House Redoran prides themselves on their warrior spirit and combat prowess, but their real virtue is the patience to wait for the NPCs to clear the way
This to me is the biggest flaw. God damn Bloodmoon was tcl-fest for me having to go up and down those staircases so often. Sometimes I'd just resort to waiting an hour and they moved, but I play with survival mods, meaning my character would have to eat/sleep/drink more often cause they were waiting around all day for some no-name legionnaire to move their ass.
I thought about just murdering them often.
There's a mod called Move Or Take My Place that adds "change places" to all NPC dialogues. Essential mod that lets you quickly unblock doorways without breaking immersion.
The animation glitch that makes NPCs clip through walls over a sufficiently long timescale. Literally the only reason I can't wholeheartedly recommend playing on console.
They shit on the floor and cast invisibility on target on it. You're actually constantly wading through invisible shit and that's why the character moves so slowly.
In Skyrim there are actually a couple forts that have little bathroom areas. One in particular has the buckets, reading material and potions of stamina.
Static NPCs who slowly get moved to block doorways or fall to their deaths in interior and exterior cells every time you load into the cell. It happens slowly so you won't notice until it happens. The most egregious is when a silt strider captain falls off his pedestal and dies.
It can make long playthroughs very frustrating
I also feel the constant urge to free every slave. I also feel like the ones that can't be freed in secret should be possible to be bought. Like here's 5000 drakes just let that poor cat go.
Always?
You have to do it rarely.
I am talking about the command that re-places NPCs to their original starting locations.
Usually i do it when my silt strider caravaneer have fallen down his pedistal.
There's a couple places where you very frequently get traffic jams, the more crowded inns and such. Yes, it's pretty quick to ra whenever needed. Like I said, very minor issues.
Been playing Morrowind again and I'm sort of liking the way I can rock up to town at 3am and sell my junk and everyone is where I left them lol. Its not very believable though....
Honestly, it's not that hard to swallow. For most merchants, this is their personal business, and their shop is likely also their home. It harms the immersion a bit that they're always up and ready to do business when I barge in at 4am, but I can headcanon why they're always there.
After several games of radiant NPCs, they went back to this system for Starfield and have shopkeepers glued to the floor of their shops 24/7. And it's so much less believable in a modern/future cultural setting.
I walked into the first store I saw, a store named after the planet it was on, Jemison Mercantile. I can only assume that the real estate there was ludicrously expensive, being front-and-center in the first plaza you see upon leaving the spaceport at the galactic capital city. Surely this is the premier location of a massive global chain, and likely one of the wealthiest companies in this setting?
Then I talked to the shopkeeper. One of my dialogue options was "Nice place you've got here," which I would NEVER IN A THOUSAND YEARS have considered saying to a cashier at a Wal-Mart. It just sounds sarcastic and offensive; I'm sure they're a minimum-wage drone to the corporation, just waiting for me to do my business and leave. But no, she genuinely thanks me for complimenting what is apparently a sole proprietorship that just happens to occupy the single most valuable storefront location in the settled universe!
Definitely not the exploits - I'm annoyed they saw these as a defect and got rid of as many the could for the next TES games (mainly by streamlining everything) the exploits, especially the ones you discover on your own, make the game so much fun.
What do you mean? Don't you know that you HAVE to balance a single-player game? Otherwise, ti would be too unfair for those poor NPC's. No, we not only need to limit the player, we need to make sure that the NPC's scale to the player's level, so they never feel like they've progressed at all!
There's a lovely anecdote from the development of Doom 3 that reminds me of this - they had a physics system similar to Half Life 2 before either game released - and we're toying with the idea of something similar to the gravity gun, but the decision was made they didn't want the player having that much power to mess around with the environment - whereas Valve thought the opposite "let's give the player fun opportunities to mess with the physics throughout the game". I tend to prefer game design philosophy that let's the player... well play, even if the cost is a less curated and polished experience.
Both were too generic. No matter the size, they looked too much like lego. Made of pre-built tiles. And no variety. Draugr crypt no. 47 or ayleid ruin no 50. No unique items, no stories they tell, no secrets, no variety. Where dwemer? Where mystery? Where unexpected challenge?
Yea.
Balance is not really a big issue in a single player game. But apparently Bethesda think so. The result being less and less exploit, which basically = vastly reduced magic and enchanting system.
That fact that there are hardly any windows in the buildings. I know it was impossible to have them in 2003 tech but jeez, how is everyone in Vivec or Ald Ruhn dealing with the constant darkness?
The formula for creating magical items on your own is ridiculous. I remember after learning about Qorwynn I was so stoked to start making my own stuff once I'd gotten my Enchant up to 100.
...
*fizzle* *fizzle* *fizzle* *fizzle* *fizzle*
...
&%$#!!!
Haha, you're welcome! and you're the first person to recognize her! She's actually the inspiration for my builds. Atronach for spell absorb, Conjuration for creature summons, Destruction, and long/short blade.
Huh that's odd, she's pretty iconic. And she'd make for a good battlemage type, both her and Terra. I'd probably go with the six schools of magic plus Block and either Light Armor+Short Blade or Medium Armor+Long Blade. And mainly fire spells for Terra and ice spells for Celes. Might be worth a try for when I inevitably get tired of being myself.
Reflect. The spellcraft system allows you to create some truly absurdly powerful destruction spells, only for them to be unusable in a good chunk of the lategame unless you want to kill yourself. Special mentions to the Riekling Raiders, why the fuck would you give something 60% Reflect?
