Weekly ‘What Games Are You Playing?’ thread #24: Lot of stuff coming out all of a sudden, feels like

Continuing my bethdrone pilgrimage. Finished Morrowind just yesterday - took a bit longer than anticipated, probably because the game is actually so good that you subconsciously want to prolong the experience Because of this I might have to cut my visits to Skyrim and Fallout 4 to a straightforward main quest rush. Never actually done that with those games, so it might be fun

TES MORROWIND

I don’t think I can provide anymore insight into the absolute ludo that is Morrowind. Although it is definitely a rough transition from giant proc-gen spaces of Daggerfall - the handcrafted nature of the game world feels incredibly soulful and it is the one thing Bethesda never fumbled with their games Vvardenfell might look alien and illogical on the surface, but it has a lot of thought put into the settlement placements and the general positioning of locations. It is one of the few games where the fast travel system is so tightly woven with the world design that it always makes sense to use it My only gripe would be the Grazelands on the north-eastern part of the isle. I never noticed before this playthrough how the whole region is just brazenly dropped there, without even smoothing over the borders with the surrounding biomes.

Atmosphere in Morrowind is in its own league. The society of the Dunmer is complex enough to confuse you at first, but logical enough that you will get a hang of it in about a few hours of playing. As some old review said, the game gives us the absolute kino premise of Persia being occupied by the Roman Empire Knowing Kirkbride’s anthropological leanings - it might very well be the intention.

I am consistently shocked with how Morrowind continues to filter zoomers. They completely ignore the attributes and skills, grab the iron dagger that holds the note in the customs office and then die to the first mudcrab I can understand the frustration with the invisible dice rolls, but the inability to read two sentences of text makes zoomers look particularly r-slurred. The game provides you with an info box for almost anything on your character sheet, so you have no excuse outside of illiteracy for failing to grasp the mechanics on your own I find Morrowind’s system to be the "golden middle" of Bethesda’s game design complexity. No obscure eldritch systems like in Daggerfall, which you only learn about through the manual, nor is it so intuitive and challenge-less as with Skyrim.

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