The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Xbox Review @ Gaming Target

Written by Gavin Wright on June 28, 2002

Review: Looking for a way to waste away 300 hours of your life? Xbox owners may now have found the answer.

The Elder Scrolls III has been in development for over 6 years on the PC. That's long before the Xbox was even announced, a great testament to the work Bethesda has put into the latest edition of their acclaimed series. The two previous games in the series, Arena and Daggerfall, both garnered RPG of the Year awards from most major gaming publications. While it has yet to be seen whether Morrowind can snatch this title once again, if anything the game will surely go down in history as one of the longest games ever created. With this also being the first RPG for the Xbox in its relatively short lifespan, Xbox owners will be forced to take notice.

Elder Scrolls is definitely not for casual gamers. Those that aren't ready for this type of game will probably find themselves lost right from the start. The scope of the game can just be overwhelming. The game world is about 10 square miles, which doesn't seem that large until you begin to travel it. At times you'll find that the nearest town is a half-hour walk through the barren areas of wilderness that dominate much of the land of Vvardenfell. It may take some people upwards to 10 hours with the game to even begin to appreciate its resounding qualities.

Indeed, it will take some people a long time to grasp the amount of freedom that the game grants you. There's nobody there holding your hand, walking you through every little aspect of the game. You'll have to figure things out for yourself if you want to get anywhere.

Morrowind is all about enabling the player to do whatever they want to do. If they want to live the life of a ruthless killer, then so be it. But if they want to live the life of a noble hero, they can do that too. Of course, there are pros and cons to every choice you make, but the game always encourages you to make your own decisions. If you treat everyone like a punk and kill everything that moves, you'll get a reputation that suits your actions. On the other hand, if you lead an honest life, people will grow to admire your bravery and valor. Regardless of the course you follow, everyone will start out with a clean slate. Your life will be your own to forge.

The story opens in the small village of Seyda Neen. You start off inside of a slave ship, as you wake up and orientate yourself to your new surroundings. After the obligatory, yet well-handled character creation process (which I'll get to in a bit), you are given your release papers. On the way out the door, the guard mentions that the emperor of Vvardenfell himself has warranted your release, and he gives you a package to deliver to a man in the nearby town of Balmora. So ends the linear portion of the game, and you are immediately thrust into an unfamiliar world with nothing but a dagger and a pocket full of gold.

The first step you'll take in Morrowind is to create your character. You begin by determining your character's race and gender, then by modifying their face and hairstyle. The second step is to choose your class, which can be done in one of three different ways. The easiest way to do this is by picking a pre-set class from a list of templates. This is the way to go for your first character, because it will give you a well-balanced, middle-of-the-road character. The second option is to answer a series of moral questions that generates your character based on your answers. This is a nice option if you don't know what kind of character you want, because it will create a character that fits the moral background you deem most appropriate. The third option is to pick your major and minor skills manually, which is the way to go for experienced players. You can pick the skills that you are likely to use the most, and won't be left with anything you won't need.

The game's main storyline isn't intended to be followed closely through from beginning to end. Instead, players are encouraged to partake in the hundreds of side quests offered to you in the game. Expect at least 200 hours worth of side quests, in addition to an 80-hour main storyline. Completing these quests gives you nothing more than experience and items, but they are such a central part of the game that choosing to ignore them can make the game very difficult to complete. Quests are either given by townspeople or are handed out by organizations known as guilds. Each guild is devoted to a different aspect of combat, so your choice of guilds can be important to a character's development. The quests themselves are well-varied and structured nicely, so that you're rewarded properly for their difficulty. Quests that require you to travel to another town or lead you into dangerous territory will reap the higher rewards, while those that have you talking to a certain person in town or finding a particular item are usually there only to open up more lucrative ones later on down the road.

The game keeps a quest journal for you, which automatically updates itself when you learn something crucial to one of your current objectives. It is certainly a convenient thing to have available, but as I got further into the game, the journal's size began to overwhelm me. At times I had as many as 20 different quests going at a time, and I, being the meticulous person that I am, planned on completing every single one of them at one point or another. However, I found it to be too much of a task to thumb through every page of my journal to find the one bit of information I had overlooked, or to look for quests I had planned on doing once I arrived in a certain town. The journal does allow you to filter the entries by subject, but that isn't much help when you don't know what you're looking for. For my sake, I just wish there were a way to delete older entries, or to get rid of topics dealing with quests that have already completed. If you're like me, you may want to keep your own journal instead of using the one provided.