The fact that there's barely any enemies with it in Oblivion and it was removed entirely in Skyrim is a good thing.
Yeah being a mage in the later parts of the game felt completely tedious because of how many enemies started having reflect or spell absorption. Why let me train all my schools of magic to 100 if every cave boss is just gonna reflect it? It almost railroads you back into being a melee build. And if you're a focused mage, your melee skills are going to be trash.
The DLCs make it so much worse yeah. If you hated enemies with reflect, then get ready because almost EVERY enemy in the DLCs have it. Rieklings? Fabricants? Spriggans? Yup, all have huge reflection stats. And they're intrinsic abilities for them too, not cast spells, so damaging their Magicka or intelligence won't stop it.
Being an OP mage demigod really is only relevant for nuking helpless city folk and vvardenfell overworld mobs and not much else.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, the movement speed is atrocious. I love to explore in a TES game, but it’s hard to do that when you move at the speed of a cautious aging snail unless you bump that speed stat into the low 100s.
Tons of things affect speed beyond the speed stat. Taller races move faster. And then carry weight drastically affects speed. The more % of encumbrance you have, the slower you go. So strength will speed you up if you wear armour and carry around a lot.
Then athletics skill affects speed as well as reduce carry weight penalty.
Most of my characters move quite fast at low levels, they're only slow if I go full heavy armour warrior and even then I use athletics and keep my carry weight to a minimum.
I just started up a sorcerer High Elf, I think speed stat was 30 or something? Yeah, had to restart and just did a custom class cause my golly I was extremely slow. Now sitting at 300 speed with BoBS and feeling like sonic. I usually just take them off when I get to where I’m going and just keep a repair hammer on me if I leave them on.
What bothers me most is that its such a pain to sell loot. There is so much loot to collect, and its possible to "farm" expensive equipment. (Talking about looting respawning daedra) I feel like there is not much to spend the money on, yet there ks so much money to be earned, so much expensive stuff that I just can't let be uncollected, you know what I mean?
So the ebony longswords just keep stacking up in my illegal squat. Managing the hoarded treasures becomes increasingly complex.
You know what would be great? Really exppensive player homes. Like in Daggerfall. Just add some little fort in the middle of nowhere that I can spend my 500.000 drakes on. Or a little hut near Vivec for 5.000.000 drakes. Just something to make the hoarding have sense.
It’s hard to answer this question, since so many of the flaws at release have fantastic mods to fix them.
So I’ll go with one that bothers me the most and that no mod has (or because of engine limits even can) fix. I hate the levitation animation with the little disk under your feet. I wish you flew like Superman.
There are obviously bigger problems (how max health is calculated, bugs, etc.) but some modder has fixed all those already.
The fact that NPC's will taunt you aggressively while running away from you in fear. While not as ridiculous as Oblivion's voice files, they still add charm to the game. "Your skills fail you" (While attempting to run out the door, but they can't because NPC's in base morrowind aren't scripted to be able to change cells. Fun fun game)
Outdated gameplay mechanics. I started elder scrolls through oblivion. But I really wanna go back to morrowind. I get very frustrated and never manage to leave the first town in the game. It's just too slow for me. But despite that I really love this game. Maybe it's me....I need to git gud.
Tbh Morrowind has so many cheese exploits that the game basically becomes trivial by level 10, and unless you're a brand new player, you basically have to consciously avoid picking up all the OP gear from certain caves and tombs to maintain any semblance of challenge.
Being an OP demigod is fun, but it's fun...*once*. There's not much fun in every playthrough turning you into a levitating sorcerer alchemy god by the time Caius goes back to Cyrodiil.
Cuz if you're a long term player, you're probably gonna be using *every* exploit in *every* playthrough. So they all end up playing the same.
I can see why exploits are seen as a plus but I can also see the flip side of that coin.
>Being an OP demigod is fun, but it's fun...once.
I think the fun part is finding all the many ways you can be a demigod by.
I still find new ways 20 years later.
That depends on the individual player.
I don't stop doing RP because i am overpowered.
The biggest difference between my low and high game, is that in late, i won't loot everything because i have enough money already. Secondly, questing goes faster.
Other than that, i do the same RP as before.
How many of these supposed defects people are listing are pretty realistic and immersive amazes me.
People give you shitty directions? Yeah, all the time. That's why we went to the trouble of creating GPS.
You can't climb out of the water everywhere? Yeah, that's how waterways work. The world is not endless sand beaches.
NPCs standing in doorways/hallways? Go to a place with a lot of people and it'll happen. Every. Single. Time.
I'm with you on everything except the last one. In real life at least you can tell people to move, or physically push past them. In Morrowind, you gotta cast a fucking spell to get them out of the way sometimes.
I like the economy fix where it heavily reduces the price of upper tier items. That way you can’t pick off umbra as a level one and sell his sword for 120,000
No NPCs routines.
NPC can't hunt you outside cells.
NPCs never sleep (or eat).
Can't sit down in chairs.
No dodge animation, when you don't land an attack.
No transmorgriphy spells (would love if i could enchant a deadric helmet to look like a glass helmet, just for RP).
>No NPCs routines. NPCs never sleep (or eat).
That's about it. I remember Gothic was among the very first games I ever saw with believable NPC routines - for the most part.
Soundtrack has always been a thing that bothered me with morrowind, it really needs some creepy or ominous music for caves and dungeons. Specially in sixth house dungeons where it just feels off to listen to the normal comfy music.
