I posted this on another forum at the request of some friends who hadn't made up their minds as to whether they were going to get Morrowind or not. I hope it convinces some of you also so that you don't miss out on this awesome game 
.
This game looks like it is going to be amazing. Although I am not very far at all, I can already start to see elements of the game that are going to keep me interested for the long run.
The character generation is fully interactive in the game... much like in Old Ultima games where you were asked questions and your answers chose your class. A similar situation has been setup in Morrowind, except that if you don't want to answer the questions, you can just choose a class manually or, better yet, create your own class. I must have spent 30 minutes trying to find the race that I thought would suit me and, after many facial nitpickings, I ended up with a dark elf male named skace. Now I wanted to have a pretty unique character, so I chose to create my own class for my first time playing (may regret this ). I envisioned a ninjaesque fighter and tried to come as close to this as possible. I made my main attributes strength and willpower and my main skills long sword, acrobatics, medium armor, aerobics, and destruction. With secondary skills centered around thievery, such as security (lockpicking), sneak, and others, I rounded off what I had in my mind a ninja should posses. Destruction doesn't really fit in, but dark elves are innate in the ability to cast dark magic so I couldn't ignore my obvious bonus. As you can probably guess by now, the character creation is very well thought out, giving you the ultimate control over the character you wish to play. To further it, there was honestly 12 different character combinations I very much so wanted to try. Such as: A wood elf archer / thief, A Khajit (sp? - cat people) fighter, they like to use hand to hand (they have claws) and unarmored combat making them very interesting minimalists, or a High Elf Enchanter (Hail Bazer).
After this, I spent the other 4 hours testing out my thieving skills on the locals of this new town and getting accustomed to the controls. The rest of this feedback is basically just things I encountered trying to navigate the town and gain trust from the locals while robbing them blind.
The great thing about this RPG is that battle is much like an FPS. Each swing of your sword is a manual act, which can be blocked by the opponent, depending on what he is doing at the time of the swing, or completely miss due to your own incompetence. Also, You can hold your axe/sword above your head for prolonged durations, as if waiting for the perfect moment to land that precision strike. Using this method, I like to go into 3rd person view and watch myself run down the landscape with my sword above my head like a psychopath . Archery and magic also require a bit of skill. You must aim your arrows as well as your spells and spells must be readied just like a weapon must be weilded. Meaning, if you have your sword out, you can't sit there casting heal and swing at the same time. The incredibly logical "law of the land" is that you can attack ANYONE who attacks you first and you are completely justified in doing so!! If you accidently attack an NPC, you can stop and turn yourself in to the guards! They will make you do hard labor or pay fees, but this is far better than becoming a murderer/outcast which happens if you kill an innocent NPC. I almost dropped my jaw when I heard this... its soo logical!
But this game is FAR from the normal RPG that revolves around combat as enhancing your character. Simply talking to a merchant can increase your speech and help you to gain more info / quests. A person with high personality and speech can go very far with words alone. Simply sneaking through town can raise sneak, jumping raises acrobatics (ability to jump further/high & Safe fall) and running increases aerobics? (ability to run fast and outlast other fighters in a heated fight). Also, when you go to sell items, your price is based on multiple attributes and your faction with the merchant BUT you can barter this price based on your mercantile skill! So no item has a fixed price, it is based on your skills as a player on how much you intend to make.
More on factions, there are a ton of factions in the game that, unlike everquest, will determine greatly who you trust and where you seek haven. Joining a specific guild has the benefit of greatly increasing some factions while greatly decreasing others.
More on speech, The talk system is amazing. It gives the text of the person you are talking to in a window like any other RPG. But key words come up as hyperlinks, which you click and get more information based on them. All of these key words go in a window to the right side. Many of the links on the right side are general questions you can ask each person (any rumors? etc) but also major items will pop up as you talk to the right people. Important text is automatically logged in your journal so you never have to write anything down. A faction bar appears at the top of the right window which shows, on a scale of 0-100, how much the NPC likes you. You can ask for training, barter or persuade/threaten the person all from this right window. From the first town, I've found this to be the most user friendly talk system ever in an RPG.
