Hello all! No, you’re not seeing things, you’ve actually just got a little message on twitter or whatever telling you your very favorite videogaming blog of all time has updated. Let’s get right to business and start talking about some videogames!
So chances are good that you’ve heard of the game Dark Souls which was made by From Software. It is the successor to Demon’s Souls, a game which wasn’t released outside Japan but thanks to having English-language options managed to become a cult hit thanks to importation. Sadly it’s only on the PS3 so nobody has actually played it because who owns one of those, but Dark Souls has been released on 360 and PC as well, and it’s on the latter of these that I’ve been playing the game.
Dark Souls is infamous for its difficulty and this is not a reputation it has gained without reason. This game is difficult in the old-school sense, in that it’s uncompromising and you’re going to have to learn things like enemy attack patterns, how to block and parry and dodge, and level layouts to progress.
Turns out they occasionally do make ’em like they used to
So here’s the thing: Until you have done some of that and get a handle on what you’re doing, this game can be really unfun to new players. It takes time to get into it, to find what works for you, to get into the flow of it. For me I didn’t really ‘enjoy’ the game until a few hours in, in fact I put it aside for a few weeks before being convinced to go back to it. And I’m glad I did, because once I did pass that stumbling block I really got into it – it’s a game that really rewards your investment and is one of the quintessential examples of “What you get out depends on what you put in”.
Of course any game which takes that long to get into is a flawed game, and I won’t say Dark Souls is perfect by any stretch. I enjoy the exploration and learning immensely but I’m not a tremendous fan of just how obscure the game can be about some things. But if you’re looking for an amazing experience and something to really get your teeth into then what you’ve heard about Dark Souls is pretty much all true – it’s a seriously great piece of software which does a great many things right and very few things wrong, and of those things it does wrong much is a matter of taste.
Basically what I’m trying to say is Dark Souls is superb and if you’re not already on the bandwagon you need to join it.
I hear you groaning, dear reader. “Another Morrowind post? Pike, you need to start playing something else!”
And perhaps I do, but not before I write up a little treatise on it and what makes it so special. I mean, it’s far from a perfect game. The actual gameplay itself, in fact, is somewhat flawed. It’s certainly not bad, but it’s not astounding, either, and the combat system is almost universally criticized. Just what is it about Morrowind, then, that draws you in?
For me, it’s the in-game culture. You see, while other people bandy around the idea of less-generic fantasy, Morrowind pulled this off with aplomb ten years ago.
It’s really an anomaly not just among the general fantasy genre but within the Elder Scrolls series itself. The first two games in the TES main series were called Arena and Daggerfall, and although they both achieved cult classic status there’s also a reason why most people today haven’t heard of them, so don’t feel too bad if you haven’t, either. Anyways, these two games set the general tone for the series as a very Dungeons and Dragons inspired medieval fantasy. Arena took you across the entire continent of Tamriel and every province could have been lifted directly from Lord of the Rings, if Lord of the Rings had been built in Minecraft. Daggerfall limited you to a smaller area (in theory, anyway– its random map generation was nearly limitless), but the overall style was still the same.
Then Morrowind came along. Morrowind is populated by Dark Elves, or Dunmer in their native tongue. And that is where all similarities to traditional western fantasy end.
Morrowind is not medieval Europe. Morrowind was actually inspired by Egyptian, early Japanese, and Middle Eastern cultures. And the keyword “inspired” is very important, here, because the developers and artists didn’t just take those cultures and transplant them, wholesale, into Tamriel. Instead, they used these cultures as inspirations to create their own very vibrant land and people.
Let’s start out by talking about the world. There are no horses in Morrowind. There are, however, giant dinosaur things which are used as pack animals.
Say hello to a Guar.
There are also flying reptile things
Lots of them.
And gigantic fleas the size of elephants (or larger) which are used to travel from town to town.
Insects are actually a major part of society here on Vvardenfell, where various giant bugs are farmed and ranched. The are no sheep or cows here, only giant floating jellyfish.