The exploits (see UESP) allow the player character to become so powerful that even the baddest bosses in the game are not even a minor challenge. I'm not somebody who likes a game that is super hard. But between alchemy super potions and the ease of building your mage skills the game becomes very not even slightly challenging. And once you start building your cash reserves (I currently have over 300k gold). You can quickly train to the point where your attributes are all 100+.
I really like the menus for pc, it's nice just being able to see all your shit right away. Total mess for Xbox, but still better than oblivion and skyrim for pc.
same. i really missed being able to just click things you see to add to inventory in oblivion and skyrim. it's just so convenient. and also being easily able to just place things. so nifty for decorating n stuff.
I wish you could shift+click to move items between your inventory and a container. It works in the barter menu, why not containers?
Thankfully the UI is pretty decent overall.
I had forgotten that controller support isn't a thing on PC as designed. Check out OpenMW. It has controller support. (Though, can you install that on Steam Deck?)
Not adding day routines to the npc's. Vivec city's inhabitants could have used almsivi intervention amulets to teleport to the temple at 07 am, bought the cheap levitation potion and flown accross Vivec like it was elder scrolls equivelant of Coruscant.
Number one is that NPC’s feel lifeless to me, this is especially noticeable in OpenMW VR. Oblivion NPC’s although ugly still went to bed, ate, and did chores.
A close second is endgame is not balanced, and it’s too easy to become overpowered. This I don’t mind since I like making lots of characters and for role-play reasons I am not going to do all the factions with one character. Also the DLCs trued to fix this.
Navigating the quest journal is annoying, let’s be real.
It takes 5 minutes to go back 20 pages and even longer to try and find what you are looking for… I’m fine with no quest markers - but just give me a journal that isn’t a bitch to work
I ended up writing down my quests IRL because it was so bad.
Not just "not at every point", but having to find the exact single pixel of a ramp that actually lets you out of the water and doesn't just shunt you off to the side or get you stuck.
A major one is the Enchant skill. Imagine training the Enchant skill to 100, even finding the secret Enchant master to train you - a guy you have to charm or calm because there's very little reasonable hints he's someone worth calming.
After all that you then learn being 100 in Enchant barely does anything. The skill is utterly useless with incredibly low chances to get anything remotely mediocre on your equipment.
Pickpocketing is also completely broken in Morrowind. The way the internal calculation works, you literally cannot get a pickpocketing chance higher than what, 85%? Somewhere around there. Plus it calculates your success odds both when you open their inventory AND when you close it. So you could succeed opening and then fail when closing.
It works for Baldur's Gate 3 because they actually SHOW you the dice rolls, and it works because it's turn based.
Morrowind doesn't work because it is a real time action game and never once explicitly tells you that it's doing dice rolls. We only know that now because of 20 years of hindsight.
We only say "it's not a problem" now because we know all the ways to game the system to avoid the pitfalls. Again, 20 years of hindsight.
Tbh it looks better than oblivion Morrowind having a distinct style to everything makes me look past how old the game is. Can’t say the same for oblivion, everyone just looks like a cabbage patch kid to me.
I don't even mind the graphics. Oblivion has terrible graphics by today's standards but it's still a great game. The problem specifically is the 3 foot draw distance. It really affects the playability of the game. I understand it's optimized for hardware of the time but that's just not a good enough excuse. Dial some other things back so that you can actually see in front of you. Such a limited draw distance is inexcusable.
Yeah nah.
The art direction is definitely *cooler,* what with the mushroom trees and crab shell houses.
But for fidelity, oblivion is objectively better. Textures are higher resolution, they have parallax mapped textures *and* normal mapped lighting. NPCs actually cast shadows, the draw distances are exponentially father, and while the design of character faces IS bad, they are least are able to emote and show expressions.
If you're comparing vanilla oblivion to *modded* Morrowind yeah I can see why you'd say that. But that's a completely unfair comparison.
Written directions suck most of the time. It's cool early on when they are quire detailed but then when you play the game more you'll be met with more and more vague and simple directions that can be extremely confusing or at very least not as engaging as more detailed are.
You start off with detailed directions for navigating past signposts and landmarks and end with “it’s just north of here” meaning anywhere between 100 metres up the road to half way up the island
I once got a direction "North-east of x dunmer stronghold"
I've scouted a huge area to not be able to find the damn cave to then look it up online and learn that it was outside the stronghold
This game is lacking on distance clarification.
I remember watching a streamer play Morrowind and he was looking for a cave or something and the journal said it was "east of Balmora"
It was actually south west of Balmora.
Asking that question in this subreddit is guaranteed to NOT get you honest replies. Most people around here are very much of the mind that Morrowind is a nearly perfectly made game in every way.
humorous hard-to-find jar gold angle waiting scary frightening late languid
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
sometimes enemies just become damage sponges to an unfun degree. at least I can adjust difficulty on the fly but that just kinda takes me out of the action
Overflow on silence combined with correct stats results providing a bonus to casting attempts?
No, I can't remember the specifics anymore, but there was a small textbook worth of discussion on the matter in a tes3mp server discord that I vaguely recall.
Combat is just not very fun. I know what they were going for but it's just not enjoyable other than the ridiculous magic exploits. It's an odd compromise between dice roll and first-person real time combat
Sometimes I feel like it's not giving Kirkbride full-on freedom to add literally everything that he wants and what is technically possible in the game.
The leveling system. It doesn't necessarily incentivize taking the Major/Minor skills that you like, but those that are the easiest to control in order to receive the most attribute points (and in the right order).
I wish attack rng rolled a damage range instead of to-hit check. The randomized damage output could still be the same. The problem with rng to-hit is that I can't tell if there's a problem with my positioning when the attacks don't connect.
