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You are simply known as the “Outlander”, a former slave, orphan and stranger to the lands of Morrowind. The Emperor has arranged your release from slavery, but you’re not sure why exactly. Your quest embarks as you step foot off the slave ship. You must deal with racial prejudice, warring factions and a mysterious acquaintance from your past that beckons you for unknown reasons. The direction you choose to take your life at this point is entirely up to you. Morrowind is the typical “You’re the chosen one, blah blah blah”. At first it doesn’t seem like it. I thought I was going to be impressed with the story when I was told I WASN’T the “one”. But Bethasoft pulled a Matrix on me and you are in fact, “the one”. Bleh. The story isn’t bad; it just won’t be winning any creativity awards anytime soon.

Morrowind verges on the scale of epic, but doesn’t quite reach the plateau that overlooks all the other CRPG’s. There’s a lot Bethasoft did right, a lot of little things they did wrong and a couple of major things that really suck. The game is NOT disappointing if you know what to expect - just a little frustrating at times. First and foremost, Morrowind is one of those rare Role Playing Games that is what YOU make of it. Meaning it can be as in depth, addictive and spectacular as your imagination can lead it to be. That’s the genius of this game. The last game that in my lifetime that I can compare that feeling to is Ultima 7: The Black Gate. If you lack imagination, need to be hand-held and spoon fed the story line, then please, save yourself the trouble and don’t buy this game because all you’ll do is whine about how much “it sucks”. Morrowind has a lot of appeal to a clique of people. Those people I refer to are the role players. They are not your typical Diablo playing, whack a mole fan, “why doesn’t this game have more boobies” type of gamers. If you don’t like Morrowind, does that mean you fall into this category of gamers? Not necessarily. You may be a dedicated role player, but if you’re also a nitpicker then all the little things Bethasoft got wrong will add up after a while.

The interface is relatively simple and easy to learn. I do suggest that you read the manual because there are a couple tricks you can do that will make your game play experience all the more enjoyable (such as hot keys for spells, dragging the map around, etc). The best thing about the interface is that there aren’t a lot of keys to memorize. It’s easy to move around and access important menus with little complication.

In Morrowind, you aren’t strictly guided along any one given path. Yes, there’s a “main plot”, but you can stray from it and go back anytime you want. Even if you kill key NPC’s involved in the main plot, there are still ways to complete the game (yes, there are). You are never forced to walk along a linear path – you simply choose to. Even then, the scripted quests and main plot still have many different ways to get things done. There are THOUSANDS of NPC’s and creatures to interact with. On top of that, you can manipulate many objects in the game. A journal keeps track of important information, but in a rather unorganized manner. It’s all essentially bunched together (my journal is nearing the size of the Bible) without any sort of real structure. You can select key words which link to other journal entries, but that’s about as organized as it gets. There should have been categories like ‘Quests pending’, ‘Quests completed’, ‘Contacts’, etc. I bet your characters bedroom is messy too! NPC’s dialogue options will vary depending on your Speechcraft skill. The dialogue trees often get ridiculously long and many NPC’s say the same thing. It’s easy to trigger a new dialogue option and totally miss it in a large dialogue tree.

Quests range from Fed-Ex style, to escorting and exploration – with a lot in between. Within the game, you can join several different guilds and factions. There are three major Houses, three Guilds and several Factions you may join. On top of the main quest, these groups have their own quests. Each group has different enemies and allies. If you join one faction that is at war with another, you may find yourself in quite a predicament when one faction asks you to kill a member of your other faction (oops!). The best bet is to join one Faction, one Great House, and one Guild, although you are definitely NOT limited by any means, until you near the end of the main plot. You could join all three Great Houses, become the House Leader and get a Stronghold (yeah, Strongholds) built from all three if you play your cards right. That could be a bug, but others claim to have done it at the time of this writing. Near the end of MY main game (I have a couple different saved games that I play), I was only a member of one Great House. When I tried to join another, they told me to bugger off. Later in the game, after my Stronghold was built, there are supposed to be rival Strongholds that get constructed by the other houses. You may find yourself doing missions regarding infiltration into these rival strongholds. Yeah, the world actually changes depending on your actions. In a totally miscellaneous quest I did, there was this big rock that I had always noticed off the shore of this Orc city, on a small island. I never thought anything of it until I did this quest that involved recreating a statue of a god. That big rock was sculpted into the statue! I had to hire this sculpture to create the statue (had to find him first). He and his men threw up scaffolding and spent several game weeks carving away at the giant rock until the statue was complete! Like my Stronghold, my actions had a visible impact on the world. Very cool.

