Reviewed by: BobiRoka
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

"You can do anything you like!"

How many PR pieces have included the above phrase lately I wonder? With MMORPGs cutting a sizeable slice out of not only the online market, but of the world's gaming pie in general, the whole concept of 'freedom' seems to have become a growing concern among developers and players across all formats. Despite a gallant attempt by Peter Molyneux with the enigmatic Black & White, it is by definition that Role-playing games will have the lead in this cultural reinvention of our beloved medium. After all, how can watering plants and slapping a monkey really compete with the totally simulative experience of Morrowind?

This being the third title in the Elder Scrolls series I have to say I'm a newcomer to Bethesda's fantasy universe. Arena and in particular, Daggerfall were praised on their release many moons ago, but this latest sprint for the 'Best RPG ever' crown is apparently quite a lot more scaled down than it's similarly open-ended predecessor. Morrowind takes place on the 10-mile square landmass of Vvardenfell, every inch of which has been manually designed by hand. Because of this, Morrowind really is quite sight to behold, but more on this later. Let's begin at the very core…

An RPG without in-depth character creation and development would be worse than a First Person Shooter with no guns. Thankfully, Morrowind serves up the most interesting slant on the idea I've seen in years. Melded smoothly into the opening moments of the game, it all starts when you wake aboard a prison ship and are asked your name by a fellow inmate. It's here you're prompted to actually type in your name before the action takes it's course and you're ordered to disembark onto dry land. Once outside, you barely get a chance to check out the incredible environment and awesomely realistic (albeit Geforce 3 powered) water effects, before you bump into a guard asking from where it is you hail. Cue race selection, where you get to pick from four human types, three elven variants and three monstrous species. All have their own statistical merits and flaws, as well as a slightly different elevation of perspective. Dark Elves favour the magical arts, whereas the cat-like Khajiit gain bonuses to speed and stealth-based skills.

Which brings us to the final stage of character creation, the all-important selection of a class. After being escorted to the council offices of Seyda Neen you are informed that "…there are a number of ways we can do this". Indeed, for in a supreme stroke of genius, Bethesda have offered up three ways of determining your character's class. Firstly, you can choose to have your class determined automatically by the answers you give to a series of multiple choice questions. Then there's the age-old method of simply selecting 1 of the 21 classes available.

It's only when you select the third and final option that it suddenly becomes clear all the pre-defined classes are nothing more than a series of 'skill kits'. So, why settle for one of these when you can make up your own class based on the exact skill path you want your character to take. There are 27 skills in Morrowind, roughly categorised into the three core schools of adventuring: Combat (Heavy Armor, Block, Axe etc), Magic (Destruction, Alteration, Alchemy etc) and the Stealth Arts (Sneak, Acrobatics, Speechcraft etc). From the full list you must choose five skills to be major skills and a further five to be minor skills, then pick an overall specialisation in Combat, Magic or Stealth Arts and select two favoured attributes. While it's possible to make use of all skills and abilities during your time in Morrowind, it's the use of your Major and Minor skills that will contribute to your levelling up accordingly, and thus define the way you play the game. Choose combat orientated skills and you shouldn't have much trouble moshing your way through the game. Go for stealth arts and you can make a decent living as a Burglar or Assassin. Take Alchemy as a major skill, and you'll find yourself taking a lot more notice of your surroundings, studying outdoor areas for potential ingredients to make potions with.

Vast is the only word I can use to describe the scale of this game, and I don't just mean in geographical terms. A highly detailed, beautiful looking game-world would be pointless without anything to do in it, but with hundreds of NPCs to interact with, over a dozen guilds & factions to work for and a convincing ecology to survive in, it's very difficult to be stuck for things to do. From the moment you leave the council offices at Seyda Neen you're on your own, free to do whatever you wish. Sure, there's the initial quest to deliver a package to someone in the town of Balmora, but you don't HAVE to do that. Why not go foraging in the wilderness for rare herbs you can later use to make potions and increase your Alchemy Skill? Or perhaps go barter at the local outfitters, buying low and selling high in order to increase your Mercantile Skill? It's possible to spend hours at a time just bodding around towns and hamlets only to find yourself levelling up despite not seeing combat for several days. Unfortunately, the problem with such a system is that it can be easily exploited. For example, I made Athletics one of my minor skills because I wanted my character to be quite nippy and because the default walking speed in Morrowind is quite realistic (see tediously slow) I've tended to just toggle 'run' on all the time. The more I run, the more my Athletics skill goes up, which in turn increases the rate at which I level up.

