The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

dear morrowind:

i was down on games in all their forms. i'd had enough. i couldn't take hints of promise wrapped in a layer of x-treme despair. i was sick of being played. and i had given up hope.

my friends told me about you. i'd heard all the open ended teasers i could handle. i crushed on your older brother arena when i was a kid, and messed around with daggerfall in between bouts of abusing youthful indiscretions in college, but i wasn't sold. i remember how unreliable both of your siblings were - lost npcs, getting stuck in walls, and more crashes to the desktop than i wanted to remember. i couldn't take any more pain.

but i know nothing ventured means nothing gained. things were rocky at first. why is every npc either impatient and intolerant or trying to get into my pants? technically, you were sluggish and not always there for me, just like before. but i hadn't been following the rules, and a few driver updates latere we were crusing paradise at 60fps. even your stupid combat mechanics make me love you even more, and i would cross some of those mountains with the funny names just to be with you.

[heart]
mike

[friedchicken]

Now that's just beautiful.

And who says romance is dead?

[Szczepaniak]

hah! Funny, I like it. Especially since following the IC thread.

Welcome to the fold of Morrowind converts.

So then, have you learned the language?
Kidnapped a wife?
Raided the trasure vaults?

Damn, I wish I could go back and discover it afresh.

So then, tell us which character you used, class, etc.
Done anything mischievious?

[dhex]

oddly enough, i generally don't fuck around that much. my disposition is one of beating things so my past TES characters tended to be fighter/chatty types. i'm not too big on thieving persay, and magic just ain't my thing.

one thing i found with morrowind in comparision to the previous two games is that there aren't as many truly useful major and minor skils to pick, since it makes little sense to pick more than one weapon type (outside of marksman, which i'm not totally sold on as a sniping option yet) so i found myself picking things like heavy armor and block to pad holes. i like lockpicking.

it lacks the sort of limitless depth of the first two games but has far more focus. i wish i were playing it now, which is a great compliment, i think.

[Shapermc]

[Shapermc]

Also I would like to direct the audience to my poem as well: http://www.gamersquarter.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2113#2113

[dhex]

that's some tough love right there.

[Persona-sama]

[dhex]

i give morrowind a sideways ice cream cone with an ass hanging out of it?

[Szczepaniak]

[Shapermc]

Sz. I know it is possible to mod your Xbox morrowind file, I just have no idea how. Unfortunatly I don't think that I have the will power to research all the information to get mods up on the Xbox, but I have seen camera photos of people who got it working.

Anyways, I would say that if you want to get it running at a decent framerate you will need at least something around 1.2ghz and about 256mb of RAM. This will get you going at about 640X480 at about 30 - 45 FPS. Just go to elderscrolls.com and make sure you have a video card that they list, that is probably more important than the speed of your PC.

But those specs were what I had in my PC when the game came out and I enjoyed playing it better on my TV than my PC monitor. I would definatly go back to the game if you can get the mods working on your Xbox.

...

Actually I did find how you do it. If you have some moderate PC knowledge it does not seem too difficult.

[Persona-sama]

[Szczepaniak]

No worries shaper....
actually, Ive been so inundated with work I havent even had time to go back to MW these past two days to test out my Ork Soldier idea... plus I have Earthbound to finally complete. (dont tell Toups I keep bailing at the half way mark btw)

Otherwise..... Yeah, I must have a look into this, but the TIME! My kingdom for some more time during the day.

Oh, and that ass in an ice cream cone thing made me laugh. Perhaps for longer than I should have...

[Scratchmonkey]

I'm bringing this thread back from the dead because it is so true. Nothing's grabbed me the same way Morrowind has and that's saying something for a game that's pretty relentlessly ugly and clunky in oh so many ways. I have Oblivion installed on my machine and any number of excellent games to play on my consoles and none of them are as compelling as Morrowind.

Despite that it's pretty obviously smaller than Oblivion, it feels larger because there's so much more going on. Sure, Oblivion probably has "more stuff" if you tally up all the sidequests and whatnot you can do; still, in the end, it feels like this generic fantasy mush. Morrowind feels like what it claims to be, a mash of different cultures and different peoples stuck on an island together, often with murderous intent. The various politics also were very well laid-out in terms of giving the impression of multiple factions, based on various historical actions.

Morrowind succeeds in spite of itself because it's got such an interesting world, something that Oblivion largely missed. I think it's similar to the way that Dwarf Fortress works, in that the actions of the player feel significant because they feel epic, or they have consequential weight to them, not because the game says "this is epic stuff"; because it impacts the game.