Other than the main quest and faction quests, there are slews of miscellaneous quests. Some are short and some are quite long. There’s also a whole set of Vampire quests, if you choose to become one.

The world is large. Not Galacticus large, but definitely larger than most CRPG’s. Sadly, it’s not seamless. The are load times, which eventually get very annoying, especially if you crash to the desktop like I do. Crashing to the desktop seems to be one of the top two issues with this game. I was able to cut down my crashes by about 75% by updating my Nvidia GeForce drivers. I hear sound related issues also cause crashing.

On top of the standard zone loads, there are also “stealth loads” where the game just pauses, doing nothing apparently but it’s actually switching zones in the background. On my decked out 2Ghz P4, the standard zone loads took 2-3 seconds while the stealth loads took 1-2 seconds. Zone loads occur often. If you’re running across the landscape, you’ll be hit with a zone load every minute or two. Movement can be painful if you are a Heavy Armor wielding Fighter. On the other hand, my Ninja moved very swiftly and I had no complaints. Speaking of my Ninja, lets talk a bit about the classes. You have three ways to generate a character. You can answer a series of questions that will determine your character class (you still pick your race). You can simply pick one of the provided classes, or you can create a custom class and choose all your abilities (this is what I did). At the end of character generation you must pick a birth sign. These birth signs give you a special ability such as Paralyze an opponent for 60 seconds, Invisibility, Permanent Boost to a stat, enhanced Personality, etc. These really add flare to your character, not to mention that the classes themselves already have their own special perks and abilities. After character generation you’ll head out into the world to seek fame, fortune, infamy or whatever you could possibly desire. You can dive for pearls off the coast of Seyda Neen. Explore hidden Grotto’s, traverse mountains, or raid any of Morrowind’s 400+ Dungeons. 400 Dungeons?! Well, yes and no. Most of them are simply one to three room caves. Maybe only three dozen are actually large Dungeons that take time to explore – three dozen is still a good number! Regardless, there’s still a LOT to do. Spend your days wandering the wilderness looking for rare plants to make powerful potions using the extravagant Alchemy system. Learn the ways of Armor smithing to repair your damaged weapons and armor. Spend time in the Mages guild doing research on creating new spells. Harvest souls for money and magic items. The possibilities are almost endless. As I said before, Morrowind is what you make of it. Most people will simply “level and go beat the bad guy”. Well, you won’t experience Morrowind to its fullest potential if that’s all you do. The game is as easy or had as you make it. You have every opportunity to make your character a god by level 20 (level 100 is the cap, I am currently level 29) and become unbeatable by 3996 of the 4000 Creatures/NPC’s in the game. Most of the time, it involves thievery (more on this in a sec). Some people complained the game is too easy. Well, yes, if you are a numbers person and a power gamer, then the game IS too easy. It’s tempting to make your character powerful. If you aren't the "stay in character" type, then you'll have to have willpower to resist the power of the dark side! Like I said before, this is a ROLE PLAYING GAME. I am not trying to demean those of you who aren’t role players – I’m just trying to WARN you. This isn’t Dungeon Siege.

