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Those who've been reading my reviews already know my disposition towards those who might release a game in the US, UK, or Asia FAR FAR in advance of Australia. Morrowind hit US shelves for the first time on the 14th of MAY! JUNE 20th and we began to see Morrowind in our local shops in Australia. PATHETIC! In todays world of the shrinking globe due to extremely modern transport, global freight is no longer an excuse for not getting a product around the globe pronto. Bethesda Softworks is a part of the ZENIMAX Medi Incorporated company. ZENIMAX was the company responsible for getting the completed Morrowind package from Bethesda and copying millions of CD's for the world market. Why on Gods Earth they couldn't keep the burners going for an extra day and send some copies to Australia on May 14th I have absolutely no idea. Pathetic Bethesda/Zenimax. I really thought the days of month long waits for PC titles was over with the recent spates of BANG ON appearances by Activision products. Well I thought wrong. Anyhow, it's here now and thats the main thing.
Morrowind comes in the newer type of smaller box about the size of your average DVD case. The new sized boxes really are a good idea due to their using less cardboard and then less waste product in the long run. Sadly this really hasn't taken on at all. There was a push around 2 years ago to switch game CD's over to DVD packaging to save on shelf space and to save the trees. It too was a good idea but never took off because those in charge of marketing wanted to stay with the larger in your face, shelf hogging packaging. Arguing that the larger cardboard boxes were more eye catching and allowed a nicer surface finish to be printed, making the overall product look groovier. So, I bow to you Bethesda for doing your little bit to help the planet. Something we really ARE going to have to think about soon. Most gamers these days are very well informed before they even walk into their local software shop, having either read a heap of reviews online or played the demo at home already. So I parted with $90.00 Australian at my local Electronics Boutique store, no free t-shirt this time. Only Activision does that. BAH!! I cooked up a mug of coffee and sat at my computer desk and delved into the world of Morrowind. In that small box you have everything you need, Dual CD case, manual, warranty registration card and an ad card for a book containing all the secrets of Morrowind for just $15.99. Weather that is American or Australian dollars I really don't know??? You just never know with stuff that comes from America. You get two CD's. One is the game CD and contains all the game information. The second contains the Elder Scrolls Construction Set, which is the toolset you need to create your own maps and content for Morrowind.
Installation of the game was an absolute breeze, as we really expect these days. Morrowind will chew up about 1 GB of your hard drive space. That too, we really should expect from modern games. Gone are the 30mb days of quake 1. Setting the game up was also simple. You get the standard menu at the games title screen. You know the deal, you hit the options button and you get the change controls, sound settings, and video settings. Point your mouse pointer over a particular setting and a textbox pops up telling you what changing that setting will do inside the gameworld itself. A big factor with Morrowind is the drawdistance and the shadow quality, along with enabling the pixel shaders. Morrowind is one of the FIRST games to use pixel shading technology to any extent, and give us the opportunity to turn off the pixel shaders if we want. Morrowind uses pixel shading technology to do the water effects and a few of the reflections on various items in the game. These effects look VERY good indeed but give you a decent HIT in performance. But Morrowind is not a fast paced game, and so the loss of a little performance is forgiveable for the visual gain you can get. If you turn the pixel shaders OFF the water has a more opaque look and doesn't react to rain falling in it or you swimming in it. Other than that the visual experience of the game is unchanged. Drawdistance is the distance in front of you the game will draw the game world. If you set a short drawdistance then things in the gameworld will only begin to appear when you get quite close to them. This means the computer has less to put on the screen at one time and helps game performance to quite a degree. If you have an extremely powerful system you can set a long drawdistance which means the game world is all drawn in at quite a distance away from you. This looks very nice indeed, as you can look down upon a long valley full of trees going off into the distance. Shadows are something I RARELY bother with. The shadows cast by characters in the game really do very little to add to the visual quality of the game and more often than not look a little stupid anyhow. There is a shadow slider in the options menu that allows you to set the complexity of the shadows characters will cast in the gameworld. Complex shadows WILL give you a serious hit in performance. During this review I had the shadows turned off.
