The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Review

A land ripe with opportunity and adventure!

Morrowind is widely considered to be the best Elder Scrolls game by the fandom, and it's an opinion that I couldn't agree with more. Now, this may shock you to know, but Morrowind was the very first Elder Scrolls game I played, and I'm glad I did. One of my childhood friends showed it to me way back in, oh, 2001 I think it was when the game was released? Anyway, when my friend showed it to me then, my jaw hit the floor, as it was unlike any other game that I had seen up to that point. Mind you, when I was a child, all I had in terms of video games were Nintendo consoles and the games released on them, but this was a new beast all together.

One of the quotes that the player will see upon
starting a new game.

Morrowind opens with a cutscene showing a quote by who I think was the king who got assassinated prior to the events of Daggerfall, and then it shows the quote you'll see in the screenshot to the left by... I don't know who, the game never tells us. Moving on, we then get to see several landscapes from the game, and an unknown voice speaks to us, the Daedric Prince, Azura, who tells the player that they are chosen. You then hear another voice telling you that you're shaking and that you need to wake up, and after you've woken up he says that the guards say that they've finally reached Morrowind and they're sure to let you both go. The guard captain comes and says that this is where the player gets off, and you then get told how to move around. Basically, the first few things in the game that you do aren't just the tutorials, but also the character creation of the game. Anyway, after setting your character up and leaving Seyda Neen's Census and Excise Office, you are then free to do whatever you please.

The basic stats, or some of them, at least, showing how
skilled your character is with each, well, skill.

Speaking of Morrowind's character creation, this was the very first game I've ever played where the player could literally create their own custom class. Of course, you don't have to create your own class if you don't want to, you can resort to the old-school Ultima style of character class creation and let the game generate it for you based on the answers you give for each of the ten questions you get asked, or you could choose your class from the list of classes available. For those just starting out adventuring through Morrowind, I would recommend starting with one of the pre-made classes so that you can get a feel for what Morrowind expects from the player, but if you want to squeeze every little thing from Morrowind, then you're going to have to create a custom class whether you like it or not. Of course, Morrowind is a bit harsher than Oblivion and Skyrim, in that your starting class and associated skills are very important, as you are forced to stay within those skills, at least early on, until you've saved up some cash to get trained in those skills, and training in this game ain't cheap, and the cost only increases every skill level you gain. Well, for the skill you want to train, anyway, and certain people can only train your skill level so much before you either have to start teaching yourself how to use the skill, or seek out someone better than the person who was training you before. This leads to one of my main complaints about Morrowind is that the grinding takes way too long, and the cost for training is so steep. You can do quests early on for money and the game isn't nearly as unforgiving as, say, Daggerfall in terms of training, but it still takes a lot of time, and I, for one, don't like to spend too long grinding.

Quite the impressive menu system, eh?

Morrowind has an... interesting menu system. You have a menu for your stats, you have a menu showing your spells, you have a menu for showing your inventory, and you also have a map in the menu. You can reorganize and readjust these four menus (more like three menus and a map) in any way you choose, but the way I show you in the screenshot to the left is my preferred way of doing it. One minor problem I have with this menu, the map, is that the map starts off totally blank. You have no terrain shown on the world map, you have no map markers on the world map, none of that. You either have to speak to people to get certain map markers to show up, or you have to go out and explore on your own. This, to me, at least, isn't so much of a complain as it is a minor nitpick, but in Morrowind, if you want to find something, if you want to find anything, then you're going to have to spend some time looking for whatever it is that you're after. You see, unlike in Oblivion and Skyrim, (as if those games came out before Morrowind) your compass doesn't function like a GPS here. You are given, at best, directions to your destination, and at worst, you're only given a very vague description of the location and you're going to have to not only explore to find, but even do some guesswork as to where you're destination is.

A sidequest with two possible outcomes.

Morrowind doesn't just have a main story to follow. There are sidequests galore in this game, baby! You have miscellaneous sidequests, you have guild questlines, you have escort quests (the worst kind of quest, main or otherwise) and you even have an anti-slavery questline to do. Oh, yes, slavery runs deep in Morrowind, and if you feel sorry for the many Argonians and Khajiit that you'll come across, then you can kill their captors (provided that the captors are bandits and outlaws) and find the key to the slave bracers that they're equipped with, then you can free them, although to actually start the Anti-Slavery questline, you'll have to free 30 slaves or so.

The music of Morrowind was Jeremy Soule's first contribution to the Elder Scrolls series of games, and they are so beautiful, in how they help to convey just how alien a land Morrowind is. Morrowind is often considered to be alien and inhospitable to most people of Tamriel (the main continent of the Elder Scrolls) even by Non-native Dunmer of Vvardenfell.

The graphics for the game are dated and showing their age, yes, but they're not totally bad. In fact, if you're playing the PC version of Morrowind, there are graphic overhaul mods out there that give the graphics a, well, overhaul that makes the game look so much better! Now, I don't care for most mods, but if you're a graphics-whore, then you're going to need one of them.

The journal of Morrowind, handy for keeping track of
quests and what other people have told you throughout
your journey.

If you need a game to last you a good little while, and you don't have an awful lot of money on you, then you need look no further than Morrowind. Remember how I said that the way the skills you choose at the beginning of the game are important? Well, you could play purely as a warrior-type character and outright ignore magic and stealth options, preferring to use strength to solve everything. After that, why not roll (another term for creating a character in an RPG like Morrowind is to 'roll' them, a reference to Dungeons & Dragons character creation, where you roll dice to get your attributes) another character and make this one purely a mage? Then after that, roll yet another character and play them purely as stealth. The options in this game are truly endless, and that means that it's very replayable. Oh, and if the numerous races and classes aren't enough for you, why not try your hand at modding the game, to try and squeeze even more gameplay and potential replay value from it? Morrowind shipped with it's game engine, a heavily-modified version of the Gamebryo engine, where you can create your own NPCs, classes, weapons, armor, spells, enchantments, scripts, the list goes on. You can even put MP3 files in the game's music folders to listen to while you play, jamming out to the tunes you love the most instead of Jeremy Soule's music.

Overall, I love this game, and after having written this review, I'll have to go back and replay it from start to finish with my new Morrowind character, a Dunmer (Dark Elf) Mage named Gadvyn Telnyn™.

Purchase the game from here. Or buy it from Steam!

This review is © 2019 Jestan Diams. Jestan Diams, Jestan Diams' Magical Tome of Games, and any original characters listed in this review are © and ™ Jestan Diams. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind belongs to Bethesda Softworks, a Zenimax Media company. All rights reserved.