Xbox The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Xbox The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind | 100-300 hours of free-roaming exploration and customization.

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Xbox The Elder Scr...

	Xbox The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Xbox \| Bethesda average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An epic, open-ended single-player RPG in which you can create and play any kind of character imaginable! Your actions define your character, and your gameplay changes and evolves in response to your actions. Confront the assassins' guild, and they take out a contract on you. Impress them, and they try to recruit you instead. No two sagas are the same in the world of Morrowind. The end result is the most open ended RPG possible, one with an infinite number of possible paths through the game. With Morrowind, the unparalleled Elder Scrolls character system is coupled with an exponential increase in the world's detail and level of visual splendor. Utilizing the graphic power of Xbox, Morrowind features hyper-realistic textures and polygon counts, real-time shadows, vast landscapes, skeletal based animation, and a dynamic weather system.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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This game is HUGE

This game has about 300 hours of gameplay, and thats just if you move right on through the story and side quests. If you actually intended to have any fun playing this game, you would explore the giant island and visit it's many cities. You can also join different factions to open up even more missions. Some of the factions include The Imperial Legion, The Fighters Guild, The Thieves Guild and the Mages Guild. Each faction has a special bonus that will be available to you once you join it. For example: If you join The Thieves Guild, you can talk to certan people to clear a price on your head for half the amount of money. The only complaint I can muster is the combat, which is almost impossible at the beginning of the game. You start out in a city called Seyda Neen on the south coast of the massive island. I went from house to house stealing gold. Then I went to the trade house, sold the stolen items and purchased a brand new steel shortsword. Feeling all powerful with my new weapon, I started to make my way down a path leading out of the city when I came across my first opponent: a worm about the size of a football. Needless to say, I was not very impressed with it's weak attacks. However, when I tried to attack it, I couldn't hit it. This fight went on for a fairly long time untill I was forced to run away from the worm as it had taken almost all of my health and I still had not even hit it. In real life, I could have just stepped on it. After you level up a few times, fighting isn't so bad. Another minor problem is the time it takes to load when you start the game up again or when you reload a saved game or something. I used a timer and found that it took aprox. 1 minute and 52 seconds to load one of my saved games. However, considering how huge the game is, it's worth it. Among the many cities, there are also old ruins, abandon mines, ancient tombs (filled with unfriendly ghosts and walking skeletons with weapons) ,caves, shipwrecks, small tribes of the native people called Dunmer who live in camps far away from cities, bandit hideouts, and tons more. There are also strange ruins of ancient cities that belonged to the dunmer hundreds of years before their home was colonized by the mainland empire. The ruins are filled with things like strange robots, giant mounted crossbows, and many other strange (and valuable) machines and artifacts. The map is so amazingly diverse one can't even imagine how long it took to make it all. I've had the game for about nine months and I haven't even explored half of it. And, unlike Fable in which you can't step over 2-foot tall rocks that line paths, you can travel anywhere you want.

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100-300 hours of free-roaming exploration and customization.

This is a long game, and therefore a long review. I glow about it and all its possibilities for a while, but skip a few paragraphs if you just want the straight pros and cons.

I'll get right to the point of how massive this game is by giving you a brief hypothetical scenario. First, you choose your character and decide on his or her face and hairstyle. Then let's say you begin the game by robbing everything from the first house that you begin the game in. But the guards spot you, so you run. Once outside, another guard gets in your way so you take a swing at him, accidentally knocking out an innocent townsperson in the process. You rush into the local pawnbroker to buy a weapon, but your criminal activity makes the owner hostile towards you. So instead you just grab the spear sitting against the wall and kill him with it, looting his body of all its goods and throwing on some armor along the way. You then jump back outside and stab the guard a few times, but he has friends so you need to run. You make it to the local silt strider transportation, and catch a ride to the next town over where you join the thieves' guild and pay the cost of clearing your name under the table. Interested in what they tell you, you decide to stay with them for awhile and hlep out their organization until the day comes when you kill them all and join the fighter's guild instead.

That's all possible, right from the start of the game. Morrowind is incredible. Without exaggeration, you can go anywhere, anytime, with the only limitation being your yet-undeveloped physical skills. See that mountain in the distance? Sooner or later, depending on your strength, you can climb it. Notice that underwater cave? Once you have the right spells you can breathe underwater and check it out. Wander day and night, walking where you want to with no pressure to do anything other than play the game in the order you want and at your own pace.

Oh, and you can do what you want too. Don't like the way that shopkeeper talked to you? Kill him. Oh, and he'll stay dead, so you might as well use his shop as your new home where you can drop off all your stuff. What stuff? Well anything you want to pick up. Barring furniture, you can pick up almost anything and use it or drop it where it will always continue to sit. Like those spoons on the dinner table? Take them. Think you can get away with stealing that helmet from the guard? Try it. There are definitely repercussions, such as being attacked or thrown in jail, but this game does not discourage you from doing things your way.

