Caltrops - Reviews - Re: Morrowind

Forum Overview :: Reviews

by jeep 07/27/2004, 7:30pm PDT

Monty Cantsin wrote:

This game is all about wandering through an immense, continuous world and coming across these incredible vistas.

I asked for a game where you could wander around for a year. I'm still wandering around this game.

Actually, it's all about shoplifting, but the incredible vistas along the way.

Every good rpg ever is at least part Antiques Road Show.

Did I mention that you could easily spend a leisurely afternoon or ten browsing used bookstores, looking for the good books, the ones that give you a little zing? Are there people who actually read these books? I mean, they have multiple pages and words and stuff, did some game developer actually write them? I'm frightened to find out.

They're pretty awful. There's a strategy guide that has cliff notes over on gamefaqs somewhere. I just get them for the stats, but I read them the first time through. The first time through I also accidentally found the god Vivec when I was like 10th level and killed him for the book the shelf behind him. Many, many librarians have met a similar fate.

This is a game where you feel like the possibility space is so large there's absolutely no way you could ever exhaust it and so you kind of relax and don't try. I guess the world is stretched pretty thin if you examine it up close, but there are enough corners with enough significant detail that for all practical purposes it's infinite. Several times I've wandered past some interesting looking thing and thought "should I check that out?" knowing that it was quite possible that I would never come back to this particular spot, knowing that this thing might end up being boring but it could also turn out cool, and that there were a thousand other boring or cool things to check out instead, and I would have to pick because I would never be able to check them all out. I like that feeling.

Negative space. I will never grow out of it.

For some reason this game grabbed me in a way that GTA never did. I always admired GTA, I understood why it was great and important and all that, but somehow it never totally pulled me in, and I sort of envied people who got yoinked into that world. On a conscious level I understand that pretend elves and dragons are theoretically more gay than pretend handguns and motorcycles, but goddamn if this giant sprawling fairyland hasn't got me by the balls.

GTA was great but the problem you probably ran into was straight out of the GEB, it didn't have enough interconnected details to seem as deep as Morrowind.

As a skeptic of graphics-obsessed, freedom-fantasy, go anywhere, do anything, it's up to you, total 360 degree sensurround simulation game design ideology, I was ready to hate this game but it turns out I love it. I'm still basically anti holodeck-as-manifest-destiny but my platform is going to have to evolve to accomodate my new schedule of standing on a lonely hilltop with a burlap loot bag, watching slackjawed as the two moons of Morrowind creep across my star spangled monitor. As a big fan of self-correction, maybe that's one of the reasons I'm so enthusiastic about it.

I'm sure you've played KOTOR, which I swear feels like the same engine. City of Heroes has it, too, but the details are still incomplete. I think CoH is my early favorite for game of the year, even though it won't hit it's real potential until next summer.

/jeep/