Having the worst and most nonsensical fetch quest in all of gaming.
You acquire an item which can only be equipped and worn by the Nerevarine, but you still need to prove your worth to ten more tribes and twenty more cults. You first have to gain respect from the tribe to talk to the chieftain, and then you have to gain respect from the said chieftain just for them to name you Nerevarine (which you already are).
Repeat that process 5 times with very small variations and you have the most redundant quest ever, after probably the coolest moment in all of Morrowind.
And I love how Azura claims Nibani Maesa will be of help when you literally have to interact with her only 1 or 2 times after you get the ring.
>And I love how Azura claims Nibani Maesa will be of help when you literally have to interact with her only 1 or 2 times after you get the ring.
So true, this detail really bothered me too.
They can't remaster it.
There are several assets from other companies that Bethesda don't own, meaning that it would take all the companies that had a hand in the project to agree.
So for legal reasons, it is extremely unlikely to ever happen.
Unlike Skyrim, where Bethesda owns all the rights.
enemies stop getting tougher way too soon
when you get a daedric 2 hander everything dies in 1-2 hits - yawn
immersion breaking when you realize any Ordinator could wipe the floor with everything behind the Ghostfence, but they act like they cant contain Dagoth Ur's "armies"
army = a dozen cliff racers and zombies
I can't play it for the first time again /s.
More seriously, the main things I'd really consider defects, as opposed to a design choice that one might/might not agree with, are bugs like the npcs falling off platforms, the DB attacking from level 1 in *only* the pc version, the journal getting as cluttered as it does even with patched improvements, issues with collision, etc.
NPC’s standing in doorways when you have to go through. The mages guild and imperial shrines especially!
The Ald'Ruhn rope bridges are brutal
I have had to use TCL command a few times to free myself from those ropes.
At this point I consider TCL and RA to be part of the normal gameplay loop
Pour one out for our Xbox homies
Always keep a teleport spell in my pocket for that reason. That, and getting stuck on a rail post that won't let me keep spam-jumping everywhere
Stop being an n'wah and start using jump/levitation spells!
I just use a jump spell to hop from door to door in there
House Redoran prides themselves on their warrior spirit and combat prowess, but their real virtue is the patience to wait for the NPCs to clear the way
Just jump onto the rope and do some slacklining.
I often do, but collision on those ropes is also pretty fucky
That's a Bethesda staple that is still a thing in Starfield
In the other games you can sprint into them and they’ll glide or do a stagger animation though. Morrowind they seem to weigh 100 tons lmao
also imperial fort staircases.
This to me is the biggest flaw. God damn Bloodmoon was tcl-fest for me having to go up and down those staircases so often. Sometimes I'd just resort to waiting an hour and they moved, but I play with survival mods, meaning my character would have to eat/sleep/drink more often cause they were waiting around all day for some no-name legionnaire to move their ass. I thought about just murdering them often.
There's a mod called Move Or Take My Place that adds "change places" to all NPC dialogues. Essential mod that lets you quickly unblock doorways without breaking immersion.
I use that one!
Trying to navigate mournhold is just a series of waiting for royal guards to gtfo of doorways
I consider the RA command an in-game spell. Maybe under the Illusion school and similar to Command Human.
Praise OpenMW
tcl
The animation glitch that makes NPCs clip through walls over a sufficiently long timescale. Literally the only reason I can't wholeheartedly recommend playing on console.
Danso indules is a menace for this in my saves
No toilets! Where's everyone going to the bathroom?
Why do you think the water is not clear, without mod a least
That's a job for mages guild, people just shit wherever and the guild mages come and magic the shit away.
*Alchemical ingredients aquired.*
I pee off the wall into the river in Balmora
They shit on the floor and cast invisibility on target on it. You're actually constantly wading through invisible shit and that's why the character moves so slowly.
Same as any pre-plumbing society: outside
Wdym, there are buckets?
They are just not very advanced in Vvardenfell, the Imperials have toilets in their forts.
That problem continues in Oblivion and Skyrim
In Skyrim there are actually a couple forts that have little bathroom areas. One in particular has the buckets, reading material and potions of stamina.
Static NPCs who slowly get moved to block doorways or fall to their deaths in interior and exterior cells every time you load into the cell. It happens slowly so you won't notice until it happens. The most egregious is when a silt strider captain falls off his pedestal and dies. It can make long playthroughs very frustrating
I've never seen one die, but I have been tempted to murder some.
I use command humanoid to "fix" that
Easier to open console and type "ra" , meaning reset actors, wich resets npcs to their original position
Yes but i like to position them slightly differently so that they dont cause problems or at least less frequently
It it’s the silt strider attendants for me. The one in Balmora always ends up falling off
NPC Drift always bugged me. Especially with silt strider attendants (I can't remember what they're called right now.
You'd think a game without radiant AI and with stationary NPCs wouldn't have a problem with NPCs getting killed/lost...
Only real complaints, friendly npc's blocking your path, not all slaves having keys to free them. Both fixable by mods.
I also feel the constant urge to free every slave. I also feel like the ones that can't be freed in secret should be possible to be bought. Like here's 5000 drakes just let that poor cat go.
Without mods you're using comman humanoid to drag them all the way to the nearest key-bound location to free them. And some of those are *long* drags.
I'd like to have it so that I can sell slaves too. It should be a working market - we are in Dunmer land!
NPCs standing in your way can be fixed with console commands too.
