can put in the the big the big old guns I can't think of their names either you can reverse you can you treat those as grenades right which also means you can reverse pickpack them pocket them into someone and uh and then blow up so I like to think of what happened in that scene was I looked at that guy with just a general err of annoyance hit quick save because I did and then I walked up sneaked pickpocketed reverse pickpocketed it into his pants and then he looks down and then he does he he does this thing he's like oh my God and then this nuclear explosion goes off which kills me too which was immensely satisfying now I've I've gone way off topic here sort of but my point in bringing up all this is the reason I like having the option the option to take horrible vengeance upon whomever I choose to is because occasionally characters annoy the hell out of me in marind I've got an example for you there's a an ark Mage who happens to be part of the help you cure you of Corpus disease who is a I I don't even want to use the word I want to use here because that's how irritating he is and I generally make it a point of killing him after I've done with him because screw you dude now I mention this especially as a bonus because in in Oblivion in fall out in Skyrim you encounter someone who irritates you and they have the essential flag and this will happen by the way and all you can do is knock them over and there is nothing sat to me at the very least there is nothing satisfying about that it's like P and then at that point you feel just as Petty as they do because you haven't done anything any more than they've done anything and it's like ah reload there's nothing there it is so much more satisfying to have that option now I keep stressing that word because as I've talked about before I love having options even if it's something I personally will never use it is something I tend to be in favor of because Lord knows I'm not the only gamer in the world first of all but second of all because by its very definition to me optional means exactly that I don't have to kill anybody it's in fact i' I have seen pacifist runs of marwin which are things of beauty which are really awesome actually because of how far you have to work in order to do so you know and it's awesome I love it it's like a pacifist of Metal Gear Solid except worse because you know now you have to include mindless monsters that are coming after you as well now I I go into all this to really emphasize the point that I'm trying to get across here which is to say marind really is the biggest open world I've ever seen there's actually two other things I want to talk about with regards to this point this is still just one bullet point one is what I call enforced exploration I will debate whether or not this is good or bad because ultimately this is not optional and therefore is something that is basically forced on the player that's why I call it enforced EXP and whether or not you're going to like it is depend on your own opinions I freely admit that there are times when I don't want to go exploring when I don't want to go over every nook and cranny to find what you know where this cave is or where if if I'm looking one for one in specific or indeed just looking for what's there in general I'm not always in the mood for that so being forced to do so at all times basically does get a little bit old there's a specific Quest and I cannot think of what it is uh for the life of me nor indeed the town that's in so I had do apologize but there's a town There's a quest where you have to go and check out what's happening with their supply of whatever mineral it wasn't anything fancy like ebony but you know they're iron mines basically and find out what's going on and they tell you that iron M the iron mines are south of town and that's basically the extent of it for the direction you get now that means you have to go wandering the hillsides and navigating the roads and try to figure out where you are based basically entirely upon your your mental uh your ility to mentally have have a good track of that kind of thing now I mentioned this I have a pretty good geographical brain okay I I have a very good sense of direction I'm I'm good at navigating it's mostly because I have a good visual memory you know in astron's call I usually don't need chords for half the things I'm going to because I know where they are because there's going to be a tree here on the right in 10 minutes and that's going to tell me to turn right at that point if you follow me so I'm tend to be good at that sort of thing and I tend to enjoy that sort of thing but I know a lot of people who aren't and who don't and there's nothing wrong with that let me make this absolutely clear clear this is why I'm listing this as an overall negative that this this enforced expolation thing is because sometimes someone just wants to go to the quest they don't want to roam the hillsides looking for this mine you you know what I mean especially since things are not as well labeled in marowan as they are in other things most of the time you have to rely on more mundane things like you know a sign that happens to be half buried under some Rubble on the side of of what used to be a road that points in a general direction that says the mind's that way and that's the full extent of what you have to go off of you know sorry about this I don't get to talk to her all that often now that kind of thing is also compounded by the nature of the graphical design I mentioned earlier this place very much Feels Like A wilderness unless you're actually in a city or within the immediate vicinity of a of a of an urban area Vander fall feels very much like a Wilderness and it is clearly done on purpose but that is also a problem because as anybody who knows a properly designed Wilderness and anded real life Wilderness is not the easiest thing to navigate first of all and is very hard to get lost in second of all and third of all is very hard to find what exactly you're looking for even if you're not trying to get back just finding that your destination is very difficult and they very much Go full in on that well there are some patterns you can find manage to discern after a while because you know they're same using the same tile set over and over relatively speaking the fact of the matter is after a while it's like oh where the heck is this mine it should be in this General vicinity and you have no idea of the fact that actually that little uh area of underbrush over there actually conceals a hidden path which goes under this chunk of the mountain and then goes down to into a cave where the actual entrance to the mine is you see where I'm going with this so this is something that is something of a problem with the game and something I feel most people need to be warned about when walking into it there are mods that help get around this but I'm going to leave all my mod talk in general for when I get to the the little bullet point here that says mods um on top of that there is one of the thing that I do consider to be an actual benefit of marawi marind is huge it is my personal opinion uh having played all all the other Scrolls uh not counting the the randomly generated one that doesn't count let's let's just talk