Now let’s talk about the inhabitants of this strange land. Traditionally the Dunmer are nomads who live in yurts. Yurts. There are major characters of this game who spend the entire game quite happily living in a yurt. When was the last time you saw that in a fantasy game? They dress like nomads do, too, wearing different types of clothing depending on where their tribe is currently located, based on what resources are available to them. There has been a shift from this traditional style of living toward living in buildings in cities like the Empire does, and the traditional nomadic Dunmer– called Ashlanders– are not particularly happy about this development. Still, these city-dwelling elves don’t live in anything that we would remotely identify as a traditional house. They live in these:
Or these:
Or these:
So we’ve got a bunch of elves who ranch bugs and wear clothes made out of insect shells and giant jellyfish leather wandering around and living in houses that may be inspired by Middle Eastern or Asian architecture or may also be a giant mushroom. This just gets better and better, doesn’t it?
Let’s keep going. Traditionally the Dunmer worship the Daedra, powerful demonlike gods whom most of civilized Tamriel won’t touch with a ten-foot-pole. But for the past several generations the citygoing Dunmer have been worshipping three “mortal” gods who make up what is called the Tribunal. The Tribunal consists of a powermad and ruthlessly intelligent woman named Almalexia, a reclusive wizard building himself a literal clockwork universe named Sotha Sil, and finally Vivec, a bi-colored warrior-poet who may or may not be both male and female at the same time.
Needless to say, they’re a pretty fantastic trio.
They’re watching you, scum.
Much like the Dunmer themselves, the gods are neither good nor bad. They exist in a constant state of gray between the two extremes and they are capable of much good and also much evil. The Morrowind universe is not black and white. The Dunmer are intensely xenophobic. Slavery is legal. So is assassination. And yet, as you play the game, you come to care for this place and its people anyway. And that, readers, is the true triumph of Morrowind and how its very non-standard and non-Western culture is used as a fantastic narrative device. Your character isn’t the only one to come into this world as an outlander– you do, too. Then as you come to know and love the land and its inhabitants, you can decide whether or not to save it. You learn about this strange new world as you go along and then travel through an arc much as your character does. Would this have worked out as well in a more traditional fantasy setting? Maybe, or maybe not. I’m leaning toward the “maybe not”.
Unfortunately, although the series continues, The Elder Scrolls has yet to achieve another setting as intensely unique as Morrowind’s. Although originally established as a rainforest, Talos conveniently showed up and turned Cyrodiil into an idealized medieval England just in time for Oblivion. (This is what that guy in Whiterun is always yelling about, by the way.) While this is a neat piece of lore, it does mean that Oblivion was largely set in a very traditional fantasy setting. The next game, Skyrim, went for something slightly more exotic by making everything Nordic-themed, but that is still an overall very “safe” Western setting. The upcoming TES Online has the potential to do some interesting things with provinces like Elsweyr and Hammerfell, but seeing as they’ve already retconned out the aforementioned Talos story and cemented Cyrodiil as an Idealized Medieval England simulator regardless of time period, my hopes for anything beyond fleeting oddities aren’t very high.
So here I am, waiting. Waiting for more elves that live in yurts and adorn themselves with tribal tattoos and crazy piercings. Waiting for more games that take their fantasy out of Western Europe, and not just for one throwaway setting or expansion pack.
CROSSPOST from someplace else I say words because I put all this effort into it!
Okay I’ll make an effortpost about mods for y’all, because despite the brilliance of vanilla Morrowind it’s even more mindblowingly amazing with mods installed.
Essentials Morrowind Overhaul: As Pike says this includes a bunch of different mods. This is mostly a graphics and sound pack with some unofficial patching but it makes an unbelievable difference and unless your computer can’t handle it, you need it.
Galsiah’s Character Development: GCD single-handedly fixes all problems with vanilla leveling. It makes everything so much more natural and smooth, lets you go above 100 in stats and skills (not without work!), and in the 50~ hours of playing with it since I reinstalled it’s seemed to be pretty much perfectly balanced in most regards. Playing without this is an indicator of the most depraved masochism. Note: There’s another leveling mod our there known as MADD Leveling which has pretty good reviews, but I’ve never used it myself. Consider that if you don’t like GCD. But for Vivec’s sake get one or the other.
