I’ve drafted this replay post about a dozen times because there are so many things to say about Morrowind that it is difficult to know where to start. The context of it’s development for Bethesda as a company is important, the direction it steered the Elder Scrolls series away from and into, and the unique take on world building, and storytelling. But how about we start at the bottom and work our way up? Let’s start with the vibes, man. Seyda Neen. Morrowind is a small roleplaying game that feels absolutely huge. The open world map is just less than half the size of the fifth Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, which released nine years later, but it’ll take just as long as that game to fully explore and interact with. Being set on a volcanic island, Vvardenfell, allows for the developers an in-universe reason to make an absolute maze of a road system through ravines, lava flows, hills and mountains. The first town you’re told to visit, Balmora, can be immediately reached by going north of your starting area, Seyda Neen, through an imposing area that used to house the lava of the Red Mountain. Instead, all directions tell you to either catch a Silt Strider (this fantastical country’s equivalent to a bus), or walk east and follow a safer, winding road past another town. It’s not that the old lava flow is any more dangerous that the proposed eastern road – it’s not, unless you venture into a cave at too low a level – it’s that the eastern road gets you the vibe of Morrowind: Travel. If you don’t like travel, you won’t like Morrowind. If this game had a tagline, it’d be that it’s all about the journey, not the destination. In part, this is why many of Morrowind’s quests may feel a little more simple than those in later games; in this game, being tasked to kill two poachers hiding out in a mine is just that. In this game’s immediate sequel, Oblivion, there would be a twist to be revealed about the simple nature of the quest that adds more narrative complexity flr the sake of interest. But that’s because, in Oblivion, you can travel to any major city location from the opening of the game, so the twists help prevent player’s getting frustrated with predictable narrative structures. In Morrowind? You have to drag yourself by your bootstraps to every location, and it’s likely you’ll gain a better reward and self-made narrative from going on a misadventure into a secondady location on the way to your actual objective. We all remember Sam and Frodo getting to Mount Doom, but I remember more vividly their stop in the Mines of Moira, or with a giant spider in a cave, and their first meeting with Gollum. Morrowind is kind of like that. The idea you might learn more about the lore, or gain equipment to help in your ultimate goal by being curious about destionations on the way to your final stop is what drives the whole gameplay loop. Another reason that the twists aid Oblivion is that it’s world was based in a traditional high fantasy setting, so it’s twists and turns in narrative helped to keep a mostly recognisable setting feel like it could still surprise you. Morrowind’s world, on it’s volcanic island where you are carried from town to town by giant fleas, which are steered by drivers directly manipulating their nerves, is much more alien and foreign. The entire game is based around the idea that you are somewhere you don’t belong, with the nationalistic and xenophobic among the population calling you an “n’wah”, which is a slur assigned to foreigners. They’ll even call you this if you play as a Dark Elf, who are native to Morrowind, because the game opens with you arriving from another province in which you’re implied to have been in for a while before the game’s start. As such, the writing of Morrowind concerns itself with making the world understandable. You might find it strange that more miners mine for eggs than they do gold, but then you realise that the egg mines easily account for more than half the sources of food produced in the whole game. In Morrowind, worldbuilding and understanding your place in it, as a player, is the priority of the narrative and broader writing. The quest structure aligns itself accordingly; an early Fighter’s Guild Quest sends you to an Egg Mine where you can optionally choose to speak to the miners to figure out which animals inside may hurt you, which are peaceful, and why exactly the miners are never attacked. Early Mage’s Guild quests send you scouting for ingredients and helping associates finish disertations, which you can optionally read to gain understanding of how to make your own potions. The Tribunal Temple quests send you on pilgramages so you can see what the Dunmer faith values based on it’s holy sites, and associated rituals. It’s because of this, and the game’s commitment to making you experience the world through manual travel, that small and basic quests can work. One of the earliest Mage’s Guild quests you can get is to collect Guild dues from a member in the wilderness. If you’ve been doing the quests in order right after arriving in Balmora, you’ll get this at a very low level. With no arrows onscreen to tell you “this is the place you have to go to”, you have to refer to your journal and interpret the directions, engaging with the road system, landmarks and terrain to navigate to the first truly remote place the game tells you to find. If you head out without potions, a good spell, or with your armour in such bad condition it’s about to break, you’re going to struggle. But you won’t be defeated because, at a certain point, you’ll get too far into the misadventure of being lost, hiding in other unrelated caves, and resting that you’ll find you’ve gone too far to turn back now. This is where Morrowind excels the most, and why it doesn’t need clever twists to work: When you’re lost, cold and alone, you’ll play better and you’ll become more powerful as a character and a player by overcoming, what will feel like, immesurably difficult bullshit. And when you finally find that girl in the cave and she