about the the three more recent ones okay marind Oblivion and Skyrim of these three games it is in my opinion that marind is by far the largest the biggest world that you have to explore in it is possible I freely admit that part of that is because there is no fast travel which I'll actually uh talk about next but because this is a good Segway point but even ignoring that fact marind is absolutely gargantuan part of that was to give that feeling that this is another world part of that was to give the concept of uh not the concept to to to to paint a canvas so that mod makers can have tons and tons of room to go ahead and plop down wherever whatever they want to do right part of that was done to add to that atmospheric tone I mentioned towards the beginning and in my opinion it's actually very successful in all these points maroin started my love affair of exploration in video games to be completely honest with you I cannot begin to express how much I enjoyed just roaming not actually looking for anything not on any given Quest just going across the countryside looking for whatever I could find and there is tons of stuff to find Vander fall is a very busy area even if you do the uh even if you have every point of Interest unlocked on the map there is so much more than just those major points of interest it's not even funny and not all of it is actually tied to something either not everything has a quest you know now I'm going to go and segue this into the no fast travel thing because that is something that need that anybody who has not played marn but has played a more recent game needs to know about there is no fast travel there it it was not an option they back in marwin they had two other things they had these they had boats and silt Striders which you could hire and say you know each each one generally connected to like three other towns major towns cities really and they you could go between them like that and you basically got a feeling for the roots if you understand me you know like this guy goes here and this guy goes here so if I need to get over here you know uh the Mages Guild also had teleport pads that could connect between certain cities you know that's sort of thing right so it was possible to get around quickly the catch was you had to know your way you couldn't just pull up the map and say here some people like that some people don't I I'm I'm admittedly neutral on the subject and I'll talk about why when I get to Oblivion review But ultimately the lack of fast travel is something that has to be mentioned for anybody who's picking this game up and has played more recent games one other thing that does help to offset that is the spell Mark and the spell recall I am going to mention a mod specifically here because there is a ring of Mark and recall that exists as a mod and I strongly recommend getting it and the reason why is because most people don't like to raise the magic skill specifically in uh mysticism I believe just to get Mark and recall because it is widely considered that that's basically the only real reason to pick up mysticism is to get Mark and recall the way it works is when you cast mark it takes a it takes your three-dimensional location in all three axises and and saves it somewhere and thus whenever you cast recall you go back to that specific spot right that works out uh rather well all things considered for getting around especially if you happen to have another mod I'll mention here in a minute but as I as I mentioned getting the ring is is generally considered to be preferable whether it's cheating or not is of course up to the individual's preference but it does save you from having to put money into mysticism when frankly you don't actually want to raise that at all couple other things that were in Marrow wind that are absent from other things includes the levitate spell basically in its entirety that it's funny that that that I mentioned that specifically because there are several areas that both in lore and in game mechanics terms you basically needed levitate to reach because that's just kind of how it is again this is a high fantasy area and it never occurred to anybody that you wouldn't have that spell in order to be able to access their area and if you don't then they probably don't want your your company you you understand where I'm going with this and it tended to be very useful especially if you're say an Archer or a mage because you could literally just hover up into the air and stand and click on things there are several reasons they got rid of that in the more recent games and most of those have to do with uh load Zone the concept of specific zones being segregate for example let let me use Fallout 3 as an example you open up the map in Fallout 3 and it's this big old map but it is important to note that that big square of of area is not actually one zone a huge amount of it is but most of this over here is one zone but there are portions of it like this up here and this area here and there's like three or so portions that make up the DC area that are all separate zones what I mean by that if you don't understand is if you were to fly for example in Fallout 3 and you're in the big Zone and you start heading towards the DC area let's let's layer this down so I can see it like this as you start to hit over the DC area you see debris in your way and you normally you have to take the subway to get in but you fly over it and you encounter nothing because there's actually nothing there you understand you're still in this Zone none of this is actually rendered none of this is actually processed because you haven't loaded it you're here you follow me that's thus you have to go so later games would use the lack of levitate in order to Force you having to go through the Zone Zone lines in order to enter the areas now this wasn't done for reasons of laziness or anything like that make make no mistake this was done in order to improve the game in over overall uh process because if you have segregate zones you can expand upon what is in a given Zone greatly because the more items that are act it's actually sell is what the term is but the more items are active in a given cell the harder it's going to be for your game for your computer or for your Xbox or for your PS3 or whatever to process process it this is why something like Megaton which ultimately isn't even that large is nevertheless its own cell because that way everything that is in there doesn't have to constantly be tracked by the by the processing while you're over here in in the middle of BF nowhere you follow me maroin doesn't have that for the most part obviously it has indoor zones but in general everything you see in the overall world is one cell and the way they got around that or I shouldn't even say that the problem was at the time in order to deal with that they have load lines load load times every so every the whole map is built up into blocks okay you you you'll see this if you as you start to explan the map and each one of these is effectively a uh a region okay at any given point in time the game will have two regions loaded the one you were just in and the one you just entered or or rather the one you're in now right and so obviously if you cross a line you can see you know