Kovax

For a lot of long-term Morrowind players who have sizable mod lists, changing over to OpenMW involves a lot of work, and a lot of their existing mods will no longer function. The fanbase is divided into those who are quite content with what's already been done and can still be done with the existing system, and those who want to throw a lot of it out the window and hope that the modders who are still active for this game and those who have long since moved on to other projects will all decide to redo their mods for the sake of the few new players using OpenMW. A decade or so ago, this would very likely have been possible and desirable; now it's more of a pipe dream. Quite simply, the active mod community for Morrowind is practically gone, compared to what it was a decade ago. I dabbled with making a few mods (and a mod to a mod to extend it to TR) back when TR was only covering a single region, but the continuous changes to TR made each update basically obsolete by the time I was ready to release them, so it never got updated. Until the OpenMW project is basically "done" and stable, a lot of modders won't touch it for that same reason. The idea was great, and the implementation showed promise, but by this point in time, I think they already missed the boat.

The series of Less Generic NPC mods (LGNPC) for various cities and regions add a fairly substantial number of small quests, not that there's any shortage of them in the vanilla game. Put it this way, after 10+ years of fairly frequent play, I haven't completely exhausted the vanilla content yet. There is no way to see everything with one character, and even two is either pushing it pretty hard or still impossible. Several of the faction quests can only be completed if you do NOT join a rival faction, so you can't do all three major House quests using two different characters without extensive foreknowledge of which quests block which other quests, and you cannot do them all with one character. Even the House Telvanni beginning quests include far more than you need to advance, so there's no need to do all of them in one play-through. Several quests are picked up in encounters with seemingly random NPCs, and many are only unlocked by doing some particular thing first, so you won't even know they exist unless/until you happen to do that thing. Basically, the game keeps growing in depth and complexity as you gain knowledge and experience, rather than too often tapping out the available content after the first encounter with each NPC (like some other Bethesda game that followed). It's pretty much a given that you WILL break a few quests long before you even know they exist, either by doing other quests, joining factions, or changing the dispositions of various NPCs along the way. Fortunately, there's no shortage, so you probably won't miss them unless you're keeping track and comparing to some wiki list or something.

I don't believe that a spell which casts Command Humanoid for one second on target, places a Mark at your current location, ALMSIVIs both you and your new "friend" to the nearest Temple, then Recalls you back to where you placed the Mark, would fit on a staff, if on anything. Anyway, It was the thought that counted, as a way for a devout Prophet to remove enemies without bloodshed. Besides, technically that first attempt DID teleport the target away, it just crashed the game as a side effect, because the scripts were never written to handle such a demented application. I'm actually surprised that it did anything.

I've made some amazing and some hilarous enchanted items in previous games. The most amusing idea, however, was a failure: ALMSIVI Intervention, on Target, on Strike. Hit the opponent and they're teleported to a Dunmer Temple to reflect on their misdeeds and erroneous ways. Unfortunately, while the target vanished as expected, it then crashed the game. Then there was my wooden staff: "Racerbane". Levitation 1 point for 1 second on Target, on Strike. Hit a Cliffracer, and a second later the Levitation spell ends, along with its natural Levitation ability. It falls to the ground, sits there helpless without legs to move on the ground, and screams impotently at you while you casually either stroll past or kill it at your leisure. Damaging the Strength of heavily armored opponents from a distance was another goodie, leaving them rooted to the spot (kind of like what happened to some naked Nord you meet along the road). Most bandits and other NPCs will have more than enough Strength to move in heavy armor even with a few points of Strength damage, so it may take multiple hits to stop them, and lightly armored targets are all but immune. My current character uses a trivial Light enchantment on a bow: 5 points of Light for 10 seconds, Ranged, on Target. Cast the enchantment on the bow at the potential target, and if the ball of light hits, you know your next shot with an arrow will be on target, without alerting them about your presence. Tall races in Morrowind (Nords, Imperials, Altmer, and Orcs) cause vertical deflection of the arrow flight, so you need to either judge the arrow drop (or climb if they're below you), or else use a ranging shot. Basically, it's the Tamrielic version of a laser sight. Also good in dim caverns where you're not sure if that's an enemy or a rock outcropping. Better yet, an enchanted BOW can damage otherwise immune targets (such as Daedra or ghosts), regardless of the ammunition or the enchantment.

