Do the great houses have moral ambiguity to them?

[stebbinsd]

I've only played a small amount of Morrowind, mostly focusing on the main quest and the fighters and mages guilds. However, from what little I've seen, if this is supposed to be the greatest Elder Scrolls game of all time, the story simply isn't sucking me in.

 

Supposedly, the Great Houses are the most interesting factions. Tell me ... what exactly are the pros and cons of each?

 

Maybe it's the fact that I've been spoiled by the moral ambiguity that is packed like sardines into Fallout 4, as well as the occasional moral ambiguity in Skyrim (like whether to side with Saadia or the Alik'r during "In My Time of Need"). But from what I've seen of Morrowind so far, the story just seems to be Capital B boring. There's hardly any real plot twists or moral ambiguity of any kind.

 

Let me give you an example of the kind of boring storytelling I've seen in Morrowind. In the first city you enter - Seyda Neen - there's a dead tax collector on the outskirts of the village. If you find out who the killer is, you can go and confront him directly. And this guy ... freely admits to killing the dude! Like, the guy just straight up confesses to cold-blooded murder! Who does that?! He was PROUD of his horrible crime!

 

The closest thing I got to a legitimately interesting twist in this story was just how easy the case was to solve!

 

Or how about a quest in the Mages Guild, where someone has stolen some reports from another guildmate to try and sabotage her progress. So with no fuss or muss, she just outright tells you exactly where she hid these reports. She says that her enemy will never find them (even though they're literally right there in the guild hall), but she never considers the fact that you're actually hunting them down for her?! Why would she be so upfront with someone who wants to stop her attempts at sabotage?!

 

Do the Great Houses offer any moral ambiguity ... or even so much as throwing me for a loop every once in a while?!

[Oblivionaddicted]

House Hlaalu is by the most hypocrit of all the great houses since they are allied with the empire but practise slavery and a good part of its most powerful members lead the camonna Tong

 

And yes the game forces you to make some morality-related choices at some moments, even if you will easily know who's evil and who's respectable.

Edited August 2, 2018 by Oblivionaddicted

[Kovax]

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.

Edited August 1, 2018 by Kovax

[leonardo2]

I think you have the wrong impression about Morrowind, so why not play it for a while and follow the dialogue (by checking the journal at the same time being in a dialogue with a NPC in-game) when doing a quest.

 

Neither Oblivion or Skyrim has that.

 

Besides, Morrowind has the best story for a MQ hands down.