oh there's that going over there and it will tend to load regions immediately adjacent to you if you happen to be close it is kind of smart about this but it does involve load times and getting rid of those load times is why they Ed the cell structure in later games you follow me so I'm mentioning all this to get across the point that the load times is something you have to get used to in marwin because it's just one big cell and yes you can levitate you can you can raise your jump in acrobatics to to 30,000 and go leaping over the mountain I'm sure you've seen that YouTube video but the load times is what you have to basically live with in order to deal with that now at a modern computer speaking from experience those load times were virtually non-existent especially with the overhaul kit which happened to streamline that process significantly which was good but it is something worth noting also marind is probably of all the Elder Scrolls I've played the one with the worst memory leak now I didn't have any problems when I was playing with the overall kit so it's possible something in the kit actually fixed that memory leak but I mention it just in case if you don't want to use the overhaul or if you don't have a the interest in it or you're playing on the consoles that memory leak problem basically means that after a certain time of playing you have to stop and stop just close it down and then start it up again occasionally after having rebooted your computer depending on how bad it got that's just kind of a reality of it one of the other things that they introduced in later uh flinging your phones games is uh the concept of hang on just a second the concept of uh Dynamic events and random events Fallout 3 is probably the poster child for this but if you've played Skyrim you've also seen this as well back in marwin the idea of Random or dynamic events basically didn't exist it's uh instead what you would have would be static okay for example if you are going along the road and you see a young Maiden happens to be standing there who is smitten with the man who just stole her uh goods and wants you to go take a message to him any given time you play the game that woman is still going to be there okay hang on just a second now I mentioned that because a lot of people have taken that type of information and assumed that Maro wind is going to be a much more I guess linear is the word I'm looking for kind of gameplay as in there's going to be no variation that that's the whole point of those random events is to give you a different experience each time you play right the truth of the matter is however marrow wind can vary significantly on your play based on your play style as well of course but also in the way you you go through it allow me to explain marwin did something that very few other games of its like have done basically you have okay in Oblivion you had the Mages Guild the Thieves Guild the Fighters Guild the Dark Brotherhood and I believe that's it actually as the major side arcs in addition to the m main Arc the the the additional organizations you could join right because joining organizations has been a big deal in in all other schools in Skyrim you know same basic thing you had what is effectively the fight 's Guild The mag's Guild the the Thieves Guild the Dark Brotherhood and again I'm actually having trouble coming up with another one I mentioned this not to put those games down but to emphasize the fact that in marwin there's something more like 10 different organizations you can join now you may say oh my God but wait a minute I think about this for a moment I realize that just means that there's that much more to do and it's still going to be just as linear and so my response to you is well that's a very reasonable assumption if they weren't mutually excluded exive in many cases that's the key point right there the fact that so many of them are mult mutually exclusive with others means that any given playthrough you can't join uh the Thieves Guild for example you instead joined the Assassin's Guild the the kamanat tong or whatever they're called you you you instead join you enjoyed the Imperial Legion instead of uh the the the the religious group whose name I can't even think of right now you get my point having that Mutual exclusivity meant that having so many factions gave you off options basically is what I'm getting at here you actually have choices do you want to join any of them do you do you want to join some of them do you want to join that one in this play through well that means you can't join this other one but you know whatever uh similarly the three houses that you can join which anybody who's been playing my uh D andd campaign will probably recognize the names of redoran hu and Tani are mutually exclusive you get to join one yes there are mods that fix that but I I personally prefer not using those mods I think it makes more sense having only the one um but I do mention it for the sake of completion and and just so forth and so on what I'm trying to get across here is that even though there are no static event or I'm sorry even though there are no Dynamic events there is simply a massive amount of content to go through and you can't do it all at once let me give you probably the most extreme example of this becoming a vampire becoming a vampire in Maran was something that was actually a rumor for a long time before we finally figured out how to do it in short if you choose to become a vampire you're kind of stuck that way now there is actually a way to cure your vampirism in which which case it'll reset it but when I say you're stuck what I mean is that the moment you come a vampire your faction is set to hostile to basically everyone that means you can't even sell you can't even talk to a merchant and say please buy my stuff you can't talk to any Quest MPCs you can't Advance anything all you can do is go on a rampage and Destroy stuff right and ironically enough that is very appropriate for the lower of Vander fall in general because vampires are thought of differently depending on the set setting depending on the region because there are different types of vampirism with in uh tamel and the ones in Vander fall are not nice and they are not kind and they need to be destroyed and of course you can become a vampire hunter and and so forth and so on and yes you can become a werewolf too and a werewolf Hunter if you choose that's actually in the blood moon expansion but anyways I just mentioned all of this to get across the point that marowan truly is a world that you can roam in at your own pace do it however you choose to there are limitations as I've already started to mention you know there are downsides I don't want to be singing the Praises of a game that is flawed well okay yes I do but I want to sing those Praises but at the same time giving you a degree of Warning part of in case anyone's wondering I've been approaching this video with the with the uh perspective that the people watching it in general have not played marrow wind because I actually know a great fairly large number of people personally who have played Oblivion who've played Fallout 3 who've played Fallout New Vegas who've played Skyrim who never played Maro wind and there is so much to