Morrowind Patch Project (Formerly known as Unofficial Morrowind Patch): A project which has persisted in one form or another pretty much since release and which aims to fix anything it can, from typos to incomplete quests to actual game-breakers.
Morrowind Code Patch: Going deeper than the above this, unsurprisingly, touches the game’s code itself to make even more repairs and improvements. Fixes a huge number of issues which were in the base game and remained through patches and expansions. Some things are vital like crash fixes, some are quality of life, but this thing is indispensable.
Delayed Dark Brotherhood Attack: Exactly what it says on the tin. In base, with Tribunal installed, you’ll get attacked when you’re a prisoner fresh off the boat in Seyda Neen by elite assassins. Not only does this unbalance things when you kill them because their gear is great and valuable, but it also makes very little sense that the person sending the assassins would even know you exist, let alone care. So with this you’re safe from the DB until you’ve reached a position of power in various guilds or have progressed to a certain point in the Main Quest.
Expansion Integration: Bethesda were lazy fuckers with Bloodmoon and especially Tribunal, and this mod goes a long way to helping that. Basically it brings everything appropriate from those expansions into Vvardenfell, so you can encounter Durzogs in the wild and alchemy ingredients can show up for sale and so forth.
That’s pretty much it for what I would class as essentials, and even the last one of this short list is debatable. Everything else is really up to the player in question, but I’ll link to a few of my favorites and then a couple of the bigger lists and important sites.
Mister Adequate’s favorites Tamriel Rebuilt: I strongly considered putting this in the essentials section because it’s just that good. TR is a project that has been running since the early days of Morrowind with the original aim of recreating all of Tamriel. They’ve since scaled back this absurd ambition to ‘just’ the whole of the Morrowind province, which is still only slightly smaller than Vivec’s Spear. They’ve recently released part 3 of this vast effort and already the game is literally twice the size.
The big peninsula is roughly akin to Vivec’s Spear, come to think of it
Those of you who’ve played the game will realize just how vast an expansion this project is. And although I’ve only seen a very little bit of it so far I can assure you what is there is great. Firewatch is a better-made settlement than any Imperial one in the native game. (Note: The small island south-west of Vivec/Ebonheart is not a part of TR, but a seperate mod named Dulsya Isle.)
Piratelord’s Creatures XI: There have been a great number of creature adding mods over the years but this is the best one currently. Everything added is well-made and fits perfectly with the theme of Morrowind and the aesthetics and stuff.
Executor Zurg’s Merchant Money Mod: Some people may dislike this. Those people are wrong. This mod increases the amount of money carried by merchants (not those added by mods though) tenfold. Very simple, and incredibly welcome, because you don’t have to go traipsing off to Caldera or the Mudcrab Merchant to sell anything worth more than five septims anymore. Don’t worry, when you start getting more expensive gear you’ll still struggle to find places to sell them.
abot’s gondoliers, boats, and silt striders: This triune of mods by abot does something that some of us have longed for for years. It adds the ability to choose a ‘scenic travel’ option from various ports, which means you can actually ride the stuff as it takes you to your destination in real-time! It also adds some ambient stuff like gondoliers paddling around Vivec City and stuff. It’s tremendously good for gigantic nerds like Pike me who just looove to act as if they’re really in the game and write up huge backstories for their characters and stuff!
Traders 300: Adds a locked chest to most merchants, within which will be a leveled list of appropriate goods. The end result is that merchants will be far more variable in what they carry, giving a lot of flavor and life to them and encouraging you to check back with them now and then.
Homes to Let: This is a really nice little addition that does, well, exactly what it says. You can now rent homes on a monthly basis. Excellent alternative to most of the housing mods out there, as this lets you rent something in, say, Hla Oad for all of 60 septims a month. Superb for anyone who can’t afford other houses or who hasn’t progressed enough to gain them, or who fancies a change of pace, or who just wants more housing options.
