Thursday 6 June 2002

Pic of the day: Of course, the Avatar never had a tail. More's the pity.

Morrowind: TES 3 or Ultima X?

One thing that struck me about Morrowind was the similarity to the Ultima series, or the last games there. When I used the trailing camera view, the similarity to Ultima IX was almost too much - I found myself humming one of the Ultima songs after one of my Morrowind sessions. The graphics are vaguely similar on my machine with just a GeForce 2 card. I understand that with GeForce 3 or 4 you get shadow and ripple effects that are unique and captivating, but on my machine it looked much like a darker and less cheerful Ultima IX. And yet technically a bit more advanced. The way Ultima X might have looked if there had been one.

Another major "Ultimazing" factor is the size of the game world. Arena and Daggerfall were freaking huge but also repetitive. The architecture and costume varied with a few climate zones, but the basic structure was a random combination of the same elements. It was entirely possible that some of the small villages were identical except for the names of the shops, though I never could document this. Certainly some quarters of towns turned up quite often. Even the dungeons were built from standard blocks - freaking huge blocks too. And there were hundreds and hundreds of almost everything. People and places were not *meant* to be unique. You could get much the same quests and training and wares in Mercester as in Kaloguja; where you settled was a matter of personal preference. Some had cheaper shops, some had more temples ... it was all rather random. You just found a place that suited you.

In contrast, each city in Morrowind (and Ultima) is handcrafted, each NPC unique (at least somewhat) and each quest only given once and by one person. I guess this is more realistic, but it also shifts the balance a bit from RPG to adventure: You explore a village, or a dungeon, and when you have "finished" it you move on. Sure, Morrowind is bigger: There's supposed to be around 1000 NPCs and perhaps 300 tombs & dungeons. But the principle is the same. The world is limited and you are encouraged to explore it all.

(Real life, of course, is more like Daggerfall: Most villages are boring and similar, and so are the people in them, and most tasks must be done again and again. But in real life you are not allowed to take a Vampiric Ebony Katana of God's Fire and show the class police what you think of the way they treat the homeless ...)

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On the other hand (or paw, if you're a Khajjiit) there are some very Elder Scrolls traits in Morrowind. You can still choose from numerous races and classes, or make your own class. (Though the advantages and disadvantages now come bundled in 13 more or less balanced birth signs, rather than the supermarket approach in Daggerfall where you could get faster levelling or more hit points in exchange for an allergy to silver or a phobia of animals, or resistance to disease in exchange for not using tower or kite shield.) You still have the spell maker, potion maker and item maker.

In this, Morrowind goes one step further: Alchemy and enchanting are now skills, the way God meant them to be. Once you have the necessary education and equipment, you can brew your own potions without first doing 12 quests and training a couple unrelated skills to a fairly high level. The same for enchantments, I think. Indeed, even using enchanted items seems to give some understanding of that skill.

The new skills and two new races are laudable additions in the grand old TES tradition. But the game as a whole has shrunk and shifted some of its weight from free-style RPG to adventure. The focus has shifted away from the spirit of role playing - to build your character - and to the spirit of adventure: To explore the world and do the right things in their proper order. Ultima was just such a game in the balance between role playing and adventure; Morrowind is not quite there, but a large step in that direction.