Macklin's Middle Aged Gaming Spotlight: MORROWIND

Morrowind

As we all wait patiently for the release of The Elder Scrolls: VI, many questions fill the air. Questions such as, “When is it being released?” And “Why has it taken so long?”

Personally, I decided to check out The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind to see how it holds up after 20 years.

Patience Is Key

Part of Macklin’s Middle Aged Gaming is patience, since I don’t have the energy these days to play each and every new AAA title to be released. Is 20 years a long time to wait to play a game? Of course not! With great reviews and being free for Amazon Prime members. This incentive was all it took for me to download the game.

Upon claiming my free game it surprised me to see that Morrowind weighed in at only a mere 2GB to download. Compared to the games that are released today, often reaching up to and beyond 100GB per game, this was tiny. I was also surprised to see some of the hardware limitations such as not being able to do 1920x1080p resolution.

After a quick install I was in the game. My first impression was quite surprising as I didn’t realize the graphics would be so nice for such an old game. Granted they were nothing mind blowing but for a 20 year old game I have to say that Morrowind looked great. Sure, maybe the heads are a little wobbly shaped and the character models may be a bit stiff but all in all I can understand why the game was so highly praised in its time.

Making A Macklin

After exiting the boat and creating my character, I made my way to the castle where I chose my class: a Bard. The Bard has always been one of my favorite Dungeons and Dragons archetypes. Having played Skyrim, I have high hopes that Bathesda did the class justice, but only time will tell. For my race I chose a Wood Elf. When I think of a Bard I think of nature and what’s more natural than the woods?

Speaking of time, it was interesting to see how the control scheme has changed with time. One important thing to note is that there is no jumping in Morrowind, instead the spacebar is used to interact with people and the world around you and I can already predict that not having a jump button will surely be the downfall of me. Just kidding.

Back To The Game

I picked up my character’s paperwork and said goodbye to the guard before advancing through the door into the next area where a dagger and my first spell awaited me. Once again, the control scheme shows its age with ‘F’ being used to unsheathe your weapon and ‘E’ being used to “unsheathe” your hands in order to perform magic. I would like to take this moment to mention that this will be a completely blind playthrough and I’m more concerned with roleplaying as opposed to min-maxing so all of the upsides and downsides to that choice will be here for your viewing pleasure.

I forgot to enable screenshots before I reached this point so after exiting the game and manually adding screenshots in the game’s .INI file, we were ready to begin, here’s what Morrowind Macklin looks like:

(Yes, that is my hand wearing his clothing and using his own sword.)

Just One More

My last pit stop for the evening will be the starting town. I got my fill of the combat system for now and so it’s time to figure on who is where, what they’re doing and why I should let them live. Fun stuff!

I am unable to switch to a view that shows the character’s face at this point but if the option becomes available as the game progresses I will include a screenshot of that as well.

My first spell was used with nothing around. It appears as though only one spell per day is allowed. Hopefully this changes but in the meantime that is good to know. Another thing I hope will change is the attack animation. I cannot currently tell if I am attacking these enemy Headcrabs or what as there is no attack confirmation. I just swing until the thing keels over!

After getting beat up for a bit by a Headcrab it was time to move on to my next destination. Unfortunately I wasn’t paying attention to the given directions, so I’m headed back to town in order to find out where to go next. In the meantime I heard this guy screaming and found him dead. According to the book he had on him he was attempting a new type of magic before he perished and so I did what any good-natured human would do: I pillaged.