WON’T pay her guild dues, you may just consider stabbing her to death. But that’s sort of the point; Morrowind wants you to feel so out of place in this world that every journey feels you’re walking from the Shire to Mordor, and if you get there unprepared for what you might find, you’ll feel like Frodo when he collapses on the side of the mountain, unable to move due to the sheer weight of that small ring. That’s a simple quest in Morrowind. A lake on fire. Consider this: A quest where you must get from the southern most point on the map to the northern most part of the map without speaking to anyone because you’ve taken a vow of silence as part of a holy pilgrimage for the local temple. This is such a mechanically interesting part of the game because it arrives at a point where, if you’ve managed to play this long, you probably know the game’s public transportation networks better than those in your own hometown, but now you can’t use them because you can’t speak to anyone to tell them where you’d like to go or offer them money. It also means that if you take the oath of silence before provisioning for the pilgrimage, you can’t speak to anyone afterwards to buy the supplies you need. So, how is one to get from one side of the map to the other without breaking their oath? Turns out there’s a lot of clever ways. One is to use Mark and Recall. One spell allows you to mark a location on the map, and the other allows you to teleport to it from anywhere, at any time. You mark the destination before taking the vow, use public transport to get back south and take the oath, and then recall back to the destination. My favourite is to take advantage of a shrine from an earlier pilgrimage, wherein you offer a levitation potion to it and it grants you the ability to fly extremely fast for ten or twenty real life minutes. So you buy the potion, offer it to the shrine, then take the oath of silence, and then fly right of over the fiery Red Mountain to the other side of the map without needing to pay for boats or Silt Striders. It is a challenging quest but, again, quite simple. Go from A to B, but under specific conditions linked to the local traditions of the temple. It arrives when it does to test if you have really mastered the game’s mechanics, understood and remembered the layout of the world map and strictness of the temple, as though you’re studying for your final exams. If you really want, you can just walk and swim too, which is totally valid. It’s a great culmination of Morrowind’s desire to have you be IN the world, and not just the loading screens between locations, and it’s worldbuilding. At it’s best, Morrowind merges the sandbox elements and worldbuilding to leverage you with challenges such as this. Temple in Vivec City, and the Ministry of Truth above it. The most compelling thing about Morrowind’s worldbuilding, though, is that it is what it is. Slavery, for example, is practiced by every single native Dark Elf faction in the game. Any other RPG would have a whole dedicated quest line to you freeing all the slaves or abolishing the practice because you’re the hero. Morrowind doesn’t because it presents slavery as something too big for you to solve as someone who exists in the world and isn’t the most important person in it just because you’re the player. This even extends to the you’re the chosen one main quest, wherein it’s left completely and utterly ambiguous if you actually are the chosen one, or just someone who happens to fit the bill. You can find slaves, find the keys to their bracers and free them. You can work with abolitionists, if you can find them, and you can even speak to representatives at foreign embassy’s about how none of them support it either. You can buy slaves for the purpose of freeing them, and can murder all the plantation guards and owners. But none of that ends slavery as a legal practice. I respect this, actually, because it doesn’t infantilise the player or risk trivialising the subject matter by charging in headlong with the suggestion that, if one man just tries really hard he can end slavery and change the minds of people who value it as a right and tradition if he just tries really hard. To do that would be to put the player’s power fantasy above the sensitivity of the subject matter, and I think a good balance was struck by allowing for the player independently engage with disapproval of it as they go. Another example might be the Ministry of Truth. This is a giant meteor frozen in mid-air by the God Vivec. Inside, his secret police house enemies of the state and you are sent to break in and free a member of the dissident priests who was arrested for reading an outlawed book. It’s essentially a concentration camp. And while you can break in, either subtly or guns blazing if you like, you can’t have the heroic moment of totally destroying or otherwise shutting down the practice of having a government run and approved political prison for good. It is what it is. Morrowind presents the world to you, goes to great efforts to let you understand that world, and quite firmly says that these things have been this way for a long time, and may well be that way for some time after the end of the game. It does put the developers in a tricky position, though, since a big appeal of the RPG genre is having the power to choose and decide outcomes. By following the main quest you can get Vivec, one of the Dark Elven Gods, to tone things down a bit. You go on a long journey into the wilderness, away from the political houses, to live among tribal nomads who believe in the Nereverine prophecy that suggests the ancient hero Nerevar, who originally united the Dark Elves, will be reincarnated. These people are persecuted for this belief because, if you take the time to read some of the history books lying around in the game, you can piece together that ol’ Vivec and a couple of his pals probably murdered Nerevar as a means to become Gods themselves. Take a guess who the Nereverine could be? That’s right, you! Or, is it? As I said before, the game