One thing that irked me was the screenshot taking ability of the game. Morrowind will indeed take screenshots for you and store them successively within the Morrowind directory on your PC for you to go through later and oogle at that HUUUGE mushroom thing you saw. BUT, to get this working you have to go in and EDIT the MORROWIND.INI file!! I really couldn't believe my eyes! People must go in and PHYSICALLY edit the MORROWIND.INI file before it is possible to take screenshots while playing the game. How are weaker computer users EVER going to do this?? Screenshot taking ability should just be a default pre-mapped key if the developers choose to include it. So I'm afraid Bethesda luck out on that score. How about a bit more user friendly screenshot enabling system????? Alright, enough rambling. What does Morrowind look like? Did I find it as good as the hype suggested it should be? Well yes and no. The colouring in the game looks a little washed out. Nowhere are there any vibrant textures with full bodied colours used. Look at screenshot #3. It is of the village of Seyda Neen where you start the game. Notice how the rooves are a lighter, more washed out type of brown with little definition in the texture. It almost begins to look a little bit comic strippy. Thankfully not all of the game appears this way. The majority of the open countryside looks really quite nice. But always lacking just that little bit of depth in the colouring that really would have made a difference to the games visuals.
The textures in the game are really a small step back from what we've begun to see recently with Jedi Knight II and Return to Castle Wolfenstien. They are adequate, but not much more than that. The textures lack any type of detail and definition, really suffering badly when you come up for a closer look. Some cavern walls, depicting rockwalls or stony type material were probably the best textures I saw, along with some tapestries hanging in some of the buildings throughout the game. But not a patch on Jedi Knight II. However, at least textures designed to be viewed from a distance actually looked ok from a distance, which is more than I can say for some in Soldier of Fortune II. If a game has really good textures used throughout, people really DO stop to look at things as they play their way through the game because they look so good. Might just be a lamp, or a door, but if made eyecatching the player WILL appreciate the beauty inherent in the object and stop to have a closer look. These are small things but add to the overall experience a player gets from playing a game. So the Textures serve their purpose in Morrowind, Wood looks like wood and grass looks like grass, albeit a little comick strippy.
Geometric Complexity! Bethesda have actually been very clever with hiding their polygon joins. Granted, if you look for them you will find them. But as you look to objects closer away you don't notice any amount of blockiness at all. In fact, quite a decent amount of polygons have been used to create the Morrowind world. Boulders strewn about on the ground really do look like rounded boulders. Hills and mountains really do look like weather worn features with rounded faces and valleys. Only in a few areas where it is possible to climb to the top of a hill do you find a bit of blatant pointyness and blockiness. But this is nothing new for this type of countryside made up with polygons. Bethesda has actually used the abrupt nature of polygons to their advantage in a number of instances. Dotted throughout the game are various versions of dead trees reaching up into the sky with their bare limbs, sometimes broken. These features really do look good and have clearly not had the very common square trunk treatment. With the addidtion of just a FEW more polygons, Bethesda have managed to injrect that little bit extra life into their world. In the major centre of Balmora, the rooves of some of the houses have actually been designed to look rounded. You have to get up prettey close to see what the real story is as far as polygon use goes. In fact, if you weren't looking at HOW the features were made, I really don't think you'd notice that the curves were actually segmented. I suppose thats just the level designer in me. Screenshot #23 shows an area of Balmora. You can clearly see the the arched doorways and curved rooves. Nice work! Character models, upon close inspection actually look a teensy bit pointy. But thats only if you make a point of studying them closely. Most characters in Morrowind look quite lifelike. Bethesda has used their available Polys to good effect and put some detailed textures over them to make them come to life. Character movement does not appear jerky which is a definite one up over JK-II. Facial expressions will change and eyes will blink as you look at an NPC's face. I suppose with armour wearing characters it is easy to create real looking characters, as many of the characters in Morrowind are wearing armour of some type. But to Bethesda's credit, at no time so far have I looked at a character and noticed their really fake looking hands, arms or legs, due to an obvious polygon vertex. You come across all sorts of people in the game. Legion Guards, Fisherman, village folk, cat like humans a la Everquest and a number of beasties hiding in the countryside. All cleverly made, and all well detailed. Just a pity the quality of work on the character textures could not be extended to the rest of the world.