It's also possible to convert hard cash into skill increases in the form of training, although you can expect to pay through the nose once you become highly experienced in certain areas. Each skill is tied to an attribute, whether that be Strength, Endurance, Speed, Intelligence, Willpower, Luck, Personality or Agility. Each time you level up, you are awarded three bonuses, which can be allocated to any three attributes of your choice. However, these bonuses often come in the form of a 2x or 3x bonus, dependent on what skills you have used to attain the new level. It might seem complicated written down, but it really does make sense.

Before I finish talking about the systems and methods for character empowerment, I really must mention the way in which Alchemy and Item Enchantment have been handled, for a learned Alchemist or Enchanter has access to a wide range of alternative approaches. The land of Vvardenfell is chock full of exotic plants and artefacts, most of which possess magical properties of some kind. Alchemy is the art of unlocking the magical potential of such items by combining them in different combinations. Suitable ingredients can be gathered from plants, fungi, trees, shop shelves and even the hides of slaughtered indigenous wildlife. With some decent Alchemic equipment, ingredients can be combined to create potions with varying properties. A favourite of mine is to pillage the hides of fallen winged creatures known as Cliff Racers, for their hides can be use to create potions of levitation. I can't remember the amount of times a quick swig of this brew has saved my skin, allowing me to fly up to some previously unreachable ledge or even hang in mid air and rain fireballs down upon previously overwhelming adversaries.

Enchantment on the other hand, revolves around the acquisition of souls. By using the Soul Trap spell or an item bound with such an enchantment, it's possible to store the souls of downed opponents within a 'Soul Gem'. These stones come in varying quality, so you'll need a particularly sparkly one if you wanna start trapping the souls of evil arch-necromancers and the like. Once you have filled a soul gem, you'll notice the value of the item go up considerably. It's at this point you decide whether to sell it or indeed, use it to enchant a mundane item from your inventory. Weapons, Armour, Rings, Amulets, Clothes and other mundane items can be enchanted, with the power of the enchantment dependent on the quality of the soul gem and the potency of the soul trapped within. Any spell the enchanter knows can be bound to an item and you can set the effects to be triggered independently of the items normal use, although it's often best to have a weapon's enchantment kick in on contact with an opponent. My latest creation is a Steel Wakizashi of Armor Disintegration - I bet you can't guess what that does. I plan to make its big brother as soon as I successfully trap a more powerful soul. In fact, I believe I have just the person in mind for such a purpose. Muhahahahaha…

So what of the story? While at first your purpose on the island seems quite vague, there is a straight route through the game and a main storyline to follow. I won't divulge any spoilers to the main plot, suffice to say it's a journey of self-discovery In the midst of an ancient feud between an established imperial order and the nomadic tribes of Vvardenfell. A top yarn indeed, but only a fool would attempt to follow it without the backing of a guild or two…

Considering my character's major skills, I thought it only right to pay a visit to the Mages Guild upon arrival in Balmora. Not only do Guilds offer a place to rest free of charge, but also a range of useful services. Various robed types offering enchantment and spell making facilities inhabit the Mages Guild in particular. Training in the more magical arts is also available. More importantly however, are the quests served up to those wishing to climb the mage hierarchy. Such tasks range from going forth into the wilderness to collect plants and fungi, to the grim business of collecting guild dues. As you might expect, the latter almost always ends in some kind of grim magical battle, although on one occasion I did manage to 'see the money' thanks to a cunning use of the Speechcraft skill. Guild quests make for a pleasing distraction from the main storyline should it become too challenging. And I can quite honestly say after 40 hours of play that the reverse is also quite true.

I've gone into great detail about character generation and some of the things you can 'do' in Morrowind, but what's this fictitious game world actually like? For a start, you'll need some serious hardware to see the game in all its glory. On my 1ghz Athlon with 256mb RAM and a Geforce 3 TI200 card, frame rates are generally quite smooth in all but the most built up towns. Slider bars allow you tweak such variables as draw distance, real time shadows and AI distance, which at the lowest setting turns NPCs into utter morons until you get real close. Not that this is gonna make much difference if you have draw distance set low, but expect a painfully 'foggy' experience should you have to resort to that.