[Cycle]

I made a charater who would be infamously known as the Pants Bandit. I would attack people and rob them of their pants. I had a secret hide away that was just filled with mountains of pants from my victims. I really wished that someone would come and discover it, but alas. It was still fun.

I should have made a mod which included the hideout as a secret... I wonder if anyone would have found it and gone WTF!
_________________

[dhex]

pants bandit is one of the best things i have ever heard.

i think i might still buy that oblivion expansion, maybe, eventually.
_________________

[Shapermc]

When we were all at the GDC awards show and Oblivion was up for some award I looked over to Toups and said “…but Morrowind was so much better.”
He responded with “It’s true.”
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Ethoscapade]

alright, i'm going to uninstall oblivion and finally try morrowind tonight (thanks guys!!)

any other recommended mods?

[Scratchmonkey]

All the ones Shapes listed are pretty good. I'm also a big fan of the mod that selectively makes enemies non-/hostile, which is pretty much a must unless you enjoy being attacked by those flying buggers approx. every 10 feet.

There was a huge bundle of mods with a manual and everything that this one big PC gaming forum came up with. I'll check when I get home and see if I still have it or a reference to what it was called, since it was nice to just download everything in one big chunk and have instructions in terms of what to install first to avoid conflicts.

[Shapermc]

I'm debating on writing an article about the better bodies mod and what it adds to the game.

The other things are mostly not essential, but I highly recommend better heads/bodies and visual pack.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Ethoscapade]

ok shaper, i'm up and running for the first time ever (quite excited about it!) with the better heads/bodies, improved visual pack, signpost mod, and passive wildlife.. question, though: is there any way to make the game run in widescreen resolutions? if not, no big deal, i'll just have to play windowed.

[Scratchmonkey]

There is! I believe you have to modify the morrowind.ini file or something like that. That's what I'm doing on my laptop, so I know it's possible.

Here you go:

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16&highlight=morrowind

[dhex]

as a note, i found widescreen morrowind unplayable on my system (16:9, 1280x720, 27"), but i didn't tweak it too much.
_________________

[Shapermc]

Yeah, I got it running too. Actually it didn't really hurt my framerate (not that I ever really got it above 30). I don't remember how anymore, but it seems like scratchmonkey does!

Also, I recommend putting the settings higher than you think they can go for draw distances. I found that it made almost no difference between 1/3 and 2/3 of the bar.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Ethoscapade]

wow! see, here i was looking in the ini to tweak resolution settings, and.. they're in the registry? that is pretty hardcore or somesuch.

and yeah, it's nice to have the resolution turned up as high as it can go (1280x800) with draw distance maxed and everything, whereas i had to gimp oblivion beyond belief. (1.6 pM, 1gb, x600). one technical question - are there any particularly popular water mods? it seemed really jarring as soon as i went above decks; it's way too white and too shiny.

[Cycle]

After playing STALKER, I remembered a bunch of mods I downloaded for Morrowind to fix the biggest problem I had with the game: it felt so dead. I mean, they had this rich world with a huge history, but everything was so static. So to improve the experience I downloaded:

Real Signs: Changes the textures on the sign posts so that you can actually read them without clicking on them.

Ambient Noise: Adds a bnuch of ambient noises for both day and night, improved that atmosphere quite a bit, especially after turning off the music which had like two tracks.

Smart Animals: This was a brilliant mod that made lower level animals not attack you once you're strong enough not to be challanged by them anymore. That means you don't get attacked by rats and cliffracers when you're level million!

Natural Selection: Made some of the animals fight each other. This was always entertaning to watch.

Travelling merchants: Added a couple marchants that would actually move between towns. I liked bumping into them, having a quick chat and seeing what they had to trade.

I'm sure I had others installed, but those were the big ones. The names are based on a hazy memory, by the way... someone else may actually be able to recall the proper names for some of them (I think about half of them are correct).
_________________

[Scratchmonkey]

I think I have all of those installed except for Smarter Animals, I had something along the lines of Realistic Wildlife, where most non-diseased animals wouldn't be aggressive and would only attack in self-defense.

I also installed the Morrowind FPS Optimizer, which was a horrible decision that completely kills my framerate by constantly fucking with my draw distance in order to give me a "smooth ride" that is roughly 10 times more frustrating than having a low framerate.

Aside from Stalker, I'm jonesing for a new computer because it would be nice to finally be able to run Morrowind (and Oblivion, for that matter) at butter-smooth speeds.

[Cycle]

[Scratchmonkey]

I got really far along it actually, or at least what I like to think as "far along". I'd gotten to the point where the shaman lady says I have to return when the moons are right, which I can tell is game speak for "run around and do sidequests and shit now because it's about to get pretty heavy".