The Less Generic NPC Project: A huge undertaking which seeks to give unique dialog for most topics to every single NPC in the game. So far they’re up to about 1/3 of the game, which is pretty damned impressive, and most of what I’ve seen so far has been decently written and kept to lore and stuff. It tends to add some minor quests as well, but the general overall effect is to make the world a much richer place. I happened to rent a place in Vivec with the above mod and it was next to a store; I went into the store and the Khajiit in there was affected by this mod, so we sat and talked forever. They worked together superbly to create a great little experience for my character!
Service Requirements: This mod is for masochists. What it does is when you try to trade with a faction-aligned person, they’ll tell you to fuck off if you’re not a member of their guild/house/etc. Want to port to Sadrith Mora? Best be a member of the Mage’s Guild! You can also pay surchages to access their services. Altogether a pretty stupid mod that only makes the game harder, I couldn’t play without it.
Further Reading
Now, this game’s over ten years old now and still has active modders. Unsurprisingly there are an immense number of mods out there, and my little list of mostly personal taste doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. If you’re interested in looking more into what is out there, here’s some resources to do just that!
There are two main download sites these days. There used to be many, many more but most have fallen off the Internet.
Planet Elder Scrolls has a huge repository of mods. Problem is some of them were on off-site hosting, and said off-site hosting has now disappeared. Still one of the most valuable resources for getting mods though, and if you check the comments on a missing mod you’ll often find someone pointing folks to a new upload someplace.
Morrowind Modding History is a place which is trying to salvage and preserve pretty much every Morrowind mod it can get a hold of. If you can’t find something on PES it’ll almost certainly be here. Also great to just browse through and see what’s on offer.
Aside from those there are various lists out there which… list different mods, usually grouped into categories like “New buildings” and so on. Like anything these lists will be based on the personal taste of their authors but you can usually find some pointers towards stuff you’re after. Great House Fliggerty is a good resource anyway and this thread has a list of lists (of lists, in a couple cases). Well worth checking out are Telesphoros’ List, Empirical Morrowind, and BTB’s list. Also try the TESNexus Wiki.
A couple of closing notes! There’s a very widely-used mod named “Necessities of Morrowind” out there, which adds the need to eat, drink, and sleep into the game. I’ve not yet tried it myself though I plan to with my next character. There are also a couple of mods which add NPCs walking around settlements. A lot of people swear by Morrowind Comes Alive but I prefer Starfire’s NPC additions; it really does help add life to towns to see people wandering around and having different people when you leave and return and stuff.
Okay I hope that helps anyone looking for mods get an idea of some of the most important ones currently around and points them to where to look for more! If you’ve got questions go ahead and ask, I’ll probably know the answer or where to find it!
So at some point over the last few days we’ve surpassed 100,000 views on this blog. A big thank you to anyone who has ever visited, read, and/or commented! Mister Adequate and myself really just started this as a little side project and knowing that sometimes people like to read our vidya rambles makes us both feel all tingly inside.
Now then, let’s get down to business. Mister Adequate and I are recently doing nothing but playing an old game. This should surprise nobody since playing old games is what we do 95% of the time. The game we are playing this time, however, is one Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and the problem with this game is that once you start playing it you will never stop for like the next month.
This is all a part of the Tribunal’s plan.
Anyways you can all blame this game for the reason that these two bloggers have disappeared off the face of the Earth and are currently ranting and raving about journeying far ‘neath moon-and-star.
I’ll tell you what, though. Talking about Morrowind has a tendency to cause most people to suddenly itch to reinstall it, which is why the number of my Steam friends who own this game has jumped from five to eleven in the past week or so. Because I won’t shut up about it. Anyways, if you, too, are now feeling this same itch, I have a present for you! It’s called Morrowind Overhaul and it’s an absolutely delicious mod pack that installs everything great for Morrowind and makes it look even more beautiful than it already is. Best of all, it pretty much does everything for you, so you just have to click the “Next” button a million times and do little else. Easy mode. Highly recommended for both longtime Morrowind players and also new players who perhaps are wary about the graphics, which, I won’t lie, haven’t aged particularly well.