It's also a very old game from a time when a Gigabyte of RAM was a lot. I would suspect system RAM more than VRAM. A more modern machine shouldn't run out, unless the program itself doesn't recognize more than a certain amount of memory. Many "semi-old" games have a 2Gb memory limitation, and if you've got a couple of utilities running in the background that use part if it, that's less for the program. Doesn't matter if you've got 8 or 16Gb, the program can only address the lowest 2. The solutions are to either disable any utilities chewing up RAM in the background, or to download a "large memory array aware" utility (there are lots of them, and most are free) that patches the .exe file to utilize 3Gb or 4Gb, depending on the utility. Run the utility, select the program, and click: done. That solved all sorts of crashing issues with Mount & Blade mods, as well as a couple of other games. Didn't run it on Morrowind, because the mods I use don't push it that hard. If it is VRAM related, you could try selecting a lower resolution and lower poly-count graphics mod, and see if it has the same problem. It could also have something to do with Steam "fixing" your installation, and changing a registry value to look for the default graphics files instead of where you have the mods, but I dont do Steam myself so that's just a wild guess. Take it with the proverbial grain of salt, if not the entire shaker. I'd at least look into the Steam chat sections and see if anyone else has the same issues.

The official Bethesda site has most of the chatter about this oldie but goodie, inclucing a far more active mod forum. Before their move to their current site (which I can't use from this location), I was extremely active on their old website. My guess is that Mad God may have moved on to other games, if not gotten involved in life-related activities like work and family. If he's still active, he'll most likely be visiting the Bethesda forums, not here. Without active permission, nobody competent is going to touch his mod. I did a semi-extensive mod-to-a-mod of my own, years back, but the constant upgrading of the TR project which it depended on kept rendering my updates obsolete by the time I finished them, and eventually I gave up on updating it. I'm sure he's likewise had to deal with conflicts and changes in other mods for years, and I wouldn't blame him for getting tired of it. You can only remain passionate about a project for so long before burnout becomes a problem, and most of the old modders have long since moved on, although a few came back after a couple of years away.

I believe it was a version of MCA that included the Undead mod. Not positive, but I think he ran into a vampire or something. As for MCA, I less than fondly recall trying to clear out the Hlormaren stronghold at a still somewhat tender level (5-8?), as I had done in at least one previous game with the original Morrowind Comes Alive (before it was formally abbreviated to MCA). I took down one vanilla defender using stealth archery, and lined up an apparently easy arrow shot on a second unfamiliar looking defender around a corner. The shot missed, and less than 2 seconds later there were AT LEAST 14 assorted high-level bandits charging at ridiculous speeds down the hall from both directions, and at least two of those summoned Daedra, just in case 14:1 or better odds wasn't enough. With arrows, spells, and thrown weapons flying from both sides, my character didn't have time between the appearance of all of those NPCs and the string of impacts of various painful objects to even open the menu to activate an Intervention scroll. The mod got a bit more than "over the top", in my opinion (and that was AFTER the Undead portion was made optional, and not used in my own game), and I don't think I could have cleared out that particular set of random spawns at ANY level. I recall running into another set of NPCs from the mod armed with some kind of enhanced Ebony weapons with higher stats than Daedric. When you keep running afoul of content that's far beyond "end game" in difficulty, frequently occurring in supposedly settled areas while still at low level, reloading gets to be a chore. After that, I switched to using Starfire's NPC Additions. If I didn't know anything about the vanilla game, and kept getting destroyed by large bandit parties with each member 20+ levels above me, I'd quite possibly consider the game "unplayable", rather than that my friend gave me bad advice about a "must have" mod.

What a new player wants to do is ultimately up to them. That doesn't mean that I need to recommend it. I vaguely recall one player quite a few years back whose friend suggested that they try Morrowind, but to use a particular mod for it. The player did so against the advice of at least half a dozen different posters, and hated the game because of the overpowered enemies that kept destroying his level 1 character in the starting village. When it was pointed out that those overpowered enemies were all added by that mod, he left a couple of rude comments and we never heard from him again. Unless you've played for a while, you can't tell what's mod-added content and what's part of the original game. Of course, if you REALLY want to change something, it's your game, and neither some Bethesda rep nor I are going to show up at your door to stop you.

