What do you want, Outlander? (The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind (PC))

Member Name: The_bulldog

Product:	The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind (PC)
Date:	17/11/02 (351 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brilliant sounds, graphics., The choice oh the choices you get!, You get to beat up a God. , Did i meantion Brilliant storyline?

Disadvantages: No online feature. It could be argued that multiplayer might ruin the game though, SYSTEM HOG!

Well.
This game is absolutely superb! The graphics are brilliant, the gameplay is brilliant, the AI is brilliant, the sound is brilliant and the storyline is....waitforit.....brilliant. This has got to be one of the games of the year.

Forget FFX. This is a real RPG. A do what you want, go where you like romp. And that's the truth. The only limit is that you are on an island 3 square miles big. Though after playing through the game, you'll be claiming it's about a hundred square miles.

Let's start with the gameplay shall we? Always a good place to start in my opinion.

The amount of choice you get in this game is unbelievable! What do you want to be? A sneaky thief? An archer? A gung-ho warrior? All right here. You want it we got it. And if we haven't got it, I betcha there will be a plug-in (mod) ready to download that has what you want. Combat is in real time, rather than in other RPG's where if you encountered an enemy you go into a battle sequence, in Morrowind it plays more like an FPS. This has some very good advantages - being stealthy and attacking someone from range with a bow is now possible without having to worry about the inevitable battle sequence. NPC interaction is pretty good, despite the fact that you can't actually hear them say anything that comes up on the dialogue box. Every piece of useful conversation you have will be with text rather than speakable words. Mind you, when you approach a person they generally say something. You approach a temple guard, and he'll sneer 'I'm watching you.... citizen'

The choice, ah the choices you have in this game. You can have weeks of fun by not doing any quests or following the storyline, and just exploring. How good this choice is, it is impossible to say in words.

The amount of places you can go to are unbelievable - there are towns, majestic cities (well one) and rural villages. There are nomadic tribe camps, and se
cret tombs.
Ancient fortresses and ancient Daedric shrines.

The graphics are very rich, and the game's graphic demands on a PC a massive. This should also be system hog of the year as well.....On my Athalon 1.4 ghz 256MB RAM, and GeForce4 Ti4200 there are times when it will struggle if I crank everything up. But back to the graphics themselves. Everything is lush. Natural flora and fauna are quite amazing when you first see them. So are the creatures who inhabit this strange world (and NO I don't mean the NPC's!) The people, all the different races, are beautifully modelled, except that some races female heads are just plain ugly. A quick trip online to a site like www.morrowindfiles.com will soon rectify that! Well you get the idea. Everything looks how you would expect it too. An ancient ruin looks ancient; a rural fishing village looks like it has not had contact with civilization for years.

The sound is very detailed. As a low level character at the beginning of the game you sometimes feel afraid to go out at night because of the sounds! All the different races' voices sound distinctly different. From the low growl of an ork to the high pitch of a female high elf. The moans of a creature turned into a zombie by corpus disease.

The storyline. Ah this is difficult. I don't want to give anything away that would spoil the game. Needless to say you were a prisoner, and you never had any parents, and for now apparent reason, you are set free on the Island of Morrowind in the province of Vvardenfell in the Empire of Tamriel. You are told to seek a man called Casius Cosades. This is where the main quest starts. Of course, as I said before, you can do what you want, so you may just kill him, totally screw up the main quest, join the Morag Tong and become an assassin.
Of course you can be in more than one guild at a time, and you don't have to do the main quest non-stop before you do something else.

Ov
erall a brilliant
game. No multiplayer though. Oh and the expansion pack is already out in the States and should be over here soon.

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