Every now and then I feel like playing Morrowind, but to get the most out of it, I would like to sit in long sessions with a notebook just to immerse myself in that world, read the in-game books, talk to the people, etc.
With small children, full time work, etc, I haven't found a way to make that happen.
Do I wait until retirement or is there some other trick to it?
I'm thinking the Steam Deck's portability would make it convenient enough to play in many unconventional settings, even on the couch together with your kids.
It's basically vanilla plus. Not only did I have a fun following the guide, I feel like I'm getting a very authentic experience. One day I'll experiment more with OpenMW (especially once it reaches modding parity), but for today I'm enjoying the real thing.
> One day I'll experiment more with OpenMW (especially once it reaches modding parity)
If you want to keep vanilla mechanics (mostly), then OpenMW has already had modding parity for at least several years. In fact, OpenMW is already mostly working on enhancements and performance improvements rather than stability and feature parity with the original engine.
AFAIK, they have their own modding guide, which is pretty extensive, and the minority of mods that aren't compatible are just those which are obsolete (not updated since 2004-5) or superceded by other, better mods, anyways.
Ahh, Morrowind. A conworld so good that the community effort put into modernizing it may have eclipsed the amount of work put into creating it in the first place. The OpenMW project is extremely impressive.
I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.
So more realistically, give Morrowind to your children. Figure out how to install it, get a character to Balmora to make sure it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and let them go nuts.
Vvardenfell is a strange land which rewards curiosity, and it doesn't have any ads.
Three years makes a big difference if he was, say, 12 when Morrowind was released. And while I wouldn't call it convoluted, Planescape: Torment is much more cerebral and much less experiential than an open world first person RPG.
The problem is that the "game" parts are not very good; even outright shit, especially if you compare it to Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale.
It more than makes up for that in atmosphere and writing, but many players are expecting to, well, play a game, not read a novel, which is entirely fair.
> I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.
What do you mean? Planescapes gameplay is pretty much the same as all party based RPGs, many modern ones are pretty similar as well, Pathfinder, Divinity, pillars of eternity...
The problem is how well does Planescape Torment work as an introduction for someone who never played any of the games you listed? A few weeks ago I was talking with some younger coworkers about new games and they came up blank when I mentioned Baldurs Gate III, any game related to it and even several out of your list. Planescape Torment is part of a genre of games many never played.
Good point, it's easy to forget that nowadays there is much more variety of games in the different subgrenes. So even if you like RPGs, you might have only be exposed to first-person like RPGs like the Elder Scrolls games, while back in the days every RPG fan would have heard of Pool of Radiance, Baldur's Gate, Planescape ... Which all have very similar gameplay.
I decided once to walk up the east coast of Vvardenfell, then started cutting inland.
Then the ash storms started. I needed shelter quickly, so dived into some nearby Dwemer ruins.
But it was infested with vampires. They hadn't detected me, but were close enough that I couldn't rest, and I wasn't strong enough to defeat them.
So I sat there in the ruins, listening to the ash storm howl outside, for an hour, until it died down.
After I finished my journey, days alone in the ash wastes, with only ash storms and danger for company had gotten to me, so I had to take a break from Morrowind. That damn howl, that sound was perfectly oppressive.
TL;DR - I'd never had a game affect me like that before, and the capacity to wander into stuff you totally can't handle made the world and its danger feel more real.
That's why anytime I played Oblivion or Skyrim, I installed mods to disable creature leveling (creatures got tougher or weaker, contingent on your level).
I like a game where eventually goblins become a non-threat I vapourise with one swing of Goldbrand, but powerful vampire mages can still turn me into paste with a few gestures.
Oh man. That game went way over my head at the time. I don't think I got anywhere in the missions. I would end up alone somewhere in a forest with no idea what to do and potentially enemies anywhere.
I think I mostly ended up watching the half-scripted and excellent sequence in the background of the menu if I recall correctly.
painful to read about planescape torment, that game was damn formative (though as a working adult now... I really want to put that time and focus into disco elysium and havnt been able to yet...)
