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Friday 8 February, 2008
Gamelog Entry #2:
GAMEPLAY:
Since I’ve been playing Morrowind for several years I’m going to discuss what happens after you’ve played the game once through and are starting a second character. Something I should mention is that Morrowind has two expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon, which I have also played through. I didn’t mention these in my first entry, but I will be commenting on them here.
WARNING: There will be SPOILERS.
In terms of character creations you will likely choose the one with the best bonuses for later in the game and you will create a custom job class so that the skill you used the most the first time around will be either major or minor. You will also know that at around level five you will be attacked by assassins as per Tribunal’s start, thus you tend not to worry about buying, finding, and/or stealing armor for your character. You will know that spells are the most powerful attacks in the beginning of the game; that being the case choosing a character race that has more mana is favorable.
Overall, game play tends to be more rushed when you already know where you need to go and what you need to do to complete certain quests. When I was replaying Morrowind several parts of the main quest that I remembered taking a really long time I managed to do really quickly. Also you tend not to interact with the NPCs that much anymore, since you pretty much know what they are going to say and you know what the background story is.
Let’s talk about the two expansions: Tribunal and Bloodmoon.
Of course, there are new items, new NPCs, a ton of new side-quests, and all-new monsters. There is a new storyline in each of the expansions, in which Tribunal’s storyline lightly builds on Morrowind’s while Bloodmoon is completely stand-alone. One thing you don’t see, which could have been really good, is new dimensions to quests. Like maybe have more puzzle-type quests rather than the straight forward “go kill a certain monster and reap the rewards” type of quests.
Both expansions add a degree of difficulty to the game. The enemies are stronger than they are in the original game and there is a lot higher chance that they appear in mass. A short-coming of the original was that 99% of the time you would fight enemies one-on-one and while this continues to hold true for a large part of the expansions there are a lot more times when you are forced to fight groups of enemies (this applies more to Bloodmoon).
DESIGN:
I don’t know whether this is a short-coming in the design of the game, but it is very easy to exploit several features and elements (training, enchanting items, corpus disease stat boosters, finding powerful unique items, and getting millions of gold) of the game in order to make your character very powerful in the very beginning and then just breeze through the game. On one hand this makes the game too easy and less fun to play, but on the other it makes several tedious factors (for example, walking with the speed of a snail) go away quickly. There is a certain amount of satisfaction to be gained from being able to exploit some small developer over-sights (like making yourself a second Wraithguard; if you know what you’re doing).
One thing I found that is definitely a short-coming is that if you have the best items (enchantments of items included) you’re practically invincible. Resist magic 100+% really does make you impervious to all magic spells along with many weapon enchantments.
Thus, interaction with the game heavily depends on whether or not you have played it before or not. If you haven’t then in the beginning of the game you spend a lot of time exploring, which is probably exactly what the developer wanted to happen. However, if you’ve played it before then you tend to skip many things and go straight for things and quests that you know are the most fun and/or will give you the best experience. Traveling via walking pretty much goes out the window, if you can help it, unless it’s to find a really good item. If you get particularly lazy and/or bored you start to travel using the console (pretty much cheating).
In that sense, the exploration and interaction elements of the game are dulled and one could argue that the game is less fun to play, but I would disagree with that. I think that the variety of races, skills, and different low-level character builds (I say low-level because in the end all your skills are maxed out and it doesn’t matter who you started out as) make the game fun to play; as long as you don’t keep doing the same character build over and over.
The fun and attractiveness of the game really starts to wind down once you’ve become a “god,” done everything there is to do, and been everywhere interesting. While you will probably never completely dissolve the fog-of-war on the map, you have to realize that more than 50% of map is just terrain with nothing on it, no caves, dwellings, tombs, ruins, or strongholds; and personally uncovering a lava pit from the fog-of-war is pretty god damn boring. There are just no more accidental finds or small nifty features that really make you stop for a moment and think, “hey, that’s cool, I never knew…”
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