is playful with it’s chosen one cliche, as it implies multiple times you might just happen to fit the bill. It even goes so far as to say you’re not the first random guy to turn up to an Ashlander Camp claiming to be the Nereverine with an actual foundation for that belief, and many others got pretty far into fullfilling the prophecy before falling flat. The list of past “failed incarnates” is actually quite high. If you think about it, that does actually make sense considering the thousand-year-old age of this prophecy. Statistically, someone, or many someones, could fit it and claim to be Nerevar reborn. And the Ashlanders see this as a way of legitimising the prophecy, while Vivec uses this to slander it. This puts you in a sticky situation, though, as the main villain, Dagoth Ur, is certain you are Nerevar reborn. Back in the day, Dagoth Ur was one of Nerevar’s closest allies, but unlike Vivec he didn’t betray Nerevar. Instead, Nerevar tasked him with defending the something called the Heart of Lorkhan, and he went a bit mad while doing it, so had to be put down. Of course, his being here in the main plot means that not only that he didn’t die, but that he returned in the place he was thought to have died: Right in the centre of Red Mountain, guarding the Heart of Lorkhan. This heart is the source of power that Vivec and friends killed Nerevar for, so that they could use it to ascend to godhood. Now they are cut off from it, unable to renew their slowly fading powers, while Dagoth Ur uses it to create a divine disease, Corpus, to spread across the land and drive the n’wah from Morrowind, just like Nerevar did when he united the Dark Elves. Vivec, the God As Dagoth Ur’s plan comes closer to fruition than ever before, and the Dark Elven Gods become weaker, Vivec is forced to acknowledge that you might be the Nereverine even if he does not actually believe it himself in any capacity. This way, he can name you Nerevarine and use you as his weapon against Dagoth Ur. Understanding he will have to, in some way, make this right with his doctrine that has persecuted quite a lot of people, he agrees to end the persecution of the Ashlanders and of the dissident priests, who are the folks that wrote all those outlawed books, in return for empowering you with the tools required to destroy the Heart of Lorkhan. Destroying the Heart, of course, severs not only Dagoth Ur’s divine powers, but also his own, and that of his two pals who helped him to kill Nerevar. Ultimately, I think it is a rather elegant narrative turn. The whole game you’ve been presented with these larger than life ideas you can engage in but not force to be any different because of the strict, stagnant and nationalistic nature of the land. But it is those very same traits about Vivec’s rulership that lead to him having to end the practices that protect him and his divinity the most: If he could have embraced change, embraced the truth about his own past, he could have become a new Nerevar in his own right and united the Dark Elves against Dagoth Ur. Instead, he missed his shot through millennia of clinging to control. So it is that he has to surrender the fame, recognition and responsibility to you, whether the prophecy is real or not. You might feel like you’re getting hard done by, being told YOU have to end this, not the folks who set it all off in the first place, but in doing so you’re robbing them of the opportunity to save the Dark Elves themselves. After beating the main quest, and when speaking to random NPC’s, they don’t thank their Gods or their private armies, or the temple, they all thank you. You, through studying history books, appealing the shunned nomads and persecuted priests, through going the extra mile to understand the world, and not just smack monsters, bring about meaningful change to the entire country and are personally thanked for it. All because their false prophet of a God was forced to acknowledge you as the real hero due to his own greed. That’s what you call a narrative power fantasy. Almalexia The Tribunal DLC picks up right after this, as an epilogue to the main quest, in a city far away from Vvardenfell. It concerns Vivec’s aforementioned buddies, Almalexia and Sotha Sil, who helped him to betray Nerevar. Almalexia takes centre stage and is a manipulative narcissist clinging to power. She is becoming mortal now, and cannot rely on her previous unlimited power from the Heart to keep her dominion. Already, King Helseth is plotting his way to positioning his monarchy as an authority above that of the temple in the wake of recent events. Helseth is the gateway into the DLC, sending assassins to kill you as he assumes that, as Nerevarine, you will represent the Temple and it’s beliefs symbolically even if you don’t find yourself actually aligned with them. You play a game between him and Almalexia of one-upmanship until Sotha Sil attacks the city. Almalexia also knows you represent the temple, whether you want to or not through Vivec’s recognition of your status, and sends you to Sotha Sil’s realm where she has laid a trap for you to die. Her plan is for you to be her martyr; to die in her name so that she can continue to cling to power even as her divinity weins. The hero of Morrowind dying for the Lady of Mercy is a good story, and better propaganda, no? If it were ever to be found that she helped betray Nerevar, that would now be overruled by the fact you were last seen doing her bidding and dying for her personal cause. Only, of course, you don’t die. You find Sotha Sil is dead, and didn’t launch an attack at all. It was all orchestrated by Almalexia, who killed him and used his realm to attack her own city and position you and her as it’s saviour. With you alive, she comes to his realm to kill you. She can’t allow you to come back, after all. Only, of course, you kill her. But her corpse is lost in that far away realm and so no one will ever know she died, only that she vanished. You can tell anyone in the game what really happened; that you killed her after she killed