What about YOUR character? When you start the game you are being held under guard aboard a ship. Thats where you meet Jiab who you see in screenshot #1. Jiab asks your name and then a text box pops up prompting you to enter the name you chose for your character. You then get off the ship at Seyda Neen where you must go into the census office and give all your characters details to the census clerk. This is where you get to define the qualities and attributes of your character. You must choose one of 10 different races for your character. But don't just go for looks, as each different race has specific abilities they are good at, and certain abilities in which they are weak. So you need to look through the different races to find a set of skills that you like. Screenshot #4 shows the exact window in which this takes place. Once you've chosen a race you can change the gender, skin colour, and hair appearance of your character. Groovy. Then you must choose one of 21 classes for your character. There are seven class options under three different class types. Your three class types are combat specialized, magic specialized, and stealth specialized. If say you were interested in being some kind of combat person, you'd then choose to be a warrior, barbarian, crusader, knight, scout, archer, or a rogue. Each of these class options has their own particular set of major, minor and miscellaneous skills. But you don't have to accept the default skill set for your character. You can actually change the skills that appear in your major, minor, and miscellaneous skill areas. If you do this, your character class simply chages to that of ADVENTURER. So you can make that magic wielding battle mage that can wear heavy armour and give it good with a sword as well as magic. The thing to remember is that if you chhose a character from the Combat group or specialization, you will level up in combat skills much faster than you would for stealth or magic. For example, a Combat specialized class with athletics as a major skill at 30 will increase athletics up to 50% faster than a magic specialised class with athletics as a miscellaneous skill at 30.
You can bring up your characters stats sheet with a ckick of your menu button which is mapped to your mnouse by default. You will see a numeric value next to your skill list ranging from 1 - 100. To begin with you will of course be better at your major skills, and your other skills will be levelled lower. You are told when you have levelled up a particular skill or attribute, and you can check your stats screen to see how much better you've gotten. Sound like Diablo?? Dungeon Siege? You bet! This is the role playing element that has been quite lacking in first person perspective games. And so it follows that your characters ATTRIBUTES, listed as Strength, intelligence, willpower, agility, speed, endurance, personality, and LUCK all govern how well you fare in mental, physical, and magical abilities. When you level up in these YOU get to choose where you add the extra points. How does this affect you?? Well it's obvious with things like health, but I found that learning to block blows with a sheild is dependent on your agility. If your agility isn't high enough you cannot learn to block better until you increase your agility through levelling up, training, or through using magic potions. In this way, all skills have a GOVERNING ATTRIBUTE that dictates how good you can get at that skill at any one point.
