GAME REVIEW: MORROWIND

The X-Box so far hasn't seen a huge quantity of incredible gaming experiences, however the system is in it's youth, and judging from the positive response toward games like Morrowind, this foreshadows perhaps good things to come for Microsoft's console. Morrowind truly manifests an image I had in my mind once of a totally massive game that allowed you to choose your own adventure, encounter hundreds of characters, explore many different places, and give you personal freedom to follow the plot or wander off to do something else. I once thought about playing a game like this, wondering if it was just a pipe dream, but with Morrowind, that vision has become a manifest reality. Morrowind is an epic Adventure-RPG experience that no player should miss. This game kicks ass, and so far this makes Zelda 64 look absolutely microscopic in comparison.

The visuals and graphics in Morrowind are by any measure of the word impressive. The sheer vastness of the gaming environment is staggering. You could spend two hours just trying to cross from one side of the world to another, and you would pass by and miss so much stuff as you did so. I suppose the graphics aren't as detailed as a game like Shenmue was, but it's obvious that a huge amount of attention was paid to the details. There are plants of numerous types, trees, rocks, rivers, huge cities, villages, sky, clouds, weather, passage of time, etc. The water looks very real and its ripple physics is almost lifelike and photorealistic. There is just so much, I don't know that I can adequately explain it all. If you look up into the sky at night, you will see twin moons, and for crying out loud you can even see the same constellations that your character can be born under like signs of the Zodiac. Every town has numerous buildings, some with multiple levels and rooms. Holy smokes, you could spend 12 hours just exploring Vivec, and still not find everything! There are at least 100 Dungeons (Probably a LOT more) to explore, that vary from burial sites, to Daedric shrines, to caves, to mines, etc. And what I love, most of all, is how stuff just doesn't reset or disappear completely like in most Adventure-RPG's or previous titles. If you leave a sword somewhere, in the corner of some guy's house in some backwater crapass town, it will still be there 2 months later. There are just SO MANY ITEMS! For crying out loud, I collected an absolute gluttony of items, some of them absurdly pointless or incredibly valuable. I had to kill a guy and steal his whole house, to store all the stuff I found, from all kinds of fancy armors (Ebony, Dwemer, Daedric, Glass, Nordic, Dragonscale), shields, and tons of weapons (can anyone say Daedric Dai-Katana! Booya!). It's truly staggering what a massive inventory this game has. I have so much stuff now crammed into a house that the game created an "Overflow Loot Bag"

This game has easy to handle gameplay, you have two views, first person, and third person view. I found it easiest to play in FIrst person, where you see your hands, a shield, and your swords. There are so many facets to character development, it puts anything Final Fantasy tried with Materia, and Junction, to shame. There are so many different stats that come into play during gameplay. Some abilities are Level based core abilities that affect lesser abilities in some fashion, while there are main character specific abilities, and minor abilities that he can also learn. For instance if your Athletics are higher, you can run and swim faster, if your Acrobatics is higher you can jump higher, fall farther without getting hurt. If you have better Heavy/Medium/Light Armor ability you take less damage when you get hit. If you increase your Mercantile you can buy items from merchants, pawnbrokers, traders, etc for cheaper and sell items to them for more. The higher your personality level is, the more likely people are to talk to you, and give you interesting information. As your character increases his abilities things get easier and you die less and move quicker. And much as you discover to your dismay, you can not carry infinite items unless you create spells or cause things to happen to your character to change his Strength beyond the upper limit of 100. I can't begin to explain how many side-quests and alternate quests there are in this. You have a diary, and from what I gather, I've maybe completed about 30% of the game, and I've been playing for 7 weeks. My Dairy is close to 200 pages deep, many things incomplete or unfinished. There are some aspects of gameplay that seem a little monotonous, like continual bombardments by "Cliff Racers" and hacking and slashing over and over and over again. You can use magic, or fire projectile items like throwing stars and steel crossbow arrows. Remember the joy you felt playing Zelda or Final Fantasy when you checked a chest or a plant and discovered an item in it? Well, Morrowing delivers this feeling 10,000 fold, and you can steal anything that isn't too heavy to carry or nailed down, just as long as no one sees you or you get caught. You can even own your own slave! Sure enough you can go into this one city on the eastern coast, and purchase your very own slave to follow you around, even attack enemies with you.