Torment is probably the easiest of the bunch to get into, it is far less combat heavy and you are literally invincible. "Game" part is just there to deliver the story. My suggestion is to just start playing and not worrying about min maxing
They're both fully functional and amazing games. Ceaser 3 is a really fun, "modern" strategy game and one thing I (and my parents) liked at the time it came out is that all the military stuff is optional. You can get just as much glory for building a grown with a huge economy and large number of exports as defeating Hannibal's elephants.
Both of those open reimplementations require the base game, which is very very cheap on gog.com. I'd really recommend it.
Maybe its my teenage nostalgia but Morrowind has one of the best settings I've seen. You got Ashlands yurts, Vivec city with its canals and ziggurats, a city inside a crab mushroom towers, and other architectures. Medieval Europe is still there, but it looks intentionally out of place as required by the story.
I feel only Dune and Star Wars have been so visually distinctive for me.
When I visited Morrowind in Elder Scrolls Online it just felt like a drab, sad place. Based on the screenshots in the article, it seems the original Morrowind game has a similar style for this area.
However, I read many good thing on the original Morrowind game so I do intend to play it some time.
In the original game it is a peculiar nation that is occupied, colonised and their religion (called the Temple or the Tribunal) humiliated. The natives are in bad mood and hate the player for being an outlander (at least in the beginning). The country is ruled by a puppet king, kind of how Herod was a client of Rome and long for a messianic figure called the Nerevarine.
So it was both pretty sad, but also quite diverse and exciting graphically. It is setup to start with a lot of hardship and an unfriendly population, which gradually changes as you learn more about them and establish your place in Dunmer society (if you choose to - you can become a vampire).
Having played Skyrim and Oblivion, I don't think they come close to the deep lore there is Morrowind and they do seem to recycle the same books.
Morrowind is much more about exploring the setting than an action RPG like the following titles.
What I loved was when I was out thieving, found a Telvanni mage tower, which I was eager to plunder, but found out very quickly that wizards who can levitate don't need stairs, so I'd need to come back with some levitation potions to get up to where the good stealing was.
Is it using up GPU time or just maxing out CPU? It uses OpenSceneGraph, which has some very slow state management (std::map and atomic reference counting all over the place) in its render thread so I wouldn't be surprised if you are stuck with a single core at 100%.
Morrowind is amazing. One of the most unique game worlds i have ever experienced. I used to just wander around and explore without purpose, and always ended up finding some cool spot or an npc. I doubt i will ever get so immersed in a game again
Speaking of “introductory guides for modern gamers”, there definitely should be one that lists most common ways they unwittingly mutilate the old games.
Mistake #1 is, without doubt, using high resolution uncommon at the production period for rendering. So they start the game, then feel it looks a bit shitty (it really is, now when you set it that way), then turn to mods, HD skins, NN-upscaled textures, and other craptastic “enchancements”. If step 0 was wrong, don't try to fix it with further wrong steps. Screen resolution, texture resolution, model complexity, artistic style, etc. should all be in balance. If you want a game that looks good in FullHD, you need to gather a new team that remakes the whole thing from scratch (and that production is going to cost more than the original one).
Mistake #2 is increasing view distance for the sole reason that hardware allows you to do it. Virtual horizon is really important to set scale for the game world. If it's too far, the exciting travel to the unknown place turns into moving to a next stand in theme park, or the wide plane turns into the small crossroad with NPCs standing here and there who don't even need to shout to hear each other.
These changes are as drastic as giving rocket launcher to the player, but everyone is so used to them that they don't realize what is wrong. Some people even make “retro” games assuming this is how games looked like originally.
The gp is calling out augmentations / enhancements. The point is you don't need to add anything or do anything extra. They're not suggesting doing something complex, they're suggesting leaving things be.
I'm the author. I'll add this in a minute, but all those enhancements can be turned off. According to a developer on the Discord I just spoke to, there's a set of options that makes the game very closely resemble vanilla morrowind.
Alternatively, just let people mod their games as they please.