So what kind of game IS Morrowind then? Well, it is essentially a FIRST PERSON perspective ROLE PLAYING game. You walk around in a fully 3-D world as you did in Jedi Knight II, and Quake III to name an older title. When you get off the guard ship at Seyda Neen you are given VERY brief instructions to report to somebody in the distant town of Balmoral. You can consult the map that comes with the game to find where that is. But you don't have to go there straight away if you don't want to. You see, Morrowind is NOT divided up into linear levels that you simply have to progress through to get on with the game. You basically have the entire game world at your disposal right from the word GO. There are no physical boundaries dividing up certain LEVELS in the game as is the case with Dungeon Siege. At any point in the game world you can simply go in any direction you like, so long as the ground isn't too steep or the ocean happens to be there. In essence we have a seamless gameworld in which we can go where we like, when we want to. There are no loading screens as such, but from time to time you will get a small message popping up saying LOADING EXTERIOIR or LOADING INTERIOR. This is usually accompanied by a few seconds freeze to the game while the new region is loaded. This might happen as you walk across an open field or up a deserted pathway, rather than you stepping through an obvious end to a particuar area. However when you approach the door to a particular building, you press the activate key to open the door. VERY few doors actually SWING open in Morrowind. What happens 95% of the time is the screen will fade to black and you will get a message with an idicator bar saying something like "LOADING INTERIOR, JOES TAVERN". This only takes a few seconds however and doesn't detract from the overall flow of the game. I suppose this is the price you must pay for having such an open ended and expansive game world. It would be nice if you could see the door swing open and then have the loading message as you step through the door without the screen fading to black. But Morrowind's framerate isn't all that high at the best of times, particularly on my aging sytem (see below), so this was obviously a game design element Bethesda HAD to include in order to keep performance at reasonable levels. Still I couldn't help thinking of Dungeon Siege and their disappearing/reappearing interiors/exteriors without the slightest glitch in framerate. So you don't have a strict path to follow. Some of the things you can do have NOTHING to do with the main plot but will net you some goods to sell or payment for a service you did for somebody. For instance, I met this pilgrim on a pathway in the middle of nowhere. Turned out she was lost and needed me to guide her to this particular place she was looking for, for that service she'd give me 150 smackaroonies! However the info she gave me was correct but was NOT where you'd think to look fist, or even second for that matter. But a quck perusal of the map soon set my mind ticking over in the "What if" mode.
I soon found that I really couldn't go into many of the numerous caves and caverns that can be found in the wilderness as the nasties inside would give me a hiding and send me crying back to mummy. These caverns can br found all over the countryside, not necessarily along pathways either. And so you can see the benefit in going OFF the beaten path to explore the wild countryside. But I found that I needed desperate training in my offensive and defensive skills before I could tackle another cavern. So I chose to stick to the roads and find someplace to get some training. I ended up in Balmora, which was a long walk from Seyda Neen. However I was able to explore a fishing village along the way which made the journey all the more pleasant. I was also asked to escort a slave to Balmora for a modest payment. Why not I thought! I found my contact in Balmora and it soon becomes apparent that your being freed from jail by the Emperor has a quite a mysterious story behind it. Nobody seems to know WHY the Emperor has gone to all this trouble just to free YOU! A seemingly ordinary person. Perhaps not so ordinary you think? But how? And Why? Doubtless as you progress through the game these questions will be answered. You need to talk to people to get information out of them. When you press the USE button with your cursor over them, an interaction window will pop up. In this window is a blue indicator bar that shows how much the person in question likes you. If you score a measly 20 on this indicator, you won't get much out of the person. Likewise it doesn't pay to peeve store owners because they might refuse to serve you. And the less they like you the more expensive their wares will be. You can try admiring, intimidating, taunting, and bribing people to increase their disposition towards you. This is called persuasion, and success or fail of these persuasion techniques depends upon your skill in certain areas. Your skill of speech for example, governs how successful you will be in admiring somebody. If you FAIL in your persuasion attempt however, the person will become peeved and their disposition toward you will fall and it will become more difficult / expensive to interact with the person. What you wear also makes a difference as to how people percieve you. Put on expensive garb and all of a sudden certain NPC's seem to like you a whole lot better. However, heavy armour and a nice big sword are the oder of the day for intimidation. So upon getting a little training which cost me good hard earned cash, I was able to come out of a few caverns with a pack full of goodies that I could sell for better weapons and training. The other alternative of course is stealing. Why go buy a sword when you can go into a house, kill the owner and hock all his crockery and books to anybody in town who's willing to buy?? You can even stip the clothes off the guys body and leave him naked on the floor with only his jocks left on. Well sorry my friend but I need to trade those expensive duds for a better sword! However, you need to be careful of the law. If you kill somebody in cold murder you get a price on your head, And then nobody will talk to you unless you come clean and pay for your sins. You can give yourself up to a guard or wait to be caught. If you give yourself up the penalty is greatly reduced and you can pay an amount of gold and all will be well again. If you can't pay you must go to jail. Of course, if you join the thieves guild there are those that can make prices on your head strangely disappear.
