Product Description

Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls III is an epic, open-ended single-player game where you create and play any kind of character you can imagine. Be the hero embarking on an epic quest or a thief rising to leadership of his guild. Be a sorcerer developing the ultimate spell of destruction or a healer searching for the cure to a plague. Your actions define your character, and your gameplay changes and evolves in response to your actions. Confront the assassins' guild, and they take out a contract on you; impress them, and they try to recruit you instead. No two sagas are the same in the world of Morrowind.

Players can choose to follow the intriguing main story line or set off to explore the province of Morrowind and the many interesting people and exotic locations it contains. Vast cities and remote villages dot the landscape, each with its own unique look and feel. Hundreds of quests and adventures await as you interact with characters and learn more. Regardless of whether you play a murderous assassin or a noble knight, the game holds endless possibilities and allows you to revisit the main story line at any time.

With Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls character system is coupled with an increase in the world's richness of detail. Utilising advanced 3-D technology, Morrowind features hyper-realistic textures and polygon counts, real-time shadows, vast landscapes, skeletal-based animation and a complete weather system. Gameplay is further extended with the inclusion of The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, which allows players to modify and add to Morrowind in any way they see fit. Change character or creature attributes and skills, introduce new weapons or dungeons into the game, or create entire new worlds to explore.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13067 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Released on: 2002-05-31
• Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Amazon.co.uk Review
If you want fantasy books or films to sweep you away into convincing worlds of wonder, you've probably been regularly disappointed by computer games. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, thanks to years of effort by designers Bethesda, offers no such flimflam-–they promise a living, believable fantasy world, and that's what you get. Beautiful first-person-view graphics and excellent story-plotting combine with a depth of game design and a freedom of player options undreamed of in previous computer role-playing games.

Skill development, for example, is based on actual experience, not simply on killing baddies--as it is in too many other RPGs. In Morrowind, if you want to become a skilled lock-picker, you just have to get out there and pick some locks. Fighting will only increase your combat skills, and then only with those weapons you actually use. (If the game has any fault at all, it is that the fighting is too point-and-click simplistic and provides no feedback on how much damage you've inflicted with each blow.)

The huge range of skills available in the game allows the player to really craft their own speciality; you're not restricted to unrealistic and hackneyed "character classes". The possibilities of the highly flexible magic system alone are worthy of hours of happy experimentation.

But what are you going to do with your potentially multi-faceted character once you've completed your shopping list of must-have abilities? The answer is: "pretty much whatever you like". The Morrowind game world is huge, highly interactive, richly populated and is riddled with feuding guilds, religions and races. There is a rich and complex central game plot, but you might prefer putting off completing it just to dive into the roiling and reactive world of Morrowind local politics.

Finally, the inclusion of the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit guarantees that even if you manage to wring every last drop of play out of the original game, you will be able to design your own adventures or download those created by other Morrowind enthusiasts. This raises Morrowind from the simple "game" designation and makes it a potential cult hobby. If Bethesda ever releases a multi-player patch, a lot of us can kiss all of our free time goodbye. --Damon Wilson

Customer Reviews

my shoulders are killing me
I've just bought a new PC for my home office (yeah right) and I managed to convince my better (and apparently wiser) half to get me a couple of games for my birthday. Cue Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights: only the latter hasnt even made it out of the cellophane yet!
Morrowind is jaw-droppingly beautiful - as someone brought up on Nintendo its quite a change to be wandering thru what is practically a photograph (not one of your gran at xmas either). Textures, meshes, light and shadow effects abound, weird sounds from all angles and a soundtrack that hasnt got annoying even after a weeks keyboard thrashing - unfortunately for you has to be seen & heard to be appreciated - cant do it justice in text! Controls are intuitive and easy to pick up, the menu system works fine and game play is well thought out and suprisingly addictive.
The open ended world gives you plenty of scope to just bundle off into the unknown and pick flowers/batter crabs/help out with stuff/get killed by bandits: want to know whats over that sinister-looking ridge? Just scramble up and take a look... want to dash about in a bikini, no problem, although the rats might take advantage.
Character generation is quick and easy, and once you are set up there is simply MASSES of stuff to do - over 300 subquests and a main quest for those who like a good plot, which you can return to at leisure. You can join war-like factions, specialise in making potions and magical weapons, rob everyone blind, plunder tombs gung-ho fashion or just collect herbs and make a pretty pile in the woods somewhere - totally up to you.
Skills are learned by reading books, buying training, or just lots of practice: just like your mother told you.
If I were to have a minor gripe it would be that talking to people can be a little slow (they often have bags of unsolicited advice), and you cant move stuff like tables and chairs (I wanted to clear a room for a party). Other than that, if you like getting away from it all then you can do a lot worse than spend just a few quid and go on holiday in Morrowind (you wont get a tan before you ask)...

Looking at the other reviews, a word of advice - get the most recent patches and plugins from the website before you get started: updates include the opponents health bar!

The way RPG's should be.
For RPG lovers, this is the game we've been waiting for. The sheer size and open-endedness in this game far surpasses anything seen before. Oh, and the graphics are probably the best you've ever layed your eyes on aswell.

Morrowind allows you to do anything you want to. If you prefer to follow the main story closely, do it. Want to fly, swim, steal the old woman who sells potions dinner plates? Do it. Want to rise to the head of the mages guild, look after your own house, buy slaves? Do it. The choices are endless and the replay value is great.

The choices in character creation are vast also. There are pre-defined templates for you to choose, or you can make your own. You can even answer questions to let the game tell you what class would be best for you, from the novice to the expert who likes to tinker with every stat, the choice is yours.

The main storyline is excellent as expected from all RPG's these days, the many sub quests could pass for main quests they are so detailed. The amount of lore is staggering, and the immersion is superb. You really can lose yourself in this game and wonder where the time went.

Of course, it's not perfect. Travelling through some areas can become frustrating with all the monsters to be killed constantly, this is no different than most RPG's - but it is still something that can annoy even the most hardcore of RPG fans. (with the many mods around this is addressed however) The system requirements are also very high, and you'll need a decent system (1gz+, 256 ram+, geforce 2+) to run this game well.

Most of the older problems have been corrected with patches from the producer, various mods from the fanbase, and with the expansion pack out in a few days there is no better time to try this epic game out. You won't regret it.

Morrowind - a true world to explore
Picking up Morrowind on the recommendation of a friend, I was quickly impressed by the graphics and the handling of the game - very nice. But I quickly realised that there is much more than pretty graphics to this game.

First, a very clever and intuitive way to set up your character, with enough stats fiddling for the completeist (me) and an easy auto generate picker for the less worried.

Once I started to play, that's when the wonderful thing happened, no forced quest, no go here first, fetch that item now, can't move on, set paths with fixed boundries. It's a world. You walk around. You find things. You kill things. And no-one forces you to do anything. You get hints, you get quests. But there are no set paths - just wilderness, towns, hidden caves, trees - all with hidden goodies behind them. It never seems to run out of places to go or see.

For those of you who, like me, love the length and depth of a game like Final Fanasy - try this. I've been playing for days & am just scratching the surface. Go for your life - I defy you to get bored...