I should play Morrowind again, it's been a long time.
I'm never going to play Morrowind again. Not because I hated it, but because my memories of it are so fond that there's no way a replay will live up to those memories and I don't want to spoil them with the harsh light of reality.
That was my takeaway the last time I replayed it. It's a game that influenced my tastes far more than I would have expected at the time but most of the "Morrowind did X better" that flies about is often coming from rose-tinted memories that aren't recalling it accurately. I really loved Morrowind and I would love to be able to revisit that first time with it again but I can't and my opinion of it was reduced by having a decade's worth of additional experience with games between that first playthrough and my most recent one. I don't want it to be further reduced by another decade of experience telling me just
how bad certain things we put up with back then were.
QFT
Once I learned the joys of the super-speed running feather potion ultra-bounce, my enjoyment was drastically hampered by the constant nagging of those
adorable cliff racers. Even when I'd obtained near-endgame gear, their annoyance affected my happiness while exploring.
One of the things that sticks with me most about Morrowind was just how amazingly FRESH and comprehensive its world felt. The building architecture, the depth of its factions, the conversations.
For its time, Morrowind threw one new opportunity after another at me in a way that strongly encouraged exploration and experimentation.
There were other excellent games from the same time period, like GTA 3/Vice City and Neverwinter Nights, that were combining complex subsystems with huge worldspaces. Yet those two didn't have such an alien feel that kept blowing my mind at every new turn. Scouring around for crafting ingredients wasn't happening in GTA. Neverwinter had awesome multiplayer, but the world was the usual DnD fare except in 3d. Meanwhile, stepping out into the swampy Bitter Coast was just the introduction to Morrowind's bizarre newness. Encountering cat people, lizard people, giant flea taxis, and using magic and first-person spell/melee combat along with a stunningly deep potion system kept me fully engaged. Raising the stakes further, Morrowind sent us to the eyeball-popping environs of Balmora, Vivec, and some freaky mushroom spaces that assured me the dudes making this game
must have been doing their own shrooms. This game is just too weird, nobody
normal is doing this.
And that was why Oblivion, as good as it was (excellent and better than Morrowind in many respects), was a bit of a let-down. Now that I had experienced a TES game, my dendrites had some idea of how things worked which took away a lot of the freshness. But the real disappointment was the lack of newness that was exaggerated by just how
normal the region of Cyrodiil felt. Sure Ayleid Ruins, Frostcrag Spire and the Gold Coast were beautiful, but Oblivion's primary weirdness was traversing through the endless gates, and those quickly became rote leaving an unfavorable impression.
Since then, Bethesda has pushed their formulas further in Fallout and Skyrim, but man... they're doing that whole franchise thing that takes away a lot of opportunity for creativity. Skyrim and Fallout 3 are over a decade past, and the only real newness since basically boil down to base-building in FO4 (which I feel took away from the core experience) and an mmo (which isn't new, it's just the bean-counters seeing potential $$$ a la GTA Online/WoW/Fortnite). I've loved TES and Fallout, but I can't overstate how thankful I am that Bethesda is even attempting Starfield. Plenty of Studios have cratered from just a single game, but not taking risks in the games industry is a path towards eventual irrelevance.
Maybe that's a part of why I've loved FROM Software's evolution; they aren't overly caught up in franchises and embrace The Weird even while attempting the new. FROM's constant is their combat systems and action-adventure focus, and within those confines FROM are still willing to toss their mega-franchise aside and explore new settings as they tweak their core mechanics. My least favorite FROM game, Dark Souls 2, had some fantastically odd locales and pvp newness. Ditto the more thematically consistent Bloodborne which executed its storytelling trip down Lovecraft Lane so beautifully, I didn't even realize I was ensnared until facepalmed by the obvious. Further cementing FROM's willingness to experiment was them ditching pvp/co-op and swords 'n' boards entirely to produce Sekiro, an absolutely insane ninja fantasy that ditches FROM's typical ambiguous lore for an excellent and focused narrative.
Now with Elden Ring, FROM are following a similar path to CDProjekt when transitioning from Witcher 1/2's segregated acts to 3's open world. Hopefully they can pull it off, and I'm pretty confident they will. Regardless of George RR Martin, I'm expecting FROM will revert somewhat to the vague storytelling ambiguity of the Souls series, but if they can craft a great and memorable tale in the process, while attempting so much other newness (a mount and jump button!), all the better.
To Morriwind's credit: at least they left the directions in the (bad) journal unlike other RPGs of the era which just told you once and expected you to remember/write it down.