I can easily name a couple of different ways to get a few thousand gold in a hurry, depending on your character's skills (Fighter, Thief, Armorer, Mystic, or Merchant), but those belong in the "Spoilers" forum. The easiest non-spoiler way would be to raid a few bandit caves and sell off the loot. Addamasartus, just outside Seyda Neen, can net you well over a thousand at level 1 (2 bottles of Skooma, 10-14 Moon Sugar, a couple of scrolls, plus all of the weapons and clothing from the bandits). Leveled lists mean that there are often more valuable items amid the usual clutter that you may get at higher levels, but you'll mostly get low-value loot at Level 1. There are often specific hand-placed items in a cave or ruin which are not level-dependent (a few tie into quests, many do not), so they're available at level 1 if you can figure out how to survive your little adventure to get them. As much of a spoiler as Creeper or the Mudcrab Merchant are already, there's an additional twist that I won't explain here in further detail.....but you can get free money. After some point, it's almost a trick NOT to collect far too much money to make sense, to the point where the entire Morrowind economy shouldn't have that much gold.

Morrowind provides several morally ambiguous situations, but in many of them, there's a "righteous" way out, if you're willing and able to find it. The first Legion mission is like that: simply get a deed from some widow, even though she refuses. Easy answer: taunt the widow into attacking you, and problem quickly solved, no matter how morally questionable your solution might be. Harder answer: I won't spoil it, but it ultimately leads you places and ties into other stuff much later in the game (including the Mages Guild and Main Quest). A couple of other quests I can think of involve killing someone for rather questionable reasons, although there are ways around it (in one, Percius Mercius tells you that it's not a valid mission, and to just pay the sum out of your own pocket). Then you have the "bad people" in Balmora, where killing them is the objective, but doing so without getting a bounty for doing so, or creating other legal issues, is heavily rewarded. The first couple of Mages Guild quests (and the "bet with Galbedir") are the wading pool. A couple of quests from the Balmora guild master are a bit more "questionable", but you can get quests from other guild locations instead if you want to avoid them. As pointed out, each of the Great Houses has its own strengths, weaknesses, and internal divisions. Hlaalu is typically mercantile, with a strong affinity toward diplomacy and covert operations, often crossing the line between shrewd business sense and thievery. Redoran is primarily concerned with honor and personal glory, and the latter sometimes conflicts with the former. Telvanni is all about individual knowledge and power, and a dog-eat-dog philosophy where might makes right....which leads to a lot of "incidents". The deeper you dig in the game, the more convoluted it gets, particularly relating to the role of the Tribunal, the Battle of Red Mountain, and the Disappearance of the Dwarves. The final answers to some of those questions are still open to interpretation or some uncertainty at the end, although you can generally come to a closer approximation of the truth than before. Besides, what could be more morally ambiguous than having the main villain of the game ask you about your motivations before the final confrontation, and you're given a list of several very different but entirely plausible options. I considered the MQ like peeling layers off of an onion, and it took a while to get past the blatant lies and twisted legends to get to the mere half-truths and less distorted self-serving interpretations of the events, from which you can glean some hints of what really happened. For comparison, I struggled through Oblivion to the final scene of Akatosh sending Dagon back to Oblivion, not struggling due to the difficulty but to keep myself interested enough to finish the stupid thing. In my opinion, Oblivion put all of its interesting bits except one up front in the tutorial, and the rest of the game was a let-down from there (that one last interesting bit was the conversation with - or rather a monologue by - Mankar Cameron about the nature of Tamriel before you kill him, sadly a case of too little lore too late). If you take out all of the lore that was left over from Daggerfall and Morrowind, Oblivion added almost nothing "interesting" to that world, and even watered down or threw out a lot of what already existed. I consider Morrowind to be a unique and well-thought-through world with a rich history, while Oblivion did a pathetic job at representing the very heart of a thriving Empire just past its peak. In the game, it felt more like the shattered remnants of an empire in the aftermath of some epic disaster. There was almost nothing said about politics, trade, or other things that one might expect to permeate the society to its core. The books in Morrowind reinforced and were reinforced by the in-game events (you meet a few of the individuals, and can visit more than a few of the places), while the books in Oblivion generally had little or nothing to do with anything in-game, often contradicting what you actually experienced. I was immensely relieved to finish the Oblivion MQ so I could return to the far more internally consistent, detailed, and believable world in Morrowind.

