The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Description official descriptions
Freed by the decree of Uriel Septim VII, the Emperor of Tamriel, a lone prisoner is transported to the province of Morrowind. It seems that the strange dreams this prisoner has been having lately may have a connection to equally strange events occurring there. The protagonist is given a simple assignment: join the Blades, a secret organization whose goal is to protect the safety of the Emperor. This leads to a discovery of an ancient prophecy and an evil scheme concocted by a powerful deity whom the protagonist alone is able to stop.
Conceived in the tradition of the Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind is a fantasy role-playing game with a vast world open for exploration. After being released from a prison ship at the shores of the island Vvardenfell, the protagonist may do more or less what he or she wants: follow the main quest and solve the mystery of an ancient prophecy, join any of roughly a dozen guilds and rise in their hierarchy by performing duties, or simply explore the gigantic island with its stylistically diverse cities, hundreds of dungeons and tombs, ancient ruins and mighty fortresses.
Morrowind uses a two-stage skill system. The hero’s primary stats (strength etc.) increase with each level gained, while secondary abilities improve by use – for example, the more often the character jumps, the more proficient he or she becomes in the Acrobatics skill, etc. The action-oriented fights are simple exchanges of strikes or spells, until one combatant dies. The enemy's hit points and condition were not originally shown; however, at the request of customers a health bar was added for enemies as part of the first upgrade patch.
The protagonist's race and gender, but also his or her reputation influence the reactions of NPCs. If a character’s sympathy for the hero is low (rated on a scale from 1 to 100), he might refuse to answer questions; if it is high, the player will get more detailed information and better bargains in shops. Most quests involving other persons can be solved by persuasion, pick-pocketing, or simply by force.
The game's NDL 3D game engine is powerful in drawing wide, detailed outdoor landscapes as well as complex indoor environments. Transitions are not fluent; houses and dungeons must be loaded upon entering.
Spellings
- 上古卷轴III:晨风 - Simplified Chinese spelling
- 上古捲軸 III:魔捲晨風 - Traditional Chinese spelling
Groups +
- Animals: Cats
- Console Generation Exclusives: Xbox
- Covermount: Fullgames
- Elder Scrolls series
- Fantasy creatures: Dwarves
- Fantasy creatures: Elves
- Fantasy creatures: Golems
- Fantasy creatures: Orcs
- Gameplay feature: Alchemy
- Gameplay feature: Burden / Encumbrance
- Gameplay feature: Character development - Repetition
- Gameplay feature: Drowning
- Gameplay feature: Equipment quick slots
- Gameplay feature: Hunting
- Gameplay feature: Journal
- Gameplay feature: Paper doll inventory
- Gameplay feature: Pickpocketing
- Middleware: Bink Video
- Middleware: Gamebryo / Lightspeed / NetImmerse
- PC Gamer Presents games
- Physical Bonus Content: World Map
- Protagonist: Female (option)
- Protagonist: Visually customizable character
- Software Pyramide releases
- Technology: amBX
- Ubisoft eXclusive releases
- Xbox Classics releases
- Xbox Platinum Hits releases
Screenshots
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Credits (Windows version)
118 People (80 developers, 38 thanks) · View all
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[ full credits ] |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 89% (based on 83 ratings)
Critic [ Expand All ] | Platform | Score |
---|---|---|
GamerDad | Windows | 100% |
Adrenaline Vault, The (AVault) | Xbox | 100% |
Game industry News (GiN) | Xbox | 100% |
Legendra | Xbox | 100% |
Nerikes Allehanda | Windows | 100% |
Next Level, The (USA) | Xbox | 100% |
Game industry News (GiN) | Windows | 100% |
GamePro (US) | Windows | 100% |
GamerDad | Xbox | 100% |
Armchair Empire | Xbox | 100% |
Silicon-Fusion.com | Xbox | 100% |
HonestGamers (Staff reviews only) | Windows | 100% |
Withingames | Windows | 100% |
GameGenie | Windows | 100% |
GamePro (US) | Xbox | 100% |
Xbox Exclusive | Xbox | 97% |
RPGFan | Windows | 96% |
Atomic Gamer | Windows | 95% |
Game Chronicles | Windows | 95% |
Entertainment Depot, The | Windows | 95% |
ComputerGames.ro | Windows | 95% |
Armchair Empire | Windows | 94% |
Joystick (France) | Windows | 94% |
PC Zone (1993-2010) | Windows | 94% |
IGN | Windows | 94% |
IGN | Xbox | 94% |
CanadianGamer | Windows | 93% |
Gamesmania.de | Windows | 93% |
games xtreme | Windows | 93% |
GameZone | Windows | 93% |
[ 80 More ]
Players
Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 294 ratings with 23 reviews)
The Good
First things first. This game is truly a work of art, close to a masterpiece. When I started playing it, I was shocked by its complexity, starting with the character creation and finishing with the ending of the main quest itself. It's not like your common hack-n-slash RPG, that limits your actions by forcing you to do certain things in a certain order to progress.
