Anyway, OpenMW is amazing and the best way to play the game these days. The only bad thing I can say about it is the expanded draw distance shows how tiny the world map actually is, but that’s both not their fault and extremely minor considering how content dense Morrowind is.
I’d say the latter rationalization is more plausible than the former. From memory, the swampy bits are pretty well concentrated along the western edge of the island, before giving way to the relatively temperate zones around Caldera and Pelagiad. By contrast, the volcanic portions of the island cover at least half the landmass, and there’s implemented ash storms with some frequency in those zones.
As far as headcanon goes though, I’m partial to thinking the fog represents aerosolized Cliff Racer droppings.
It should be compatible with most mods, or it was when I last played several years ago. Major overhaul packs have engine tweaks included that aren’t compatible and the script parser in OpenMW is/was stricter than vanilla’s so one or two poorly written mods might need typo fixes in their scripts, but other than that it seemed to work just fine.
I played Morrowind for the first time a few weeks ago and installed OpenMW, as I saw it being recommended.
I don’t know anything about the game/engine, but after completing the setup and being told to walk to the next city I came across small enemies, and it tooks about 3 minutes to kill them as my hits didn’t seem to connect.
Am I missing something or did I mess something up during installation?
Sorry to ask you randomly here, but you seem to have experience :D
I’m gonna guess your fatigue was low from running. Paying attention to your fatigue (and some kind of melee weapon as a major skill) makes the game much less of a drag in the first few levels.
That’s just how low levels work in Morrowind, unfortunately. The first few Elder Scrolls took heavy inspiration from tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, including making you roll for everything. Internally the game rolls after each swing to see if your attack hits, so you need to both hit an enemy physically and win a dice roll based on your skills.
You’ll want to make sure your character starts with at least one weapon skill at as high a level as your class and race allow. At 40+ skill you’ll hit most of the time rather than whiffing 90% of your attacks. There is also a massive penalty to hit chance when your fatigue is low, so spamming attacks will get you nowhere.
(I believe there are mods to make it work more like Oblivion and Skyrim where you only need to hit them physically and skills only affect damage, but I don’t know the names of those mods off the top of my head.)
Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.
You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.
You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.
If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.
The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.
Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.
Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.
also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.
also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers… It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.
The only roadblock here are guild requirements to get to the top of the hierarchy. Gameplay-wise, I can’t remember any time I had regrets over a borked leveling in the past or something. In spite of Morrowind’s system sounding utterly weird, it didn’t implement autoleveling to such a degree that it matters. Comparatively, I got frustrated with Skyrim and completely dropped Oblivion the last time I tried to revisit them. The latter directly tied enemies and their equipment to your base level, so it punished you greatly in the middle of the game if you pick something weird, and you can’t just sink money to correct that.
The level scaling in Oblivion and Skyrim are worse, true. It’s kind of impressive how bad an idea and execution the level scaling in Oblivion was. They place enemies based on your total level, so if you leveled up from non-combat skills then you’ll have a bad time. It makes exploring kind of pointless, because you’ll never find anything interesting. And then there were the bandits wearing thousands of GP worth of equipment mugging you for 100gp.
In morrowind, not much scales with you so it matters less. You can’t raise a skill above its stat, so you can kind of paint yourself into a corner with bad leveling. (Though I think you can use fortify-attribute to get around that at trainers)
I feel like that push (and then radiant quests, automated faction battles, structure of dungeons with a final chest and an exit, mini-bosses etc) came from Todd trying to optimize everything in production after the hell of making Morrowind. Let the game write itself as much as possible, let’s make places not Lego, but Lego Duplo constructors for our designers and generate trees\grass over them, and then - the leveling got too generalized to become awkward. Wide brush strokes and big ideas as a base canvas, with some select things painted-in afterwards intentionally.
*peers suspiciously at username* Hmmmm…
Anyway, OpenMW is amazing and the best way to play the game these days. The only bad thing I can say about it is the expanded draw distance shows how tiny the world map actually is, but that’s both not their fault and extremely minor considering how content dense Morrowind is.
You can adjust the draw distance/fog amount in OpenMW, you know…
Also… isn’t the base game’s level of fog… more or less canonically justifiable, due to most of Morrowind taking place in… a swamp/bog type of biome?
That or a volanic death zone that could just be said to have lots of gas plumes and such?
