Morrowind! An awsome mod compilation making the game worth playing again

[Cerb]

Hope this question isn't too much of a thread derailment. If I didn't care too much for Oblivion (the exploration/graphics kept it interesting for a bit, but I gradually got bored of it), is it likely that I'll feel the same way about Morrowind? From what I've read, it seems that if the games had identical graphics, that Morrowind, as a game, is generally considered better?

Morrowind has more depth, and the UI is on the awkward side (it was pretty much ground-breaking for its day, which means nobody els ehad done it well by that time, either). If you liked the general gameplay of Oblivion, but disliked how it all seemed so generic after you got a few levels in, you'll probably like Morrowind.

As already stated, it is still old, though. If an old game's graphics bother you, like NPCs walking like puppets, and copious amounts of textures in place of geometry, you won't be impressed. It makes a 10-year-old game not feel quite so dated, but it doesn't make it work like a 3-5 year old game. Also, Morrowind+expansions will be, at most, $20.

Mine: E6750@3.28MHz, 8GB RAM, GTX 460@840MHzWin7 64-bit, 1680x1050.
8x AA, 4x AF (I find older games start looking weird w/ high MSAA and AF)
0 mipmap bias
2048 world textures, 1024 normals (max VRAM use has been over 700, so I don't want to push it)
100 grass density
9 cell draw depth
Normal shadows
Most everything else at recommended or default, IIRC

Shaders; HDR, ambient occlusion, and water bobble (I hate DoF with a passion )

Minimum FPS reported has been 28, so far.

Also, iMaxActiveDist set to 336 (default 192), making NPCs/enemies show up at longer distances.

There's some setting somewhere--maybe it was shadows--that, combined with occlusion, causes occlusion to make the game unplayable.

 

[Elcs]

I'm sorry to break it to you, but you are actually the one that has no idea what they are talking about. You are just gullible enough to be shown a few marketing screenshots and take them as unaltered fact. The truth is, DX10 did next to nothing to improve graphics, and all of those comparison screenshots were made by nerfing the DX9 renderer to make DX10 look good by comparison (or by simply fabricating the DX10 shots completely). Just look at Crysis, it locked out the very high settings if you were running on DX9, but simply changing a couple .CFG files allowed all of those "DX10 Only" features to be played on everyone's DX9 graphics cards.

Anyway, no debate needed here, because you need to do some research so you can prove yourself wrong.

Hellgate: London

Google and you might learn something yourself. DX9 Vs. DX10, night and day.

 

[crownjules]

I thought I would post my settings for reference.

My rig is:

Core2duo e8400
4gb 1066 ram
460gtx graphics
Windows 7 64

Awesome. I have virtually the same specs so I'll try out your settings. I was playing at higher res but less high settings and getting good FPS, but I'll try out these and see how I like the difference.

 

[Powermoloch]

I ordered morrowind goty around ~$10 . Can't wait to try it out ! I love oblivion back its day (still have my character since 2006!)

 

[Modular]

Awesome! I'm installing now. Like many, I started to play earlier this year (after the steam sale) and couldn't get into it like I wanted.

I really want to play this game before Skyrim comes out and this should help make it more fun.

 

[motsm]

Hellgate: London

Google and you might learn something yourself. DX9 Vs. DX10, night and day.

You just don't get it. If you do some real research on DX9 and DX10, out of the context of a game, you will find there is almost nothing in DX10 that will give you all of these new graphical features like the game developers show us. If the only stuff you look at is comparison shots a game developer has purposefully made, you are looking at a rigged comparison.

This pretty much says it all.

We've worked very closely with both NVidia and Microsoft to integrate the newest technology into Hellgate: London so that those gamers that live on the cutting edge will get something special from their experience.

Translation, MS and NV gave them money to make it look better than DX9.

 

[Markbnj]

I've been having a lot of fun with it. I realized that I forgot to install the 1.1 patch, which made a big difference in performance since I was able to turn off the "foam" effect around the edges of water. Now with the specs I mentioned above I'm getting 35-50 FPS depending on the area, and the game is very playable.

Someone mentioned the dated engine and AI, and that's all true. Combat is very one dimensional, there are still too many cliff racers, animations get stuck sometimes, but I don't think any of that stuff will deter an RPG fan who wants to play through this game again. For me it's enough that it looks great and runs smoothly in wide screen.