Sound effects are more than adequate, with outlandish noises signalling the presence of wildlife whilst outdoors and a justified level of reverb added throughout interiors. Particular praise goes out to the fireball spell sound effects, which are so meaty you'll forget melee weapons ever existed. As is usual for the genre, music has been handled by none other than Jeremy Soule, who seems to have the entire RPG market in the palm of his hand thanks to some excellent scoring in Icewind Dale & Dungeon Siege amongst others. My only reservation about his contribution to Morrowind is that there really isn't enough of it. This might just be down to the obscene amount of time I've spent playing the game though… Finally, I feel it my duty to warn you that this game requires a fully Direct X 8.1 compatible sound card. I have an aged Soundblaster Live! 1024 card in my rig and I suffered frequent pauses during some of the games cutscenes and intro sequences. Everything was fine in game though.

So it's a system pig, but no marks off for Bethesda trying to push the graphics envelope. Morrowind is an immensely ambitious title, and once you've tweaked the settings to your liking there's an amazing environment to explore. Full Day & Night cycles are included, as are variable weather effects. Rain lashes down onto rivers showcasing the game's use of pixel shader effects, while harsh winds blow through the more mountainous regions, kicking dirt and grit in your face. It's all so atmospheric, giving the impression of an almost seamless alien world for you to explore and make your own.

I say 'almost' for I did suffer frequent loading pauses throughout play. This wouldn't be so bad if the last game I'd played to death hadn't been Dungeon Siege, with it's constantly caching level design. To give it credit though, Morrowind is vastly superior to its peers in terms of non-linearity and the very nature of it's first person perspective allows for so much more interaction with the world. For instance, the ability to jump and swim long distances really does matter, although a 'Water Walking' spell can eliminate the need for the latter.

While there is plenty of NPC interaction in the game, I can't say it's really on a par with games like Baldur's Gate and Deus Ex. While there's lots of dialogue to be read, the whole conversation system revolves around a titanic database, explored via each NPC encounter with the use of Hyperlinks. It's quite an elegant idea, but one that allows for a lot of repetition and regular non-sensical replies, like people telling you where they live when you've already arrived at their house. On the plus side, interaction with the populace can be made more interesting with the Speechcraft skill, often supplemented with some hard cash. Every time you enter a conversation with an NPC, a demeanour indicator is displayed showing the character's attitude towards you. Successfully admiring, bribing, taunting or intimidating characters can raise or lower this bar, which is good for getting extra info out of people or instigating violence so you can claim your actions were in self-defence when the town guard arrives.

While on the subject of fisticuffs, now would be a good time to mention how combat works in Morrowind. A lot of people have complained about its highly repetitive nature and the fact that it's impossible to gauge how much damage you are doing to an opponent. While I too find the latter inexcusable (I'm not marking it down for this though as it's been addressed in the forthcoming patch) I don't have a problem with the way in which combat has been executed. Holding the attack button down increases the intensity of the swing, slash or thrust you wish to execute by pressing a direction key at the same time. However, the people are forgetting that Morrowind is massively skills-based game, even down to the act of combat. Every time you press 'attack' you're effectively making a roll to hit your opponent based on your skill with that weapon. There are many other factors though, including combatant's fatigue levels. In an interesting twist, it's possible to become 'tired' once your fatigue bar has depleted. This can result in you being knocked over and less able to defend yourself in combat. Hence the importance of potions of 'Restore Fatigue'.

Morrowind may be a stubbornly single-player only affair, but with 500 hours of gameplay I shouldn't imagine most people will ever get to see all the game has to offer. The wide range of skills, classes and races offers good replay in itself, even without the variable associations you can have with all the guilds and factions available. As if that wasn't enough, Morrowind ships with a comprehensive editor that allows complete customisation of the game world. This may seem a little odd for a single player only game, but given the amount of time you'll spend playing it and having downloaded a few plug-ins myself, this idea really does work. For example, one plug-in I had was simply this chap's character. He'd decided to offer it to the public as a new character for the game, who just so happened to be buying and selling a lot of expensive soul gems. Some may view this as unbalancing or even cheating, but I just looked at it as a new character arriving in the world. It's rather strange I know, but if support for the game continues in this way who knows how Vvardenfell will develop in the future. A constantly evolving single player experience? Absurd, but now entirely true.

So yes, in Morrowind you really can do anything you like, but it's the choices you make at the start that have the greatest bearing on what you'll decide to do. Experimenting with miscellaneous skills will increase your character's range of capabilities, but at the cost of levelling up to face the trials of the main campaign. You'll need to put a fair bit in to get much out of the game, but with so many avenues to explore and so many ways in which to play; most RPGers should find themselves utterly lost within the depths of Morrowind.