talk about with regards to that game that I find it difficult to do so without getting into however long video I I don't have the thing up so I don't know how long I've been talking for so long and I'm only like three or four bullet points into my list here but you get the point it's there's so much to chalk about in this game because ultimately marind is a very different game from all the other ones all all the other ones I mentioned Oblivion up through Skyrim ultimately you could group those all into the same kind of category over here everything is a variation of itself I'm not saying that's a bad thing I'm just saying in general if you've played one you know how to play another one right right Maro wind is over here it is different in just about every major way it is different obviously you still have the the Elder Scrolls perspective and the same general leveling system I'll talk about that next I guess but it's over here and so it takes more to get into that especially if all you're used to is over this you follow me let's talk about that leveling uh the leveling system thing actually has to do with several points which I will mention all as all as one little thing here first of all let's talk about the vendors in Marrow in marwi the vendors have a static amount of gold and I I shouldn't say static that's actually being let me try to explain by using a contrast okay in Oblivion a vendor has a gold amount that is the most amount they will pay for any given item right you can raise that through disos you can raise that for your own merkantil scill but the general concept is that's their gold limit per item given that fact they effectively have infinite gold you can just fling items at them and you know there you go right in marn that is not the case in marind the gold amount of every given a merchant in the entire game is saved at any given point in time so if you return to a merchant that you were talking to sometime ago and he you know you you you sold him several things so he's out of gold you can't sell him anything else because he's out of gold now there are certain there are certain merchants and certain events which will reset that amount but in general you have to do this if you want to sell something that is expensive you have to get their gold high enough in order to sell it to them which means you have to buy and sell and buy and sell there's actually a whole complic process involved in order to to force their gold amount up so that you can then sell this item that's worth the 10,000 gold or whatever and that can be either interesting or incredibly irritating depending on your opinion I'm not going to cast judgment on either perspective I personally tend to think that's really irritating uh I'm one one of the mods I very much did use was one that gave more gold to Merchants because hey you know um and there was actually another mod which I enjoyed which basically created this island that you you could uh warp to and on the island was Merchants who had a ridiculous amount of gold that reset regularly so there you go you're you're good but even ignoring that acquiring money in marind is not the easiest thing in the world and that's interesting for reasons I'll get into when I get when I start really talking about the leveling but at the same time I ignoring the the ver Merchants thing let's say let's say we've used the mod I just mentioned we have fixed the merchants problem ignoring that getting money is enjoyable in my opinion in Maro end first of all the obvious way to really get yourself started is to join the Fighters Guild because they just give you you know they give you missions and you get paid for it you are a mercenary for all intense purposes that's what the fighter Guild is but of course there are other ways to get gold depending on your class for example let's say you're a thief kind kind of character either Archer or melee based doesn't really matter one of the best uh and most enjoyable ways I tended to found find to get gold was going to the mines now let me explain briefly in the L of the setting the Empire has basically occupied marind and Vander fall in specific and Vander fall is one of the most uh prolific one of the most wealthiest sources of Ebony and glass which is used to make armor and weapons in throughout most of the the continent right so the Empire has possession of those and actually trading in Ebony and glasses is technically illegal by Imperial law because all of that by decree belongs to the emperor you follow me so that's why I mention you have to be sneaky because if you get caught the gar will come after you and and that'll be bad but if you're good at it you can sneak your way through those mines and steal a whole bunch of Ebony and glass and have a decent source of income and the best part is you can just kind of keep it on your person assuming you don't get caught in the future such that anytime you need something you can just dle out a few pieces of glass or ebony in order to pay whatever it is you need for right which I rather liked if you're a mage of course you have a slightly harder time of it but at the same time one of the things you can do as a mage is to go find any any of the given Bandit camps or any of the areas where the D worshippers are and just kind of go to town if you know what I mean and this is also something you can do as a fighter admittedly but the point remains it's it's a source of income and the the point I'm trying to emphasize here I'm trying to give specific examples and I don't want to give too many because that would take forever the point is you have options I keep using that word you have options you have so many different sources of revenue that you can use within this game and so many of them make a degree of sense either in laow or in gameplay and tend to be enjoyable in general unless you really know what you're doing you're not going to have a huge amount of income in this game not until you get to a certain point where enemies are actually dropping ebony armor or something like that but for most of the game your money supply is going to be somewhat restricted but not in a way that's actually irritating as long as you use the merchant mod that I mentioned now that I feel is worth mentioning especially in regards to leveling and maroin most people I know who have played maroin all came to the same conclusion I did that money equals exp okay now I I say that it's not quite a 1:1 ratio but if you've played Oblivion or Skyrim or anything like that you know that you could train at a trainer for a certain amount of gold a certain many times a day in order to augment your leveling but of course the way you leveled in those games was you actually use those skills right in marind most people agree that it is much more useful to go ahead and use the trainers pretty much exclusively to level that is to say the only thing preventing you from leveling is your gold Supply and you can raise whatever it is you feel you need to you know generally you raise compat skills first but you get the point in order to level in order to be stronger in order to get better that admittedly took me a while to figure out because that was kind of a unique concept to me at the time but once you understand that you understand the