Regardless of staying in character, power gaming or however you choose to play, there are definitely some issues with the game mechanics that cannot go by unnoticed – even by the best role players. Stealing is WAY too easy. With invisibility or chameleon powers, it’s near impossible to get caught. You can also walk right up to an NPC, hit your Stealth key and if your stealth skill is high enough you will simply vanish right in front of their face (I.E. your Stealth indicator icon appears). NPC’s in general lack AI. There was a bookstore in a Plaza at the capital city that my buddy was robbing. Right across the hallway was a shop that bought books (how conventient). There were two local NPC’s wandering that same hallway as the two stores. Imagine you are one of those NPC’s. You keep seeing a total stranger carting armload after armload of books between two doors across from each other in the hallway, trying to be sneaky about it. Wouldn’t you be a little suspicious? Or say you run a shop. Some Lizard man (known for their sly nature) walks into your shop and starts digging through your personal chests and drawers? Wouldn’t you yell for the guards? Well, not if you’re an NPC in Morrowind. Only if you try to steal and get caught will the guards come (as far as thieving goes) and trust me, it’s very easy to not get caught. But wait, it gets better. Guards normally confiscate any stolen property you are carrying if they stop you for whatever reason (which in effect creates another problem with the legal assassinations you can do). All you have to do is drop everything you have that is stolen, confront the guards then choose your punishment. Pay a fine, jail time, in which your skills atrophy or resist arrest and fight. Simply pay the fine (usually small), then go back where you dropped all the stuff and pick it up! All of this can be done right in front of the shop owner, by the way. No matter HOW good of a Role Player you are, there still needs to be a little suspension of disbelief here, people! To sum it up, the game is definitely not “balanced”. Although it’s a single player game, balance is still required by some people to suspend their disbelief. Morrowind fails horribly at this, unfortunately. Stealing isn’t the only thing that’s messed up. Murders are buggy. Combat is way too basic and enemy AI is crap. Frame rate performance is mysteriously random from machine to machine. A few of the quests that I ran were bugged, and various other minor issues that all add up in the end. There is a patch in the works at the time of this writing, but Bethasoft hasn’t told us shit about WHAT exactly they are going to patch or fix. Oh, and the official Morrowind forums SUCK (read: slow as hell, but will get better I’m sure).

The graphics and music are fabulous. The world is rather grey and bleak but I honestly think that was the look Bethasoft was going for. The music is done by Jeremy Soule and is even provided separately on a soundtrack CD if you buy the Collectors Edition. The sound effects are wimpy and not very high quality, however. As mention above, performance really varies from machine to machine. I played on a P4 2Ghz, GeForce 4 with 512MB of memory. At times, frame rates got a tad choppy, especially in towns. I’ve seen reports from people with half my system, that claim it’s “totally smooth”. If you check the boards, you’ll see this is the second biggest beef people have with Morrowind. Something isn’t right… but for the most part, the game IS “playable” on 95% of the systems out there that meet the requirements on the box. You Xbox players hopefully won’t run into this. Then again I sure hope Bethasoft fixed all the bugs because it’s kinda hard to patch a console game! Morrowind would be a good title to finally implement downloadable patches & updates from the Internet, which is entirely possible on the Xbox.

This game could have really used four to six more months in development, perhaps a holiday release. There are a lot of things they need to work out. Fortunately, the editor (PC Version only) gives you the ability to overhaul most of the game so I’m sure you will see tons of user created mods that enhance the game and hopefully fix some of Morrowind’s shortcomings. There are already a number of mods available at the time of this writing, including a difficulty mod that makes the game more challenging. Despite all of the annoyances, I still find enough immersive content and fantastic scenarios to keep me playing even after I completed the main plot. The open ended design and the feel of the world are easily enough to keep me coming back for more adventure. Hopefully you’ll be able to decide if Morrowind is a game for you based on this information that I have provided. Considering the massive scale of this game, in all honestly, Bethasoft did pretty damn good, I think. Not perfect, but no one ever is. I give Morrowind an 8.4 out of 10 final score.