🎈 Happy Birthday Morrowind 🎈
And thank you for the hours upon hours of fun, adventures, and escapism you have brought us, as well as so many people around the world. The love and passion for you within the community you've spawned is what made Skywind first come to be, and what still keeps us going, and we are ever so grateful.
In celebration of Morrowind's birthday, we'd also like to share that it is almost time for a brand new development video! Milestones have been hit and advancement has been made since our last progress update in 2024. While there is still work left to be done across many departments, we are excited to present the current numbers, facts and stats - stay tuned for more information very soon!
I really love how free and unassuming it is. Wanna kill off a main character and break the plot? Go for it!
"Why can't I fast travel?"
"Did you learn to fast travel?"
"No."
"Well, that's why."
With the console and mods, people that don't like it can get around it easily.
Having said all that, I don't miss melee combat in Morrowind.
Skybaby here and I've played Morrowind for a couple of weeks this year for the first time. Absolutely love it. Morrowind do have fast travel imo, but it's just so well implemented that you don't think of it as fast travel.
Sure you cannot instantly travel from anywhere to anywhere, but with some magic skills you can do mark and recall. You can take boats and stilth striders to get around faster. Become a member of the mages guild and you can teleport to mages guild locations. I recently learned about divine intervention too which is cool. I haven't looked everything up, these are just the stuff I've discovered whilst playing.
I can't believe this isn't more commonly used in games. The immersion stays intact and you can move around somewhat efficiently. The only comparable experience that I can think of is the transportation systems in WoW classic, if you remove the flying.
Totally worth it to find all the propylon keys, I think there is a dude in Caldera that starts you on that path.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler It's also neat that there's a Tribunal Temple equivalent, Almsivi intervention.
::: spoiler advanced strategy They're not just for returning to the nearest settlement. With the the ability to cast both and enough knowledge of exactly where the Imperial Cult and Tribunal Temple shrines are in relation to each other, you can sometimes alternate between casting them one after another to leapfrog around the map.
For example, say you're at the northern tip of Vivec and you want to get to Balmora. Almsivi Intervention from there would take you to the Vivec temple. But doing a Divine Intervention first would take you to Pelagiad, and then Almsivi Intervention from there would take you to Balmora. ::: :::
At the risk of sounding like an ass, the combat works on the exact same principle.
"I can't hit anything in melee combat."
Did you learn how to do melee combat?
"No."
A D&D wizard isn't going to split someone head to asshole with a greatsword, and a Nerevarine with 20 AGI and 15 Long Blade isn't going to either. But one who is statted appropriately (and managing his stamina appropriately!) sure will, with ease. Once you're past level 5 or so missing in melee becomes a thing of the past, for the most part, so long as you're actually investing in your melee skills.
Gaenor is an outlier and is not being included in this generalization for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who was about to whip him out as a counterexample.
Morrowind's game systems and especially it's combat system is very tabletop inspired. You roll to hit, and if your bonuses to hit are good, then you will. Otherwise, you roll to hit, and sometimes, you don't hit.
We can understand why something is the way it is without agreeing that it's the way it should be. Choosing to make the character miss in a 3D game with animations that make it look like it should be a hit (especially when the enemy isn't even doing anything to block) just isn't a good experience. For characters that suck at melee combat, they should've turned up the hit rate but turned down the damage dealt. Or maybe turned up the hit rate and left the damage the same, but made misses really miss, staggering you or knocking you prone. Or something like that, anyway. Even at minimum melee skill on a level 1 character, the number of whiffs fighting a mudcrab was too many.
My absolute favourite thing of morrowind is that not a single person is necessary. You 100% can murder hobo the entire island and still win