This is, quite probably, the geekiest thread I’ve ever started, but here goes anyway.
I picked up Morrowind today, after hearing everyone and their dog talk about how it’s the greatest game ever made. After playing for a few hours, I’m coming to you.
On the one hand, I’m very impressed. The graphics are quite good (though I have to admit I wasn’t blown away, as I expected to be) and the sheer size of the world is, of course, astounding. On the other hand, I’m getting the feeling like it was made for people who are much more hard core about their gaming than I am. When I hear about people talking about the hundreds of hours they’ve spent building up their chraracters, for instance, I don’t think “Wow, cool!” I think “you utter dork.” I guess I’m just feeling a wee bit overwhelmed. I mean, the character creation process alone is pretty danged intimidating.
But, I payed $50 for this thing, and I’m damn sure going to enjoy it! So I guess I’m asking for advice from people who may have been in a similar position before me. Advice, please! Tell me anything, I’ll take it.
Return it. Sorry, that’s all the advice I’ve got. I tried many times to get into it always to get bored really quickly. 90% of the game seems to be watching your character run. Combat’s boring too.
Well, the best advice I can give is to give it a while. The first few levels are hard, it seems like everything can kill you with no trouble. Don’t worry about the main “quest” too much. Wander around, join a guild and run a few errands, explore the countryside. Of course, some of the places you may wander into can end up with a quick re-load, but that’s half the fun too. To me, the middle levels were the most fun, my character was strong enough to fight some of the more advanced monsters, but not high enough to walk all over them. Once you hit level 32 or so, most things aren’t really a challenge anymore.
Only advice I can give you about charater creation:
Most of the “animal” races can’t wear shoes/boots, or helmuts. This makes for frustration when you get a cool item that you can’t equip.
Pick the major skills carefully. While on your first character, it’s tough to know exactlly what will be usefull, how do you normally play a RPG? Are you a sword swinger? Magic user? do you usually tend to go with one type of charater most of the time? I tend to be a sword using type guy that also has a bit of magic. I also like to use a shield, since I want the most bang for my buck, I tend to use a long sword. So I put the long sword skill, along with heavy armour as two major skills. Since I knew that running would help advance my athletics skill, I put that as a major, to help my leveling up. Then tossed in a couple of magic areas, and I was done.
I don’t spend massive time worrying about character creation, but I did go back and start over once, just because I had played enough by then to get a better feel of what kind of end character I wanted. At first I was worried about getting bored, since I had already done the first part, but actually, the game is so open ended that I totaly ignored the main storyline for a long time. By the time I went back to it, I could breeze through the early quests with no problem.
Good luck. Don’t forget to check out some of the modifications created by other people. There are some amazingly talented people making things every day. Check out This link to see a good list of the site. Just be carefull when loading them, some aren’t tested very well. All the official downloads from the elderscrolls site are ok, and some are fun.
I felt a lot like you Smeghead, when I first started playing. I decided to just choose a character that can wear all armor and go from there. Here’s what I’ve noticed. It doesn’t seem to matter all that much which character you choose, other than it may take longer to advance in some skills.
As smiling bandit stated, I don’t seem to use magic very often. I thought I would, but I’m pretty close to finishing the game now, and I haven’t used it much. Levitate seems to be a pretty important spell, but potions take care of a lot of the rest.
I think the most important thing is saving the game often. I’ve completed quests, gone back to the quest giver to report and given the “wrong” answer, making it necessary to redo a quest. I’ve also killed people that would probably have made it easier for me in the long run, had I left them alive. If you join the Fighters’ Guild, there’s a character who will give you pretty sound advice on the “to kill, or not to kill?” question (or even whether you should complete a task).
I almost forgot, the path I chose, I seem to be stealing like crazy. Sneaking and lock-picking (and pickpocketing a few quest items) are as much a part of my game as swinging a sword. It helped me out quite a bit by advancing these skills early in my game.
Well, I’ve been playing on-and-off for a while (the Real World[sup]TM[/sup] keeps getting in the way) and I do think it is an excellent game. It is a bit slow at your first few levels since you are a bit weak and have to take things carefully but it starts picking up fairly rapidly around fifth level.