I’d say the latter rationalization is more plausible than the former. From memory, the swampy bits are pretty well concentrated along the western edge of the island, before giving way to the relatively temperate zones around Caldera and Pelagiad. By contrast, the volcanic portions of the island cover at least half the landmass, and there’s implemented ash storms with some frequency in those zones.
As far as headcanon goes though, I’m partial to thinking the fog represents aerosolized Cliff Racer droppings.
Unless you want to mod it, then it’s best to stick with the original.
It should be compatible with most mods, or it was when I last played several years ago. Major overhaul packs have engine tweaks included that aren’t compatible and the script parser in OpenMW is/was stricter than vanilla’s so one or two poorly written mods might need typo fixes in their scripts, but other than that it seemed to work just fine.
There’s a growing catalogue of Lua mods for MWSE that aren’t cross-compatible and neither set of devs seem interested in a unified Lua API.
That’s good to know, thanks! I was mainly thinking about traditional esp/esm mods; the script extender never even crossed my mind.
I played Morrowind for the first time a few weeks ago and installed OpenMW, as I saw it being recommended.
I don’t know anything about the game/engine, but after completing the setup and being told to walk to the next city I came across small enemies, and it tooks about 3 minutes to kill them as my hits didn’t seem to connect. Am I missing something or did I mess something up during installation?
Sorry to ask you randomly here, but you seem to have experience :D
I’m gonna guess your fatigue was low from running. Paying attention to your fatigue (and some kind of melee weapon as a major skill) makes the game much less of a drag in the first few levels.
That’s just how low levels work in Morrowind, unfortunately. The first few Elder Scrolls took heavy inspiration from tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, including making you roll for everything. Internally the game rolls after each swing to see if your attack hits, so you need to both hit an enemy physically and win a dice roll based on your skills.
You’ll want to make sure your character starts with at least one weapon skill at as high a level as your class and race allow. At 40+ skill you’ll hit most of the time rather than whiffing 90% of your attacks. There is also a massive penalty to hit chance when your fatigue is low, so spamming attacks will get you nowhere.
(I believe there are mods to make it work more like Oblivion and Skyrim where you only need to hit them physically and skills only affect damage, but I don’t know the names of those mods off the top of my head.)
Thank you for your answer, I’ll give it another go then :D
Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.
You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.
You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.
If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.
The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.
Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.
Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.
also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.
The only roadblock here are guild requirements to get to the top of the hierarchy. Gameplay-wise, I can’t remember any time I had regrets over a borked leveling in the past or something. In spite of Morrowind’s system sounding utterly weird, it didn’t implement autoleveling to such a degree that it matters. Comparatively, I got frustrated with Skyrim and completely dropped Oblivion the last time I tried to revisit them. The latter directly tied enemies and their equipment to your base level, so it punished you greatly in the middle of the game if you pick something weird, and you can’t just sink money to correct that.
The level scaling in Oblivion and Skyrim are worse, true. It’s kind of impressive how bad an idea and execution the level scaling in Oblivion was. They place enemies based on your total level, so if you leveled up from non-combat skills then you’ll have a bad time. It makes exploring kind of pointless, because you’ll never find anything interesting. And then there were the bandits wearing thousands of GP worth of equipment mugging you for 100gp.
one of the original developers recently came out and said it was a huge mistake: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/elder-scrolls-4-oblivions-level-scaling-was-a-mistake-says-designer-so-why-is-it-in-the-remaster
In morrowind, not much scales with you so it matters less. You can’t raise a skill above its stat, so you can kind of paint yourself into a corner with bad leveling. (Though I think you can use fortify-attribute to get around that at trainers)
You know, you could afford glass armor too, if you skipped the cup of soy ale every other day! Coin-to-coin, that’s how my business is going!
An article for an article: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-morrowind-oral-history-bethesda
I feel like that push (and then radiant quests, automated faction battles, structure of dungeons with a final chest and an exit, mini-bosses etc) came from Todd trying to optimize everything in production after the hell of making Morrowind. Let the game write itself as much as possible, let’s make places not Lego, but Lego Duplo constructors for our designers and generate trees\grass over them, and then - the leveling got too generalized to become awkward. Wide brush strokes and big ideas as a base canvas, with some select things painted-in afterwards intentionally.
Not really, there are several mod lists with varying levels of changes, that can be installed automatically, and most mods otherwise work.