There are a few things that suprised / impressed me about the graphics of the game. Overall, the graphics are amazing and I honestly thought they would be worse from the screenshots. When I was picking my face, I thought a lot of the faces looked kinda ugly / stupid, but the fact is that the faces look much better once you are at the normal zoom level that you will be at during game play. Whenever you put your crosshair on ANY object in the game, it pops up a little panel of info (this panel can be changed from instant to varying delay timers to off). Look at a spoon on a tabel? Boom, the weight, value, name, and any information you may know about that spoon (the information slot seems to be primarily for alchemists in identifying all the herbs in this game). At first glance, I thought water was missing a texture, but after a second, I realized that the water in this game is far better than most games (read: every single one I've ever played). The water is very reflective, making it hard to look below the surface of it. It also accurately ripples based on your movements and has large light reflections like if you were looking over the water in real life as the sun was setting. Also, the monsters in the water appear to practically sneak up on you - you can't seem them against the reflective surface until they either come out or attack (scary / exciting). The only quirk with the graphics / world so far is the fact that most houses are like minizones, so when you click use on a door, it zones you into the house instead of opening the door and letting you walk in - This sort of ruins the otherwise seemless transitions everywhere else but was probably necessary in a world this big.
My last comments about the game will revolve around my attempts at theft / robbery. First off, I have yet to figure out how to pickpocket an individual. My sneak is pretty damn low, so I would probably fail, but according to the manual sneak is responsible for pickpocket also (I think - or perhaps they meant stealing from a shelf/etc). Second, I'm not sure if people sleep in this game, making it hard to steal all the items in the shops if the owner is awake 24/7 . At night the NPCs in town seemed to be sporting torches / lanterns but other than that they went about their same schedule. I'm not positive on this one yet though, as I didn't try sleeping until nighttime or coming into the town during nighttime / etc. Third, since people don't sleep.. I am unsure how you rob/lockpick houses near guards. I must rob everyone down to the silverware!!
Ok, so from this behemoth review of only the first 5 hours, I'm hoping you can guess how AWESOME I think this game is. I plan to play it this weekend until I forget my first name and fall asleep at the keyboard. I hope you get and like it, Wuven and whoever else reads this.
*note: Yes I know I mentioned Everquest even though they arn't really similar games at all. But I originally posted this on an EQ forum
.This game looks like it is going to be amazing. Although I am not very far at all, I can already start to see elements of the game that are going to keep me interested for the long run.
The character generation is fully interactive in the game... much like in Old Ultima games where you were asked questions and your answers chose your class. A similar situation has been setup in Morrowind, except that if you don't want to answer the questions, you can just choose a class manually or, better yet, create your own class. I must have spent 30 minutes trying to find the race that I thought would suit me and, after many facial nitpickings, I ended up with a dark elf male named skace. Now I wanted to have a pretty unique character, so I chose to create my own class for my first time playing (may regret this ). I envisioned a ninjaesque fighter and tried to come as close to this as possible. I made my main attributes strength and willpower and my main skills long sword, acrobatics, medium armor, aerobics, and destruction. With secondary skills centered around thievery, such as security (lockpicking), sneak, and others, I rounded off what I had in my mind a ninja should posses. Destruction doesn't really fit in, but dark elves are innate in the ability to cast dark magic so I couldn't ignore my obvious bonus. As you can probably guess by now, the character creation is very well thought out, giving you the ultimate control over the character you wish to play. To further it, there was honestly 12 different character combinations I very much so wanted to try. Such as: A wood elf archer / thief, A Khajit (sp? - cat people) fighter, they like to use hand to hand (they have claws) and unarmored combat making them very interesting minimalists, or a High Elf Enchanter (Hail Bazer).
After this, I spent the other 4 hours testing out my thieving skills on the locals of this new town and getting accustomed to the controls. The rest of this feedback is basically just things I encountered trying to navigate the town and gain trust from the locals while robbing them blind.
