A review with our experiences, preferences and over all thoughts on Morrowind? Thats quite a tall order. But since I'm sitting here with two broken ribs and not much else to do, I will indulge you (and myself).
I have finished Morrowind and the Expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon. I initially started with a Redguard specializing in a couple kinds of swords and things. The game does start slow. Very slow. For people used to linear games with a good pacing it probably would feel overwelming. Truthfully, I really like an open ended sandbox feel for a game, but not everyone does.
Anyways, the combat overall is pretty weak. It gives the appearence of being action based, but is instead almost entirely stat based. Since combat is the main feature and problem solving method in the game, the fact that it feels awkward and ineffectual to me is a major stumbling block.
Another major stumbling bock is, despite the open ended nature of the game, there isn't actually a lot to do. The lands you wander are mostly empty, the NPCs you meet are almost all the same, and the conversations with them consist mostly of clicking through long blocks of text being entirely unable to respond except by clicking on highlighted links in the text that lead to other long blocks. The only statements you ever really make consist mostly of "Yes" or "No". This really bugged me. Every NPC has mostly the same text to give you, and are treated mostly like dictionaries. You must also be sure to click through every link as you might otherwise miss a quest some random block of text might give you.
Speaking of missing quests, the Journal system is horrible. It doesn't help you organize anything. Its confusing and you can very easily miss important details (for example, that you have finished or started a quest).
The leveling system is interesting, but easily abused. I liked some of the ideas of it, although the flaws tended to really bug me. Overall not so bad if you have the ability to prevent yourself from hopping all over the world like a bunny in platemail.
The customization features are really good. Everything you wear or use is represented in game, which is really nice to see. I'm not one to be impressed by graphics, but this aspect was one of my favorites in the game. I wish more games of this nature could do the same.
Anyways, after putting about 8 hours into the game with my first character, I decided I just didn't like the way my character was shaping up and decided to start over.
I restarted as an Imperial with less combat oriented skills. The going was A LOT harder and more frustrating. I spent hours building up my skills, only to find many of them are pretty useless. However I refused to start over again and continued on. I very quickly grew tired of the quests being issued by the various guilds. Most were very boring and of little interest. I also explored on my own as much as possible. At first this was fairly interesting, but I soon realized there wasn't very much out there for me to explore. Yes there was a lot of space, but there was little actual content to that space. And again, it always seemed to come back to the NPCs. They were just cardboard cutouts with some person off stage shouting lines to me. Horrible.
I finished the main quests and continued on to the Tribunal quests after some assassin attacks. This was pretty boring straight forward hack and slash. Since my character was by now very well armed and skilled in combat (By neccessity, it was entirely unviable to use other skills) I didn't have too much problems.
Bloodmoon was much better. Figuring out how to get to the Island was a pain for me, but once I got there I began to really have fun. It was how the rest of the game really should have been. Character interaction seemed alot better, influencing the island's population was great and it felt like I was having an impact on the game world there. It also had several interesting stories going on at once, which I liked. There were some flaws of course, the NPCs still seemed stiff, but it felt better. I had also taken a break from the game before this part, so maybe that influenced my feelings.
Overall I would say that, I don't particularly like Morrowind. Its not so bad to me, but its really not that good until the very end. To me, the high level end content doesn't make up for hours and hours spent before. I put maybe 40 hours into the game over the course of almost two months. Most people who don't like it give up long before that, and I only continued because I am compelled to finish all my games.
As a note, like a couple people mentioned, there are a great deal of mods now available that add a lot of content to the game. However they don't fix the boring and lifeless NPCs. The only one I saw that was interesting in this regard added a romance story (not for the Player character) to Seyda Neen. This was interesting and fun, but thats all it added. Wandering merchants and random bandit attacks also helped, but I never got over the feeling of an empty sandbox. I said earlier I like a sandbox feel to a game, but it needs to have some fun toys and maybe other children playing in it. This one just feels empty to me.
If you do play, I suggest you stick with it for longer then a couple of hours if you don't like it at first. You really don't get a good feel for the game until further in.
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