// KOTAKU — GAMING
The Elder Scrolls’ World Is Bigger, More Beautiful, And More Customizable Than Ever In Its Latest Adventure
BethesdaElder Scrolls 3: MorrowindMorrowindReview RoundupWarp Week 2002
It’s been five long years since The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall dazzled us with its incredibly realistic fantasy world, and hopes have been high that its sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, can somehow top that. Taking place in the Dunmer land of Vvardenfell in the titular province, Morrowind promises everything Daggerfall did, but bigger and better: a bigger world, far more class customization, and hand-crafted environments with responsive physics and NPCs. Morrowind has a lot to live up to, so let’s take a look at what critics are saying to see if it comes close to being the Elder Scrolls adventure of our dreams.
If all you look at is numbers, Morrowind looks to be a smash hit almost everywhere. 9/10 from Game Informer, 8.7/10 from GameSpot, 9.4/10 from IGN, 90/100 from PC Gamer, and 89/100 from GameSpy. But if you actually read the reviews themselves, it seems like the whole of Morrowind is significantly, oddly greater than the sum of its parts, because most critics have a lot to complain about in the paragraphs above those high scores.
For GameSpy, William Abner can get us started with his criticism of the game’s very introduction and character creation. He starts by praising the tutorial, which drops you into the cargo hold of a slave ship and then asks you to define the backstory that got you there in response to various characters. “It gives you a visual and auditory sense of the gameworld,” Abner writes. “It supplies a tutorial to the interface, as each action you’re requested to perform is accompanied by subtitles revealing the appropriate command. Finally, it furnishes an excellent roleplaying vehicle for character creation, as various people you meet (a slave, an officer, a bureaucrat) require you to select a name, race, sex, birthsign, and skills configuration. You can design a character using one of three methods, answering a series of ten questions (which may bring back nostalgic memories to old Ultima game veterans), choosing one of twenty-one pre-figured classes, or completely creating your own class from scratch.”
Abner admits he finds the questions method “blunt and superficial,” but has better things to say about the game’s from-scratch character creator, though he notes you’ll want to read the manual to understand the kinds of options available to you and what they’ll mean throughout the game. There’s a lot of customization, he says, letting you be a mage with heavy armor if you’d like, or a fighter with excellent lockpicking.
That all sounds great, but let’s turn to Greg Kasavin, who has some compliments and some critiques as to how those skills develop over your time in Morrowind:
“The most interesting thing about Morrowind’s skill system is that it’s tied in with how you gain experience levels,” he writes in his 8.7/10 review. “In most role-playing games, you gain experience (and thus improve your abilities) mostly by killing stuff or solving quests. In Morrowind, you gain levels by practicing your character’s main skills. Other RPGs tend to cripple non-fighter characters by still forcing them to fight to gain levels. But in Morrowind, if you play as a thief, then you gain levels by thieving. If you play as a magic user, you gain levels by using magic, and so on. This is a clever system that makes perfect sense.
“However, it does have some problems, insofar as certain skills are much easier to improve than others. The playing field is leveled somewhat since skill improvement (through training) can simply be bought. Sadly, you might not realize until after many hours of play that some of your character’s skills just aren’t cutting it. Your options are to suck it up or start over. Some of the skills aren’t ineffective so much as they’re underdeveloped. Speechcraft, a seemingly sophisticated ability, is simplistic in practice. You have the option to try to flatter, intimidate, taunt, or bribe any of the NPCs in the game. B