If the honest path is more your thing, then play the game straight or go and join one of the factions that share your interests. There are 3 great clan houses you can join, as well as gangs of fighters, thieves, magicians, assassins, soldier forts, and religious organizations. Spend your time making pilgrimages to various locations around the world, or try to get to the top of your magician's order. Or if you want just skip all this stuff and do the main quest, or skip that and do everything else. It's really your own choice.

And what a world Morrowind is. Composed of fields, mountains, volcanic barrens, islands, grottos, and hundreds of caves and tombs and ruins, it will literally take weeks and even months to cover everything and go everywhere. Just walking from one corner of the map to its opposite would take at least an hour or two of your life, and that's just a straight line without doing anything interesting. There is a lot, I mean, A LOT to do. There's so much variation though, it takes a lot to get sick of what you're doing. Don't worry about getting around though, there are boats, wizard teleporters, spells, and more to get around. Oh and you can walk on water and levitate once you get the right spells, too.

Okay, now for my more objective review. Morrowind, being the third game in the series (you don't have to know the first two at all), is all about open-endedness and exploration. Clearly there are hundreds of choices and dozens of ways to play the game, all presented to you in a first or third person perspective (your choice). You can play as a male or female of 8 different and very unique races who all have their own skills. And this game has dozens of skills to hone: Keep hitting living things with your sword to develop your long blade skill, or do lots of jumping to improve your acrobatics. The point is that your character develops how you want him to, with lots of customization and honing to do as you go up in levels.

The meat of the game is the exploring and questing. And there are hundreds. Any faction, such as clan house or guild, each has its own dozen or so missions, and there are about a dozen of these such factions to join. Each faction has its own specific mission style, too. Join the religious cult, and you'll run around asking for donations. Join the mage's guild and you'll be looking for plants and ingredients to make spells out of. In addition to this, there are also a hundred or so miscellaneous quests to undertake at your discretion, requiring you to just stumble on them. A man in the wilderness may ask you to help him find the thieves who stole his goods, and you can do it or not, and then even decide how you do it (such as getting the goods but then keeping them for yourself). The main quest alone is a good thirty or so missions long, and comprises an interesting tale of legend and deceit. It's all fun stuff.

There are a few gripes about the game. There are lots of things to kill, so one would expect combat to be better. It's very, very basic, with each weapon having three ways to swing and battle being nothing more than repeatedly tapping the attack button. Kind if cheesy and disappointing, but nothing that makes the game terrible. The other gripe I heard was that all the characters say the same basic roster of dialog, which to an extent is true. Conversation is initiated through dialogue windows, and you choose the topics from a list of relevant things. There are a lot of unique and specific dialogue options depending on who you talk to during your quests, but it's true that everyone will say the same thing when you ask about "fines and compensation" for example. It's somewhat boring and disappointing, but you get used to it, and it seems that this gameplay shortcut allowed the rest of the programming to go towards the exploring and questing which is fine with me. You won't feel like the only real person in the game by any means, since there are hundreds of characters in a couple dozen towns and they do all say a lot of different things, it's just that too many of them share a lot of the same topics.

The graphics are good, with beautiful skies and shimmering water but with some clunkiness such as a generic shadow and somewhat stiff character animation. But the entire game is fully 3d and gives you complete range of vision, which is quite impressive. The music is ambient and quiet, yet more dramatic and tense when the situation calls for it. It doesn't seem to get repetitive even after hours and hours of play because it's not very intrusive.

Basically, though the game has a couple flaws, there's still a genuinely startling amount of things to do, places to go, items to collect, and new things to try. I've had the game for a year and a half now, and there are still caves I haven't visited and items I've never used. There are still quests I haven't undertaken as well, and I've played this game for literally about four or five hundred hours (It can honestly be that involving). I only recently found out that I can kill the owner of a large house and then command people from all over the world to follow me and permanently reside there with me. That alone has been a fun task that's given me another dozen hours of gameplay, and that's just a silly task that I undertook to make my home seem more one of a kind. But that's the whole point of this game- you can do so much, with so few limitations, that this IS literally the first role playing game I've ever played that lets me overtake the home of my choice and force my favorite characters to come live in it with me (then decorate it with red candles and so on). More than anything, this game is meant for some good old fashioned exploring and discovering, with loads of mission variety and your own pace to set. Rent it if you want to just check and see how deep it goes, but I guarantee that if you like what you see, you will have multitudes of free-roaming action at your fingertips. All that's left for you to decide is how deep you want to go.

IMPORTANT: Last thing- you may hear about this game being glitchy. Some people aren't aware that older Xboxes have trouble with this game, as mine did, so don't just assume it's faulty. Once I upgraded my old "Thomson" Xbox drive, It's been smooth sailing.

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People just don't know good games when they see one.

Great game. You can do whatever you want and, since people dont know what to do in the game, what happens in the beggining? They give you something for Cais Cosades. Go there, he'll ask a favor of you. Go with the flow and you'll beat the game. You can also get a house (kill someone, get house. Simple) There is alot of things in this game that makes it the best RPG ever. Do not listen to anyone else, this game is 100% irresistable. Will at least take you a week to beat it playing 24 hours a day. Wow.

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