The Khajiit walk animations are akin to this.
What are you currently playing as you enter the new year?
I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately, and I do apologize for that. The truth is that I’ve been having an obscene about of fun with the lastest WoW expac so I’m playing a lot of that.
Today, however, I thought I would give something new a shot and I booted up Torchlight, which I have somehow never played before. And I promptly wound up playing it for the next few hours, because it was just that addictive. For the few of you who haven’t played it, it’s an action-RPG along the veins of Diablo, and it is just wonderful. You can pick from three classes and I promptly picked alchemist because the guy is wearing goggles, and I think I made the right choice. I love hurling poison bolts at my enemies from afar, watching them all expire, and then going around and collecting all sorts of great loot. It’s simple, straightforward, and a whole lot of fun.
Also, one of the questgivers is a steampunky robot. I approve.
The sequel recently came out and I look forward to playing that as well, but for now I’m having a blast with the original! Anyone who hasn’t looked into this series should really do so. It is well worth the price!
In between huge bouts of WoW and considerable addiction to FTL, I’ve also been playing the long-awaited release of last week, Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a widely lauded game, and rightly so, of the Action RPG genre – which is to say a Diablo clone. Indeed, Runic Games was formed partly by exiles from the Diablo 2 team and this shows in a variety of ways. I was rather late to the TL bandwagon but I had a blast with it recently, and the polish and love of Diablo was present there too. It wasn’t a perfect game, but I would argue it had shortcomings rather than flaws, and that these shortcomings were deliberate choices made in order to ensure a polished final product. Entirely reasonable and indeed much more commendable than overstretching limited resources and doing nothing properly.
Torchlight 2 however has had the budget, built on the success of the first game, to try to overcome those shortcomings and so far I have to say it looks as though it has succeeded fairly comprehensively. It’s a far larger game, with a much greater variety of locations. It has one more class, and all four classes seem somewhat more malleable in playstyle than the previous iteration’s. I will admit that I would have liked to see more classes still, and I’ve heard reports that the game isn’t properly balanced for every playstyle (e.g. berserkers can have an especially hard time, I hear, when enemy damage starts to ramp up). There are more items, more characters, more locations, just plain old fashioned more of everything, but in my own play experience the game’s polish hasn’t suffered for for the increase in quantity.
Sweetie Belle explains the appeal of ARPGs with commendable succinctness.
Bearing in mind I’m not tremendously far through the game yet, everything so far seems to sparkle with both polish and love and it’s just a really good, satisfying game that lets you carve through hordes of monsters in order to get experience points and loot. It’s not a complicated concept, but it is what we humans like, so it’s not like there’s much room for complaint about it.
The game also has multiplayer, the absence of which was by far the original’s greatest and most bizarre shortfall, but I’ve not yet had the chance to mess around with it. Pike and I are planning on some playing soon though so if anything about it is striking I shall report to you all.
With all the hubbub around Diablo 3 lately it’s probably been lost, but the Action RPG genre is actally a thriving one, with several exciting things on the way. I thought I’d quickly run through a few on the horizon in this post, so those of you who don’t already spend too much time hunting for loot can begin to do so!
First up we have Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a great little game, if lacking in a couple of areas, and the sequel looks likely to tidy up pretty much everything that was criticized to make for a great experience.
Next we’ll look at Grim Dawn. Grim Dawn is coming from Crate Entertainment, founded by folks from Iron Lore who worked on the fairly well-regarded Titan Quest. I’ve not played that myself but I got it in the Steam Sale so I will be giving it a look soon, but everything I’ve seen about Grim Dawn has me very very excited. Grim Dawn is also promising an open world where you can wander into trouble long before you’re prepared to deal with it, which sounds like a pretty promising angle to me, and the whole exploration side of things will hopefully be played up!
