A few weeks ago I was visiting my buddy Greg, and he showed me a bit of Morrowind. As soon as I saw it I knew I would be buying it. Just the character creation was enough to convince me. You get to pick your race/sex/look as in any decent RPG, but that's nothing. Then you get the chance to pick which skills you want to focus on as primary and secondary skills. You also get to pick your most important attributes. This allows you the freedom to totally remove yourself from the concept of cookie-cutter classes. Want to be a magic user wearing heavy armor and wielding a long sword? In Morrowind you can. There's no sort of penalty to you for doing so either. The sheer freedom you have in your character makes this game insanely better than any other RPG I've ever played.

The first day I saw Morrowind at Greg's I purchased a copy. Unfortunately it won't play on my laptop even at the lowest quality settings. The ATI Rage Mobility has failed me at last. The next day when I got home I immediately installed Morrowind and started playing. I created a test character more or less as a warrior thief and experimented a bit. There's so much in the game that it is a bit overwhelming. Magic had me a bit baffled at first. There are magic potions, magic scrolls, magic weapons, and magic spells. I didn't realize that using magic spells was what would raise up my Destructive Magic skill. Therefore I wasted a bunch of money and effort on potions and scrolls. I also experimented with the interface and combat system just to get the hang of how it works. It is actually quite a bit like Everquest or any of the other first person online RPGs in its mechanics. That was welcome to me since I've been an occasional player of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot since they were respectively released.

After playing for a couple or three hours I figured out that I had really done a stupid job of selecting my primary and seconary skills. The next time I launched the game I created a new character which more closely matched what I wanted. Light armor, short blade, Athletics, Acrobatics, Destructive Magic, Restorative Magic, Stealth, Security, Merchantile, and Speechcraft are most of the primary/secondary skills I chose. My primary attribute is luck and I don't remember my other bonus attribute. Pretty much it works out to a rogue jack-of-all-trades. A little magic, decent combat, sneaky; just what I like to play. In nearly every RPG I play a rogue of one sort or another. The nice thing about Morrowind is that I get to choose exactly how rogueish I want to be. If I want to rob everyone blind I can. If I want to kill everyone and everything, I can just darn near do that too. There's a few quest NPCs that you can kill that will condemn the world to destruction but other than that everyone is fair game. Personally, I like to do a little petty thieving on the side to supplement my income. Wait until no guards are around, pick the lock on the back door to a shop, sneak in, and steal everything in the back out of the sight of the proprietor. This is great fun in my opinion. Every game that implements any sort of thief character should take notes from this. Thief 1 and 2 are the definitive sources for what a thief class should be able to do, but Morrowind is the new high water mark in terms of freedom to be the type of thief you want to be.

The world of Morrowind is pretty amazing looking too. The water effects are absolutely stunning with a GeForce 3 or 4. The detail is excellent too. The characters are very distinct but the majority of the faces are a bit fugly in my opinion. I had to really work to decide which of the faces sucked the least when I created my character. That's a small thing though compared to how good everything else looks. The whole thing reminds me a bit of the comic artist Moebius' work.

I could go on, and on, and on about the coolness of the tradeskills, storylines, and total coolness of most everything but, frankly there's so much that I'm not sure where I'd stop.

Negatives: There aren't many but there are a few. There is no autorun button. When I'm running miles on end I don't want to hold down the forward key the whole time. I should be able to just turn on autorun like I would in an online RPG. It is altso pretty easy to get stuck on the geometry. It gets irritating when you don't walk over a small rock in your path but instead just get stuck on it. Frequently you then can't even jump over it and are forced to back up a hair before being able to then jump it. The coders really need to play a bit of Quake 3, Everquest, or something because it shouldn't be this easy to get your character stuck. In fact it is so common that they added a command to the console to unstick your character 'FixMe' or something like that. Now I've implemented more than my share of half-assed workaround hacks to fix underlying bugs in my day but I'm not a big fan of it when I'm the target user of the product. The 'FixMe' console command also exposes another problem. I've mapped my inventory character screen key to 'i'. Makes sense doesn't it, i -> inventory? Unfortunately the console does not grab full keyboard control. That means that when the console is up typing 'i' will cause it to try to bring up the inventory rather than typing 'i' in the console window. That kind of sucks in my opinion. However, that's about it for negatives in the game that I can think of.

Conclusion: I'm going to say that Morrowind is the best RPG I've ever played. That doesn't really mean a lot because I haven't really played all that many. In fact it is so few I can probably enumerate them. I played most of Final Fantasy 7, all of Panzer Dragoon Saga, all of Biomotor Unitron, 2 years or so of Everquest, and 6 or 8 months of Dark Age of Camelot. I don't know that I've really played any other than that. I have read inordinate amounts about RPGs though thanks to sites such as the defunct Lum the Mad site. I also have watched friends play many, many RPGs. Based on that Morrowind is the best I've ever seen. It is a huge, detailed world that provides unprecedented amounts of freedom in gameplay style. You know what I would really like to play? A massively multiplayer online version of Morrowind would totally rock.

Update: June 5, 2002 This game just gets better and better. This has to be the best implementation of a thief since Thief 1 and Thief 2. I raided this massive dungeon and stole everything I could carry while killing anyone and everything I came across. Then I went back to town and sold all of my loot. Next I went and assassinated an entire nest of rival cutthroats. I took over their lair as my own and sold off everything they had on their bodies. Now I've got my own bar to store stuff in. I followed that up with a little petty thieving while visiting a Legion outpost. Now I just need to get my stealth skill raised up to where I can do a bit of decent sneaking around. What a great game.