You know, I’m just a little baby compared to all the other games journalists out there. While I’ve played a lot of, what I would call, old games, other gamers will harass me for being unborn whilst they were whipping the coccyx off skeletons in Castlevania. But I’ve always believed that if you are passionate about something, whether it be books, films or video games, you should consume content that came out before your time or while you were too young to understand it properly.
And that’s where Morrowind comes in. I remember when I was living with my biological parents and my father had got me a pretty decent PC for the time. I had no idea that my computer was so good that running Half-Life 2 was a miracle and to this day neither of us can remember how we got that computer for so cheap online. But shortly after, at a small boot sale, (or yard sale for you Americans) I saw Morrowind on a PC CD-ROM for just a few pounds. Goodbye pocket money!
After getting my dad to do the installation process for me, I booted up Morrowind for the first time and just over twenty minutes in I got angry since my little brain in 2004 couldn’t wrap itself around basic navigation. But what is Morrowind some of you may be thinking. Well, Morrowind was the third game in the Elder Scrolls series, of Skyrim and Oblivion fame. Oblivion is better than Skyrim, by the way. This means that it’s a massive, open-ended experience where you can do pretty much anything, including flying straight to the boss and defeating the game in about three minutes. But what other games are like that? Why, everything that Bethesda develops of course!
If you look at the list of games that Bethesda Game Studios has developed, five out of the seven games they’ve developed have been Elder Scrolls and the last two main series Fallout games, with the remaining two being Fallout Shelter and some drag racing game in 2005. But have they really developed seven completely different games? Well, technically yes, but when you look at Elder Scrolls 3 to Elder Scrolls 5 and then to Fallout 3 and then Fallout 4, they’re all the same!
I love Elder Scrolls and I love Fallout 3 but even to this day, since the release of Fallout 4 I feel like I’ve hit my limit. Bethesda have been attempting to streamline the Morrowind experience since it released in 2002 and, in my opinion, they mastered it in Oblivion which I thought was the perfect blend of role-playing and action. Questing, combat, dialogue trees, and more have all been simplified and, in terms of the combat at least, some have even been improved. But when you look back, it’s just a simplified Morrowind.
Now, I’m not saying that Morrowind is a perfect game. I don’t think Bethesda and perfect have ever gone together in the same sentence. But Morrowind was a massive adventure. You had to follow signs to get to your destination, you had to read maps! I actually had the paper copy of the map that came with the game to find my way to different places, I still have that map on my bedroom wall! Fast travel options were limited, you had to pay for travel on a giant Silt Strider or ask a mage to take you somewhere. It felt like you were living another life, even if every character had a face of three triangles.
You could say that I’m looking at Morrowind through rose-tinted glasses, extremely rose-tinted glasses, glasses smeared in the blood of my memories. But, I do know the negatives of Morrowind. I am aware that if you don’t pick the correct stats at the start of the game you can get screwed over by a crab, or a rat, or by bloody breathing in too fast. This is where Bethesda has made genuine improvements over the last fourteen years but as I’ve repeated numerous times during this article, it’s just a different Morrowind.
You do the same things! Mostly fetch quests to be perfectly honest. You wake up in captivity, whether it be a prisoner ship (Morrowind) or an underground vault (Fallout), you find companions, you reverse-pickpocket people by putting your underwear in their pockets and then pick a fight with the guards in the nude. In fact, until Fallout 4, Bethesda’s games felt extremely identical. Fallout 3 was just Morrowind with guns and then Fallout 4 was a less janky, simplified version of Fallout 3 but with extremely limited dialogue choices and some pretty decent voice acting. But in the end it is just Morrowind! Have I said that enough yet?
Now that I’ve ranted for about eight hundred words already, I should probably get to a conclusion. Is Bethesda remaking Morrowind over and over and over again a bad thing? Nah, I don’t think so. Even though I can’t bring myself to actually finish Fallout 4, it’s for completely different reasons than Bethesda burnout. I’ve had Assassin’s Creed burnout for the last five years which results in me wanting to choke anything that wears a white hood. Maybe some of you have the same feeling with Bethesda titles but after spending hundreds of hours in Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3, God knows I can probably stomach a couple of hundred hours more. That’s just because I love Morrowind which in turn means I love the Bethesda formula but it doesn’t shake the feeling that every single product that Bethesda releases still houses the rotting smell of a beaten Morrowind corpse hidden in every corner of its game world.
This could just be seen as a disparaging rant of a man who feels a lot older than he actually is but I originally planned this as a love letter to Morrowind to talk about how much it influenced Bethesda’s other games but it turned out to be more of a rant about how the studio hasn’t released an innovative game since 2002. They’ve even been using the same creaking, dying engine for Christ’s sake! But even if after all this ranting hasn’t convinced you to see things from the eyes of a Bethesda addict, I implore you to play Morrowind for a few hours, maybe even a hundred, if it’s for you. Only after playing will you then see what the framework for every modern Bethesda game started as, what it still is and what it will always continue to be. Because let’s face it, every single Bethesda game is just another Morrowind.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author’s and do not reflect the views of ICXM.net as an organization necessarily.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.