The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a 2002 action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is the third installment in The Elder Scrolls series, following 1996's The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, and was released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox. The main story takes place on Vvardenfell, an island in the Dunmer province of Morrowind, part of the continent of Tamriel. The central quests concern the demigod Dagoth Ur, housed within the volcanic Red Mountain, who seeks to gain power and break Morrowind free from Imperial reign.
Though primarily a fantasy game, with many gameplay elements and Western medieval and fantasy fiction tropes inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and previous role-playing games, Morrowind also features some steampunk elements and drew much inspiration from Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. Morrowind was designed with an open-ended, freeform style of gameplay in mind with less of an emphasis on the main plot than its predecessors. This choice received mixed reactions while maintaining reviewers' appreciation for Morrowinds expansive, detailed game world.
Morrowind achieved critical and commercial success, winning various awards including Game of the Year and selling over four million copies worldwide by 2005. It has since been considered one of the best video games ever made. The game spawned two expansion packs: Tribunal and Bloodmoon. Both were repackaged into a full set and titled Morrowind: Game of the Year Edition, which was released in October 2003. Morrowind was followed by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in 2006.
Gameplay
Character creation
Morrowind begins with the player's character, having been imprisoned, arriving in Morrowind by boat to be pardoned. A tutorial depicting the prisoner's release moves the player through the process of character creation. The player is successively asked questions by a fellow prisoner, an officer, and a bureaucrat as the player is registered as a free citizen; choosing, in the process, the player character's name, race, gender, class, and birthsign. These affect the player's starting attributes, skills, and abilities. The player determines their class in one of three ways: picking from a class list, generating a class via questions, or creating a custom class themselves.Skill system
The player character's proficiency with a skill is increased through practice, training, and study. Practice involves performing the specific actions associated with a given skill, which gradually raises the character's proficiency in that skill. Raising weapon skills requires striking an enemy with the appropriate weapon; raising armor skills requires being struck while wearing the appropriate type of armor; etc. Training involves paying money to non-player characters in exchange for immediate proficiency increases in that skill. Study requires reading books found, some of which will immediately raise a skill when read. Weaponry skills affect the character's chance to hit. Armor skills affect the defensive strength of the armor. Other skills affect proficiency in other actions such as potion-making, running, lockpicking, etc.Morrowind, like its predecessor Daggerfall, makes a distinction between attributes and skills; skills are individual proficiencies in particular schools of battle or with particular armor classes, and attributes are broader proficiencies, such as strength and endurance, which are either tied to important features unconnected to any skill, or improve the efficiency of a wide variety of skills. Strength, for example, improves the damage of any physical blow dealt by the player character. Attributes are improved only when the player levels up.
The player levels up their character by gaining levels in ten pre-determined skills, listed as major and minor skills. Each time the player levels up their character, they can select three attributes to augment as well. The player is better able to augment attributes related to their skill set, as each level gained in a particular skill adds to the multiplier by which the skill's governing attribute is augmented.
Combat
The simplest melee attack is a chop action. The slightly more complex slash and thrust attacks are performed by clicking in unison with tapping a directional key, though by turning on the "always use best attack" option, players can eliminate the moving element, freeing them to focus on the combat. A melee weapon's damage potential is rated for each of these attacks. Reviewers found little value in choosing between the three types of attacks for most weapons and recommended the "always use best attack" option. Hidden arithmetic modifiers, applied to each combatant's skills, determines whether or not the attack hits. In the game's original release, the player was given no indication of the amount of health left in their enemies and no indication of the strength of the player's attacks. Reviewers took the absence badly, wishing for more visible feedback. Bethesda added enemy health bars in patch 1.1.0605, released one month after Morrowinds initial release.Free-form design
Morrowind, following the tradition established by its predecessors in The Elder Scrolls series, is an open world, with few constricting boundaries on the player's actions. From the beginning of the game, players are put in a world where they are left to roam, steal, quest, and explore, without necessarily following the main quest. Lead designer Ken Rolston, when asked before Morrowinds release what he thought were the "core, untouchable design elements" of The Elder Scrolls series which "set them apart from other games", responded immediately: "Free-form experience." In Rolston's view, the game's central plot is a chance to introduce the player to a cross-current of conflicting factions, background themes, and the characters of the game, rather than the primary focus of the player's experience. "Every game has to let you create the kind of character you want, and then do the things you want. We would never have a role-playing game force you to be a certain character or go down a certain path."To allow for this behavior, in addition to creating an extensive main quest, Morrowind provides detailed discursive quests for a variety of factions including various guilds, religious organizations, and aristocratic houses. All in addition to side-quests found by exploration. The main plot itself may be undertaken in many ways. There are, in the words of critic Craig Lindley, "a very specific set of central plot points within this main plot. But the plot points are partially ordered: seven high-level tasks must be completed, but their constituent sub-tasks... can be accomplished in any order, and this is repeated for the sub-tasks involved in those sub-tasks." The choices the player makes in their performance of these tasks thus become methods of character interpretation; a set of dramatic tools establishing the player's newly created self-identity.