I see your point and you're not wrong, but people have different priorities and playing video games is a hugely subjective experience anyway. Yes, adding a sentence or two about how the game may not look and feel as intended could be a nice idea. But it's not _wrong_ to change it, if that's what you prefer.
I've played Morrowind vanilla and with loads of mods (including graphical improvements) and I honestly liked the modded one better. Just personal preference.
My point was not about mods at all. Using a mod is a conscious decision, both when adding pink ponies, and when fixing a bug that causes you to fix saves or edit scripts manually. My point was about the trap people fall into because software and tools auto-select highest or native resolution, or because they are used to doing that manually in every game's settings screen, or because “bigger equals better”. Here they don't even understand the conscious decision to choose a suitable setting has to be made.
Rough pixels, rough edges, rough effects, everything is more or less balanced. On the contrary, when you streeeeeeeeetch the same 64×64 texture onto a single polygon covering half of your giant screen, then blend it with pixel-perfect light gradient, it won't ever look good. But a lot of people today call the monstrosity they see on screen in high res a “vanilla look”, and even reason about its visual quality.
Morrowind was made in later era, and was less resolution-dependent, as there was a range of accelerators of varying performance to run on. Still, its user interface makes it clear that playing in resolutions higher than commonly available at the time was not really considered. Many other games simply crash or develop bugs at high resolutions because they weren't even tested with those (or it was simply impossible with contemporary consumer hardware). When people release “fixes” for that, they don't question themselves whether everything that is possible to do should really be done.
Game makers had some top hardware configuration in mind as a performance and quality reference. In simple terms, the beefiest machine in the studio set the gold standard for the look of the game. I would advise against setting game resolution higher than that for '90s and significant part of 2000s games to see the game the way it was meant to be seen (visuals produced in modern shader graphics era are much less dependent on rendering resolution if they aren't constructed in a hacky way).
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadWith small children, full time work, etc, I haven't found a way to make that happen.
Do I wait until retirement or is there some other trick to it?
https://github.com/Sigourn/nerevarrising
It's basically vanilla plus. Not only did I have a fun following the guide, I feel like I'm getting a very authentic experience. One day I'll experiment more with OpenMW (especially once it reaches modding parity), but for today I'm enjoying the real thing.
If you want to keep vanilla mechanics (mostly), then OpenMW has already had modding parity for at least several years. In fact, OpenMW is already mostly working on enhancements and performance improvements rather than stability and feature parity with the original engine.
AFAIK, they have their own modding guide, which is pretty extensive, and the minority of mods that aren't compatible are just those which are obsolete (not updated since 2004-5) or superceded by other, better mods, anyways.
I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.
So more realistically, give Morrowind to your children. Figure out how to install it, get a character to Balmora to make sure it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and let them go nuts.
Vvardenfell is a strange land which rewards curiosity, and it doesn't have any ads.
Wasn't that released just three years prior? How old are your parents?
It more than makes up for that in atmosphere and writing, but many players are expecting to, well, play a game, not read a novel, which is entirely fair.
Tides of Numeria suffered from the same issue.
What do you mean? Planescapes gameplay is pretty much the same as all party based RPGs, many modern ones are pretty similar as well, Pathfinder, Divinity, pillars of eternity...
The problem is how well does Planescape Torment work as an introduction for someone who never played any of the games you listed? A few weeks ago I was talking with some younger coworkers about new games and they came up blank when I mentioned Baldurs Gate III, any game related to it and even several out of your list. Planescape Torment is part of a genre of games many never played.
Then the ash storms started. I needed shelter quickly, so dived into some nearby Dwemer ruins.
But it was infested with vampires. They hadn't detected me, but were close enough that I couldn't rest, and I wasn't strong enough to defeat them.
So I sat there in the ruins, listening to the ash storm howl outside, for an hour, until it died down.
After I finished my journey, days alone in the ash wastes, with only ash storms and danger for company had gotten to me, so I had to take a break from Morrowind. That damn howl, that sound was perfectly oppressive.
TL;DR - I'd never had a game affect me like that before, and the capacity to wander into stuff you totally can't handle made the world and its danger feel more real.