value of money because ultimately there's not much you can spend monetarily on that matters other than ingredients you know repairs that kind of thing other than leveling but leveling itself is one of those great benefits of of of the of the financial system and one of the reasons I like the fact as I mentioned earlier that the money supply is somewhat limited unless you really go out of your way to get it which of course you can options like I said so that's something to be kept in mind as well the leveling system and and the path at which you take to level is basically completely determined by you and how you choose to do it now uh what's what's my next Point here the scaling this is important to note um uh okay let me actually pull up the camera so I can see what I'm doing here okay most old Styler game older styled games had a I hesitate to call it a problem but a different mentality of how they approach scaling you're probably wondering what the heck I'm talking about with regards to scaling if you have 10 acrobatic skill you can uh let's make this nice and flat you can jump this High okay if you have 20 you can then jump 20 right and if you have 30 you can jump triple that okay this isn't exact but you get the point I hope you're following me on this because this is the point you'll notice that from one 1 10 to 30 there is no variation in the the line if you were to graph this out this is the scaling of most older games it is I'm doing a little off because I'm weird but it's basically linear is what I'm saying now whether or not that's a problem or a good thing is completely up to you but I mention it because in maroin it is quite easy to make yourself potions of increase my ability to make potions and then use those to make better potions and use those to make better Potions all when you're in all while you're in the menu which means the game is paused so even if that potion only lasts one second you can still you can just keep doing this forever until it reaches the point where you can make yourself super potions and blah blah blah now I don't actually do that I I think that really is a degree of cheap and unnecessary but I mention it because even ignoring that there's more you can do with a system like that than you can with than anything else modern games uh Having learned this lesson tend to do this kind of a scale where it tapers off and it basically plateaus at a certain point and you no longer gain increase uh obviously there's some limitations that but that's the general concept if I might diverge for just a second to really explain way back in Final Fantasy 3 on the Ness they had the linear curve so if you were high enough level and you had enough stat and whatever it was it was either agility or strength I can't remember the number of attacks you got per round got went up significantly to the point where if you were like a level 99 monk you know how they do the the animations like this you'd be stuck here like this as he's doing this animation for like a good 20 seconds until it the attack would go through and you'd see like 55 hits go through and then then it would switch to the other arm and stuff like that in the more recent games that scale is like this it it tapers off and as such you only get like 17 attacks and that's actually the most so marind had that problem as well a lot of people abused it of course but it also is worth noting that there are ways to buff yourself and stack Buffs on yourself in order to increase your stats you know that kind of thing you can use the console to increase your stats to stupid levels you know things like that in general if you're playing legitimately and not trying to be cheap it's not going to be a big issue with one exception which I really do feel like I have to mention even though this is kind of spoilery I shouldn't even say spoilery but I I prefer people who examine this on their own right because most people make the exact same Choice when it comes to this right after you leave sanine which is the first town the tutorial town you come across you hear this and you see this guy plummet from the sky in front of you and fall to his death now he has some Scrolls next to him in a journal and you could read the journal and he's talking about how he's invented this new transportation system and it works wonderfully and he's going to have everyone is going to be jealous of him because you know even though they keep mocking him he will show them and then he uh has a scroll several Scrolls actually which I I I forget what they're called but what they do is increase your acrobatics by a huge factor and I have NE I have known so many people who will pick up the Scrolls and use one and then look around and be like oh nothing happened and then as they're going about they will just kind of casually jump because people tend to just casually jump as they're playing games you know maybe hopping on a rock and then he's off because because it scales like this so when you have 10,000 acrobatics your jump suddenly goes like you're on a rocket now the beautiful part about this is acrobatics serves two functions in marent one how high you can jump and how fast obviously and two how far you can fall in other words to to put this linearly if you have a 10,000 jump skill and it's just 10 or 10,000 acrobatics if you jump you'll jump way up here really really really high obviously to the point where nothing is rendered for several minutes as you Plum it but when you hit the ground you'll be fine you will take no damage because that is the limit of how much how much you can fall the same amount that you can jump right these Scrolls only last a few seconds so you no longer have a 10,000 acatic skill when you land and die horribly on the other side of the island so yeah there are some amusing things that come as a resultant of that H what else we got here money talk about that lots of content no essential NPCs I already mentioned that no fast travel I'm actually kind of going through these pretty quick aren't I let's talk about the expansions I strongly recommended that you at the very least get Tribunal tribunal is the clear and decisive point at which they were trying to modernize Maru and they they improved the journal they improved their their styling of of zones they used cells and things like that more often you know it was it was clear they were moving forward in terms of technology and presentation and you could see bits and pieces of Oblivion within tribunal I also mention tribunal because it very directly continues the main plot I haven't talked about the main plot yet I don't wanted to get to spoilery because again so many people I know wanted this video because they've never played maroin but the main plot of Maran proper does continue within tribunal uh to a degree some degree or another so I strongly recommend if you are getting this that you finish the primary Quest chain in marind and then pick up tribunal especially since tribunal is significantly more difficult than the rest of than the entire rest of Maran for obvious reasons um but I have to give definite props to tribunal because it is extremely well done there's a great deal IND conditional subtlety and nuances the characters are far more fleshed out than they are even in Maran and