We first came up with the idea around , during Daggerfall's final days. The initial concept was to build on the Daggerfall codebase and do it like that, but in high resolution. We then realised we needed to start from the ground up, continues Howard, building a new game for a new generation of RPG players. Ken Rolston, Morrowind's lead designer and the man tasked with shaping its story and setting, had come to the company during the game's three-year hiatus.
The game has a strange and alien setting; its people and culture are dark and distinctive. All the other narratives and conflicts grew out of this exotic setting. While Howard knew the game had to be huge in scale, he also wanted to fill it with tiny, intricate details at the very lowest of levels.
In this respect, the team took their inspiration from the Ultima series. Realising the magnitude of such a task, the team developed the Morrowind Construction Set, a surprisingly simple editing tool that enabled them to assemble the game world - from the top right down to the smallest of minutiae - at a faster pace.
The game just seemed to grow and grow, grins Howard. With the tools in place, the team could begin crafting the game's world: the gigantic island of Vvardenfell. Naturally, this produced problems of its own. Where do you start, for instance, when you've got to create a continent from scratch? At the design level, the first step was to create regions with distinctive features and themes, like the rock-and-marsh of the south-west coast, and the wide grasslands of the east," says Rolston.
The remarkable part of that creation is at the artist-landscape designer's detail level - the shaping of landscape, the selection of rock texture, the placement of plants, rocks, fungi and flowers. Morrowind also has an exceptional sense of routes and pathfinding; the land forces you away from the straight path, and in doing so it slyly reveals ruins just out of reach on the slopes of a mountain, or a citadel glimpsed from a high prospect.
The landscape constantly presents you with new, distant or hard to reach features that suck you into the exploring experience. In addition to a stimulating physical environment, Morrowind required inhabitants, a culture and some form of social framework. Ken Rolston's extensive background in the pen-and-paper RPG industry made him the ideal man to flesh out the world.
Nonetheless, the PnP RPGs have provided the universities where us designers have learned the trade of setting and theme development. Morrowind's settings and themes are wide and deep because I learned to appreciate and create those features in my PnP game designs.
The Vvardenfell that Rolston helped to build is populated by 2,odd NPCs, plus a raft of ferocious wildlife and demonic deadra. It's also home to several villages, towns and one large city, along with numerous subterranean caves, mines and tombs, each home to someone - or something. It's a location that Rolston remains proud of to this day. I love its sense of place, its other-worldliness. That sense is present in the landscape, the architecture, the clothing, the religions, the Great Houses and the individual themes and stories of the characters.
Indeed, one of the things that strikes you about Morrowind is the oddness and peculiarity of its setting; it has all the ingredients of a familiar, generic fantasy world - elves, dwarves, monsters, swords and sorcery - and yet doesn't feel familiar or generic.
And then from LARP live action roleplay game design, I took the fundamental underpinnings of social, religious and political faction conflicts that give depth to the stories and characters in Morrowind. So Ken was instrumental in how we set up and executed this freeform game where you could really roleplay, while also being challenged and entertained.
He's brilliant and insane at the same time. Bearing in mind that final comment, one suspects that Rolston may have been behind some of Morrowind's quirkier aspects. The man himself remains tight-lipped when it comes to this subject. There's a wealthy, alcoholic talking mudcrab in the islands on the south-east coast.
What's more, many people have savoured the whimsical allusion to Icarus that plunges from the skies and crashes to the ground in front of you. I absolutely forbid our designers to allow any humorous nonsense like that into the final version of the game, he says with a wry smile. I have no idea how it got past my ever-vigilant editorial delete key.
While Ken Rolston was instrumental in providing the themes and backgrounds, the visual side of things was Todd Howard's domain. I hold Todd completely responsible for our pioneering forays into cutting-edge visuals, attests Rolston. Todd wanted revolutionary advances in graphics and revolutionary advances in console design and interface.
We designers were the lucky ones, working mostly with familiar narrative technologies. Todd and the artists and programmers were marching courageously into the unknown. Combine our ambitions to achieve new levels of graphical splendour m with our ambitions to make the 'Biggest Game Of All Time', and we E were confronting terrible risks. The H team successfully managed those W risks, bringing Morrowind in at the E exact sweet spot of achievable "graphic distinction.
Getting it right was very important to me, Howard adds. I'm the graphics whore and SBiw Ken is the text whore, and Bgus think that Morrowind really represented a coming together of those two disciplines. In this day and age most of the audience is enticed by sexy graphics, but they stay for the deep gameplay. Enticed the gamers were, and stay they did. Morrowind was a huge commercial success upon its release, both on PC and, somewhat surprisingly for Howard, on Xbox. I thought it would be successful, but I think I underestimated how many people wanted a game like that and how long it would be successful.
I really underestimated how popular it would be on Xbox. Ken Rolston was less shocked by the enthusiastic response. So it would have killed me if it hadn't been a success. Morrowind also garnered a warm reaction from the gaming press, who heaped praise on its visuals, scope and freeform gameplay style; we gave it a stellar 94 per cent in issue But not everyone loved it.
A quick scout online reveals a slew of recurring criticisms: a lack of direction; too slow-paced; characters that were impassive and dull. The perceived lack of direction can be put down to Morrowind's open-endedness a big plus in most reviewers' and fans' eyes.