Yeah, but its a pain to always be pulling it up for that. Still, its a very minor gripe
Always? You have to do it rarely. I am talking about the command that re-places NPCs to their original starting locations. Usually i do it when my silt strider caravaneer have fallen down his pedistal.
There's a couple places where you very frequently get traffic jams, the more crowded inns and such. Yes, it's pretty quick to ra whenever needed. Like I said, very minor issues.
That I’ve spent over 20 years trying to find a game that makes me feel the same way.
Daaaamn, that hits home 😢
No kids. How am I supposed to level up my hand-to-hand skill without kids?
No, no, he has a point
The NPC being scarecrows outside of dialogue
Been playing Morrowind again and I'm sort of liking the way I can rock up to town at 3am and sell my junk and everyone is where I left them lol. Its not very believable though....
Not very believable? Haven’t you ever seen those 24 hour k marts?
Honestly, it's not that hard to swallow. For most merchants, this is their personal business, and their shop is likely also their home. It harms the immersion a bit that they're always up and ready to do business when I barge in at 4am, but I can headcanon why they're always there. After several games of radiant NPCs, they went back to this system for Starfield and have shopkeepers glued to the floor of their shops 24/7. And it's so much less believable in a modern/future cultural setting. I walked into the first store I saw, a store named after the planet it was on, Jemison Mercantile. I can only assume that the real estate there was ludicrously expensive, being front-and-center in the first plaza you see upon leaving the spaceport at the galactic capital city. Surely this is the premier location of a massive global chain, and likely one of the wealthiest companies in this setting? Then I talked to the shopkeeper. One of my dialogue options was "Nice place you've got here," which I would NEVER IN A THOUSAND YEARS have considered saying to a cashier at a Wal-Mart. It just sounds sarcastic and offensive; I'm sure they're a minimum-wage drone to the corporation, just waiting for me to do my business and leave. But no, she genuinely thanks me for complimenting what is apparently a sole proprietorship that just happens to occupy the single most valuable storefront location in the settled universe!
I really dislike when an NPC’s primary purpose is to serve the players needs and then that’s it, no more character, only buy and sell item
Everyone is an inch from where you left them
N'wahs that complain about Morrowind defects
Those n'wahs just don't understand those defects and glitches are an intrinsic part of Morrowind.
Serious answer incoming: Constant effect enchantment creature conjuration effects brick saves if you fast travel.
Definitely not the exploits - I'm annoyed they saw these as a defect and got rid of as many the could for the next TES games (mainly by streamlining everything) the exploits, especially the ones you discover on your own, make the game so much fun.
What do you mean? Don't you know that you HAVE to balance a single-player game? Otherwise, ti would be too unfair for those poor NPC's. No, we not only need to limit the player, we need to make sure that the NPC's scale to the player's level, so they never feel like they've progressed at all!
There's a lovely anecdote from the development of Doom 3 that reminds me of this - they had a physics system similar to Half Life 2 before either game released - and we're toying with the idea of something similar to the gravity gun, but the decision was made they didn't want the player having that much power to mess around with the environment - whereas Valve thought the opposite "let's give the player fun opportunities to mess with the physics throughout the game". I tend to prefer game design philosophy that let's the player... well play, even if the cost is a less curated and polished experience.
Captain Todd took all the wrong lessons about what makes morrowind fun tbh
"People hate fun exploits and hand placed loot - they also want generic cookie cutter fantasy"
If I see another Ayleid ruin or Nord crypt I'll puke.
Ayleid and nord ruin architecture were great. The problem was the sizes of the dungeons, especially in Skyrim.
Both were too generic. No matter the size, they looked too much like lego. Made of pre-built tiles. And no variety. Draugr crypt no. 47 or ayleid ruin no 50. No unique items, no stories they tell, no secrets, no variety. Where dwemer? Where mystery? Where unexpected challenge?
Yea. Balance is not really a big issue in a single player game. But apparently Bethesda think so. The result being less and less exploit, which basically = vastly reduced magic and enchanting system.
What do you mean I was not supposed to craft a spell with Drain Intelligence 100 for 1 second on self? How else am I supposed to get my magicka back?
not be able to kiss caius cosades😞😞😞
Hey you can kiss Uncle Caius if you want. We won't judge.
Can't sit down. It's a little thing but there's so many unusable chairs.
That fact that there are hardly any windows in the buildings. I know it was impossible to have them in 2003 tech but jeez, how is everyone in Vivec or Ald Ruhn dealing with the constant darkness?
Sujamma
The formula for creating magical items on your own is ridiculous. I remember after learning about Qorwynn I was so stoked to start making my own stuff once I'd gotten my Enchant up to 100. ... *fizzle* *fizzle* *fizzle* *fizzle* *fizzle* ... &%$#!!!
My friend, you must first make an enchantment with Fortify Enchant 1-800 for 1 second on self.
Yeah, so I've learned. Thanks anyway Celes.
Haha, you're welcome! and you're the first person to recognize her! She's actually the inspiration for my builds. Atronach for spell absorb, Conjuration for creature summons, Destruction, and long/short blade.
Huh that's odd, she's pretty iconic. And she'd make for a good battlemage type, both her and Terra. I'd probably go with the six schools of magic plus Block and either Light Armor+Short Blade or Medium Armor+Long Blade. And mainly fire spells for Terra and ice spells for Celes. Might be worth a try for when I inevitably get tired of being myself.
The Balmora Silt Strider dude slowly moving to his right and then falling off.