There are a few issues with Morrowind that really could have been done better. One is the way your character moves. You movents when you walk or run are very static and rigid. You push forward and you go WOODENLY forward, stopping the INSTANT you let go of the forward key. It just feels like you're pushing through this incredibly dense atmosphere that makes it difficult to move around. Games these days have very fluid camera movents that you'd expect to see as a person moves along. But this is sadly lacking in Morrowind. Movement feels very plastic, forced, and wooden in Morrowind and unfortunately you notice it. No bobbing movements as you take each step, just the plain movement of the camera like you had in REAL MYST. NOT NICE. There also seems to be an issue when you jump onto water. I found that sometimes I was actually standing on the surface of the water unable to move. This seemed to be solved by jumping up again, seeming to free your feet so you could move again. Very strange. Also at various times in the game I became STUCK! I couldn't move, jump or crouch my way out. Once I bacame stuck on this narrow beam that led up out of the water. I could slowly move up the beam by pressing the jump key, and I'd slowly slide back down if I let the jump key go. But I was STUCK on that beam. So there seems to be a problem where water is involved in difficult terrain, causing your characer's freedom of movement to be reduced to nothing. Strange as I said. I think Bethesda's movement coding is just too simple and gets itself in quite a mess in certain situations. Most games now actually check if you've become stuck and free you without you even noticing you were stuck in the first place. Lack of attention to detail is always quite noticable, ESPECIALLY where movement is concerned. But it is all too easy to find fault with things people have spent long hours making for your enjoyment. So I like to focus on a few positives. One is undoubtedly the water effects. Simply amazing. When you enter the water you get a ring of wavelets radiating out from the point at which you entered. Likewise when it rains each raindrop causes it's own little ring of wavelets on the water to appear. I tried to take a shot of this happening with shot #18 and 35 but those shots don't capture the true effect. Very lifelike indeed and a pleasure to sit and watch for a little while. You are also able to see thigs under the water from above, still with the rippling water effect going on at the surface of the water. You can see jetty pylons going down into the depths and submerged weeds and boulders. This is the glory of pixel shaders in all their splendour. The game also alternates between day and night, fine weather and stormy weather with loud crashing lightening overhead producing brilliant flashes of light. Those storms would have the most REALISTIC sound effects I've heard to date. The sound of the rain falling and the angry thunder in the sky really sound as if they've been recorded from an actual true to life strom. I was quite taken aback at the EXCELLENT storms. Likewise you progress through the full seqence of a day. You get a gloomy dawn as the sun comes up and the darkness begins to fade. At night time the guards walk around towns with torches producing an orange glow wherever they go which also looks excellent. You move through the day with the sun progressing through the sky, causing a brilliant flare if you choose to look up at it. Afternoon sees fading light conditions and a gradual reddening of the sky as you go through a brilliant orangy red sunset as you see in sots #7, 8, 14, and 17. Then you begin to see a few stars appearing in the sky as the light fades. More stars come out as it gets darker and red and pink nebulae appear as well as a huge red planet and a moon in the night sky (shot #9 and 11). No sudden changes, just a subtle progression of the sun across the sky with all the associated times of day. Purely BRILLIANT! UNREAL also had differing times of day but they were the SAME for the entire level. In Morrowind you can stand and watch an entire day pass you by if that is your wish. Some days it's good weather, some days it's stormy and overcast. EXTREMELY well done Bethesda!