they were pretty fleshed out in Maran too you know all sorts of things like that it is very well done and the villain who I will not mention here for for fear of spoilers is arguably one of the better presentations of a villain in the Elder Scroll series that I've seen personally probably one of my favorites All Things Considered um blood moon which is I really enjoy Blood Moon it doesn't have anything particularly to do with main plot but it is still suitably epic and it is still suitably awesome and it has to do with uh one of the dri princes I can't remember his name who deals with where wolves and basically going on the great hunt finding him find cutting off the source of werewolves that are happening on the island and you know successfully saving the day and blah blah blah and of course there's tons of content as usual now hang on just a second one of the other things I really have to mention in regards to tribunal and blood moon most people who've played Modern Bethesda games um don't know what I mean when I say the difference between a DL see in an expansion I have talked before about this from a fundamental perspective and from a corporate perspective and from a development perspective but on the terms of the gaming perspective in general an expansion is going to have more content that's really what it comes down to whether or not it's higher quality is debatable and indeed uh variable it kind of depends on the circumstances but it is generally widely considered you know 100 100% of the time basically that an expansion is going to have more content this is why I call both tribunal and blood moon expansions there is a huge amount of content in both of them and most of it is awesome awesome I actually I say I only say most of it cuz I personally can't think of anything that isn't but of course I don't want to put words into your mouth if you don't find it awesome but you know in general lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of additional content and a way to keep going if you know what I mean which is which is awesome and one of the things I liked is the way they did vampires in uh in in marwi as I said basically you become a vampire you lock yourself off from everything except for the Cure the vampire Quest but as a werewolf as long as you're careful you can still go about and do quests and do whatever you want to do while being a werewolf you just have to be very careful about who you change in front of and that kind of thing right very simple actually and uh really well done I thought it made being a werewolf actually worth it as opposed to being a vampire which most people myself included didn't actually consider it to be worthwhile uh one of the other things I have to mention as a little on a side is that uh Blood Moon occurs on an island called Soul which I may be pronouncing incorrectly and it that Island may sound familiar to any of you who are fans of the modern series because that's where Dragon born is occurring the DLC that isn't quite out yet for Skyrim which I'm really looking forward to um now one of the one last thing I want to talk about here with regards there to is dth er now I said I wouldn't mention the villain of the next game or or rather the villain of tribunal but I don't feel bad mentioning the villain of marwin proper because he's well publicized very early on it's not exactly a you know it's like saying that the villain of Star Wars is Darth Vader that's not really a surprise is it now of course arguably he's not the villain but you get my point it's the same general thing dag is the villain okay get over it I personally think that of the main villains of the Elder Scroll series dagur is probably my favorite of all of them while uh Jagger tharn or however you say his name was certainly interesting in his own right ultimately it is and and as has been revealed later he was basically just kind of a puppet and your classic scheming Vier kind of character and the guy in uh in Oblivion whose name I suddenly can't think of can't even be qualified I'm talking about the dri Prince can't even be qualified to be the actual main villain because ultimately you he KN he never interact with him he has zero characterization all you know is that this is all his plot what you do encounter is maner Cameron now this is an interesting facet maner Cameron the president President Eden in Fallout 3 and uh and uh God I suddenly can't think of his name uh and DNE all basically receive what amounts to a single scene in total characterization show them it's something that they they seem to like to do for some reason uh dther is no exception but I I'll get to that in a minute every single one of them basically all you know about them comes from what they've done and what other people say about them and then you actually encounter them and you usually learn more you usually learn hidden details that's usually where any given twists happen that kind of thing for example the biggest twist in Oblivion which I will not give away here is given away when you are confronting maner Cameron within his paradise for example and the twist about Eden being a computer and the whole uh virus thing and what's going on with the conclave uh which I did just spoil but whatever you know that's another thing with regards to Fallout 3 that's given away in that scene so these tend to be scenes that they build up and they tend to to deliver on that being said maner Cameron is is arguably one of my favorites definitely my second favorite of these villains he it helps the fact that they had an awesome voice actor for him uine was nothing short of pathetic I'm sorry it it was one of the the biggest downsides of Skyrim in my opinion that andu was just uhhuh but dag ER was was brilliant one of the reasons I feel that is because he was such a unique type of villain he was you could argue that he's your classic uh egotistical insane guy I would argue against that I would argue that dagi ER is someone who actually has some complexities to him who you can't just summarize with a single sentence in other words which I like I like it when my villains have some complexity I like when everything has some complexity to it as I'll mention when I get to the Kingdom Hearts series but ultimately I really enjoyed the portrayal of someone from everyone's perspective you you hear about him from the churches which portray him as the devil basically I I think they actually say that literally you hear about him from the other individuals involved vivec and Alexia and the guy whose name I can't think of you hear about his perspective from the writings which were told From narin's perspective you hear about him from the perspective of one of the dric Lords uh Ashura and then at the very end of the game you encounter him himself and he gives you the final perspective perspective his own and what I love about this is every single one of these perspectiv is effectively flawed if you know what I mean because it's someone's perspective it's not literal fact it's how they perceived something and so from all these pieces you are left to come up with your own interpretation of dag ER and what you thought about him and what you thought about his methods and his and his motives and whether or not he was right or wrong or