The pacing depends on personal preference, but Howard agrees there's some truth in the third point. If I could go back, I'd spend more time on the dialogue and general characters in the game to add more life -they do feel very stale, he admits. I know it's a desolate world, but at times it came across as too lifeless. It seems that Bethsoft is spending a lot of time ensuring that such a criticism won't be levelled at Morrowind's follow-up, the forthcoming Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion see The Future', opposite page.
Following its release, Morrowind's lifespan was bolstered by two successful expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, not to mention Bethsoft's decision to ship the Construction Set -the selfsame toolset that had been so invaluable during development - with the finished product.
This gave fans the means to build and modify content for the game. The number of plug-ins created and downloaded is staggering, says Howard.
I think the big fan site is over five million downloads and growing rapidly. That's a big number. One of my favourites was created by Brian Robb; you can run around, do Matrix-style combat and lop people's heads off. We eventually hired him full-time. Despite Morrowind's resounding success, there have been very few imitators or even strongly influenced titles released since.
Ken Rolston believes he knows why. It's just too difficult. MMORPGs can provide vast landscapes and epic scope, but they lack the narrative depth to make those settings more than entertaining loot-and-advancement treadmills. Singleplayer games can spend more energy on character and story, but they generally don't have the time or resources to build such wide and deep settings.
In fact, it's likely that in this centric age of games development, no company will ever again attempt to create a game offering such breadth and freedom as Morrowind.
Even Bethsoft seems to be narrowing the scope or altering the focus with Oblivion, which will feature less NPCs and fewer quests, with much of the emphasis on recreating convincing emotions and reactions in the game's inhabitants rather than on building the largest world possible.
So Morrowind may well turn out to be one of a kind, which suits its creators. I loved it," says Rolston. For all its flaws and blemishes, it's a classic monster whose like shall never be seen again. It was too big, too grand In conception, too overwhelming in scope to ever be produced. It was a miracle. And sometimes, thankfully for the game's legions of fans, miracles do happen. While we may not see other developers working on Morrowind-esque titles, Bethsoft is currently working on its follow-up, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Currently scheduled to appear before the end of the year, Oblivion is set in another part of the Elder Scrolls world - the Imperial capital, no less - and its plot revolves around the assassination of the Emperor and the opening of a portal to Oblivion, a hellish underworld populated by legions of demonic nasties. If the screenshots are any indication, we're in for another visual feast, while Bethsoft is promising to inject far more life into the realm's inhabitants.
Improved Al gives the NPCs daily cycles, needs and desires, while combat will be far more visceral and dynamic than that of Morrowind. Gameplaywise, you can expect another freeform approach, giving you the opportunity to again join various different factions or simply do your own thing and ignore the main quest.
We can't wait. The mother lode has been struck, and you, my fellow RPG lover, are about to become wealthy. Morrowind is a classic RPG with uncommon realism and staggering replay ability. A single player game that is viewed in the first person, Morrowind has you select what race, class, birth sign yes, it affects the game along with attributes and skills that let you know you are in for a long, long ride.
Once the game begins and you have created your character, it's off you go, into a massive gaming environment that breaks all the rules of traditional RPGs.
Do you choose to start your quest, or do you choose to start robbing people and drinking in the local bar? Will you travel the main road, or prowl through the forest in search of villains and their treasure.
The game's choices are literally endless and you could arguably play for as little as hours or for as many as , maybe even more! Yes, this is the closest thing to an alternate reality I have ever had the pleasure of playing. What makes it even scarier is the game also includes a construction set to make your own quests. But let the numbers do the talking:. Casual players and peasants will get the holy living bejeebers slapped out of them. The challenge has been issued, do you dare venture forth?
At last, I have finally got my hands on Morrowind. Questions raced through my mind, can this game possibly live up to all the hype, will it be buggy, and could we finally have a decent RPG out on the XBOX? Let me tell you what I found. Morrowind is a hugely ambitious game. Everything about it makes us RPGers salivate: non-linear game play, huge variety of character classes, countless NPCs to interact with, completely immersive interactive environments, an engaging plotline, as well as a seemingly endless number of quests, dungeons and lands to explore.
You have complete control over whom your character will be which is where the replay value really shines. You can choose to be play a good character, helping those around you in need, or you can play as a self-seeking rogue looking to enhance his wealth and power, stealing items when others aren't looking.
It's your decision. Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Reviewer: mangoson - - November 15, Subject: Can anyone help? Everything runs excellent but there is no option to save the game upon resting or otherwise.. Does anyone else have this problem? Reviewer: DaddyUr - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - May 17, Subject: Awesome Game This was my first experience of Morrowind and I absolutely loved every second of it. Best of all there were no problems with the download and it worked from beginning to end!
This is where the character creation begins and the game opens up. Once freed, the game world becomes an incredibly interactive environment filled with opportunities for fun and adventure. Even though the main quest centers on the player being the Nerevarine of prophecy, it is an open-play style role-playing game, meaning you can do what you want and be who you wish.
Prowl the streets as a nimble thief picking pockets and fencing ill-gotten treasure, join the Mages Guild and rise to the rank of Arch-Mage, be an assassin stalking targets in the shadows, become a noble member of one of the Great Houses. Or, you can decide to join the werewolves and become one of them, opening up a whole new style of gameplay. Conan Exiles Complete Edition. Delivered by FeedBurner. Telephone Your telephone number is opetional.
Search for:. Download Here Help Center. Share this post Digg Tweet Stumbleupon delicious reddit Facebook. Related Posts. Gold Edition.
0コメント