Basically, you are a prisoner, an "outlander" that's been set free in the immense world of Morrowind, and is told to see a man in the town of Balmora. Now, you're on your own, and you can choose to fulfill your quest, or to start making a name for yourself, in your own way. Your actions will change the way the others look upon you. You can be a choose a life of crime, and people will be afraid of you, or you can choose to be a good guy, earning people's respect and admiration.
You can apply for membership in the various factions and guilds available, each with its bonuses.
The Bad
The game is somewhat incomplete, lacking basic needs such as eating, drinking, sleeping, bathing, etc. Also the dialogues, the NPCs' routines are rather lifeless. Not to mention that more than half of the map is a barren wasteland.
The Bottom Line
This game is a must-have for the RPG lovers, and despite all of its problems, it spawned a huge community of players and modders. All the problems can be fixed by using mods available freely on the internet.
Anyway, a great game by Bethesda Softworks.
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Windows · by tata_lu_stefan_cel_mare (11) · 2006
They did a great thing bringing this game to xbox.
The Good
One of the greatest things about this game is it's completely open-ended. The game starts out on a prison ship, and soon you are released on Vvardenfell, an Island in Morrowind. From there you can choose to follow the main quest and fulfill ancient prophesies, join one of the guilds and rise through their ranks, or just explore the huge island. You can stop and start any of these things at almost any time in the game. Those are just a few examples of how open-ended this game is.
Another great quality this game has is the graphics. The detail and quality of each individual object in the game is astounding. This game will probably give you 100+ hours of game time, if not, more.
The Bad
This game has few flaws, but they're just enough to piss you off. For an example, lets say you've gotten nearly to the top rank of a guild, you may have to make a choice, to stay at the Master rank of the guild forever or try to become a Magister and then the Archmagister which are higher ranks than Master. Seems simple to make the choice right? Well your boss "forgets" to give you the choice and you automatically get stuck at the Master rank forever. Glitches like this will pop up ever so often in the game. Of course you can get a patch for most bugs and glitches in the PC version, but obviously not for the xbox. Sometimes there are ways to avoid these problems but most people don't figure that out untill it's too late. The glitches in the game, avoidable or not, are too big a problem than we hoped fore.
The Bottom Line
This game is a must get for open ended RPG fans. And luckly, the new
Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game of The Year Adition, that will be coming out very soon, will fix many of the previously stated glitches and bugs in the game. It will also include the expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, which are also must gets for RPG fans. All and all, this is an amazing game that will keep surprising you when you think you've seen it all. This is my favorite game.
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Xbox · by Efrum TheRetartedRabbit (1) · 2003
If ambition equaled excitement, this would be tops. But it doesn't.
The Good
Let me start out by admitting that it's been several months since I played Morrowind. At first I thought that that would make my review a little suspect, but I've reached the conclusion that instead it might actually help people, since my remarks represent the impressions that have stuck with me over time.
First, the good. Morrowind is by far the most immersive RPG I've ever played. That's because it all takes place in first-person, in a convincingly rendered 3D world. Unlike most RPG's, which make you strain to convince yourself that you're actually the character on the screen, Morrowind lets you don the armor of your character of choice quite convincingly.
Hand in hand with that goes the fact that the art, the sounds, and the animations are all done nicely, and there are some genuinely interesting sights for you to see--at least for a few hours, until no matter what you see you'll have the distinct feeling that you've seen it all before.
Finally, the stats system is nice, with lots of areas for you to dump points into, and the freedom to shape your character as you'd like. Oh, and for the creatively inclined, the inclusion of a full-featured editor is a major boon--at least until your game gets so clogged up with crappy, doofus-grade mods that you swear off the use of them entirely.
The Bad
Ok. So much for the good. The bad: it's boring. Even though when you first start out, you'll be impressed by its seemingly limitless horizons, you'll soon realize that Morrowind is little more than yet another Federal Express simulator. The NPC's are flat and characterless, and there is absolutely no sense of life or activity in the countryside. Not a single butterfly or bird flits about in the sunshine. There is only lifeless landscape dotted with the occasional out-of-place looking "monster" (I put "monster" in quotes because none of them are particularly frightening). You'll be hard-pressed after a few days of repetitious slogging through Morrowind's environments to convince yourself that you're in anything like a realistic, living world.