Morrowind's real-time combat system is not too far of a leap from many other PC role-playing games, but it's far different from the turn-based combat that console gamers are typically accustomed to. Fast, weak attacks are done by tapping the Attack button, while more powerful, slower attacks are performed by holding down the Attack button. While the Attack button is held down, blocking is done automatically, although its success depends on your character's skill. Weapons can be thrust in up to four ways by holding the joystick in different directions as you release the Attack button. Magic is performed in a similar way. You simply switch to the spell you wish to use and press the attack button to activate it. The types of attacks you are best at are based on your skills. Warriors will tend to stick to swords and axes, causing a lot of damage but leaving them open to counterattacks. Mages will primarily use magic, but will also have to rely on some sort of secondary weapon.

There are tons of spells in the game for you to acquire. Everything from the normal attack and healing spells, to the insanely cool levitation and telekinesis spells are in the game. Spells can even be used to summon creatures or teleport yourself across the world. It's even possible to create your own spells by combining spells you have already learned.

When equipping my character for the first time, I ensured that I had equipped the most powerful sword I could find. I ran into my first battle with a smirk on my face, knowing I was more than ready for the usual entry-level pushovers I was expecting to find. The first creature I came across was a small bug, which I promptly began slashing away at with my new sword. I found it incredibly difficult to make any contact with the creature whatsoever. After a few more of these puzzling encounters, I realized that equipping your character in accordance with their best skills is a necessity. If your character is more adept to short-bladed weapons, you'd better not even try to use a long blade. The same goes for armor and magic. It is imperative that you stick to what you're good with. Being a proficient fighter is all about equipping your character methodically. But even if you have the right equipment, you're not necessarily going to connect with every single attack. You must remember that this is an RPG, every attack can be thought of as a role of the dice.

Every physical action you take, whether it be running, casting spells, or swinging your weapon, drains your Fatigue bar. Once the bar bottoms out, your hit rate with weapons and spells is drastically reduced, and your running speed is slowed down. Walking and resting can restore your fatigue, but you must rely on potions if you run into a battle with an empty Fatigue bar. The total weight of the items in your inventory also has an effect on how fast your fatigue depletes, so it's always best to stay away from heavy, unnecessary items.

Communication with non-playable characters is carried out by picking from a list of on-screen topics presented to you. If someone reveals a new bit of information in your conversation with them, the list will be updated with the new topic so that you can ask them more about it. If you complete the quest that the topic applies to, it will be taken off of the list. Each character in the world has a gauge that represents how much they like you. The number their meter starts out at is determined by a few different factors, such as race, clothing, and reputation. If they don't like you, they may not barter with you or give out information. To manipulate this stat, you have a number of СPersuasion' options at your disposal. Bribing the person is a good way to make them like you, but some morally upstanding citizens will feel insulted by this action. Admiring someone will also boost their respect for you, but once again its success depends on the character in question. Intimidating a person will temporarily raise his respect for you, but will immediately fall back down once you leave. You can also attempt to taunt a person, which basically allows you to fight them without getting arrested for fighting them.

One of the coolest things about Morrowind is that most objects in the game are usable items (not all items necessarily have a use, but you can still put them in your inventory or sell them). That means you can literally walk into someone's house and take everything that isn't nailed down. I'm not saying there won't be consequences for getting caught; you just have to do it behind peoples' backs. The fine art of thievery includes picking locks on chests and doors, which is also a crime if you are seen. Spells like telekinesis can make stealing easier, allowing you to steal items and pick locks at a distance. If you do get seen stealing, you'll either be in for a fight or just get turned over to the town's guards. The more crimes you commit, the higher your bounty will get. As your reputation grows as a criminal, people will stop talking to you and guards may even try to chase you down when you walk into town. To clear your name, you must go up to a guard to pay a fine, but they will also take all of the stolen items you have in your inventory. You also have the option of going to the thief's guild to get your name cleared without the inconvenience of having your items taken from you. If you know what you're doing, the life of a thief can be very profitable, and you'll often find it to be the easiest way to make quick money.

In Morrowind, you can literally kill anyone you want to in the world. So, if you're ever looking for a place to call your own, you can just walk into someone's house and kill all the occupants and it'll be yours. In addition to providing a place to sleep at night, it will give you a place to put all of your extra stuff that you don't need to carry with you all the time. You can arrange items any way you want by pointing the cursor over a shelf or table and dropping an item. You can also store items in chests and under other objects. I like to keep a dagger under my pillow in case I get attacked at night (no, it really doesn't happen, but that would be neat, wouldn't it?). You can make a very cool-looking house with a little bit of patience and creativity.