Usually, my first day in Morrowind ends with Foryn Gilnith having a "brief encounter with a sharp object", so I've suddenly got a hammock available for the night. Problem with the shack is that most or all of the containers are "owned", so anything you put in them will be considered "stolen" when you remove them, and much worse, ALL other items of the same type (example: all iron arrows) will also be marked as stolen for the rest of the game. Don't use the crates and sacks if you ever expect to be arrested, or else any of that stuff which you're currently carrying will be confiscated (why is my character suddenly naked?). I started work on a mini-mod to offer your character use of the empty shack "until a buyer is found" (which never happens) as an option instead of the 500 credit reward you get for the Tax Collector quest, which would also remove ownership on the containers, but I will probably never get back to finishing the mod. You could also pick the lock on V. Nuccius' house after you buy his cursed ring and he leaves for the mainland (he's not happy in Morrowind), but I'm not sure if the containers still have ownership marked or not. The local bandit cave (Addamasartus) provides free temporary storage until I have a real house, since "bandits have no righs" and the containers have no legal ownership. You can sleep in one of the above locations in the mean time, or use the bedroll in the Census and Excise office storage room. As for a permanent home, I've used several different places for different characters, but the most noteable would be: Hlormaren features lots of room, especially with a crafting mod that allows me to make furniture and more storage crates, and set up a workshop with an anvil and smelter on the lower level. Marandus has a nicer furnished interior than Hlormaren, but worse location and some respawning vermin on the upper level. The vermin and tipped shelves can be removed/disabled via console. A luxurious apartment becomes available in the basement of St. Olms after evicting the current residents. It's conveniently located in Vivec City with a richly furnished and paneled bedroom, but an awkwardly placed statue of good old Sheo parked in the living room, and you also need to keep the door closed to keep the sewer odors (and cultists) out. There are a couple of tiny apartments located along the above-water levels elsewhere in Vivec City which can be used, but they pale in comparison. Hlaalo Manor has that one "infinite storage" container (technically NOT infinite, because anything over a few thousand unique items will spawn a "loot bag" in the middle of the floor - I believe more than about 1024 items on console will do it, PC limits are substantially higher), but MOST of the more normal containers are marked as owned, and I don't recall which one or two aren't. I find the body in the middle of the floor far more disturbing than a big, ugly statue. Then there are the Great House fortresses which you can have built as a ranking member of the faction. It's nice when the game clearly recognizes that you own it.

This is probably a case of being months too late to the party, but here's some advice for the next potential player: The Morrowind Patch Project (MPP) replaced the venerable old Unofficial Patch, which fixed literally THOUSANDS of small item placement errors (flying plants, rocks hovering an inch above the ground, spelig erors, and various other details too numerous to mention). Supposedly, the latest MPP release has a few minor issues with the journal, which won't break the game but may be irritating. Check current discussions to see what the latest good/bad points are before adding. The Morrowind Code Patch solves a number of previously unfixable bugs and issues which were not fixable with conventional Construction Set based mods. It's highly configurable, although you may want to do a bit more research to decide which of the issues you want "fixed" and which of them are actually "unintended features" that you'd rather keep. You can re-run the utility to change those settings later. After playing OB and SR, you'll almost certainly want to run some texture replacers. Normally, I start with one overall replacer that stays faithful to the original art concept, and then add specific textures that also fit the look and feel of the original game. Better Bodies gets rid of the disjointed "marionette" look of the vanilla bodies (there are options to download bodies either with underwear or full nudity), and you probably want to add either a head replacer or at least some improved facial textures, otherwise it's rather comically cartoonish. I also added a "Reflective Silverware" mod, and one to resize potion bottles down from gallon jugs to something that fits into a pocket, higher resolution clothing textures, and MANY more. Wrye Mash was (and may still be) the default utility for removing or solving conflicts between mods. It takes a little bit of reading and some minor technical knowledge of files to get the most out of it. Since I'm currently running close to 150 mods, it's close to essential. With just the above mods, you probably won't have any conflicts to worry about. I would NOT recommend any mods that change gameplay or add items, factions, or NPCs to the game until after you've sunk at least 50 hours into the vanilla game. By that point, you should at least have some idea of what the game is and isn't, and what you want out of it. Making an uninformed decision and altering the game in ways that will disappoint you is far too likely until you're already fairly familiar with the game. Once familiar with the game, there are mods to alter combat, change magic, add extensive crafting of weapons, armor, furniture, clothing, and a host of other items, as well as mods to add NPCs (hostile and/or otherwise), lots of new creatures (including undead), extensive conversation enhancements and additional quests, new factions, new races, and a host of other changes too numerous to even list the categories. There are THOUSANDS of Morrowind mods available, covering just about every aspect of the game. Some players spend so much time adding and trying mods that they don't really have much time to actually play the game, and then there are a few dedicated modders who spend virtually all of their free time modding and haven't actually had time to play in years. Enjoy your stay on Vvardenfell, outlander. You'll be stuck here for a long time, thanks to the quarantine.