Perhaps its time to talk vibes. As I said the storm associated lightening crashes and thunder sounds are some of the most realistic I've heard. As you near the ocean you also get the sound of crashing waves and the wind rushing through the trees. Really good environment building stuff. The sounds of battle though leave a little to be desired. They serve but don't really convey the severity of what is happening. For instance, when you hit somebody with a sword you shouldn't just get a clunky/splatty sound. You need an intense ringing sound if the sword strikes armour or a splatty sound with depth and feeling if you strike home. With nondescript sounds for actions like this you really don't feel like you're in an intense fight with somebody, it feels all light and ho hummish. PUT SOME OOMPH IN THOSE SOUND FX!!!! How many times must I say it! Voices of the various NPC's sound very good though. How many times have you come across a game that has voice actors that either tried too hard, didn't try enough, or produced a voice that just looked wrong for the guy it's meant to come from. Or that time at the start of FAKK 2 where Julies sister YELLS at the top of her voice to get Julie's attention when she is standing only a few feet away. It SOUNDED like se should have been yelling down from the third story window rather than being close by. None of that in Morrowind. All voices fit the characters perfectly and the lip synch is even quite good. But I do find it funny that the sound of your footsteps NEVER changes no matter what you walk over. Grass, a wooden jetty, cobblestones, mushy mud always those same old footsteps! Must be those damn common shoes you always seem to be stuck with. What about those weapons? Well for a start it doesn't mean squat if you've got a kick ass claymore but not the skill to use it properly. Weapons are functional but nothing more than that. Bethesda wasted little time in including any great detail into the weapon models. Shot #30 will attest to that. The sword in that shot looks it's been forged and shined with no further work. Sadly this is the case for many of the weapons. The dagger in shot #16 is about as detailed as the weapon models become. Yet with just a little more definition and a few finer details included these weapons would become a pleasure to stick in something. As they are, they're just weapons amd they work fine. Swords, Bows, spears, daggers, katanas, and magic spells are the order of the day as you would expect in any RPG. You will find that your weapons degrade a la Diablo. As your weapons degrade more they become less effective and do less damage to the resident naughty boys. You will have to find somebody who can repair weapons or attempt to repair the weapon yourself if you have a smith's hammer. Your success in repairing a weapon depends on your skill as an armourer. If you're bad at it you might need several tries to perform a successful repair all while your smith's hammer is wearing out. There are mnay other thigs I could talk about for Morrowind, being such an involved and seamless game. The Idea of letting you go about things at your own leisure is a really good aspect that you really don't get in games today. Most of the time you have a set path that you really have to follow as there is no other course open to you. Morrowind sets you free to solve the mysteries of Vvardenfell island in the world of Morrowind. I have spent hours playing the game and have only explored a small section of Vvardenfell island. With that in mind it is obvious that the entire game of Morrowind would take a long time to complete. Especially since you can hit the trails and explore your heart out before you even begin to chase up the central story in the game. Even when you HAVE completed all your tasks and revealed those mysteries that clouded your vision to begin with, you can still go back and make sure that you found all the caverns, or you can return to that black dude that whipped your butt the first time you visited and remove his blessed head. You are free to do what you like, WHEN you want to do it. Morrowind has issues yes. Very few games don't. However I really feel that a little extra effort would have made quite a bit of difference to the overall feel of the game. The movement code needs work to make walking and running seem more fluid. A little more texture detail, particularly on the weapon models, and those getting stuck situations need to be ironed out. Otherwise the game is superb, particularly the changing time of day and the weather and all associated FX with those. And perhaps the colouring could do with a small tweak to make some of the textures a little more vibrant. Morrowind IS a good game and Bethesda can be proud of what they've managed to do. You never can create the perfect game. So you're left with producing something different that will catch the eye of the gaming public. Morrowind will require PATIENCE! As it takes a good deal of time to walk from one place to another, and gather up enough cash to get training and decent weapons. Fans of both FPS and RPG genre's will fit straight into the world of Morrowind, and become captivated by those sunsets over the ocean with lush trees growing all along the beach. Graphics 7.0 / 10 Level Design 9.0 / 10 (General gameworld design) Sound 7.7 / 10 Enemies 8.8 / 10 Detail 7.0 / 10 Gameplay 8.5 / 10 Addictiveness 8.2 / 10 |
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