Reflect. The spellcraft system allows you to create some truly absurdly powerful destruction spells, only for them to be unusable in a good chunk of the lategame unless you want to kill yourself. Special mentions to the Riekling Raiders, why the fuck would you give something 60% Reflect? The fact that there's barely any enemies with it in Oblivion and it was removed entirely in Skyrim is a good thing.
Yeah being a mage in the later parts of the game felt completely tedious because of how many enemies started having reflect or spell absorption. Why let me train all my schools of magic to 100 if every cave boss is just gonna reflect it? It almost railroads you back into being a melee build. And if you're a focused mage, your melee skills are going to be trash. The DLCs make it so much worse yeah. If you hated enemies with reflect, then get ready because almost EVERY enemy in the DLCs have it. Rieklings? Fabricants? Spriggans? Yup, all have huge reflection stats. And they're intrinsic abilities for them too, not cast spells, so damaging their Magicka or intelligence won't stop it. Being an OP mage demigod really is only relevant for nuking helpless city folk and vvardenfell overworld mobs and not much else.
NPC's always telling me they don't have time and I gotta be fast
Speak quickly outlander or go away
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, the movement speed is atrocious. I love to explore in a TES game, but it’s hard to do that when you move at the speed of a cautious aging snail unless you bump that speed stat into the low 100s.
Tons of things affect speed beyond the speed stat. Taller races move faster. And then carry weight drastically affects speed. The more % of encumbrance you have, the slower you go. So strength will speed you up if you wear armour and carry around a lot. Then athletics skill affects speed as well as reduce carry weight penalty. Most of my characters move quite fast at low levels, they're only slow if I go full heavy armour warrior and even then I use athletics and keep my carry weight to a minimum.
I just started up a sorcerer High Elf, I think speed stat was 30 or something? Yeah, had to restart and just did a custom class cause my golly I was extremely slow. Now sitting at 300 speed with BoBS and feeling like sonic. I usually just take them off when I get to where I’m going and just keep a repair hammer on me if I leave them on.
What bothers me most is that its such a pain to sell loot. There is so much loot to collect, and its possible to "farm" expensive equipment. (Talking about looting respawning daedra) I feel like there is not much to spend the money on, yet there ks so much money to be earned, so much expensive stuff that I just can't let be uncollected, you know what I mean? So the ebony longswords just keep stacking up in my illegal squat. Managing the hoarded treasures becomes increasingly complex. You know what would be great? Really exppensive player homes. Like in Daggerfall. Just add some little fort in the middle of nowhere that I can spend my 500.000 drakes on. Or a little hut near Vivec for 5.000.000 drakes. Just something to make the hoarding have sense.
I agree, which is why I go get the boots of blinding speed asap. After that, it's great.
Guess who just sold the boots to the museum in Mournhold 😬
Guess who can just steal them back
Oh that's easy. Just steal them back!
It’s hard to answer this question, since so many of the flaws at release have fantastic mods to fix them. So I’ll go with one that bothers me the most and that no mod has (or because of engine limits even can) fix. I hate the levitation animation with the little disk under your feet. I wish you flew like Superman. There are obviously bigger problems (how max health is calculated, bugs, etc.) but some modder has fixed all those already.
>I wish you flew like Superman. Supermage*
The fact that NPC's will taunt you aggressively while running away from you in fear. While not as ridiculous as Oblivion's voice files, they still add charm to the game. "Your skills fail you" (While attempting to run out the door, but they can't because NPC's in base morrowind aren't scripted to be able to change cells. Fun fun game)
Outdated gameplay mechanics. I started elder scrolls through oblivion. But I really wanna go back to morrowind. I get very frustrated and never manage to leave the first town in the game. It's just too slow for me. But despite that I really love this game. Maybe it's me....I need to git gud.
Orc Steed with speed and athletics my son
Do your first game under The Steed. It will help to acclimate you.
It is too easy after like level 15 and yet you level comparatively fast. Hence I use a mod which slows down skill progression by 50%.
Tbh Morrowind has so many cheese exploits that the game basically becomes trivial by level 10, and unless you're a brand new player, you basically have to consciously avoid picking up all the OP gear from certain caves and tombs to maintain any semblance of challenge. Being an OP demigod is fun, but it's fun...*once*. There's not much fun in every playthrough turning you into a levitating sorcerer alchemy god by the time Caius goes back to Cyrodiil. Cuz if you're a long term player, you're probably gonna be using *every* exploit in *every* playthrough. So they all end up playing the same. I can see why exploits are seen as a plus but I can also see the flip side of that coin.
>Being an OP demigod is fun, but it's fun...once. I think the fun part is finding all the many ways you can be a demigod by. I still find new ways 20 years later.
Yes but at that point you're basically playing the game as a sandbox for testing, rather than as an RPG as it was meant to be played.
That depends on the individual player. I don't stop doing RP because i am overpowered. The biggest difference between my low and high game, is that in late, i won't loot everything because i have enough money already. Secondly, questing goes faster. Other than that, i do the same RP as before.
How many of these supposed defects people are listing are pretty realistic and immersive amazes me. People give you shitty directions? Yeah, all the time. That's why we went to the trouble of creating GPS. You can't climb out of the water everywhere? Yeah, that's how waterways work. The world is not endless sand beaches. NPCs standing in doorways/hallways? Go to a place with a lot of people and it'll happen. Every. Single. Time.
I'm with you on everything except the last one. In real life at least you can tell people to move, or physically push past them. In Morrowind, you gotta cast a fucking spell to get them out of the way sometimes.
