The Elder Scrolls

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JON CENA said:
Yes hello sera this is Aurelius Tertullius with the Imperial Census and Excise Bureau detecting a deficit of 100,000 septims in your taxation account. Please do the needful and send the equivalent amount in Clavicoin to our Dreamsleeve wallet within a fortnight or you will be arrested by the Blades

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this after reading the India Menace thread and Null’s viral Xitter post. There’s no way a culture rooted in worshipping Boethiah and Mephala doesn’t have wacky fuckshit concepts like Izzat and Jugaad baked into it.

Honestly Morrowind was missing more realistic honor killing quests, like having a Morag Tong mission where you have to fulfill a writ on some low-level nobles that got caught raping a guar.
 
It was on sale, so I decided to have a go at the worst game ever made: Morrowind. The last time I tried to play this, the original Xbox had just gone out of season, so 2006 or 2007, maybe. It is unplayable jank on the Xbox, but I figured it's time to have another go, give it a fair shake on a machine that can handle it and see if running the game at over 9 fps changes my opinion.

I'm not playing it with any fan mods other than a binary patch I found that fixes a bunch of crashes. I'm not using a wiki or walkthrough. I'm playing it much as I would have if I'd had a PC that could handle it. Even the mighty GeForce 4 Ti would occasionally shit its pants to 10 fps in this game. At the time I gave it a whack, I'd gotten rid of my old P4 + GeForce 4 MX and had a Macbook.
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I'm a Dark Elf Nightblade named Blorf (played Skyrim as a heavy armor warrior, so being sneaky should be a nice change of pace), and I should have edited a .ini file if I wanted to take screenshots, of course, because of course that's how Bethesda does things. Nice water effect for the time, though. Alt-tabbing to take that cap with Snip & Sketch crashed the game, but I don't entirely blame Bethesda for that one.

The Geforce 3 Ti200 got kneecapped to 30 fps by that water. "Games used to be so well optimized in the olden days!"


Textures are pretty ugly. Looked it up online, and they're only 16-bit. Woof. Already, I've had to edit the .ini file a bit just so I could read the text and take screenshots.
 
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The Ugly One said:
I'm evaluating the game Bethesda made, not the game fans wish they'd made. Yeah, I know, even the crash fixes don't keep it 100% pure, but I have my limits. I don't want to get halfway through it and get a corrupted save file.
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I must have a drunkard's luck with games because I almost never get crashes i played day 1 cyberpunk and only had one crash, played about a 1000 hours of New Vegas and 1500 hours in unmodded morrowind and never crashed play heavily modded Skyrim and fo4 and never crash.
 
The Ugly One said:
It was on sale, so I decided to have a go at the worst game ever made: Morrowind. The last time I tried to play this, the original Xbox had just gone out of season, so 2006 or 2007, maybe. It is unplayable jank on the Xbox, but I figured it's time to have another go, give it a fair shake on a machine that can handle it and see if running the game at over 9 fps changes my opinion.

I'm not playing it with any fan mods other than a binary patch I found that fixes a bunch of crashes. I'm not using a wiki or walkthrough. I'm playing it much as I would have if I'd had a PC that could handle it. Even the mighty GeForce 4 Ti would occasionally shit its pants to 10 fps in this game. At the time I gave it a whack, I'd gotten rid of my old P4 + GeForce 4 MX and had a Macbook.
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I'm a Dark Elf Nightblade named Blorf (played Skyrim as a heavy armor warrior, so being sneaky should be a nice change of pace), and I should have edited a .ini file if I wanted to take screenshots, of course, because of course that's how Bethesda does things. Nice water effect for the time, though. Alt-tabbing to take that cap with Snip & Sketch crashed the game, but I don't entirely blame Bethesda for that one.

The Geforce 3 Ti200 got kneecapped to 30 fps by that water. "Games used to be so well optimized in the olden days!"


Textures are pretty ugly. Looked it up online, and they're only 16-bit. Woof. Already, I've had to edit the .ini file a bit just so I could read the text and take screenshots.
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On one hand, good for you for trying it. On the other, this sounds very zoomerish.
On the other, other hand, if you weren't around for when the game was out or happened to have played the worse version of it, I can see why you might not be enjoying yourself now. I hope you do enjoy the game and not focus on the worst aspects of it to the point of ignoring everything else like I've seen others do, it's nowhere near perfect but there's a reason it's still beloved to this day.
The Ugly One said:
Sneaking fucking sucks at the beginning of the game. In that first dungeon, I can't sneak up on anybody, even with the Chameleon spell active.
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Well of course, you're the bottom of the barrel right now so you suck at literally everything. Even walking is a pain in the ass early game.
 
Tri-Tachyon'sClown said:
On the other, this sounds very zoomerish.
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Are you serious?

Tri-Tachyon'sClown said:
if you weren't around for when the game was out
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Are you serious?