partially right or partially wrong it was brilliant it was beautiful and he is the way they presented this makes him in my opinion arguably the most well-characterized villain in in the history of of the ELD Scroll series definitely of the most of the main villains and AR and without question my favorite of the main villains even though the last boss itself wasn't a big epic fight of Doom I like the way it was presented uh I I don't want to give away too much but suffice it to say that there's this Divine item that you're trying to to deal with and ultimately while you fight dth ER defeating him isn't really possible as long as that item still exists and your actual goal is to get rid of it not just to get rid of her but to get rid of the the the influences it has had on various other people throughout the duration of of the history and as the more you pay attention to the story and the lore the more you get all of this I don't want to spoil everything in the universe here suffices to say there's a lot of reasons why getting rid of this item is a good idea and you find yourself in this place and you equi the the artifacts that you've gathered and and you don't attack dag IR with them you attack the Divine item to destroy it and it's beautiful cuz the voice actor actually is like no don't wait and he sounds genuinely panicked is because it never occurred to dth ER that you would do anything other than try to defeat him the thought of getting rid of that was just oh my God and and of course you succeed and it changes the history of the island forever and then of course everything goes to hell in like a century or however long it is in the books I don't remember but anyways brilliantly done very well done and I I mentioned uh some time ago when I was being asked uh I believe it was in with regards to halflife the differing ways that you could do a last boss sequence you know the finale the last boss the the the the ending and the conclusion there or however you want to to Jumble these up and I was asked again is there a way to do it other than this you know the ff4 style as I like to as I like to style it marwi is another beautiful way to do that that whole sequence perfectly you know to do it it it was it didn't do the slow descent into total deadness and creepiness that halflife did instead it maintained this very strange level of just kind of half tension half quakin for lack of a better term as you there there's no big Fanfare there's no we're going to the last boss it's just like this but it imagin is to be so atmospheric and so impacting without having to budgeon you over the head with it basically it's very it's very creepy in its own right but it's not half life creepy you know it's not down here it's up here which is just terrifying in its own right brilliantly done brilliantly constructed um and another one of the reasons why marind is my favorite now mods it's the my last Point here I strongly strong strongly recommend you mod marand I really do because duh basically let's talk about a couple of the mods that I remember I don't remember names I apologize and I don't have the files anymore uh at least not anywhere accessible but let's talk about a few of the mods I do genuinely recommend first of all I mentioned that Mark of re the mark and recall ring there is another one um that helps with Transportation as well with regards to that uh let me actually take a step back one of the most popular there were two types of mods that were extremely popular back when the modding Community was very strong within marind one was housing and two was content Quest Cubs that kind of thing I just feel like pointing out this second Point here now because it is so rare to see actual content added to more modern games like like uh Skyrim and stuff yes there are such things don't mistake me of course there are but there was so many quests and indeed Quest hubs that people added to maroin just because that was what so many people assumed the modding was for was to add content if you follow me and that's one of the things I loved about marwin for example there was a whole thing uh there was it was a whole faction you could join and rank yourself up in just like you could any of the other factions called the the Society of the cloud or something like that and at the end of the day you know after you went through all their content after you saw their whole story line you gained a unique spell which would change the weather within the area which doesn't have actually have any real effect other than changing the weather you know but it was cool it was interesting and it was more content to do I loved it but with regard to housing lots of housing mods tended to be well-labeled when there were you know this housing mod is basically a cheap mod because it has all the stat books in it and stuff like that um but a number of housing mods were just designed to be interesting or engaging and most of them fit within the lore obviously the concept of an Airship mod was very popular but this is Maro when we're talking about the idea of a moving Airship was virtually impossible and yet there was a mod that I used as my Airship one primarily you had to it was a dmer uh floating Fortress which by itself sounds awesome for anybody who knows what I'm talking about but it not only that it was mobile now obviously it didn't actually move this is this is sheer Brilliance that he pulled this off with the limited tools available in Maro and you could park it at any given City you could you could there was a console you had there and you could say I want to move this thing to balora and and the whole thing would move there and I mentioned that because the concept of moving a an a structure within the sell like that is not exactly an easy one within the confines of the game but they he did it or she did it whoever actually made them M I don't I don't know off the top of my head obviously and so you could basically set your marker recall on this thing use it to move move around throughout the world and basically have what is effectively an Airship and effectively a fast travel system within your floating dmer Fortress now the beautiful part about this was I didn't considered a cheat mud because it was hideously expensive remember I mentioned earlier how hard it is to come across money in this game every individual functional part of this house this this Fortress was like 100,000 gold each which is not a small amount as anybody who's played marind will tell you and so coming across that money was what I considered to be one of my main goals what during that given playthrough when I would use that or actually I used it more than once obviously but you get the point you know that would be one of the main uses of money and in fact I would have to be living with a balance of leveling and and saving up for my massive awesome house because it was just just so expensive brilliant thing there were several other uh add-ons that added like arenas for example which is funny cuz then Oblivion would actually add an arena in the main game but you know where you could go in and fight and you could keep whatever you got off of the corpse and you know you would get money for it just just stuff like that I I could not even begin to list how much