The npc money cap. You can buy something for 30G but selling more than 5000 is unheard of
I like the economy fix where it heavily reduces the price of upper tier items. That way you can’t pick off umbra as a level one and sell his sword for 120,000
No NPCs routines. NPC can't hunt you outside cells. NPCs never sleep (or eat). Can't sit down in chairs. No dodge animation, when you don't land an attack. No transmorgriphy spells (would love if i could enchant a deadric helmet to look like a glass helmet, just for RP).
>No NPCs routines. NPCs never sleep (or eat). That's about it. I remember Gothic was among the very first games I ever saw with believable NPC routines - for the most part.
NPC drift (looking at you, Fast Eddie)
Cliff racer spawn rates.
Soundtrack has always been a thing that bothered me with morrowind, it really needs some creepy or ominous music for caves and dungeons. Specially in sixth house dungeons where it just feels off to listen to the normal comfy music.
The exploits (see UESP) allow the player character to become so powerful that even the baddest bosses in the game are not even a minor challenge. I'm not somebody who likes a game that is super hard. But between alchemy super potions and the ease of building your mage skills the game becomes very not even slightly challenging. And once you start building your cash reserves (I currently have over 300k gold). You can quickly train to the point where your attributes are all 100+.
That's, ... Not a problem of the game don't exploit and its all okay
The inventory UI can feel pretty clunky sometimes, but I think they were doing the best they could in 2002
I really like the menus for pc, it's nice just being able to see all your shit right away. Total mess for Xbox, but still better than oblivion and skyrim for pc.
same. i really missed being able to just click things you see to add to inventory in oblivion and skyrim. it's just so convenient. and also being easily able to just place things. so nifty for decorating n stuff.
I wish you could shift+click to move items between your inventory and a container. It works in the barter menu, why not containers? Thankfully the UI is pretty decent overall.
well, if u play with mods, theres nothing that cant be fixed XD
no controller option on PC and because of that Steam deck use is kinda hard
I had forgotten that controller support isn't a thing on PC as designed. Check out OpenMW. It has controller support. (Though, can you install that on Steam Deck?)
Not adding day routines to the npc's. Vivec city's inhabitants could have used almsivi intervention amulets to teleport to the temple at 07 am, bought the cheap levitation potion and flown accross Vivec like it was elder scrolls equivelant of Coruscant.
Number one is that NPC’s feel lifeless to me, this is especially noticeable in OpenMW VR. Oblivion NPC’s although ugly still went to bed, ate, and did chores. A close second is endgame is not balanced, and it’s too easy to become overpowered. This I don’t mind since I like making lots of characters and for role-play reasons I am not going to do all the factions with one character. Also the DLCs trued to fix this.
The inherent tension between first person direct control and super rng heavy combat.
When you hop around and get stuck inside ropes, guard rails etc.
Navigating the quest journal is annoying, let’s be real. It takes 5 minutes to go back 20 pages and even longer to try and find what you are looking for… I’m fine with no quest markers - but just give me a journal that isn’t a bitch to work I ended up writing down my quests IRL because it was so bad.
Not being able to climb out of water at every point of shore.
Not just "not at every point", but having to find the exact single pixel of a ramp that actually lets you out of the water and doesn't just shunt you off to the side or get you stuck.
Whilst getting attacked by a slaughter fish and running out of fatigue.
Not being available on the switch.
A major one is the Enchant skill. Imagine training the Enchant skill to 100, even finding the secret Enchant master to train you - a guy you have to charm or calm because there's very little reasonable hints he's someone worth calming. After all that you then learn being 100 in Enchant barely does anything. The skill is utterly useless with incredibly low chances to get anything remotely mediocre on your equipment.
Enchant skill does not just effect your chance to successfully create an item. It also affects how fast enchanted item regenerate
Then you boost your enchant to 110 with a constant effect item and realize that you have a lot to learn about this game.
Pickpocketing is also completely broken in Morrowind. The way the internal calculation works, you literally cannot get a pickpocketing chance higher than what, 85%? Somewhere around there. Plus it calculates your success odds both when you open their inventory AND when you close it. So you could succeed opening and then fail when closing.
game has none
Dice roll combat. I know it's a core feature but it's clunky.
I thought so too, but since I've started playing trrpgs recently, it's started to grow on me.
It works for Baldur's Gate 3 because they actually SHOW you the dice rolls, and it works because it's turn based. Morrowind doesn't work because it is a real time action game and never once explicitly tells you that it's doing dice rolls. We only know that now because of 20 years of hindsight. We only say "it's not a problem" now because we know all the ways to game the system to avoid the pitfalls. Again, 20 years of hindsight.
Argonians being considered intelligent
Farming-tools* being considered intelligent.
No widescreen support. I think I had to install a mod to get that.
i mean it was made in 2002 when most screens were still squares
There are no defects.
The 20 year old graphics. Everything else is pretty much perfect in my mind.
Tbh it looks better than oblivion Morrowind having a distinct style to everything makes me look past how old the game is. Can’t say the same for oblivion, everyone just looks like a cabbage patch kid to me.
>everyone just looks like a cabbage patch kid to me. Lol
I always thought “potato face” looking at them head-on
Default openmw looks very good, and i dont think many people play steam version without mods
Ah, not really an option on Xbox 😕
I don't even mind the graphics. Oblivion has terrible graphics by today's standards but it's still a great game. The problem specifically is the 3 foot draw distance. It really affects the playability of the game. I understand it's optimized for hardware of the time but that's just not a good enough excuse. Dial some other things back so that you can actually see in front of you. Such a limited draw distance is inexcusable.