Tri-Tachyon'sClown said:
I can see why you might not be enjoying yourself now
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Things that were okay so far:
  1. Each town's unique, good visual design so far
  2. Rendering engine's nice
  3. Lots of lore if you want to read 10-15 pages of spergery now and then
  4. There seems to be a lot to do. It doesn't spoon-feed you quests
  5. They very obviously took the criticism of Daggerfall being a boring RNG game to heart. There's less, but it's better.
Things that were moderately bad:
  1. NPCs will offer to train me, then say, "wtf who said I offered services?" Lots of inconsistencies like this.
  2. Character skins just look plain bad. Plenty of other games from the era could line up textures properly.
  3. They also use N64-style limb joints, which is weird to see in a 2002 game.
  4. The game really invites savescumming. This is a problem a lot of RPGs have. The stakes on a roll are too high sometimes.
  5. Torches do basically nothing.
Things that were awful
  1. I leveled up my sneak by crouching behind a rat that was stuck on the scenery and just sitting there.
  2. Using arrows, harder than your average FPS to line up a shot, but you miss anyway because roll-to-hit
  3. Directing melee swings with WASD is horrible
  4. "Level it up by using it" is a nice-sounding idea that is kind of stupid in implementation. Bunny-hopping everywhere, mana-dumping before I rest, and sitting down behind a rat makes the game feel silly.
  5. I had to steal a diamond from some lady's store. The easy way to beat the quest was stand right behind her, crouch, and grab one off the shelf next to her.
Other things:
  1. This patch made armor affect sneaking. Apparently it's not supposed to. I turned it off. Sneaking now works okay.
  2. Lack of fast travel is NBD
  3. Most NPCs seem to stand in place 24/7.
  4. I hope I won't screw myself by leveling up skills in the wrong order. Oblivion could really cripple you if you messed that up.
Special mention to how many major bugs the Morrowind Code Patch fixed. Not only did the game ship in a state where Unarmored didn't actually work, but they couldn't be bothered to fix it.
 
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The Ugly One said:
I hope I won't screw myself by leveling up skills in the wrong order. Oblivion could really cripple you if you messed that up.
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Yeah Morrowind doesn’t really have that issue, you inevitably reach a certain power threshold regardless of if you leveled up perfectly every time. Plus the wild monster scaling is way, way less aggressive to the point that some people think it doesn’t exist anywhere at all in Morrowind, that’s how subtle it is.
 
When i'm finished with the NV run, i'm gonna test a nice modlist which changes the level progress in Skyrim to a JSawyer-like.
I'm a bit anxious.
 
scathefire said:
Plus the wild monster scaling is way, way less aggressive to the point that some people think it doesn’t exist anywhere at all in Morrowind, that’s how subtle it is.
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I only started noticing it when I was playing a game where I was perfect leveling, as I was going about my skillups very intentionally, so I was leveling up much more often than you would normally. If you aren't playing the game like a lunatic, then it just feels like it is keeping up, if slightly lagged across most of the map. Either way, you can beat any enemy if you are canny enough anyway, I say as someone who has gotten the Daedric Crescent at level 1 with skilled magic play.
 
Update!

I assume everyone over the years who whined that combat is impossible is a moron who just selected whatever weapon had the highest damage rating. Is melee janky? Yes. But am I able to more or less hold my own using the weapon I'm trained in? Yes. Combat isn't really fun, but it's serviceable.

Meanwhile, there are three random encounters I've had when sleeping in the open: Rat, butthole slug, and ninja assassin. Holy shit, what a thing to throw at a L1. These guys showed up before I'd done anything at all! I usually just have to reload my game because those guys are faster and tougher than me. The last one showed up in what was supposed to be a safe house - joke's on him, I had just leveled up. I managed to kill him with 2 hp remaining on my end and get a really sweet set of light armor. But this guy just stood there, grinning like an idiot, as I fought for my life:

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Age: 63, Race: N64 Sausage Person

This worthless skooma addict couldn't be bothered to lift a finger. I'll figure out why the Dark Brotherhood is after me sooner or later, and when I do, I'm going to kill them.

That aside, this experience illustrates a problem Bethesda's games have always had, which is that it feels like the different people making different parts didn't really talk to each other, or there weren't any centralized design docs governing how parts of the game should work. This guy flat-out tells you his house is a safe place to sleep, but it's not, because whoever programmed the random DB assassins didn't put anything in to respect safe houses. And while guardsmen don't tolerate assassins, this Blades agent is perfectly fine with a DB assassin trying to murder his charge in his own home. I don't think it was deliberate. It feels like somebody slapped in a questline without even thinking about how it worked with the rest of the game.

Asian tech support said:
>uses morrowind code patch instead
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Somebody's gotta fix the game-killing bugs if Bethesda won't. I don't want UI overhauls and graphics enhancements, though.
 
The Ugly One said:
Meanwhile, there are three random encounters I've had when sleeping in the open: Rat, butthole slug, and ninja assassin. Holy shit, what a thing to throw at a L1. These guys showed up before I'd done anything at all! I usually just have to reload my game because those guys are faster and tougher than me. The last one showed up in what was supposed to be a safe house - joke's on him, I had just leveled up. I managed to kill him with 2 hp remaining on my end and get a really sweet set of light armor.
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That is the entice you to play the expansion: Tribunal. If you get tired of it, just report the incident to a guard, and then it will suddenly cease. That said, there are a lot of mods to delay it, because it is absurd if you don't and don't want to start Tribunal, especially this early in the game.
 
The Ugly One said:
Somebody's gotta fix the game-killing bugs if Bethesda won't. I don't want UI overhauls and graphics enhancements, though.
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That's what OpenMW did


Turn on always use best attack in the settings, no more wasd directional attacking, since specific weapons are better at specific attacks
 
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