Recently in .: On Morrowind Category

The news of more delays for Oblivion last December were enough to motivate me to get as close as possible to a new version of Morrowind.

Four years after its release, Morrowind has spawned so many mods that it has become possible to literally upgrade the game to a whole new experience.

Getting there not an easy task though, but with a bit of patience and discipline, it is definitely possible.

I spent a better part of last year collecting mods and fighting with errors, duplicate items and other collisions between mods to finally settle on about 200 enhancements, ranging from purely visual to deep gameplay changes.

First, if you have played Morrowind before looking into mods, make a backup of your original saved files. If anything goes wrong whie adding new mods, you will not regret being able to go back to the original files.

Next, a few sources of mods :

- Planet Elder Scrolls (previously Morrowind Summit)

- TES source

- The Lys

- Empirical morrowind 

... just to name a few.

Getting organized from the time of the first download helped a lot with future trials and errors. I organized my downloaded mods into categories :

- Visual enhancements

- Sound enhancements

- Lighting effects

- New characters and faces

- New weapons

- Game extensions

- Companions

- Quests 

- Gameplay enhancements, patches

Keep the categories in that order, as it will keep the mods sorted by order of increasing risk of corruption to your original saved games.

I found a reliable method of upgrade is to work by layers, making backups of the game at various level of enhancements.

Make a backup of your entire installation folder (again, you will be happy to have it if things go awry).

Start with a fresh installation of the game and its official extensions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon. Apply the latest patch and create three new folders in your 'Morrowind / Data File' folder : unused, readme, install.

- 'unused' will contain optional .esp files that come with some mods, should you want to use them later

- 'readme' will contain all readme files (keeps things less cluttered)

- 'install' will be the staging area when installing new mods 

Make a backup of this fresh installation as 'morrowind-base'. If you need to start over later, copying this base installation folder will save you time.

Categories of mods from Visual Enhancements to Weapons are safe to install in one shot, as they rarely impact the game itself. Unzip your mods in the 'install' folder, read the readme files to get an idea of limitations of the mod. Once you are ready to install, move the files from 'install' to your 'Morrowind / data files' folder and the readme files to the 'readme' folder.

Before trying your new mods, make sure to check if the mods require updates of the Morrowind.ini file, usually with utilities such as bsareg or mini.

Do this one mod at a time. Take your time - install, start the game, add the mod to your Data Files, load your last saved game, ignore errors and warnings, save your game as 'test save', close the game, start the game again and load your test game.

it is necessary to 'save - close - start' again to make sure your test game does not contain much references to old, discarded mods. If it does, you run the risk of seeing duplicate objects (doors, characters), or errors during the game. In that case, use utilities such as Wrye Mash to clean up the test game (a word of warning - using this kind of utiiity without a full understanding of what you are doing is a sure way to corrupt your saved game beyond repair).

Once you are satisfied with your list of mods, take your game for a test drive and travel across the map - some errors will not appear immediately and there is nothing worse than playing with your main character for a while only to find out one mods is messing things up. Adding a mod is relatively safe - removing a mod is messy and requires sometimes to revert back to a save game 'before' that mod was installed.

Here is the list of mods I settled with after months of testing. Look at the end of my Morrowind.ini file for the complete list.

Good luck with your mods - they turned Morrowind into a whole new game, well worth laying long after Oblivion is shipped. 

I opened up a new section in my main gallery for Morrowind screenshots.

One of the albums in this gallery is dedicated to the adventures of Bastet in Vvardenfel , my main character since I started playing the game in 2002. Unfortunately, I started taking screenshots on a regular basis only late in the game. Hopefully, I will fill in the blanks thanks to my test character, A'Eryn, created last year to test new mods.

Where do I even begin talking about Morrowind ?

How about with a shot from one of the very first scenes in the game ?

From the moment you step out of the prison ship that brought you, an outlander, to the Land of the Dunmers, one thing is clear : this is way more than a simple game.

The 3rd chapter of The Elder Scrolls  series from Bethesda Softworks, is a serious attempt at creating a living, breathing world to play with.

In many respects, they have beautifully succeeded.

Morrowind is the first game where I felt actually intimidated by too many possibilities.

After going through the opening sequence and the character creation process (smartly fused with the flow of the game through a registration process with the local Customs), the game welcomed me by a merchand killing my character in a local shop as I tried to look at something on his shelves (much less trying to steal).

The second attempt at starting the game was more successful. I went through the first mini-quest without an itch and ended up leaving the little village of Seyda Neen only to stop at the first crossroad.

What to do next ? Take the path through the swamps ? the road up the hills ? or the local 'bus' service to go straight to the first city ?

For the first time, there was no clear path to the next quest. That much freedom can be intimidating.

So I did something I could never do before in a game. I found a rock by the water and stood there to watch the sun go down in the ocean and observe the stars as they were revealed by the night.

Morrowind has night and day cycles... and cloud patterns ... and moon cycles... and weather patterns. It has fog in the morning and rain under cloudy skies. And this was only the beginning.

Their previous game, Morrowind, was so beautiful when it was released 4 years ago, that the first steps outside of the village in the beginning gave an overwhelming sense of freedom.

I remember one of the very first things I did the first time I played was so sit on a rock and wait for the sun to set on the horizon.

With all its shortcomings (no game is perfect), Morrowind delivered a world so rich in adventures that  it is maybe the only game I know of that makes me feel as 'going home' when I start it up.

In anticipation of the new chapter, I came across several sites literally bursting with new content for Morrowind. And after a few weeks of downloads and fine tuning, I settled down on enough expansions to make Morrowind feel like a completely new game.

These changes are so extensive that I decided to give up my first (and only character in the game so far) and start all over again, from the beginning, which gives me a chance to explore the game from a fresh perspective.

I opened up this site to comment on the richness and depth of both games and their extensions