A few comments:
[list=1]
[li]Lots of the character creation guides recommend placing skills you can easily increase as your Major or Minor skills so that you can level up faster. For example, you can raise Sneak quite easily simply by holding the control key down all the time, Athletics by running everywhere and Acrobatics by jumping all the time. This will let you gain levels fairly quickly.[/li] Don’t do this! The game scales encounters and your opponents to your level. Head out at first level and you will be fighting mudcrabs and rats. Head out at tenth level and you’re getting Blighted Alit and Kaghouti. If you have raised your level by using the easy to increase skills you may have the level but not the combat skills to fight them. Just play the game normally and your skills will increase more evenly.
[li]Don’t be afraid to walk places. Most guides I have seen suggest taking “public transit” (silt striders, guild guides, etc.) everywhere but I have discovered that you will miss a lot of set encounters along the road if you do. There are lots of interesting places out there you will never find unless you explore on your own.[/li]
[li]Hi Opal![/li]
[li]Don’t spread your weapon and armor skills out too much; pick one weapon type and armor type and concentrate on it. Just as a note, there is an almost complete set of glass armor (best light armor in the game) which you can get fairly easily and fairly early on in Ghostgate. Also, if you plan to join the Imperial Legion you will have to wear an Imperial Curiass while doing their quests so you may want to select your armor skill accordingly.[/li]
[li]Join a guild. Heck, join several. This gets you quite a few quests that you can undertake to gain experience and quite a few other benefits as well; training and bartering is cheaper with members of your guilds and the disposition of other members of your guild towards you is improved.[/li]
[li]Don’t think that the guilds are the only opportunities. I found a very interesting sub-plot simply by going to the Moonmoth Legion Fort and talking to Larrius Varro, the legion champion there. This wasn’t a guild quest but it turned out to have a nice reward at the end of it. There is also a fairly interesting quest in Vivec that seems to be unconnected to any of the guilds.[/li]
[li]Definitely do some of the other quests before starting on the main Blades quest. It will be worth the experience.[/li]
[li]You will want to join one of the great houses eventually. The Telvanni are mages, the Redoran are warriors and the Hlaalu are merchants and diplomats. Make sure you pick one you like; unlike guilds you can only join one.[/li]
[li]To disagree with smiling bandit, get spells, but not to cast them. You will need them when you are ready to start enchanting items (and you will want to enchant items).[/li]
Enchant skill too low? Buy a bunch of fortify intelligence potions, drink a few of them, then try enchanting. It boosts your chance of success immensely and is a lot cheaper than paying someone from the mage’s guild to do it for you.
[li]Speaking of potions, Skooma boosts strength. Drink a few bottles before entering a major fight to give yourself an advantage.[/li]
[li]Use Creeper as your main merchant; he always pays full value for everything you sell him. He’s on the second floor of (mumble) manor in Caldera.[/li]
[li]You will learn to hate anything with “Diseased” or “Blighted” in it’s name.[/li]
[li]You will really learn to hate Cliff Racers.[/li][/list=1]
I started a walkthru of the game myself but haven’t gotten very far with it. (That Real World[sup]TM[/sup] problem again.) Still, you might find it useful for starting out.
I played through a good 13 hours of this game and then put it down to get into FFX and Buffy. But now I want to head back to it.
It will be my third character.
With the hindsight I had I am considering changing some of my major skills to include alchemy. It seems like a damn useful skill, but I wanted some input from dopers on this one.
I found that being a magic user made the game quite difficult, but I also didn’t like hand-to-hand combat. There were some nasties I met in caves that shot some terrible garbage at me and would make some short work of me. I returned later at higher levels and managed alright… it was intense, but not impossible. I just have always preferred magic users to fighters in general and was wondering about experiences out there.
Great game, as long as you don’t come to it with any impression of just “playing it”. It really is a whole world, in a way. Good game.
The only problem that I have with the Alchemy skill, is that you basically have to spend a lot of time experimenting, and searching for ingrediants. I’m just not patient enough to do that. Also, there are ways to “cheat” in the game by using alchemy. So I tend to mostl aviod that skill, besides, you play enought, and you wind up with more potions than you can carry anyway, so I never really see the need to create my own.
I got to the top of a couple of guilds and well into the main quest when the main quest started to become really slow going and real life intervened. (Computer games always seem to me anymore like you need to play them as a full-time job to get much out of them.) I’ve been wanting to start again, but it’s going to dive back in where I was, so I might end up starting over.