Sotha Sil, but no one will ever believe you. And if you suggest any such idea, they will lose disposition with you, which is how the game measures how much an NPC likes you. It’s an inverse on the main quests empowerment, of making you become the saviour who is thanked by all. None of the events of Tribunal will ever be publicly known. All people will remember is that Almalexia went to Sotha Sil’s realm, after he supposedly attacked the city, and then never returning. But neither did Sotha Sil attack again. To the public, both are missing. Ironically, she has not elevated the weining influence of the Temple, but ensured it’s downfall. She has smeared the name of Sotha Sil, the third Dark Elf God, and publicly named him a betrayer and tyrant, before leaving the city and never returning the people she tells she loves and cares for. Sotha Sil All that leaves is Vivec. He is still alive. But what is he to do? He can’t claim to have solved any of the recent problems in the land, remains head of a smeared and collapsing religion, and is slowly losing his God powers and becoming mortal. You can tell him what you did, and he will be the only NPC to ever believe your story, admitting that he had thought Almalexia was plotting against him too. You can choose to kill Vivec, or leave him be. In the next game, Oblivion, NPC dialogue indicates Vivec disappeared at some point, but no one knows why. It could be that the Nereverine did kill him, or it could be that he knew the jig was up and buggered off to his own realm like Sotha Sil had. Later, in Skyrim, it is revealed that the Dark Elves consider Vivec, Almalexia and Sotha Sil to be false Gods who abandoned them when they were most needed. They have resorted to a new form of worship now, with the old temple collapsed entirely. There’s so many moving parts in Morrowind considering that it’s a game where so few NPC’s actually move. It’s quite impressive how these grander quests are paced, with busy work and side ventures being implemented even into the main story such that the whole world feels cohesive. You never get the impression that “now I’m doing important quests” and “now I’m doing small scale stuff”, because typically small scale guilds and factions will occasionally pop up with rather radical and political tasks for you, and sometimes the larger factions and stories will allow for a moment of respite with a slightly easier task to do than the last one you did. Because of this, even in DLC zones that are significantly harder than the base game, you don’t get the typical arcade impression that each subsequent level or quest is getting harder, instead you have to stick to that core experience we mentioned at the start of all this: Provision well, and you’ll never be caught off guard. It’s a small miracle any of this even came together. Bethesda was going bankrupt at the time due to a series of failed games, and the original creator and lead programer of Elder Scrolls was not at the company when this game’s practical production started. Much of what makes Morrowind work stems from this context; this was a ride or die game. If it succeeds they stay in business and if it fails, they’re all out of the job. So they threw the craziest worldbuilding, lore and creature designs at the wall and mashed them up into a remarkably coherant (under the circumstances) alien-fantasy land. To this day there is not a fantasy setting, that I can think of, better at making you feel like a total outsider to its world and cultures than Morrowind. The game also deviated heavily from the previous mainline game, Daggerfall. That game immersed you with scale and expectation; it presented you a realistically sized world and had all quests be under the expectation of a time limit. It moved without you and told you that if you wanted to be the same lazy, bed ridden person you *might* be in life, it won’t work in the game. Morrowind is much smaller and much more forgiving in narrative, with unlimited quest completion time and no consequences for taking a year and a day to do any given task. It immerses you by being meticulously hand crafted and catering you a specific experience, rather than trying to account for any experience you might want. For this reason, I find comparing Morrowind and it’s sequels to the likes of Daggerfall and Arena to be a total waste of time: Both had different design goals and philosophies on such a level that you could mistake them for being from different franchises, at a glance. The changes were not all popular, it’s true. But what’s also true is that both the franchise and company did what they had to do to survive. Morrowind is the template of all current Bethesda games. All offer compact and concise open worlds with hand-crafted experiences in mind for quests, dungeons and NPC’s. They are more modernised, and only slightly less janky now, but even in Fallout 4 or Starfield you can still see Morrowind’s DNA. It’s ironic for me because, post Skyrim, and even earlier in Bethesda’s Fallout games, I haven’t liked much of these design tropes. It’s not like I like Morrowind just for nostalgia either, as I played it after Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 4, being only 2 years old when it released and absorbing, what were, newer titles first. I think it’s the tighter focus of Morrowind that makes it work: Worldbuilding, worldbuilding, worldbuilding. Everything comes back to this and your place in it. In something like Skyrim, some quests might do that, but others might be going for a mood, others might be going for a punchline, and some might be going for grandeur and power fantasy. All those things happen secondary to the worldbuilding in Morrowind, while the opposite is true in the modern games. It’s not a bad thing, just something I don’t like as much in those titles. Morrowind is also a game that’s very close to my heart and I’m not embarrassed to say I’ve become quite attatched to. Call me biased, but I’d highly recommend that you play and explore The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind.