TES 3: Morrowind

Skywind will be amazed if it's ever completed

I remember it being hard as shite

I have never played this one. Is it dated or would it still be enjoyable for a newcomer? I've only played oblivion and ESO.

I love the flexibility Morrowind gives you with magic. For example, I made spells to drain my own skills to make training them cheaper. The searching and searching for quest locations got a little old sometimes, but there is something to be said for not just following markers.

I remember cheating and leveling up only jump. You would go flying off into the distance.

Landing was a different story.

The leveling was much more complex in that game compared to following ones.

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I have never played this one. Is it dated or would it still be enjoyable for a newcomer? I've only played oblivion and ESO.

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It's not as dated as some people think. The combat is a little wonky. It's all based on dice rolls, and especially in the beginning, you will swing and miss while you literally watch your sword pass through the NPC. I'm lvl 15 now though and rarely miss. You can hack, sideswipe, and stab with a sword, so it doesn't feel all that different from Oblivion or ESO once you level up a bit. You just can't manually block attacks.

The graphics are dated, but the art direction is superb. The alien landscapes more than make up for the lackluster textures. There are graphics mods if you're into that sort of thing that increase view distance and/or provide higher resolution textures.

There is fast travel, but it's only available in certain towns via boat, silt strider, or mage teleport. Otherwise, you have to run from place to place. There is no instantly porting back to towns like in ESO or Oblivion. It sounds worse than it is. Vvardenfell (the island the game takes place on) is smaller than Cyrodiil. It doesn't take that much time to travel from place to place on foot. Sometimes it can feel larger than it really is though due to view distance and the way the world is designed. Morrowind in TES 3 is not as flat as it is in ESO or as flat as Cyrodiil in Oblivion, meaning there are paths in certain areas where you have to follow a road. You can't climb up a steep hill or mountainside.

The difficulty isn't any harder than Oblivion, but the lack of quest markers is the biggest hurdle. NPCs give detailed directions (go south of of town, take a right at the fork in the road, and it's down the path on your left), but sometimes they can be a little vague. The Morrowind wiki is your friend though.

There are more factions to join than in Oblivion and more quests per faction. You have Fighters Guild, Mage's Guild, Thieves Guild, Morag Tong (Dark Brotherhood), The Blades, Imperial Legion, Imperial Cult, the great houses. I may have left off one or two. From what I have seen, the faction quests are a lot more numerous but they are mostly MMO style fetch quests or errands to clear out bandit caves. They are not entirely self contained storylines like they are in ESO and Oblivion, although I think some of the quests are that way.

Morrowind to me is the only one playable without mods. You need dozens of mods for oblivion and skyrim just to get to the same level of fun.

I beat the game last night. I feel like I accomplished a monumental task even though I used a wiki

This game has to be my favorite Elder Scrolls (I have not really spent a lot of time in Daggerfall). The amount of freedom in regards to what you can do with you character and how you can interact with NPCs is astounding.

It isn't perfect though. You have to pay attention to dialogue with NPCs. Not just for important information relevant to completing quests (you can look up that information online), but sometimes you are unable to trigger a certain quest update without choosing a very particular dialogue option. I would think I completed a step in a quest only to realize I could not activate the next part because I missed a dialogue prompt via the NPC and had to run all the way back.

Some missions make use of skills that your character may not have such as placing NPCs or items important to the main quest behind locked doors or requiring levitate spells, items, or portions to reach certain areas. If you're not skilled in lock picking or don't have a levitation spell, you can buy scrolls that do it for you (or find enchanted items), but if you don't have these things, it's annoying to have to run back to town when you're deep in a dungeon and can't open a locked chest.

The main quest really didn't require much combat that I can recall. That is in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing but it was mostly just ping ponging to different locations talking to people. It's a bit goofy when your quest to gain acceptance from the 3 great houses largely revolves around either A) admiring/bribing NPCs to get them to like you or B) killing them.