 

[Cerb]

DX10 enables more efficient use of newer graphics hardware, and reduces CPU overhead, compared to DX9. It also standardized support for many added features, like HDR, low AA levels, better single-precision floating point support (DX9 had it, but DX10 has stricter requirements for supporting it), and others. It's not, in itself, a feature package that enhances any detail, and since devs must explicitly support it, and since most games that you can do a comparison with were made for DX9, it's not a cut and dried issue.

The best you can factually say is that some games that have had DirectX 10 features added have had more detail added in the process. While it might perform better than with 9, we can't know, unless the same geometry and textures are rendered with DX9, and an attempt at the same shader effects is also made, and then a performance and IQ comparison is done...and most games that add DX10 w/o a higher detail level for it look practically identical, and you can see that in many articles, if you follow many of the pics from the linked Google Image search.

 

[motsm]

DX10 enables more efficient use of newer graphics hardware, and reduces CPU overhead, compared to DX9. It also standardized support for many added features, like HDR, low AA levels, better single-precision floating point support (DX9 had it, but DX10 has stricter requirements for supporting it), and others. It's not, in itself, a feature package that enhances any detail, and since devs must explicitly support it, and since most games that you can do a comparison with were made for DX9, it's not a cut and dried issue.

The best you can factually say is that some games that have had DirectX 10 features added have had more detail added in the process. While it might perform better than with 9, we can't know, unless the same geometry and textures are rendered with DX9, and an attempt at the same shader effects is also made, and then a performance and IQ comparison is done...and most games that add DX10 w/o a higher detail level for it look practically identical, and you can see that in many articles, if you follow many of the pics from the linked Google Image search.

Indeed true, but in practice, the DX10 optimizations don't turn into anything tangible. Of course the aforementioned Crysis was quite a bit slower when using the DX10 version of it's shaders rendering the same thing. Then you have games like Far Cry 2 where the DX10 version is ever so slightly faster rendering the same thing, as it should be, but it's still an extremely small and situational increase.

 

[vrait]

Y'all fail at being a PC gamer if you never played Morrowind. It's one of the best PC games ever created. And you owe it to your self to play it. It's a lot better then Oblivion. So much more lasting appeal.

 

[Cerb]

Indeed true, but in practice, the DX10 optimizations don't turn into anything tangible.

It won't be optimizations that make it, but game engines with real DX11 support (IE, not DX9 with some 10/11 bolted on). Some of the features, like multithreaded rendering, will remove bottlenecks from the programmer (and add headaches in their stead ), but they won't make any one thing go any faster, or look any better, at least not by enough to matter. It will probably take 5 or more years for DX11's potential to show up in more than tech demos--when games that won't even have DX9 support, that will only grudgingly back down to DX10, start to come out in reasonable numbers.

 

[motsm]

It won't be optimizations that make it, but game engines with real DX11 support (IE, not DX9 with some 10/11 bolted on).

I agree about DX11 to an extent, hence my first post in this thread. Though it's diminishing returns at this point, so they seem to be exaggerating what they can to move product.

There were marked benefits up to DX9 for sure. DX10 did next to nothing however, and DX11 in it's current iteration is rather useless too, as both games and hardware aren't properly built for it.

:Edit: We are really getting way off topic though.

So, Morrowind >>>>>> Oblivion.

 

[Powermoloch]

Y'all fail at being a PC gamer if you never played Morrowind. It's one of the best PC games ever created. And you owe it to your self to play it. It's a lot better then Oblivion. So much more lasting appeal.

lol wut

 

[Darklife]

I played Morrowind with a passion when it was first released, but now replaying it again has taken some of that magic away. The quests are painfully simple and mundane, most involving you having to go to some far away place and kill a few monsters. Most feel as if taken from an MMORPG. I thought the ones in Oblivion were droll, but this game takes the cake. The same goes for some of the combat mechanics and the facade-like living cities. Oh and despite all of these new modded effects it still very much looks its age.

Honestly this game's saving grace is the atmosphere and feel of the world, why else would I still be roaming the wilderness, exploring ruins after 30 hours in?

 

[Cerb]

Honestly this game's saving grace is the atmosphere and feel of the world, why else would I still be roaming the wilderness, exploring ruins after 30 hours in?

...you wouldn't. Quests are there for some nice rewards, and that's about it. The secret to playing a nonlinear Bethesda game: "That direction looks nice. I think I'll go that way."

It might reduce replayability, once you've traveled it all, sure, but I was too busy with twitchy FPS games when Morrowind came out to get too into it, so I'm good .