The great thing about this RPG is that battle is much like an FPS. Each swing of your sword is a manual act, which can be blocked by the opponent, depending on what he is doing at the time of the swing, or completely miss due to your own incompetence. Also, You can hold your axe/sword above your head for prolonged durations, as if waiting for the perfect moment to land that precision strike. Using this method, I like to go into 3rd person view and watch myself run down the landscape with my sword above my head like a psychopath . Archery and magic also require a bit of skill. You must aim your arrows as well as your spells and spells must be readied just like a weapon must be weilded. Meaning, if you have your sword out, you can't sit there casting heal and swing at the same time. The incredibly logical "law of the land" is that you can attack ANYONE who attacks you first and you are completely justified in doing so!! If you accidently attack an NPC, you can stop and turn yourself in to the guards! They will make you do hard labor or pay fees, but this is far better than becoming a murderer/outcast which happens if you kill an innocent NPC. I almost dropped my jaw when I heard this... its soo logical!
But this game is FAR from the normal RPG that revolves around combat as enhancing your character. Simply talking to a merchant can increase your speech and help you to gain more info / quests. A person with high personality and speech can go very far with words alone. Simply sneaking through town can raise sneak, jumping raises acrobatics (ability to jump further/high & Safe fall) and running increases aerobics? (ability to run fast and outlast other fighters in a heated fight). Also, when you go to sell items, your price is based on multiple attributes and your faction with the merchant BUT you can barter this price based on your mercantile skill! So no item has a fixed price, it is based on your skills as a player on how much you intend to make.
More on factions, there are a ton of factions in the game that, unlike everquest, will determine greatly who you trust and where you seek haven. Joining a specific guild has the benefit of greatly increasing some factions while greatly decreasing others.
More on speech, The talk system is amazing. It gives the text of the person you are talking to in a window like any other RPG. But key words come up as hyperlinks, which you click and get more information based on them. All of these key words go in a window to the right side. Many of the links on the right side are general questions you can ask each person (any rumors? etc) but also major items will pop up as you talk to the right people. Important text is automatically logged in your journal so you never have to write anything down. A faction bar appears at the top of the right window which shows, on a scale of 0-100, how much the NPC likes you. You can ask for training, barter or persuade/threaten the person all from this right window. From the first town, I've found this to be the most user friendly talk system ever in an RPG.
There are a few things that suprised / impressed me about the graphics of the game. Overall, the graphics are amazing and I honestly thought they would be worse from the screenshots. When I was picking my face, I thought a lot of the faces looked kinda ugly / stupid, but the fact is that the faces look much better once you are at the normal zoom level that you will be at during game play. Whenever you put your crosshair on ANY object in the game, it pops up a little panel of info (this panel can be changed from instant to varying delay timers to off). Look at a spoon on a tabel? Boom, the weight, value, name, and any information you may know about that spoon (the information slot seems to be primarily for alchemists in identifying all the herbs in this game). At first glance, I thought water was missing a texture, but after a second, I realized that the water in this game is far better than most games (read: every single one I've ever played). The water is very reflective, making it hard to look below the surface of it. It also accurately ripples based on your movements and has large light reflections like if you were looking over the water in real life as the sun was setting. Also, the monsters in the water appear to practically sneak up on you - you can't seem them against the reflective surface until they either come out or attack (scary / exciting). The only quirk with the graphics / world so far is the fact that most houses are like minizones, so when you click use on a door, it zones you into the house instead of opening the door and letting you walk in - This sort of ruins the otherwise seemless transitions everywhere else but was probably necessary in a world this big.
My last comments about the game will revolve around my attempts at theft / robbery. First off, I have yet to figure out how to pickpocket an individual. My sneak is pretty damn low, so I would probably fail, but according to the manual sneak is responsible for pickpocket also (I think - or perhaps they meant stealing from a shelf/etc). Second, I'm not sure if people sleep in this game, making it hard to steal all the items in the shops if the owner is awake 24/7 . At night the NPCs in town seemed to be sporting torches / lanterns but other than that they went about their same schedule. I'm not positive on this one yet though, as I didn't try sleeping until nighttime or coming into the town during nighttime / etc. Third, since people don't sleep.. I am unsure how you rob/lockpick houses near guards. I must rob everyone down to the silverware!!
Ok, so from this behemoth review of only the first 5 hours, I'm hoping you can guess how AWESOME I think this game is. I plan to play it this weekend until I forget my first name and fall asleep at the keyboard. I hope you get and like it, Wuven and whoever else reads this.
*note: Yes I know I mentioned Everquest even though they arn't really similar games at all. But I originally posted this on an EQ forum
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