Adding to this problem is the fact that Vvardenfell (the actual name of the island on which the game takes place) has got to be the most depressing place ever conceived. If Everquest is like crack, Morrowind is like Valium, and beyond one humorous main-quest NPC at the beginning of the game, there is nary a smile or bright moment to be had in the entire game. At least, there wasn't up to the point at which I finally had to quit playing before I just slit my wrists and ended it all. Every dark place is filled with evil and foreboding, but it's not exciting evil and foreboding, like, say, Mordor. It's dull evil and foreboding, like Cleveland, and somehow the designers have made even the bright, sunny areas of Vvardenfell seem merely like bright and sunny tombs full of nothingness.
As I said, the quests are boring. Even the main quest, which features one of those dime-a-dozen monumental revelations about your true nature so common to RPG's, lacks any ability to engage the intellect or imagination, and simply serves as one more excuse to send you hacking and slashing into yet another cave full of dark foreboding and evil. On the one hand you could ask, what does one expect from an RPG anyway? But on the other, you could ask with equal justice, why does the obvious and boring have to seem so doggone obvious and boring as it does in Morrowind?
The Bottom Line
Morrowind is a fun game for awhile, and is easily the most immersive RPG made to date. But it suffers from the somewhat serious defects of being boring and depressing. To be sure, it has legs among a certain segment of the population--those, I guess, who rather like boring and depressing games--but I imagine that for most people the interest in it will be relatively short-lived.
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Windows · by Jim Newland (56) · 2002
Discussion
Subject | By | Date |
---|---|---|
Add Game Group | karnak1 (22) | Dec 24, 2012 |
Morrowind vs. Oblivion | Unicorn Lynx (181607) | Jul 26, 2007 |
Trivia
1001 Video Games
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Content
Morrowind is told to include 3244 NPCs, 316.042 hand placed objects, 480 billion possible characters to create and play, 150 billion spells by using spellmaking in the game, and six full sized novels worth of text.
Creature differences
Some monsters and creatures went through drastic visual changes from Daggerfall and Battlespire to Morrowind. First, the type of khajiit are the same as those presented in Redguard, while the Dremora were turned from fair-skinned, horned demons to black and red-skinned demons. Harpies were replaced with (visually at least) Winged Twilights, and other monsters such as the slaughterfish, orcs and others remain much the same, though much better looking in true 3D.
Graphics
The reason Morrowind taxed higher-end computers as late as 2004 was the high number of polygons rendered in larger and busier areas.
References
There is a single daedric crescent from Battlespire hidden in Morrowind, but getting to it requires some work and initiative (it is not a part of any main or faction quest), or access to a hint guide.
Awards
- 4Players
- 2002 – #9 Best PC Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
- Computer Games Magazine
- March 2003 (Issue #148) - #3 overall in the "10 Best Games of 2002" list
- Computer Gaming World
- April 2003 (Issue #225) – RPG of the Year
- GameSpy
- 2002 - PC RPG of the Year
- 2011 – #14 Top PC Game of the 2000s
- RPG Vault
- 2002 - Game of the Year
- 2002 - Role-Playing Game of the Year
Information also contributed by calavera, Jason Musgrave, ShadowStrike and WildKard
Analytics
Related Sites +
- Baldurdash
Kevin Dorner's site has bug fixes for Morrowind - Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
The official homepage of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Contains general information, downloads, art, and plug-ins. - Hints for Morrowind
Need just a few clues about Morrowind? These question and answer hints provide nudges before the final solutions are revealed. - Morroblivion
A free mod that brings Morrowind into Oblivion by converting the game files. - Morrowind Summit
A Morrowind fan site containing vast amounts of information about the land of Morrowind and how to create your own Morrowind adventures. - Morrowind at RPGDot
Contains news, information, and downloads for Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. - Telesphoros' List o' Mods
One man's opinion of the ESSENTIAL fan-made enhancements (mods) to the Morrowind world. - The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - FAQs & Guides
A multitude of walkthroughs, faqs, maps, text files on Morrowind. - Wikipedia: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Article about the game in the open encyclopedia - Wiwiland
French modding community with a lot of exclusive mods.
Identifiers +
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by NeoMoose.
Xbox One added by Kennyannydenny. Xbox Cloud Gaming added by Sciere.
Additional contributors: PCGamer77, -Chris, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, OFoglada, Shoddyan, Sciere, Aubustou, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Plok, FatherJack, Kennyannydenny.
Game added May 10, 2002. Last modified March 10, 2025.