The only thing I’d add is that while I agree that you should cover as many paths by foot as possible, you should get comfortable with the other transport options, since you’ll be traipsing around a lot. I spent some time making a diagram of where I could get to by silt strider, magic guild teleporting, and boat, but I’m sure such a thing is available online by now.
Yes, and if you wait 24 hours (I liked to do so on the little balcony right next to him, for some reason), he has his full cash reserve again. If you’re shrewd about buying and selling combinations (sell him a less expensive item, wait, sell him a more expensive item for all his cash and the less expensive item, wait, sell him the less expenive item again, etc.) you can really rack up the scratch.
I also found it useful later on to have a weapon enchanted with Soul Capture and to carry around several soul gems. (I think this is all right; it’s been a couple of months.) Not only can you use them to enchant other objects, but you can sell the ones you don’t need to the Creeper.
Nah, go ahead and use to level rapidly trick. Soon enough you’ll be heading into dungeons full of daedra. Also, I don’t get into spells, but I’d recommend having some kind of healing and stealth spells available, and practice using them. If combat is tricky, get a sword that does stuns and hotkey it. Whack your foes with that until they freeze up, then switch to your more effective weapons.
Eventually, as you proceed to steal everything under the sun and have developed your trade route so that you maximize your returns for various high-ticket items, you’ll have so much money that you can pretty much buy any skill you like, so the importance in the major and minor skills is that the stats associated with them improve faster. Try to choose at least one skill for each stat.
Enchant is a pretty useful skill–around the ~30ish range or so, you can reliably make low-level but very useful items. Just something that can heal a few hp at a pop is a nice thing to have around, as are a few seconds of water walking and such.
The single best spell school to invest as a skill in early in the game is Conjure, for one reason: the “Bound <item>” series of spells. Instant, zero-weight armor and nasty weapons that can give the wimpier characters survivability.
Other than that, yeah, stick with one type of weapon. Unarmored is simply not as nice as it sounds. Thievery is so lucrative that it’s a challenge not to engage in it.
If you’ve got the PC version, a minor amount of fiddling with the world editor is a good thing. Or just download one of the umpty cliff racer-defanging mods out there.
Allegedly, the PC expansion pack that’s coming out for it is going to repair the in-game journal, which is shockingly useless unless you pursue quests with a single-minded tunnel-vision.
Everyone here has a lot fo good advice, (except Silentgoldfish) but the most important thing is to figure out a good way of keeping track of your quests. The journal is totally useless. Don’t even bother. Instead, get a pad of paper; graph paper is probably the best, as you’ll want vertical lines as well as horizontal. You’ll need at least four headings: Location (where you got the quest, so you know where to return for your reward), Employer (so you’ll remember who to talk to about your quest), Destination (It’s nice to be able to just look down the page and know what you need to do in each city, so that if you find yourself in Ald’Ruhn, you can quickly check to see if there are any other quests in the city you can complete.) and Objective (which is, of course what the quest is all about) I’m only about 18th level, and my quest log is already three pages long (that’s at one quest per line, btw) I can’t over-emphasize how useless the ingame journal is. I ended up trashing my first character and starting over simply because my journal was such a mess, I had no idea what to do next.
Well, I liked the game a lot (I still haven’t even finished it), but I think that if you want to get your 50 bucks’ worth you pretty much have to acknowledge the Geek Within and just run with it. There’s a big story there, but you have to seek it out and let yourself get into it. It’s definitely not a game of Diablo-style combat; the combat system, well, sucks.
Also, I didn’t really start having fun with it until I started playing as a thief character. The sneaking/lock-picking skills seem the most rewarding to me; as I mentioned, combat is pretty dull, and I got bored with alchemy very quickly.
I’d also recommend you try to join one of the Great Houses instead of just working through the guilds. It opens up another branch of quests and makes you feel like you’re part of the story instead of just running around the fringes of it.
I bought Morrowind when it first came out, and I still haven’t completed the “main” quest. My main game is Everquest, and I don’t have a lot of time to play other games. However, I do play Morrowind as a “filler” game when I’m sick of EQ, or want to try something different.
I mainly just wander through the world, looking at things. It’s amazing how full the world is. There’s so much to see and do, it’s nuts!
