Morrowind - Xbox

I absolutely loved Morrowind. It was one of the first games I purchased for the Xbox and I played it for God knows how long, I probably spent ten hours alone just exploring and talking to people in Vivec. Since I bought it on Xbox I've played it at least twice as well as buying and playing it on the PC. I love games that allow me to explore and Morrowind exceeds at this. Though despite loving the game, I've never actually finished it, and because it's such an open ended game I'm not really sure how close I had come. I needed to remedy that. I needed to beat Morrowind.

One thing that actually somewhat shocked me is how well Morrowind has aged. For an almost eight year old game it doesn't look half bad. The character models are pretty bad as well as the animations, but overall the game is still rather pretty. I'm not one of those people that constantly complains about how games have just all turned brown, but it's kind of interesting to see the vibrant colors in Morrowind. The skies are sometimes a mix of blue, pinks, and purples. There's forests, mountains, water, things that feel like a true environment. It's a stark contrast between it and games where you sometimes feel like you're in a dull wasteland.

I will say that Morrowind is an absolutely great game. It's an amazing exploring experience and a great game with a great story on top of everything else. If you liked Oblivion, if you like Fallout if you like just kind of wandering on your own and making your own experience, you will love Morrowind. However there are a few complaints I had with this game.

The map and travel system are kind of lacking. The map is adequate but sometimes I would have liked a bit more detail. There were times when I wandered around for a half hour trying to find something that was actually marked on my map, it could get rather frustrating. I wish there could have been a way to mark your map, not necessarily a waypoint system but just a way to put a mark on your map so you could reference it. The travel system could get rather confusing as well. On many occasions I had to go and look on the internet what town I had to travel from to get to other towns and it became a maze of towns to get to one place. It could get confusing. Part of it made you feel like you were exploring even more, though with the game being as big as it is and with as much travel as there was it eventually became somewhat frustrating.

Okay, here's the weirdest complaint I've ever had about a game. It's too damn big. I absolutely love games that allow me explore. Fallout 3, New Vegas, Oblivion, I've spent around 400 hours just playing those three games. With Morrowind I feel like I could have easily spent that many hours just exploring it. I'm not sure how many hours I spent playing Morrowind, it doesn't keep track, I do know I started it February 10th and finished it around April 4th or so. That's almost two months of playing, I would estimate that I played somewhere between 50 and 100 hours, the main quest alone probably took close to thirty hours. Here's the thing, I would guess I saw less than 25% of the entire world. I didn't explore a ton of the caves, I didn't see a lot of the eastern part of the world, and yet I easily spent at least thirty to forty hours if not more exploring... and still only saw maybe 25%. If you explored every cave, every nook and cranny, every sidequest, every town, I would guess you could easily spend 250 to 300 hours on this game. Maybe more. It's huge. Amazingly huge. In Fallout 3 I did every quest I could, discovered almost every location, did everything I could in the game and finished all of the expansion packs. That took me 145 hours. I didn't even bother trying to complete the expansion packs for Morrowind, didn't explore probably 80% of the places I could have, I didn't do a ton of sidequests and yet it still took me almost two months to finish. Morrowind may actually be too big of a game. You may actually get tired of it before you could 100% it. The sheer size of the game is amazing.

Morrowind is a thoroughly enjoyable game. It's just fun. There's some annoyances here and there but overall it's a very solid game and still remains that way even seven years later. If you like exploring, if you like any of the other games I talked about, and if you have a lot of spare time, it is a definite must play.

Squid.