It's hard to review a game as massive as Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It's so epic that it would take pages to describe each individual element of the game. It's an amazing game and can't really be appreciated fully unless you actually play it. What makes Morrowind fun is thinking there's no way the game would allow you to perform a certain action and then doing just that.
The game starts with your character arriving at a town via ship. You're a criminal and you've been locked up for years, when the Empire mysteriously asks you to be released. You begin the game by naming yourself and following a guard to the deck of the ship and onto land. A man greets you and asks who you are, and you are allowed to pick your race and skills. There are many different combinations of characters to choose from, so many in fact that you'll probably never play through the game with the same one twice. That's what I love about this game, the fact that your character actually feels like you had some part in creating him and not just given a person to portray.
My first character was an orcish barbarian, a character strictly combat-oriented only. I spent the majority of my time killing things and improving my equipment. I could've played through the entire game with this character and would still have only seen a mere fraction of what this game has to offer. The game is a totally different experience if you use a character such a mage or a sorcerer. Whereas my orc was pretty simple to play with, a character class such as mage or a thief would have a whole other slew of different elements to do. My barbarian would never have had to mingle with the magic system in the game or gotten the chance to sneak up behind a merchant and pickpocket them.
The real basis of the game is the fact that you can pretty much do whatever you want. You will be amazed at how much independence you are given to choose your actions. The amount of freedom this game provides you is beyond the level of Grand Theft Auto III's, you can complete your quests in whateever way you want. You may be given the task of acquiring some diamonds from a merchant. There are many ways you could go about doing this. You could pickpocket them, kill him and take the diamonds, or possibly even persuade him to hand them over. To balance out the game a bit, there are consequences placed on you if you a negative action. People will put a bounty on your head, begin to not want to barter with you, or you can even be arrested or charged a fee.
For example, my character desperately needed some money for equipment and I wasn't sure how to go about acquiring it. I figured doing odd jobs for people would eventually get me what I wanted but that took too much time. I noticed that a merchant I frequently visited had a shield worth 15,000 gold. I knew this would be more than enough so I walked on over to the temple that housed him, made sure no one was watching, annihilated him with my sword, and took the shield from his corpse. I know it was evil, but I didn't think that I would actually be able to get it so easily and was amazed when I did. Unfortunately, I wasn't ready for what happened next. I left the temple, and a guard ran up to me and gave me the option of paying him some gold as a fee, going to jail, or resisting arrest. Not only that but he took whatever I stole from the merchant.
Morrowind relies a lot on you wanting to explore its world and try out new things and as such there are a huge number of side quests present throughout the game to accommodate this. Lone travelers stand around outside of town to try to get you to help them with something, residents of towns assign you quests, and there are also a number of guilds that you are allowed to join and perform tasks. These tasks start out extremely easy but can become extremely challenging, as you move up ranks in the guild. The guilds add a massive amount of playtime to the game. My first two hours of the game were spent with the thief guild, lock picking chests, traveling to faraway towns to steal something from a certain someone, and killing lots of stuff along the way. The guilds are a great way to acquire money, improve your character, and not to mention kill time.
The world of Morrowind is, in a few words, incredibly gargantuan. After the many hours I've logged on to this game I still haven't explored every nook and cranny of the map. There is a huge list of small villages/huge towns to explore that you probably will not visit every one of them your first trip through the game, and you will most likely want to play it again just to see what you may have missed. The best part is that the entire world has been beautifully created and just feels so alive. The sun rises and sets, characters move around throughout the towns they inhabit, monsters can be seen across your field of view waiting for you to cross their path, and a fair number of scripted sequences occur as you travel from town to dungeon and back again.
I am sure that some people may not enjoy this game as much as others. You can get easily confused, and Morrowind will frequently leave you not knowing what to do next. I can bet that there are some gamers out there that will give up on the game because of the fact that everything is not laid out for you and you are not always clear about which way to go next. This even happened to me a few times, but after a while I realized what needed to be done with a bit of backtracking and talking to NPCs. I'd recommend you pick up a strategy guide if you're one of those types of people that gets frustrated quickly or who hates looking for the next route to get somewhere.
There has never been any other game that held my interest so long or one which gave me so much freedom and customization of my character. Morrowind is an example of what can result if you have a creative team that cares about the final product as much as the people who are going to play it. This game has been a long time coming and many delays arose before we could finally get our hands on it. Luckily, it was worth the wait.
-Sam
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