There is a main plot or set of events that you can follow from start to finish, but it's almost impossible not to get sidetracked by your own curiousity. Honestly, I can say that have done almost none of the main objectives aside from meeting with Caius Corsades, doing some orders, etc. The storyline is entirely open ended, however there is an entire culture here, or a melding of cultures all living on the same place. There are factions, rivals, treachery, chivalry, average joe workers. Ultimately there is an evil lurking under the surface of Morrowind, involving a kind of demonic entity called "Dagoth Ur" There are worshippers of this entity that have their own cult buried in caverns and ritual sites across the world. This game falls entirely into sub genre category of Adventure-RPG because nothing is predetermined to happen, and you have full control over exploration and the direction you want to take your character or your understanding of the world. The dialouge in the game is extensive. When you first play you will feel overwhelmed by how much information is being flooded at you, but you'll start noticing people saying similar things, but that will take a while. There are also as it would seem a couple hundred books all over the world inside of cities, towns, castles, hideouts, etc, and those books, some of them take up 50 pages of reading! I'm not joking, you could just spend a few days reading an entire library of books in Vivec. You can also become part of various factions and houses that exist in Morrowind, and increase your rank until you are the Grandmaster, and can even build your own Stronghold! (Even outfitting it with your gear, and slaves!)

The weakest link in this game is the music and sound. Mind you the Morrowind overworld music is symphonic, ambient, and heroic at times, making for a good theme, but you will spend so much time in the game that it seems like it loops over and over again. There are two musical themes that you hear, the main gameplay overworld music, and the fighting or battle suspense music. If you play this game consistently, you will become sick of it sooner or later. It's nothing like what you would hear in something like Zelda or a Modern, or Classical RPG like Final Fantasy. The characters do make comments verbally if you look at them like, "Where's that slave, he was here just an hour ago...?" or "Wealth beyond measure Nord!" or "Spit it out, or hit the road!" or "Seen any Elves! Ha, ha, ha, ha!" These are usually one liners, sometimes funny, but the actual dialogue that you read is not spoken. There a lot of ambient outdoor noises like grunting animals in the wild, trickling water, rain, and sandstorms that crop up.

Morrowind seems like the type of game you could continue playing until the end of time. I've already put about 7 weeks into it, and can say that I have only scratched the surface and dabbled here in there in various areas and completed some smaller quests. My character is at level 27, he's fast, nimble, strong, and a good thief, but he is weak in magic abilities. My goal is to create a character with the most well rounded abilities possible, a supercharacter capable of everything. You can create a massive house of riches beyond your wildest dreams, or just concentrate on building up your character, it's all up to you, and you know, there are like 20 different types of characters you can be, before you even play the game. This game has replayability beyond the measure of any previous title in it's genre or any other.

As much as Morrowind is a work of art in terms of sheer size and scope, it suffers from technical errors, perhaps either caused by the X-Box's inferiority in handling the massive amount of data processing and hard drive access that occurs during this game, or defective quality control on Bethesda Software's part. Periodically during the game, if you are playing the X-Box version the game will crash for apparently no reason, simply fail and freeze or go to a screen that says, "The Disc you are Using May by Dirty or Damaged, press A to Retry" When you press A the game resets and you lose all the progress you made after the last time you save. There is nothing wrong with the Disc, no scratches. In some places there is noticable slowdown, and framerates drop below 7 FPS. The game often crashes near the areas of Vivec, Ebonheart, and the Ascadian Isles. This often happens when you access the Menu Screen and check the Map, which is vital to playing the game. My X-Box has crashed about 50 times while playing this game, and in honesty I'm a little pissed off about it. Console games are not like a PC, you can't just download the patch and fix it, for that matter console games are NOT supposed to crash consecutively and reproducably. There is a serious programming flaw that almost makes the game unplayable at times, when the crashing becomes repetative in certain areas. I've had sporadic crashes, sometimes can go for several hours of play before it fails, to every 10 minutes. My best suggestion is to save often. I'm taking points away from the Gamplay category for this, otherwise I would have given it a solid 9.5.