Saturday 1 June 2002

Pic of the day: By now my character is wearing a mixture of around half steel (heavy) and half bonemold (medium) armor. I doubt there is any training available for such a combination...

Morrowind, day 2

Like Daggerfall, Morrowind is a skill-based RPG. The concept of "experience points" is completely eliminated. This means that you won't become a better thief or mage by bashing trolls over the head. You can still do it, of course; and if you survive long enough doing this, you will get really good at bashing things. But you won't gain any levels, and you won't improve your attributes (or "stats" as some may call them).

Your skills go from 5 to 100 (you're supposed to at least know not to hold the sword by the pointy end when you are released into the game world). The skills that are important to your class start at higher levels, in tiers depending on just how central they are to your person. For instance a Crusader, such as my character, will have weapon skills in the first tier and magic in the second. He (or in this case she) relies primarily on weapons, but with magic as support. For most mage classes, magic will be the essential skills and weapons somewhere further down, depending on your subclass. Let me show you how this bears out in practice: I go into a room where a giant rat is waiting. As a crusader, I cast a conjuration spell that summons a magical mace, which strengthens my blunt weapon skill and does additional damage. Then I wade in and use my weapon and armor skills. As a mage, I would instead prepare a devastating spell to release as soon as I entered; if the rat survived that, I might have to rely on my staff to finish it off. You see the way skills define what kind of person you are?

***

In Daggerfall, there were many sentient non-human races, and we had an array of language skills: Orc, nymph, centaur, harpy and so on. This is not the case in Morrowind. The few orcs who live here have learned the Imperial tongue, and the rest of the critters are less than humanoid. So bye-bye to my Linguist class, which was one of my favorites in Daggerfall ...

Instead we have finally got armor skills. This is highly realistic: You can't really just strap some heavy armor on a girl and expect her to take full advantage of it. In the beginning she will just stumble around and the armor will get in the way of her as much as of the opponent. She can learn how to use it by surviving battle (not necessarily winning – running away is often an option). Or she can pay a professional instructor to train her in moving right with the armor. Light, medium and heavy armor are different skills. I'd like to see some overlap: Being familiar with medium armor for instance might have given you a 50% bonus to using heavy armor, as compared to never having seen the stuff before. But that's not how it works. Still, it makes a lot more sense than just an on/off switch for armor.

When your significant skills have risen by 10 points (together, not each!) you gain a level. This gives you 3 attribute points that you can distribute freely. But you probably won't distribute them freely after all, because of the multipliers. You see, each skill is connected to one attribute. And the game keeps track of which skills you have used the most, and give you a multiplier for that attribute. For instance, if you have gained your level by fighting in heavy armor, then you may get 6 points of strength thanks to the multiplier, but only 3 point of intelligence. This will tempt the player to spend the attribute points "in character" for his class, while allowing some freedom for those who want to break out of the stereotype.

As you may expect, it is far easier to raise the skills when they are low. And if you want to buy training, it is also much cheaper to learn the basic than the expert stuff. Some trainers simply aren't experts themselves and so they cannot teach you advanced techniques no matter how much gold you offer them.

***

Oh yes, the matter of gold. The economy in this remote island off the coast of Morrowind is rather constrained, compared to the mercantilistic fiefdoms of Daggerfall. There are no banks, for instance. At least none that I have heard of. This means you can't take up a student loan to buy training in useful skills and buy decent starting equipment, the way you could in Daggerfall. (If you didn't know you could do that, I have two words for you: Nyah nyah!) But it is worse. The lack of banking means the various traders don't have unlimited gold either. If you find some really valuable stuff in some cave, your local trader may not be able to buy it off you. Even frequent visits with small loot will eventually exhaust his resources, unless you buy something off him too.

All in all, this game is a lot more like Ultima IX than its predecessors were, but it's still recognizably Elder Scrolls. You may or may not hear more about it in the near future, I'm still not quite sure.