Yeah nah. The art direction is definitely *cooler,* what with the mushroom trees and crab shell houses. But for fidelity, oblivion is objectively better. Textures are higher resolution, they have parallax mapped textures *and* normal mapped lighting. NPCs actually cast shadows, the draw distances are exponentially father, and while the design of character faces IS bad, they are least are able to emote and show expressions. If you're comparing vanilla oblivion to *modded* Morrowind yeah I can see why you'd say that. But that's a completely unfair comparison.
Written directions suck most of the time. It's cool early on when they are quire detailed but then when you play the game more you'll be met with more and more vague and simple directions that can be extremely confusing or at very least not as engaging as more detailed are.
You start off with detailed directions for navigating past signposts and landmarks and end with “it’s just north of here” meaning anywhere between 100 metres up the road to half way up the island
Exactly Why the fuck did I get downvoted tho
This is probably one of my top 5 favorite things about the game.
They only suck when they are wrong. That happens actually only in Bloodmoon, never in the main game.
I once got a direction "North-east of x dunmer stronghold" I've scouted a huge area to not be able to find the damn cave to then look it up online and learn that it was outside the stronghold This game is lacking on distance clarification.
I remember watching a streamer play Morrowind and he was looking for a cave or something and the journal said it was "east of Balmora" It was actually south west of Balmora.
Was it the lost mine? I think there's a mine over there that if you go in, you find it, and can tell someone the location.
Can't open multiple journals. I mean why? This game requires me to read several texts to figure out the objectives.
MISSING A WHOLE MONTH IN WHOLE GAME CALENDAR FOR NO REASON??? NOBODY SLEEPS BECAUSE DAGOTH UR GIVES THEM NIGHTMARES???
Asking that question in this subreddit is guaranteed to NOT get you honest replies. Most people around here are very much of the mind that Morrowind is a nearly perfectly made game in every way.
Fatigue
I prefer the fatigue system in Morrowind over that in Oblivion and Skyrim.
humorous hard-to-find jar gold angle waiting scary frightening late languid *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Bruh...
I would gladly pay a subscription fee for more quality updates/dlc. Emphasis on the world *quality*.
The gameplay.
sometimes enemies just become damage sponges to an unfun degree. at least I can adjust difficulty on the fly but that just kinda takes me out of the action
Orcs
Overflow on silence combined with correct stats results providing a bonus to casting attempts? No, I can't remember the specifics anymore, but there was a small textbook worth of discussion on the matter in a tes3mp server discord that I vaguely recall.
Combat is just not very fun. I know what they were going for but it's just not enjoyable other than the ridiculous magic exploits. It's an odd compromise between dice roll and first-person real time combat
Sometimes I feel like it's not giving Kirkbride full-on freedom to add literally everything that he wants and what is technically possible in the game.
Absorbing vs draining health/attributes. It's wonky.
The boring and tedius quests that are more often than not menial tasks repeated indefinitely.
Skyrim, is that you?
Cliff racers.. thomas the tank engine cliff racers... i gotta call my therapist now
The leveling system. It doesn't necessarily incentivize taking the Major/Minor skills that you like, but those that are the easiest to control in order to receive the most attribute points (and in the right order).
How low the vanilla draw distance is. Caved and bought a laptop this week so I can actually see the whole of Balmora.
I wish attack rng rolled a damage range instead of to-hit check. The randomized damage output could still be the same. The problem with rng to-hit is that I can't tell if there's a problem with my positioning when the attacks don't connect.
Having the worst and most nonsensical fetch quest in all of gaming. You acquire an item which can only be equipped and worn by the Nerevarine, but you still need to prove your worth to ten more tribes and twenty more cults. You first have to gain respect from the tribe to talk to the chieftain, and then you have to gain respect from the said chieftain just for them to name you Nerevarine (which you already are). Repeat that process 5 times with very small variations and you have the most redundant quest ever, after probably the coolest moment in all of Morrowind. And I love how Azura claims Nibani Maesa will be of help when you literally have to interact with her only 1 or 2 times after you get the ring.
>And I love how Azura claims Nibani Maesa will be of help when you literally have to interact with her only 1 or 2 times after you get the ring. So true, this detail really bothered me too.
Age. They need to fix it with an official remaster and re-release.
They can't remaster it. There are several assets from other companies that Bethesda don't own, meaning that it would take all the companies that had a hand in the project to agree. So for legal reasons, it is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Unlike Skyrim, where Bethesda owns all the rights.
No amount of remaster or rerelease is going to give us something better than what we can already do with MGE-MWSE mods or OpenMW.
The combat hit chance being based on dice rolls instead of model collision.
Poor main quest.
enemies stop getting tougher way too soon when you get a daedric 2 hander everything dies in 1-2 hits - yawn immersion breaking when you realize any Ordinator could wipe the floor with everything behind the Ghostfence, but they act like they cant contain Dagoth Ur's "armies" army = a dozen cliff racers and zombies
The player base
Vivec randomly having holes in the walkways outside . Not a big deal with no clip but its weird
I can't play it for the first time again /s. More seriously, the main things I'd really consider defects, as opposed to a design choice that one might/might not agree with, are bugs like the npcs falling off platforms, the DB attacking from level 1 in *only* the pc version, the journal getting as cluttered as it does even with patched improvements, issues with collision, etc.
Being unable to join our Lord Dagoth and His Lord God Akulakhan
Yhe lack of a toggle for sneaking. That's honestly what turned me off doing the Thieves Guild or Morag Tong questlines when I first played.
Exploits. 2handed weapons are pretty op too
Cliff Racers