It is shaping up to be a weekend alone and my resolve has weakened. I was putting off buying any more games until Warcraft III came out, but
I.
Just.
Can’t.
Do it.
Sooooo, new computer game for me. What are people’s opinions on Morrowind? Since this is all about me, do you think I might like it? To help in that regard:
Dungeon Siege - My resolve had weakened before. Bought this. Hated it. If I wanted small unit combat I would have bought
Freedom Force - Loved it. But I’m a sucker for silver age comics
Arcanum, Baldurs Gate - Liked them both. They kept me occupied. I like the mission type stuff. I particularly liked the relative open-ness of Arcanum, ie you could win a mission by killing, or stealing, or talking. Not always, but a lot.
Thief 2 - Classic. Great atmosphere. Liked creeping around. Very nerve wracking at times.
Well, that’s about it. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Another nomination for Deus Ex, fi you don’t already have it: it’s been out long enough you should be able to get it relatively cheap. That means you’ll still stand a fighting chance of being able to afford Warcraft III when it comes out.
** Daoloth** you know that stat called endurance? It doesen’t actually do anything unless you get a mod. I also tended to get stuck when I jumped, and whenever my summoned bow would dissapear as I was firing it would say the game was corrupted and ask if I wanted to continue running Morrowind. Also if you don’t remove its safedisc protection the game will run like 20% slower and randomly crash. Those bugs are only the ones I can remember off the top of my head. Its like they never even had a beta.
I take it Sterra never played Daggerfall. Morrowind is bugproof by comparison.
Anyway, Absimia, I would recommend Morrowind 100%. The open-endedness is very nice, but it’s not so structure-free as to leave you feeling completely aimless (as Daggerfall was). If you get bored with just randomly exploring, you just crack open your journal and check to see if there were any quests, clues, hints, or rumors that you could follow. During one random conversation with a random townsperson, he told me that he heard a rumor that a certain guy at a fort was looking for me. That led to me being “asked” (very subtlely) to assassinate all the members of a certain Council Club in the city of Balmorra. Damn, that was cool.
Other times, when I don’t want to do any quests, I’ll just go off somewhere in the massive, beautifully-detailed wilderness, and look around. You’ll find some real treasures, let me assure you. And you’re fully confident that you can just pick up your previous adventures where you left them off.
Further… there is only one person in the whole game that needs to be left alive in order to beat the game. Everyone else can be killed if you so desire.
I’d like to know where this particular bit of theory came from. It may be true X distance along the “main” quests, but if you start slaughtering before beginning the main plot sequence, there’ll be any number of “the thread of prophecy is broken” messages (a nice touch to let the player know when they just screwed themselves and to reload).
But yeah, it’s good. If they manage to patch away the randomly-clustered crashes to desktop and at least reduce the getting-stuck-on-the-scenery problems, that’ll be even better.
I like the game. It’s been virtually bug free for me, including that whole bit about 'remove the safedisk and it’ll run 20% faster." I did that, noticed NO difference.
My biggest complaint is that you do need a fairly high end machine to run it at the highest resolution. When I push it to 1200x1600 on my machine, the frame rates dropped down to 5 or 6, and it was very slow and jerky. So 1024x768 for me.
It’s a beautiful game, set in an amazingly complex world. You can literally pick anything up - you walk into a dining room, the table settings are their for you to check out.
Personally, I’d wait. I bought Morrowind, and while I can only say a small amount of bad things about it (more on that in a bit) thier is a seriously large number of great looking games coming out soon. The crown jewel of this, IMO, is neverwinter nights, scheduled to hit stores the 18th, I believe. While thier is always the chance it turns out to be an overhyped piece of ca-ca, I have pretty good faith that bioware will do a smash up job. Its the same company that did the Baldurs Gate series, which you seemed to like by your post.
I’ll also have to go with some previous posters and recommend DeusEx . It’s not only a mindnumbingly great game, it’s also cheap, and it also uses comparitively older technology, So it shouldn’t turn your comp into a whimpering baby like Morrowind might.
As for Morrowind itself, like I said, I can’t complain that much about it. Its a great game, and one that I’m sure you probably won’t regret buying by any means. It CAN be buggy - check out the Morrowind.com forums if you need any convincing. It crashed intermittently on my comp, and when it didn’t, the FPS would gradually drag down over time, potentially due to some memory leak. It has great graphics, but can certainly stretch your rig beyond it’s limits. Just a word of warning, since you didn’t post your specs.
The game itself can be an incredible time killer, and I had plenty of all nighters playing this thing. But the NPC’s seem kinda sterile, and conversation with them is pretty monotonous (quite the opposite of Baldurs gate). My biggest gripe, though, is the game just hasn’t seemed ‘dangerous’ enough. I decided to go out for a round-the-world trek when I was level 8, trying to find the evil gigantic monster that would tear me to shreds, but alas, thier wasn’t much. Just a long string of mudcrabs, rats and cliffracers. I know thiers more coming when I get further down the game to some of the dungeons, but at this point in BG, I was sweating for my life.
I meant by the end of the game, you can kill all but that one guy. Certainly if you kill Caius Cossades right off the bat, you’re gonna have a rough time figuring things out later…
Big whup. Resolution is the LAST thing that concerns me. I have no qualms about running it at 640x480 (my monitor can support 1600x1200)… I’m on a 700 mhz Duron machine with 256 megs of RAM and a GeForce-2 MX400. I need to turn down the view distance in towns to keep from getting 10 fps, but otherwise the game runs fine.