 

[ibex333]

I tried modding Morrowind in the past, but it usually tends to be a very unpleasant and extremely time consuming experience. You need to install a thousand different small proggies, files, etc. and do a ton of reading. Initially I was fired up, but my excitement faded away over the 4 hours I spent on this. I had to quit in frustration several hours later when I realized that most of the mods I installed don't even work and don't appear in the game.

This was by far not the 1st time I installed mods or played them. I did it with Stalker, Fallout 3, old Infinity Engine games and countless other games... But this was by far, the most frustrating, pointless and disappointing experience. I really hope the people behind these mods made the installation easier, faster and FUNCTIONAL.

Also, this is the mod for graphics and sound only... What about the characters, clothing, etc? I am well aware there is a ton of mods out there for that, but most of them don't work in my experience or tend to be extremely difficult to get to work.

 

[Darklife]

Just find the Morrowind 2011 mod on torrents and install that, the guy gives very precise step by step instructions on his site

 

[Markbnj]

Installing the overhaul mods and patch from the link in the OP was cumbersome, for sure, but following the install guide precisely was pretty bulletproof. The list of mods installed with the overhaul is huge, dozens of them, including all the popular mods for characters, faces, voices, item textures, etc. There may be some good ones missing, I don't know, but the list is pretty comprehensive.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think many casual RPG players are going to find this worthwhile. But if you're a real fan then this is a blast. It looks great, sounds great, and runs smoothly, and it's Morrowind in 2011. If that sentence isn't enough to get you to try installing it then I probably wouldn't bother.

I've got ten or fifteen hours into my character (level 8), and I've gotten a huge kick out of rediscovering the game. The thing about Morrowind is that it was really the last big, sprawling, open hack-n-slash; the kind of game where you can stumble on a little wooden door in the middle of the wilderness and end up spending an hour exploring a unique dungeon, killing mobs, and grabbing loot. The whole thing is old school, dated, everything it's critics could possibly say about it... but... if you love this kind of game then this modded version might just be the best one currently available to play now.

 

[shortylickens]

I just started a new game after several years and I had forgotten how clunky the interface and physics were. Game is almost unplayable to me now. Oblivion wasnt great in the beginning but with loads of mods got to be very enjoyable.

Perhaps I will jump on this and see if its worth playing one more time.

 

[Sulaco]

I just started a new game after several years and I had forgotten how clunky the interface and physics were. Game is almost unplayable to me now. Oblivion wasnt great in the beginning but with loads of mods got to be very enjoyable.

Perhaps I will jump on this and see if its worth playing one more time.

I could honestly care less about bad physics. That's more or less a gimmick.

Bad UI and combat mechanics are another story though.

I played Morrowind off and on when it was new, but never really got into it because of uninteresting quests, dialogue, and poor combat.
Of course, I loved the exploration and vast world to wander through, and that's what might make me go back again with this mod.

On that subject, can anyone recommend some mods that improve the map/UI a bit, and do something to improve combat early on?

 

[HunterDT]

Wow, the graphics are amazing in this. They did a great job putting this all together. The only weird thing I ran into was the game was "Stuck" in 1600x1200 stretch mode. MEGUI would not make it 1920x1200. I had to run FPS Optimizer and set the res in there.

I created an Orc Battlemage. So far so good. I spent an hour trying to find the tax collector because the new grass was hiding everything. There was a huge storm the first night I was in town. The lightning and sound effects were awesome. You could even hear the rain while indoors.

I've got so many games on my list. Why oh why did I have to go back to this now? Arghhh

 

[Markbnj]

I got a kick out of hearing the rain inside too, and the thunderstorms and sandstorms are very impressive. I remember the sandstorms in the ashlands being a pain the first time around. Now you really feel like you've been caught outside in something nasty.

 

[Modular]

Hmm, I can't seem to get the game to start in my native (1680x1050) res. Any tips?

Really enjoying it so far. It's clunky and feels old, but I've never really tried to play it before and am getting into it.

There's TONS of lore.

 

[bactiman]

There is another option for playing morrowind. morroblivion. This is mod for oblivion that " merges the amazing world of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with the enhanced graphics and capabilities of Oblivion."

 

[shortylickens]

There is another option for playing morrowind. morroblivion. This is mod for oblivion that " merges the amazing world of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with the enhanced graphics and capabilities of Oblivion."

WIN!

Perfect game in improved engine.
I will be sending a hooker shortly. Since its UPS she'll have to be young and Asian. I hope they're your favorite.