According to Gamasutra's Matt Barton, some have argued that these changes put Morrowind closer in spirit to the original Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game, where players take a more creative role in their play, and where players are left to decide for themselves the "right" action. This is a view paralleled by Rolston, who has stated that "The goal of every game is to create something that resembles a pen and paper RPG on the computer." The sheer number of quest possibilities, combined with what developer Ken Rolston identified as a lack of "narrative urgency", left many critics dissatisfied with the main plot. Ken Rolston later stated that the main quest might have been presented with greater force, in the style of the game's successor, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, without losing the free-form design of the series, but such concerns were not addressed before Morrowinds release.
Plot
While Morrowind contains many quests and storylines, the central plot revolves around the Tribunal, a triumvirate of god-like beings ruling over Morrowind and their struggle against a former ally: the demigod Dagoth Ur and his Sixth House – a cult of followers stretching out from Red Mountain, the volcanic center of Vvardenfell. Dagoth Ur has used the Heart of Lorkhan, an artifact of great power, to make himself immortal and now seeks to drive the Imperial Legion occupiers from Morrowind using his network of spies, as well as Akulakhan, an enormous mechanical golem powered by the Heart of Lorkhan.After a storm and a strange dream vision, the player character begins in a town called Seyda Neen. Fresh off a boat from a mainland prison, they have been freed by the string-pulling of the current ruler of the Tamrielic Empire, Emperor Uriel Septim VII. The player is given the task of meeting Caius Cosades, a member of the Blades, a secret group of spies and agents working for the Emperor and the Empire.
Cosades inducts the player to the Blades on the Emperor's orders and sets them on various quests to uncover the mysterious disappearances and revelations that the citizens of Vvardenfell have experienced, particularly the Sixth House and the Ashlander prophecies of the Nerevarine. It is later revealed that the induction under Cosades, and the player's release from prison, was due to the Emperor's suspicion that the player might be the Nerevarine – a reincarnation of the legendary Dunmer hero Indoril Nerevar – or at least someone who would make a convincing impostor to use for political gain. The player is tasked with uncovering the prophecies regarding the Nerevarine and to fulfill them to finally defeat Dagoth Ur and his Sixth House cult.
Prophecies from the nomadic Dunmer people living in the Ashlands, the Ashlanders, predict that Nerevar's incarnate will fulfill a set of seven prophecies. The first two prophecies are that the Nerevarine will be born on a certain day to uncertain parents, and will be immune to Corprus disease, a Divine disease created by Dagoth Ur. The player has already fulfilled the first. The player then becomes immune to Corprus by contracting the disease and surviving an experimental cure. Fulfilling these, the player seeks to complete the third prophecy: finding the Moon-and-Star, the symbolic ring originally worn by Nerevar which has the power to instantly kill anyone who tries to wear it. Upon finding and equipping the ring, the player receives a vision from Azura, the ancient Daedric Prince of the Dawn and Dusk, who confirms that the player is Nerevar's incarnate. The Nerevarine completes the fourth and fifth trials, which are to rally the Great Houses of the Dunmer and Ashlanders of Vvardenfell under one banner. After receiving the support and being declared "Hortator" by every Great House and "Nerevarine" by all nomadic Ashlander tribes, the player is officially called "Nerevarine" by the Tribunal Temple, who normally persecutes anyone to death who claims to be the Nerevarine.
The Nerevarine is invited to the palace of the poet god-king Vivec, one of the three deities that form the basis of Morrowind's religion known as the Tribunal, to discuss the assault on Dagoth Ur's stronghold in the heart of Red Mountain. Vivec presents the player with the gauntlet 'Wraithguard', an ancient Dwemer artifact that allows the use of the tools Sunder and Keening. These ancient weapons were created by the Dwemer to tap into the power of the fabled Heart of Lorkhan, which they found beneath Red Mountain - and these same tools have been used by the Tribunal and Dagoth Ur to reach their god-like status. The tools can also destroy the fabled Heart of Lorkhan, but without having the Wraithguard equipped, they will deal a fatal blow to whoever wields them.
The player travels into Red Mountain to Dagoth Ur's citadel. After talking with Dagoth Ur, who attempts to sway the player to his side with the claim that he is merely following Nerevar's final orders, the player and Dagoth Ur fight. Besting Dagoth Ur, the Nerevarine soon discovers that while the Heart of Lorkhan is still intact, Dagoth Ur remains immortal and he soon returns from death. Making his way to the heart of the mountain, the Nerevarine finds the Heart of Lorkhan and destroys it, severing Dagoth Ur from his power and ultimately killing him. Akulakhan's Chamber, where Lorkhan's heart resided, is destroyed in the process as the cavern collapses and in turn, Red Mountain is cleared of blight and The Sixth House falls. Upon escaping from the chamber, the Nerevarine is congratulated by Azura who comes to reward the player's efforts of fulfilling the prophecy.
The game does not end upon the completion of the main quest, but the game world Vvardenfell is affected in many different ways. The Blight Storms cease to plague the land and the weak-minded followers of the Sixth House are reawakened, remembering nothing of their ordeal. The Dreamers who harassed the Nerevarine fall silent and the Nerevarine becomes widely known as the savior of Vvardenfell. The quintessential consequence of defeating Dagoth Ur was the destruction of the Heart of Lorkhan. Due to their immortality linked to the heart, Vivec and the Tribunal become mortal again, leaving Vivec's future in question and up to the player to determine his fate. The loss of divinity among the Tribunal is the main plot point of the game's first expansion, Tribunal.