I just started up another MW campaign over the weekend, after a couple of years playing mostly Mount & Blade, X3:Terran Conflict, and a couple of Paradox strategy games (Hearts of Iron 3 and Europa Universalis 3). After playing Morrowind extensively back before Oblivion came out, I was eager to try Oblivion, but it turned out to be missing practically all of the things that I liked about Morrowind. At this point, I've probably got an absolute minimum of 4000 hours into Morrowind, compared to less than 100 before I gave up on Oblivion. From everything I read and saw, Skyrim took the few remaining good elements left from Morrowind and watered them down even further, or removed them completely. The most important critical difference was "failure": the "old school" RPGs like Daggerfall and Morrowind used the abilities of the character, not the player, to determine success or failure, and the objective for the player was to work within the constraints of the character, doing what the character would do under the circumstances. With player-skill game mechanics in the later titles, now you can have your Orc Barbarian pick difficult locks with ease, only because you as a player are capable of it, or else your agile and intelligent Bosmer thief can't pick a lock to save his life despite 90+ skill, purely because your shaky hands as a player are unable to master the mini-game. It''s now all about the player, not the character, and TES has clearly stepped over the line from RPGs with active combat to Action games with token RPG elements. Further, your Morrowind character has to sleep or use magic to regenerate health, and needs to sleep or use potions to restore their modest pool of magicka once it's been used up; magic is a strategic resource that needs to be carefully conserved until it's needed. In Oblivion, you've got rapid regeneration of magicka on the fly, but a comparatively shallow puddle that only allows for one or two tactical uses at a time; you can spam magicka every few minutes as long as you don't cast too many spells too closely, and there's no ability to "save up" more than a trivial amount at a time. I found it ridiculous to have my "mage" spending most of his combat engagements constantly blocking attacks until his magicka bar regenerated enough to cast again. Ideally, in a modern world, the "all or nothing" success or failure in the "old school" games could be moderated, so many of the failures would become "partial failures" or "marginal successes", but the "always succeed" aspect of the new games, with the AMOUNT of success being the only thing affected by skills, is disturbingly out of place in a RPG. Morrowind succeeded brilliantly as an RPG, but was pathetic as an Action game, whereas Oblivion and Skyrim failed in many respects as RPGs but handled the Action elements far better. The use of text for most conversation (other than initial greetings, taunts, and a few other spoken lines here and there) instead of fully voiced dialog as in the later games, allowed for far more depth in conversation, many more topics, random bits of lore, and gossip, and the acknowledgement in conversation of things that the player did. Your actions DID affect the world around you, unlike in Oblivion where almost everything in an area automatically reset in 3 days if you weren't present. Daggerfall and Morrowind used Attributes and Skills to determine the success or failure at various tasks, and Attributes not only contributed toward those chances of success, but in some cases limited the ability to advance or train at the related Skills. Oblivion watered down the effects of Attributes, making them almost meaningless in a game where "skill checks" rarely happened, and then Skyrim replaced them with Perks. From my understanding, Attributes were supposed to represent "who you are" in terms of natural abilities and inclinations, Skills were supposed to represent "what you learned" as an overall average indication of proficiency at specific tasks, and Perks were supposed to indicate unusual abilities, highly specific specializations, or other things too narrow or out of the ordinary to be defined by Skills. Morrowind could have used a Perk system to add flavor and further customization to the charater. Oblivion gutted Attributes and added "automatic" Perks which did nothing to differentiate one character from the next because EVERY character got them at the same skill level. Skyrim expanded Perks into a real system, but removed Attributes, so ALL characters run at the same speed and carry the same amount of weight. Sadly, no game made proper use of all three defining aspects to create a comprehensive character creation system. I'm still amazed by the attention to detail and the interactive nature of the quests in Morrowind, where your progress in one faction can affect the Disposition of members of opposing factions, or where doing one quest can close off or open up other quests in other factions. The later games feel simplistic and shallow in comparison, and only the primitive graphics, clunky animations, and visually awkward combat keeps Morrowind from being the indisputably better RPG. I'm playing it again (heavily modded), and loving it.