content people added through mods I really couldn't it would take me so long and it would take me so much effort and and and thought just to go down the list so I strongly recommend you look into any mods of that variety um on top of that like I I mentioned the dmer Fortress there were many other housing Ms that were much more down to earth and yet nevertheless very enjoyable uh balur is an extremely palur and Caldera are both extremely uh Calder is that right I think so extremely popular areas to have houses in so make sure that whatever one you're getting doesn't conflict with something else because a lot of people tend to put stuff in the same relatively empty spaces within balmore and Caldera that being said I remember one distinctly that was a library basically I mean obviously it had a bed but that was it it was a bed and then a ton of books and it wasn't just the stat books it was all of the books I didn't mention this earlier because I forgot but um one of the things I really enjoyed in the exploration aspect of maroin was the fact that there was so much literature in maroin this is the first Elder Scrolls to really do this to really flesh out the entire world and the setting and the characterization through its literature through its through its novels through the things you would find of written works and and historical bits you learned so much about that setting by reading those and I loved finding a new book and just perusing it just stopping everything just and just reading my way through it in Skyrim if you have played it you know that you can buy bookshelves and basically put books into them as though it was a chest and the books will self arrange which is an awesome feature by the way in marind obviously that what didn't exist what you could do is you could P you could drop the book and then you have to pick it up and manually kind of get it up there on the bookshelf it probably will not surprise anyone to know that I was one of those people who was carefully tediously getting every single book lined up in my bookshelf one by one because because I'm it's me you know and I loved collecting every single one of those those pieces of literature across the world so when I saw this mod which is well after I had succeeded at getting all the books I found that to be awesome because then I could go and read whenever I wanted to basically without having to go back and and get every single piece of book one by one which is a nice feature um other mods like I mentioned the merchant mod I almost consider that of the mods I've mentioned the merchant mod and the overhaul kit are probably the two I would consider to be basically required to enjoy marind in a modern setting because the ability to actually sell items to a merchant whose gold doesn't go away like immediately is is beyond helpful when it comes to a user friendliness uh Affair and the problem is there's so many mods that I find myself thinking well where do I go from there you know the magic retooling or the fact that you know the the the uh the addition of companions uh there was an act there was Act there wasn't actually in a concept of having a companion NPC in marowan there was code that supported it this was true and Oblivion as well but it is mods that added it to both it wasn't actually until Fallout 3 that really that really became a vanilla feature um yes I know there's exceptions to that especially with in spells just just bear with me here but there were add-ons that actually added whole companions to to marand uh I never used them personally but that's because I never use companions in general in any Elder Scrolls I know many people who can't imagine playing Skyrim for example without a companion of some sort so if you are playing maroin and are that kind of person I strongly recommend you look into one of them there are several that have been very well designed and uh add add a great deal and and are very well coded so you know there you go um honestly I'm having trouble coming up with other specific examples except for one which is something along the lines of diabolic deal or something like that it's basically you can sell your soul for a specific uh buff which is very powerful now in general that buff is so powerful you're it's going to feel like cheating here's the catch you have a certain amount of days will pass before basically demons will start coming and showing up and trying to take your soul because you just sold your soul and they're trying to collect and at a certain point in time that's going to get not just irritating that's going to get to the point where you're not going to survive it even with your Buffs unless you're really good which is possible but there are several ways out of that for example you can just resend on the deal basically get your soul back and lose the power or you can go on an extremely difficult long-term quest in order to drag your way through and and successfully get several other souls to satisfy Davey Jones I I mean um whatever his guy's name is in order to do so it was very well designed and it was very well balanced in its own right because it's not just here's it wasn't just a cheat mod of which there were of course several it was more like a here's a cheat but you're going to have to pay for it if you follow me which I liked and I liked the way they presented that that's another mod I do recommend past that I can't come up with any specific individuals now I have no idea how long this has been it's been commented recently that the length of my videos has to do with how good the game is I'm looking at that I I disagree with that fervently but I want to make this absolutely clear for anyone who who has any doubts still even despite all of the difficulties and problems that Maro wind has I still enjoyed playing it just as much as I did back in the actually more so because the mods had improved the experience obviously but that game is so huge so rich so diverse so well so flavorful there is so much atmosphere in maroin it doesn't have an extremely tight I you know I'm actually going to take that back the primary Quest chain is actually really well done in maroin I was going to say it doesn't have the most tightly done plot in the world but in all honesty amongst the Elder Scrolls in my opinion it has the best major plot of all the other Scrolls it is extremely well done extremely well written extremely well presented it is old and you have to get over that uh I'm sorry let me phrase my statement a little bit more correctly you have to overcome the oldness as an obstacle to enjoying the game such as say Fallout one or two for example to use another or or uh balder's gate as another good example you know these games are old games that are harder to play that's just because they were older and we didn't know how to do things as well back then but once you do what you find is an absolutely incredible game underneath which I cannot possibly recommend enough now I'm going to go ahead and cut this off and uh I will talk to you all later

Channel: Lorerunner

Views: 51,302

Keywords: Archengeia, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Video Game), Lorerunner, Review

Id: Z9IKBAZctjo

Length: 72min 27sec (4347 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 20 2013