I decided to listen to Morrowind theme song.

[DrakeTheDragon]

A little bit of thread necromancy going on in here, but as much still alive and kicking as Morrowind is today so is this topic I guess. Ah, the memories...

 

MW was my first TES game as well, thus my introduction to the series I learned to love so dearly, and it was also my first real step into game modding...

 

...ah, no, scratch that. It'd be a blatant lie, considering all the messing around with Quake-engine-based games before, up to even diving deep into C++ to mess with things or create new stuff in modules.

But this can't be compared. I was mostly using existing stuff and put it to different uses. There was a sentry gun, or so it was called, but all its aiming was to point right at the target's 'current' location, thus of course only hitting unmoving targets ever!... Yeah, well, I made it 'predict' the target's course and speed and shoot at the interception point instead (spent months in train to university to fine-tune the algorithm). Then there was a rocket launcher, alright. I made it 'intelligently homing', or a 'smart bomb' (camera switching into rocket's PoV and player controlling it). Or shoot 5 of these babies and they keep cruising around your spot, following your every step as a sort of shield, until an enemy gets into sight range and 'swarm out' and *boom*. And last but not least, let's combine the predictive sentry guns with the shielding homing missiles, and you got yourself a set of intelligent 'battle sattelites' letting nothing alive ever come near you... fun times, but at the end of the day... it was just 'applied math', nothing else.

 

All of this changed with my first steps into modding Morrowind. The dabbling became serious. For the first time in history I started learning to create my own assets from scratch. Retextures were first, but models created in Blender were soon to follow, though I admit that was only after Oblivion hit the shelfs. I created my own custom races back in Morrowind even, but nothing was ever coming close to my later works in Oblivion, of course. The scripting there provided massively more possibilities I was seriously lacking before. But that was only the modding part of it.

 

The playing part was a whole different story! I immediately fell in love with the game and its background. While previously prefering the sci-fi setting, this new and alien fantasy world soon started getting at me. It was so 'deep'... you could immerse and easily get lost in it.

Ever spent a whole day (real life, not ingame!) in a virtual library only to not miss reading even a single one of the books and their captivating stories, many of them even relating right up to the current events going on around you right that moment? I couldn't stop until I literally 'absorbed' all of them, everything, all lore and stories and backgrounds... but that's a habit of mine. I keep doing it in about every single game I play, and if it doesn't provide enough for me to read into, it's not a game I'll be playing for long for sure.

I was pleasantly surprised to find all those books from Morrowind being re-integrated into Oblivion as 90% of the books found ingame with 10% new ones added, and in Skyrim again as well making 80% of the books to be found. Guess literature will always survive the ages one way or another. And it made those games so... 'connected' with each other, feeling like a whole, an ongoing story, the successors building up on the predecessors, in a way I have never once experienced in any other game before.

"That was a fine fairy tale I read there, enjoyed it very much... the daring adventurer and his band of brothers, all the adventures they got themselves into, and this hidden place of them where they stored all their loot, in this one cave in the... wait... I know that place! There's supposed to be a cave there?... Yeah, there it is indeed!! Now, where's that secret passage to their hideout they mentioned?... Found it! My, oh, my... Who would've thought? That story was 'true'... and there's their loot!! O.o"... if you know what I mean... that's immersion to me!

Or how about glaring hours on end into the sky during the night, just to identify the many different birthsigns to be found at exactly the places the literature I read a day before told me? Did you ever do that? Remember what it was like? It was an entire new world to live in during your free time or if you needed a time out from real life exhaustion... not 'just a game'!

 

As for the theme song... the ever-reoccuring theme song migrating through the entire series since its very beginnings (or so I was told) and still reoccuring nowadays even... yeah, that's a sledgehammer to your memory, pushing you right back into the good'ol times when you were playing all the predecessors and reminding you of how much you enjoyed every single one of them!

I still have it somewhere on my external drive today... together with all my savegames and a huge bunch of unreleased mods I created back then... though entirely not release-worthy any of them, of course. It was my playground, messing around with random things only to see what's going to happen.

 

Thanks for the YouTube link, Jim! Immediately got a massive flashback just by listening to it for a while! :sleep:

 

And sorry for all the spam here. Wasn't planning to write 'that much'... Guess a rush of 'nostalgia' just came over me on that one... :sweat:

Edited February 15, 2014 by DrakeTheDragon

[shelbypup252]

I, have never played Morrowind before, (I kept thinking it was so out-dated and bad), but then I finally bought it and played it, and it was the best thing... Better than Skyrim, or Oblivion for sure! :D

[Hoverarm1]

I remember getting this game years ago. It was free from a computer magazine my dad had bought. I didn't touch it until one day i had a friend over and we played it. One controlled the keyboard the other controlled the mouse. Then i really started playing this game and it is still the best game i have ever played. Sure it might not have the best graphics or game mechanics, but i lost myself in the world. even now i occasionally go back and play Morrowind, mostly after i listen to the theme and all the memories it brings back. :D

[Illuminated888]

You guys talk as if the game no longer exists. I still play it. ;)

[JustATac0]

I love it but i personnaly HATE the combat system.

[Oblivionaddicted]

I always loved the main theme.

 

I bought the game 8 years and a half ago and found it rather disappointing and frustrating at first. I modded and patched a lot since and now I love it. It's the game I play the most after Oblivion.

[Azurolf]

I played lots of First Person Shooters in those days and some Hack and Slash. RPGs made me yawn big time, especially the Baldur series. FPS and H&S were becomming to linear to my taste, and then autumn 2001 i read about an exciting new Title. I saw some images and was hooked straight away. When it finally hit the shops, i was so eager to try it that i took a day off. Stayed home for the remainder of the week. Next week i was 'very ill', so (i hope my boss don't read this - it is true i was cough cough very ill then)

 

Well. The total freedom, the fact that you put something somewhere and when you load that save it's still there, wherever, as many and as long as you want. Hardly ever played H&S or FPS anymore, to me MW has it all. Except - and that's where my mod comes in.

 

The tune will be played at my funeral, and my grave will have a miniature Azura Statue. THAT's how deep i am into Morrowind. It's my Bible.

[Arxa]

When I first started up MW all I saw was a wacky mess. Made me go buy my first graphics card upgrade.

[leonardo2]

The video JimboUK posted doesn't show in his post, but here it is...

 

 

...and in Polish.