That's why anytime I played Oblivion or Skyrim, I installed mods to disable creature leveling (creatures got tougher or weaker, contingent on your level).
I like a game where eventually goblins become a non-threat I vapourise with one swing of Goldbrand, but powerful vampire mages can still turn me into paste with a few gestures.
I think I mostly ended up watching the half-scripted and excellent sequence in the background of the menu if I recall correctly.
Many people would argue that the complexity of 3.5e isn't really worth going back to because a 5e game just flows better
I’ve recently been playing Julius, a reimplementation of Caesar III; and Augustus, a form with extra features:
https://github.com/bvschaik/julius https://github.com/Keriew/augustus
Both of those open reimplementations require the base game, which is very very cheap on gog.com. I'd really recommend it.
I feel only Dune and Star Wars have been so visually distinctive for me.
However, I read many good thing on the original Morrowind game so I do intend to play it some time.
So it was both pretty sad, but also quite diverse and exciting graphically. It is setup to start with a lot of hardship and an unfriendly population, which gradually changes as you learn more about them and establish your place in Dunmer society (if you choose to - you can become a vampire).
Having played Skyrim and Oblivion, I don't think they come close to the deep lore there is Morrowind and they do seem to recycle the same books.
Morrowind is much more about exploring the setting than an action RPG like the following titles.
BOO! BOO!
Speaking of “introductory guides for modern gamers”, there definitely should be one that lists most common ways they unwittingly mutilate the old games.
Mistake #1 is, without doubt, using high resolution uncommon at the production period for rendering. So they start the game, then feel it looks a bit shitty (it really is, now when you set it that way), then turn to mods, HD skins, NN-upscaled textures, and other craptastic “enchancements”. If step 0 was wrong, don't try to fix it with further wrong steps. Screen resolution, texture resolution, model complexity, artistic style, etc. should all be in balance. If you want a game that looks good in FullHD, you need to gather a new team that remakes the whole thing from scratch (and that production is going to cost more than the original one).
Mistake #2 is increasing view distance for the sole reason that hardware allows you to do it. Virtual horizon is really important to set scale for the game world. If it's too far, the exciting travel to the unknown place turns into moving to a next stand in theme park, or the wide plane turns into the small crossroad with NPCs standing here and there who don't even need to shout to hear each other.
These changes are as drastic as giving rocket launcher to the player, but everyone is so used to them that they don't realize what is wrong. Some people even make “retro” games assuming this is how games looked like originally.
I see your point and you're not wrong, but people have different priorities and playing video games is a hugely subjective experience anyway. Yes, adding a sentence or two about how the game may not look and feel as intended could be a nice idea. But it's not _wrong_ to change it, if that's what you prefer.
I've played Morrowind vanilla and with loads of mods (including graphical improvements) and I honestly liked the modded one better. Just personal preference.
Look at some examples:
https://vintage3d.org/gallery/vt4.php
Rough pixels, rough edges, rough effects, everything is more or less balanced. On the contrary, when you streeeeeeeeetch the same 64×64 texture onto a single polygon covering half of your giant screen, then blend it with pixel-perfect light gradient, it won't ever look good. But a lot of people today call the monstrosity they see on screen in high res a “vanilla look”, and even reason about its visual quality.
Morrowind was made in later era, and was less resolution-dependent, as there was a range of accelerators of varying performance to run on. Still, its user interface makes it clear that playing in resolutions higher than commonly available at the time was not really considered. Many other games simply crash or develop bugs at high resolutions because they weren't even tested with those (or it was simply impossible with contemporary consumer hardware). When people release “fixes” for that, they don't question themselves whether everything that is possible to do should really be done.
Game makers had some top hardware configuration in mind as a performance and quality reference. In simple terms, the beefiest machine in the studio set the gold standard for the look of the game. I would advise against setting game resolution higher than that for '90s and significant part of 2000s games to see the game the way it was meant to be seen (visuals produced in modern shader graphics era are much less dependent on rendering resolution if they aren't constructed in a hacky way).