Well, they’re two different things. Morrowind can give you hundreds of hours of single-player play, easily, while Neverwinter Nights is slated to be about 60 hours. What makes NWN look so cool is the multiplayer aspect, and the fact that they’ve supposedly stayed really true to the original D&D game rules… essentially making it possible for NWN to replace pen-and-paper D&D roleplaying (on some levels).
I like Morrowind, and it sounds like absimia will too. Anybody who liked both Baldur’s Gate and Thief II should like Morrowind. The game is incredibly open ended, but there is also a good central plot you can get involved in.
Though I also caution about bugs. As mentioned, you can get stuck after jumping into a nasty spot. There is also the incredibly annoying crash-to-desktop-for-no-apparent-reason bug that apparently has something to do with hardware acceleration for sound. There are stretches I can’t play more than five minutes without a crash, other times I play for embarrassingly long stretches without a problem.
Also worth noting are rather steep hardware requirements. If you have to have fluid, high detail graphics, do not attempt to play the game on anything less than a 1.5 Ghz processor wit a GE-Force 4. If you can live with a lower resolution and no shadows, a 700MHZ processor with a decent graphics card should cut the mustard.
I also recommend Deus Ex. System Shock 2 is also good. It uses the Thief engine for a sci-fi horror action game. I got more replay out of SS2 than DE, but they’re both great.
Thanks for all the responses. I did end up going to get it on Saturday night and played pretty much all day Sunday. I tried a couple of characters ('cause I’m impatient) and ended up (as I usually do) playing a custom class thief guy. (I don’t even know why I try playing other chars, I’m just too larcenous at heart). My computer isn’t totally Bad Ass, but I’m like SPOOFE in that I don’t need the tip top graphics. That being said, it is a pretty beautiful game. The sun effects are astonishing. It has crashed once, but having suffered through Star Fleet Command 2, I’m pretty satisfied. I do wish, however, it didn’t take so long to run/walk everywhere. It is kind of silly to move faster by leaping around than to sprint. Oh well.
Oh and I do have Deus Ex. I enjoyed it quite a bit. KnightNavro, while I had heard of System Shock 2, I’d never seen it at the store. Is it an older game? What sort of feel does it have? I have the Playstation Emulator on my Mac and played Resident Evil on it and really liked it. Mostly because there wasn’t monsters around every corner so when you did see them they scared the crap out of you. (well, me anyway).
Anyhow. Thanks again. If anyone has tips, advice, or people in Morrowind that you think I should talk to because of a fun quest it might give (like SPOOFE’s assassination-fest) I’d love to hear it.
Heh. If you want faster movement, just wait until you start enchanting things. I’m currently scouring the land looking for Golden Saints to ensnare for my equipment. I’m currently loving my constant water breathing helm…
A friend has it. It’s pretty good–very stable and it has decent performance. It’s just a tiny bit stripped down, but not in ways that would bug most people.
You can only drop things in containers and you won’t be able to install mods. That’s about all I noticed after watching him play a while.
System Shock 2 is a somewhat older game, but I imagine it can still be found in some stores. It can also be found at Chips and Bits online.
It’s a bit more action oriented than Resident Evil, but it’s nothing like Halflife or similar games where waves upon waves of zombies swarm you. It’s much more like Thief; you can probably handle one or two baddies, but three or four will likely result in your death.
To give you an idea of the “feel” of the horror of the game, think of the movie Alien. It’s that type of horror. Plenty of suspense and danger, but a fair amount of heavy weapons. More than once I literally jumped out of my chair when some baddie came out to attack. It has one of the best plots in any video game I’ve ever seen.
But this is the Morrowind thread.
Don’t be fooled into thinking jumping increases your movement rate. Unless you have a jump spell active, it doesn’t. Well, at least as far as I can tell. You move forward quickly for a moment, but there is that pause between jumps. If you want faster movement, put on the boots of blinding speed. They certainly live up to the name. On the other hand, walking the roads between each city does lead to a lot of side quests. You also stumble across tombs to raid and slavers to slay.
Easiest thing to do… go to Balmorra (follow the road signs), and do a few quests for the Fighter’s Guild. They’ll give you some quests that’ll give you a chance to get some level-ups, some gold and items, etc.
Or, if you’re very patient, you can kick back in Seyda Neen (the starting town) and ask around to see if anybody’s heard any rumors. That’s an amusing way to get into a quest.
Sorry, I’m gonna have to pull a minor hijack here since you asked about SS2… apologies everyone .
It isn’t easy to find, but it’s still out thier. And its CHEAP, like 8 dollars in some places. I believe Amazon still has it. It has a few similaritys with DeusEx, as in the way you can Upgrade and Customize your character, and interact with the objects around you - like smoking cigarettes and drinking beer . It isn’t as balanced though - All the character abilities in DX have thier uses, but in SS2 you have to be a lot more careful how you spend your upgrades. The game ISNT very forgiving of careless choices.
Actually, the game ISNT very forgiving in general. The designers were quite frankly a large bunch of sadistic mo-fo’s - your weapons break, ammo is rather low, and even using weapons other then the good old wrench require a good amount of skill upgrades. Depending on how you look at it, this could either make the game really frustrating, or add to the general horror and fight-for-your life type atmosphere that the game is great at conveying. Navro’s right. The game is scary in ways no other is, and I, too, jumped out of my chair more then once.
Yes, that’s a good bet. I have a 700 mhz Athlon with 384 mb ram and a Radeon 8500LE and it’s…playable. I get ca 15-20 fps outside with view slider at 33% and 25 fps inside. This is at 800x600.
Tips for thieves: if you’re a beginning thief and have a decent security skill (ca 40% or better) and a master’s lockpick or two, high thyself to the fighter’s guild in Ald’ruhn. In the basement, there’s a locked door. You’ll find the equipment on the other side fairly handy…