I’ve also played two characters, and the experience is quite a bit different. I went through the question thing to create my first character, and ended up with a monk who I think had no alchemy skill at all. I didn’t much like the monk fighting skills, and was getting kind of bored with her, so when I switched PCs instead of moving her over I started a new character. This one is a Battlemage, and she’s got enough of an alchemy skill (I think that’s the one, correct me if I’m wrong) that she can actually DO stuff with all those plants out there. I’m having fun with that.
I think Morrowind is a really subtle game. It’s crafted, not just thrown together. You have to have some patience with it. I’ve gone to the libraries and just read the books there; I’ve talked with NPCs to get to know them. I do side quests all the time. I sit at the edge of lakes and wait for the sun to come up so I can watch the sunrise.
Recently I completed the Seven Pilgamages. Yes, you run around a lot. But you see a lot at the same time. Plus, for those of you who haven’t found this one yet, one of the pilgramages requires you to bring a Potion of Rising Force to a shrine in Vivec. In return, you get a 24 hour levitation blessing. This is VERY nice for getting around Vivec, I’m pretty much never without it after I discovered it.
I bought Morrowind when it first came out, and I still haven’t completed the “main” quest. My main game is Everquest, and I don’t have a lot of time to play other games. However, I do play Morrowind as a “filler” game when I’m sick of EQ, or want to try something different.
I mainly just wander through the world, looking at things. It’s amazing how full the world is. There’s so much to see and do, it’s nuts!
I’ve also played two characters, and the experience is quite a bit different. I went through the question thing to create my first character, and ended up with a monk who I think had no alchemy skill at all. I didn’t much like the monk fighting skills, and was getting kind of bored with her, so when I switched PCs instead of moving her over I started a new character. This one is a Battlemage, and she’s got enough of an alchemy skill (I think that’s the one, correct me if I’m wrong) that she can actually DO stuff with all those plants out there. I’m having fun with that.
I think Morrowind is a really subtle game. It’s crafted, not just thrown together. You have to have some patience with it. I’ve gone to the libraries and just read the books there; I’ve talked with NPCs to get to know them. I do side quests all the time. I sit at the edge of lakes and wait for the sun to come up so I can watch the sunrise.
Recently I completed the Seven Pilgamages. Yes, you run around a lot. But you see a lot at the same time. Plus, for those of you who haven’t found this one yet, one of the pilgramages requires you to bring a Potion of Rising Force to a shrine in Vivec. In return, you get a 24 hour levitation blessing. This is VERY nice for getting around Vivec, I’m pretty much never without it after I discovered it.
So you bought Morrowind. How do you like the loading times? I despise games that require you to keep the CD in the tray. There is an utility CD that you can buy out there for 20 bucks that I believe is called virtual CD. When you use it the game believes that the CD is actually in the drive. No more nasty loading time. No more hearing the CD spin constantly. It was the best 20 bucks I have spent involving my gaming because suddenly I can play the games without the !@#%^& CD.
Of recent video games, this ties with GTA3 as my favorite. I played through to the main quest once as a Nord warrior, then played a couple more times just doing the houses and guilds I skipped the first time. Lots of good advice has been posted already. Skills I focused on with later characters based on experiences the first time through were:
Personality: I had a terrible personality the first time through, and it was a pain dealing with merchants and other NPCs. The second time through I added speechcraft as a major skill, and it was very useful. It is also pretty easy to increase speechcraft through admire/taunt.
Security. Even if you choose to be honest and not go around ripping off everyone, being able to open any door/chest easily is nice.
Alteration. Levitating and water-walking are used all the time, and it’s handy being able to cast these spells with high effectiveness.
Light armor. I played with heavy armor the first time, and although it makes your Armor class nice and high, it decreases the amount of stuff you can carry too much. At least in my experience, there wasn’t as much good medium armor to be found. The glass armor is very effective, fairly easy to get, and doesn’t weigh you down.
Any of these can be substituted for with spells, potions, and enchanted items, but I found it much easier to have the skills always on.
On choosing a race, I wouldn’t worry to much about their innate powers. At least in my experience, the spells you automatically get with them aren’t all that special. Better to focus on the skill modifiers they have. I’ll reiterate what others have posted and say to stay away from the animal races. There’s too many useful boots around.
Be careful matching skills with the guilds you want to join. I created a character to complete the Mages Guild quests, and the magic type I picked as a major skill wasn’t one of the favored skills of the guild. (I forget which one it was, I think Conjuration)