The world of Morrowind changes from day to night in real time, although the world doesn't react to time as it should. People never leave their normal places, shops are always open, and the same creatures are always around. Although it would be an inconvenience to have to track down people in different spots at different times of day, it definitely jars the game's realism. Weather conditions, namely rain and dust storms, come and go throughout the day. However, they also have little effect on the world. People just stand outside and brave the storm as if it were a normal day. It's nice to see these effects included in the game, but it would be great if they provided some interaction with the world as well.

The default camera mode is set in first-person view, and it is for the most part the preferred way to play the game. The third-person view, while it does have its advantages, is generally a lot clumsier. The third-person view gets rid of the crosshairs, making it harder to point to items and aim towards enemies. However, it does allow you to see to your sides and behind you without turning around, making it useful for certain situations. It may seem a little odd at first to play an RPG from a first-person view, but you'll soon find that it works quite well in Morrowind.

There are some coding issues in Morrowind that really hold it back in terms of gameplay. Most pressing is the poor A.I. of non-playable characters, often getting stuck on buildings and other people while walking around town following their usual patterns. They never go indoors at night, or talk to each other when nobody is around. It can make you feel as though you're the only real person in the world.

Much like the PC version, the game allows you to customize your own control scheme and set certain graphical and audio options. You are also given the options to invert the joystick or adjust its sensitivity. One disappointing omission I noted is that it is not possible to assign buttons to the D-pad. Most people use the joysticks for movements, and the unused D-pad would have been convenient for cycling through spells and weapons. Other options allow you to toggle shadows, subtitles, and the autosave feature on and off, among other things. The volume level of voiceovers, sound effects, and background music can be changed as well.

At times things seem to go wrong more often than not in Morrowind. This is the only Xbox game that I have ever owned that has actually crashed on me, not once but multiple times. Microsoft has a strict policy against game patches; even though the system's hard drive would allow them. But in this case, I believe a patch would be warranted. The PC version of Morrowind is still seeing game patch releases even two months after its release, so it's clear that Bethesda hasn't cleared up all the bugs for the Xbox version's release.

Such an enormous game is bound to have issues with gameplay balance, considering the huge amount of options afforded to the player. Depending on how you play Morrowind, you may or may not experience this imbalance. Players that tend to focus on the side quests more so than the storyline are likely to find that the game starts getting pretty easy at around level 30 or so. Players that exploit glitches in the game to get high-level weapons early on will find the same thing. If you come into large amounts of money through killing sprees or heavy looting, you can basically ruin the game by paying for training to raise your levels rather than doing it yourself.

The Xbox version of Morrowind is graphically equivalent to playing the game on a mid to high-end PC. The long development time of the title shows through in the game's visuals, with a graphics engine that seems to be at least two years old. While the environments looks good enough up close, with decent lighting and some detailed textures, draw distance is a nagging problem in large outdoor environments. The game only renders about 100 feet around your character before a thick, white fog swallows up the environment. As you approach objects, they begin to pop into sight rather awkwardly, with only the tips of objects becoming visible at first. The frame rate also takes a dive in cities, making the game significantly choppier than normal. Character models can look very flawed, suffering from a lack of detail and a segmented appearance to their arms and legs. Also, many articles of clothing don't look right on certain character models. Animations aren't as fluid as they could be, and some are particularly questionable. But despite all of these graphical flaws, the water effect used in the game has to be among the most impressive I've ever seen. The water accurately reflects the environment around it, and movement through the water creates realistic waves on its surface. The effect is even more impressive when you see raindrops falling on it, each creating their own little ripple in the water. In fact, the water looks so good that it almost doesn't fit in with the comparatively bland, drab environment around it.

The background music is a nice collection of tunes that fits in well with the game's sense of freedom and adventure. It does get repetitive after a while, but the music usually stays very low-key and discreet. While most of the speech in the game is in the form of text, when you go up to a person they will usually make some sort of remark in the form of spoken words. The voice acting, like the background music, is acceptable but also suffers from repetition. Sound effects are for the most part pretty drab. Many of the sounds, particularly the footsteps, sound muffled and flat. In the end, it seems like the game's sound department was more of an afterthought than anything.