Taking a slightly different approach is the online-only Path of Exile, which gave us a truly glorious image of a skill tree I shall show you in a moment; it really puts Diablo 3 to shame. At any rate it’s another promising-looking ARPG on the way, and one whose funding through microtransactions looks to be backed up by people who have actually got a notion of why microtransactions cause some problems, and are trying to avoid them.
Meanwhile, in Spira…
There are also people trying new things in the genre, such as Nyrthos, being made by some Czech czaps which is aiming to be playable in browsers and on iOS. At first I was skeptical about that, but upon reflection, if they can get the pacing down properly, that might just work – ten minutes of ripping through baddies on your lunch break or on the bus could actually be a whole lot of fun. We’ll have to wait and see!
So if you like sitting around all day clicking the mouse incessantly and weighing up whether your new Chastity Belt of Frustration +3 is better or worse than your Codpiece of the Equine King then it seems like there are going to be a heck of a spread of options in the coming months! Tell us in the comments what you’re excited for, and let us know if we’ve missed any!
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been playing through Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic lately. Playing through a good RPG is always an interesting experience for me in particular, because the storytelling method is so far removed from that of the strategy games that I’m usually playing. Something like a strategy game is very open-ended and sandboxy; the story comes entirely out of what you are doing. RPGs and other story-driven games, on the other hand, are more limited. There are a set, finite number of stories to be told, even when you’re presented with a multitude of options and endings in classic Bioware style.
SPOILER: Twilight is Darth Revan.
But this isn’t a bad thing. Rather, it’s a very interesting narrative device. It’s akin to a movie or book or TV series, but separate from all three.
A movie tends to be just a couple of hours long, for example, whereas the main storyline of a game can easily go on for 30+ hours. So a video game’s storytelling is more in line with the lengthy tales of a book or TV series, but then you have the interactivity and the subsequent bond you develop with it because of that, and the result is a truly fascinating way to tell a story.
It will be interesting to see where games go from here in terms of being a narrative device. While I personally believe that features like interactivity and gameplay are of paramount importance in games– that is why games are games, after all– the idea that a game might be considered a great piece of literature some day is a really fantastic one.
My new job likes to give me at least one (and sometimes two!) weekend days off so now I get to participate in these posts. I know what I’ll be doing this weekend: Loads and loads of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Yes, the one from way back when. I bought it on Steam sale and now I just can’t stop playing it. I love how all these years later it’s still a great game.
Once I finish it I think it’s on to more RPGs, like Morrowind and New Vegas. I’ve been on this random RPG kick lately, which I’m okay with.
So lemme put it this way: I smashed through my entire “Steam Sale” budget by Day Five. Obviously this hasn’t stopped me from buying anything further, but let’s just say that I’ve spent a rather lot of money so far.
Of all the stuff I’ve gotten so far, here are some of the ones I’ve been enjoying the most:
The Legend of Grimrock: Fun dungeon crawling oldschool RPG that eschews silly things like maps in favor of you bumbling around lost and attacking giant snails. All of the charm of old dungeon-crawls from back in the day.
Train Simulator 2012: No, I’m not kidding. This game is great. Especially if you’re a sim game grognard who gets excited by the thought of playing a travel game in real-time, so if it takes an hour to go from Point A to Point B in real life, you’d better believe it will take you an hour to do so in game. With “Simple Controls” activated, this game is in the vein of classics such as Desert Bus, except you can pause and do things like start and stop. This is more endearing than it sounds and this game easily devoured three hours of my time right after buying it.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: A game which I haven’t touched since it launched almost a decade ago and I played it on the Xbox. I’d really forgotten how much fun this game is and what was originally going to be an “I’ll dink around for an hour and feel some nostalgia feels” game has turned into several hours of a legitimate playthrough. Let’s just hope Carth stops wanting to talk about his feelings at some point. (He won’t.)
Orcs Must Die!: I’ve actually yet to play this one (the curse of buying so many games at one time), but my dear associate Mister Adequate swears up and down that this game is amazing and fun. Considering his raucous laughter over Skype whenever he plays it, I’ll take his word for it.
What sorts of gems have you picked up with the sale?
