Where do you guys rate Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on the greatest-RPGs-of-all-time?

[misfits859]

Is it possible to beat the main quest without a guide? I always wondered if a large percentage of players actually beat it without help. After I finished it I just felt that the game world was just way too big to be able to figure it out on your own.

[pseudonym]

Yeah, it's possible to beat the main quest without a guide. I think that there are a couple of ways to screw up the main quest if you sell certain items, kill certain characters, etc. At least with Oblivion, you couldn't sell any important item and the quest page is much better than Morrowind. I've never played the PC version of Morrowind until recently.

[Gooch3008]

Morrowind is a fantastic game. A very fleshed out world to explore, indeed.

[swlovinist]

Morrowind has its fans, I am not really one of them. As time and priorities have changed in my life, so have my game tastes. Ten years ago, when time was unlimited, I probably would have wanted to play more games like this. I played Morrowind back in the day, and have to say I just got bored wandering. More of KOTR fan personally, but respect that this game is good...just not my cup of tea. I am now more in favor of games that you can pick up and play 15 minutes...not 150 hours..

[Lady Jaye]

I do have Morrowind for Xbox and I've yet to play it. In fact, I'll probably finish Oblivion first, and that was put aside when I started playing Dragon Age... Oh well, eventually I'll get to it, especially now that I have an original Xbox.

[misfits859]

Forgot to mention that Morrowwind's soundtrack is one of my favorite ever.

[calthaer]

Morrowind is like looking through Google and not knowing what you're searching for. That's the thing I hate about the game because when I owned the Game of the Year edition, I never really made any actual progression because it felt too much like every random person had you do a fetch quest here and there. With Oblivion you had some idea what to do because it pointed you in the direction you were required to go.

I think of it as being something like the early Adventure games, like King's Quest / Space Quest and so forth. I'm thinking in particular of the "NIKSTLITSELPMUR" puzzle, but in general those games required you to come up with the one particular solution - the one that the developers had in mind when they made the game. It's weird, because the quests aren't quite like this - there are lots of people that explain what the factions are, what sorts of skills they require, where to find the quest-givers for that faction...you can pretty much ascertain where to go to get some "action" that's appropriate for your character.

The problem is that there are loads of other "questions" that a player / character might have. Where can I find a particular item, or type of item, for sale? What kinds of "legendary" items are there that I might find particularly useful for my class / skillset? Or, what type of purchaseable item is "best-in-class," and who sells it? If you don't know about this, who would or might? Where can I find someone to train me in a particular skill? Where can I find the shrine to a particular deity? Where might I find a particular type of monster, or ingredient (that grows / spawns in one region or another)? What sorts of monsters out there should I be particularly wary of? You can't find out much of this info in-game at all, although it is there in part (e.g., there's someone somewhere that tells you that a particular town is a good place to buy spells).

Looking at the Wiki and getting those sorts of answers all in one place, I can see how the developers might have expected such things to be obvious, perhaps with a little bit of educated guesswork...but I can also see how, for a new player, trying to find these sorts of answers can be overwhelming to the point of forcing one to use the "hint" file. You don't even know where to begin, because there are few pointers - if any - in the game itself, and if there are, they're well-hidden (and some of them only showed up in the expansion - for example - and maybe slightly spoiler-ish - the museum that told the player what sorts of "artifacts" exist...but then again, this relies on a player finding the ONE place in the game where they can get that information, with no signposts pointing to the museum as the source of that info, and even then, the museum provides no hints as to where to find any of those artifacts). They even include "libraries" in the game with a lot of books, but said libraries don't contain any useful information whatsoever in terms of those questions I've posed. In a post-Google age, when people expect information on anything to be obtainable from some source out there, I hope that they make this a bit better for their future games.

[josekortez]

Saddest part is that I didn't understand what I was supposed to do with all the stuff I found in Morrowind until after I had played Fallout 3 on 360. Durh!!!

[Ninjamohawk]

I loved the atmosphere of morrowind but the combat is assy

[Zthun]

Yeah, it's possible to beat the main quest without a guide. I think that there are a couple of ways to screw up the main quest if you sell certain items, kill certain characters, etc. At least with Oblivion, you couldn't sell any important item and the quest page is much better than Morrowind. I've never played the PC version of Morrowind until recently.

It's possible, but this is one of the rare cases where having someone guide you through the game is more fun. Big worlds are fun to mess around in, but when you've got something overly massive; it's really not at all enjoyable if you find yourself at a point where you get stuck.

[Night Driver]

@ calthaer

No. You had it right the first time.