What annoys me about Morrowind, is that no matter how you generate stats, your character will be absolutely worthless at the beginning. Oh, you gave archery every bonus imaginable? Miss 3 shots out of 5. You "know" "magic"? Well, you might heal a couple of scratches before you need some sleep. Sneaky fella? Someone will spot you at night in the blackest corner of a dark empty street.
The characters can barely fulfil their primary role in a friendly environment. What am I supposed to do with that? Grind? Pay overpriced trainers? Or do I whip out the magic console?

I mean, in Darklands a competently generated character can fight off a bandit solo. In Fallout you won't be completely dominated by a random thug. In Icewind Dale a character with a smattering of Bow skill kills an orc in two shots. Even in the most hardcore Wizardry clones, when your Lv.1 Fighter lands a hit, it does hurt most early enemies.

Most of the levelling in Morrowind is not for your character to "grow" but to "become less shit". You start with a set of weights hanging on every single aspect of controls and resource management, and you spend the following hours sawing them off with a nail file.

There are plenty of weak enemies at the start of the game (even cliff racers) you can kill easily with decent starting skills. If you think Morrowind is hard at the start I can only advise you never to play the Gothic games.


To the OP: Morrowind does have plenty of flaws. Personally I can overlook them (or correct them with mods) because I really love the setting and sense of freedom.

My problem with Oblivion is that in trying to correct those flaws Bethesda completely overreacted and made even more flaws that I hate far more than Morrowind's. Namely, horrible level scaling to try to smooth out the difficulty curve, generic environments to make them prettier, etc...

As Morrowind is one of your favourite games and I'm sure you've played through it many more times than I have I don't want to be too sound cocky challenging you about this, but... Are you sure?

Remember being beaten my the mad wood-elf of Mournhold in ebony armour so badly I had to flee, twice. Even though I had maxed out Strength and axe, my own Ebony armour, magical weapons and minions. I fought The Frost Giant at the end of Bloodmoon when I was 300 hours in and he was still virtually an insta-kill. Had to grind up down with endless minions before I could even try to chip away at his heath. The game can be dead easy it parts. But not as whole. What was Is doing wrong there?

While this isn't exactly a "flaw" of Morrowind, I feel like somebody here may enjoy this story.

My first character was going to be a conjuration mage, and without the ability to regenerate magicka or health, obviously needed access to an inn. Well I stupidly went exploring around the town you begin in and before I knew it I was in some other small town, luckily the town had an inn. Everything seems pretty okay so far, right? Read on...

I head off to do some exploring and leveling up, encounter a few unfriendly skeletons and mudcrabs, typical low level stuff and by the time I head back to the inn my character is low on both health and magicka and is in dire need of some rest. So I rent a room for the night and go to sleep only to be awoken after one hour by strange noises! Oh no, what does this mean? Keep reading to find out!

The game informs me that there is a Dark Brotherhood member after me!...only...they're stuck in a locked room down the hall...and leaving/reentering the inn doesn't reset them...and I can't go back to sleep while they're in the inn...and I can't search out other towns because I'm almost out of magicka and health....

That's the story of my first playthrough of Morrowind.

The level scaling in Oblivion it totally broken. I remember bursting out laughing when I first saw bandits with glass armour. But you like mods, surely there's a mod for that;) For the insane levelling system is just part of the game's charm now.
As for the more genic environments. Cyradill so far more traditional but I don't mind that as it felt like a place I wanted to live in. The Shivering Isles Had plenty of huge mushrooms though.

I dunno what to say. I was, like yourself, a hybrid guy (longswording destructomagic heavy armoured brute), and I don't think in the entire game there was any point I needed to reload a game because one of my spells failed. Maybe two or at most three out of every ten fireballs I tossed (around the beginning of the game) failed. Mysticism and Illusion, which I was weakest in, failed slightly more often, but since I only really used it for single instance spells (wanting to Mark some place, or be Recalled to that place, or wanted to charm someone who disliked me for some reason) it didn't bother me that much, and those spells barely cost any magicka at all.

I think living in a place full of mushroom trees with actually be shitty because everyone in the vicinity would be stoned as F##k :P

That is quite funny. It's a shame how the Tribunal expansion fits into the GOTY edition as now apparently King Helsif wants a nobody with no skills or reputation dead "In case you become a threat to him". This probably made way more sense when you bought Tribunal separately and your character was hopefully already Nereverine. I can't hold it against the game though.
I hope I'm not insulting you if I ask if you were playing at a lower difficultly? with the exception of destruction of fail average was more like 8/10 most of the time. To get any good at Regeneration I had to buy the weakest, most useless healing spell and practise it in my spare time for hours before I could try one that was worth a damn.

Maybe you just rolled lucky and I didn't (metaphorically speaking).

That's funny. Maybe it's the real reason why Sheogorath was so crazy :)

That does not explain people living in Vvardenfell or all of Morrowind unless of course the Mushroom Trees there are not as "influential" on people than the trees in the Shivering Isles :-/

I don't remember those specific examples too clearly, it's been a long time since I did expansion stuff actually. In general though I think money is so easy to come by, and money equals training, so it's really easy to level-up your skills and attributes fast. And then at some point as early as level 10 or so you end up a god no one can hurt.

I have a playthrough going right now around level 20ish. Literally nothing can hurt me, I'm so fast and protected. Maybe I will jump into Mournhold and see if that changes.

Oh, I've beaten G1 and got quite a bit into G2. They're less annoying than TES3.

Good luck to you. The mad wood elf is outside the temple. You can engage him straight away. He'll ask for increasingly large amounts of money If you refuse him or run out of money he'll swear revenge. He disappears and comes back some time later in full ebony armour. Let me know how you do :)

Fair enough.

People do seem to be enjoying talking about it still.