I figure since Morrowind isn't available on GOG and I can't really find a specific answer to my question I would try to ask it here. I am going to play Morrowind on the PC for the first time and I know there are different community-made patches.. I simply don't know which one(s) to use... there are so many of them... I did do searches and different posts say to use different patches.. any help figuring this out would really be appreciated!

If you install MGSO, it comes as an installer, and it includes all the patches you will need, as well as making the game look nice.

It's definitely your easiest option. And, the installer asks you various options to choose, so, whether your pc is strong or weak, you can find settings and options that will work for your system.

Someone who has a lot of experience working with patches for morrowind told me to ask in the bethesda forum.. I'll try that. I'm going to keep MGSO as an option in back of my head just in case though =) Thanks!

My recommendation is to go vanilla. But I'm sort of an anti-patch nazi.

Thank god someone made this thread, I lost all my Morrowind patches and links when my HD died. I can get over having to restart a game from scratch but I think there were two mods/patches on there I was using (it created a checklist in the options screen) one of which was definitely the leveling mod; I can't remember what the others were. Any help would be appreciated.

I had another problem with the game too, for one the trees in the blackish mountain-esquw area in the middle parts of the map, just getting to close to the trees will cause you to glitch in them and get stuck in them, man everytime I go in those lands I dread those trees.

Not had that problem...but...you can choose which type of trees to have. Maybe try a different set

No patch is necessary for the game. You can play it easily enough without worry. Mind you, the game does have bugs. The Morrowind Overhaul Patch will fix a lot of known issues in dialogue, glitches, spawning areas, so forth, but it requires both expansion sets. The issue here is that the first expansion, Tribunal is active in the story the instant it's installed, and story-wise it's not meant to be played until beating the main game. The game throws enemies at you that can be tough to kill as a level 1, and the place/area that eventually leads to breaks the game in turns of money. The second expansion, Bloodmoon, is more subtle, but it is specifically for high levels, so..... also meant for after the main story.

As for nice to have upgrades, there's graphical mods that change the character base models, the head, and the world itself. You won't get anything on the level of Oblivion, but there's some very gorgeous video of a complete Morrowind Graphical Overhaul that makes it look close. All in all it just comes down to preference, and if you can I'd avoid using them unless you don't think you can play the game the way it is.

You are one of the only people I've never seen complain about the original leveling system. To be honest I heard that patch made it so much better I never even played with the original system. Maybe my OS crash was sign from god that I should go back to basics. :D

There's a patch to the leveling system?

There are so many leveling mods for Morrowind that I devoted a whole folder in my mod archive for that ... the most popular ones are a) simple ones that just remove the points cap on skills, b) Galsiah's Character Development (GCD), a very elaborate rewrite of the leveling system that I would never play without, and c) another one that was less elaborate, but still popular, the name of which eludes me at the moment. I can try to hunt it down in my archive if you like?

I just found and downloaded GCD. All that I need to do now is find the overhaul (the bug crashes drive me nuts) and I'll be ready to start over.

The original leveling system works better than most people make it to be, but it has three fundamental flaws:

1. Skills aren't balanced at all, and as a result, you'll get into problems if you level the "wrong" skills. The system was designed mainly for fighters and mages, stealth characters are substantially harder to play.

2. It forces you to make a choice between either roleplaying, or building a powerful character - which is bad, the two should go hand in hand. There is an objectively "best" way to develop a character, which involves counting skill upgrades during the game, and training specific skills at specific times, in order to maximize your attribute gain (through multipliers provided during level-up). If you play the game naturally, you'll get 3 choices of raising an attribute by 1, perhaps one of them by 3. If you use the objectively best strategy, you will get x5 multipliers, resulting in a much more powerful character. But playing this way is more work than fun. So in order to have fun, you have to consciously decide to build a weak(er) character. That's not well designed.

3. The level system provides too little room for growth considering the amount of content the game has to offer. You will eventually max out all your skills and attributes. As a result, all high-level characters play pretty much the same, since they all have the same skill values.

One of the reasons why I'd never play without Galsiah's Character Development is that it addresses all three of these problems. It makes all classes and builds viable, allows natural progression of skills, removes the silly attribute multipliers, and removes the skill caps (while still making it much more difficult to increase skills the higher they are already), so that high-level characters are still distinct. As a bonus, it lets the leveling happen entirely in the background, so that it doesn't detract from the game, which enhances immersion.

I have just recently played Morrowind (GOTY) on Steam with the Overhaul Mod.
I could not stand the original graphics, because I did not play the game in the
old days. The Overhaul makes the game look acceptable (people, creatures)
to great (landscape, sky).

If you just want to have a (more or less) bug free Morrowind with nice graphics,
get the Overhaul mod (which includes the Morrowind code patch --> bug fixes,
minor rebalancing).