A few weeks ago Armand from Bits ‘n’ Bytes Gaming inspired me to check out The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a game I’ve been curious about for years but never felt compelled to pick up. After a quick dash around some of the local game shops I found a copy of the Bloodmoon expansion tucked away amongst a neglected pile of second-hand titles and miraculously, a few shelves down, Morrowind and Tribunal, all for the paltry sum of £5. I even picked up Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis for 25p. How could I resist?
Since installing the base game and all its expansions I’ve not actually started playing Morrowind properly yet — and it’s not for the lack of trying either — you see, since its release over nine years ago Morrowind has amassed thousands of mods, from the slight to the seismic, and, well, I’m not the sort of person who’ll play vanilla without checking them out…
But where the hell do you start with that many mods? And with a game as big as Morrowind?
Guides. Lots of guides.
If you don’t know already, myself, Armand and (former Tap writer) Yapette have been chronicling our efforts in taming this wild Bethesdian beast right here on the Tap forum so feel free to drop by (or even join in)!
It all started off simple enough; apply the official and unofficial patches, apply some discretionary tweaks and give the graphics a spit and polish (if only there wasn’t a ‘but’ here), but things soon became unstuck shortly after installing the patches and moving on to the tweaks. Oh the tweaks. ‘Don’t bloat the game with mods’ I thought, ‘don’t get carried away’, ‘keep it simple’.
Two weeks ago I was grinding through extensive guides and maintaining a rapidly expanding list of mods ranging from ‘this sonafabitch is going in’, to ‘myeh, could be useful’. Enhanced stealth, a more balanced economy, darker nights, stronger magic classes, wandering traders, NPCs that pursued you through loading screens, bow zoom, in-game time display, script and dialogue packs that made NPCs respond with less generic remarks — there were loads; some worked better than others, some didn’t work at all.
Since that over-zealous spell I’ve freshly installed Morrowind after messing something up along the way and — for my own sanity — have boiled down the list to largely essential fixes, tweaks and graphical buffs. Therefore, I’m keeping it as close to vanilla as possible despite originally having greater aspirations.
The first problem I had was the sheer volume of mods out there and by extension the number of conflicts that could arise from using them all together (many guides advised using as fewer mods as possible to ensure fewer issues — sound advice). Alarmingly certain mods required their own patches and to make all this skullfuckery even more unbearable some weren’t even compiled properly and needed restructuring and further editing. Testing all of these mods was another problem seeing as many of them would only affect sections later on in the game or in far flung lands, not to mention even mods that appeared to be working correctly could very well have bodged something up out of sight. But that’s not even worth thinking about.
It quickly became apparent that the more I bent the game to my will, the more likely it was to break and eventually it did, prompting me to evaluate my creeping list of mods. That’s when I started thinking about how far should I be taking Morrowind beyond the bug fixes and whether it really mattered.
Modlines.
I remember a few years ago buying Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines and stumbling across some sort of patch feud between two modders by the name of Tessera and Wesp. Tessera was responsible for the True Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines Patch (or True VTMB Patch for short) which sought to fix only the bugs that shipped with the original game. Wesp’s modestly named Unofficial Patch on the other hand aimed to fix the bugs that shipped with the original game as well as make various tweaks to balance the gameplay and restore content left out by Troika.
Spiritually the two mods were very different despite both markedly improving the overall experience; one was simply a vanilla fix-up, the other was a fix-up that added unused content and attempted to balance the game. At some point however, a petty war broke out between the two over whether Wesp’s Unofficial Patch was indeed a patch at all on the basis that it added content and took liberties with the make-up of the game, ultimately aligning it more with a mod. I’ve no idea how the feud started but it spans multiple forums and even stretches as far as the defamation of each others Wikipedia patch entries. Suffice to say, semantics had never been so much fun.
In the end I went with Wesp’s Unofficial Patch (or mod or whatever) on the grounds that if Troika were unable to release a stable, mostly bug-free game then what hope was there of the rest of the game being finished and tuned properly? This was the reasoning I held close to me whilst modding S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. I made the nights darker, my torch dimmer and more sulphuric, stealth was cleaner and more reliable (although still quite temperamental), the artefacts were (apparently) more useful and better balanced as were some of the weapons and items, there were fewer bugs and the game, overall, was a lot smoother. Of course, having not played vanilla Shadow of Chernobyl for any length of time prior to modding it I’ve no way of comparing the two experiences but I felt comfortable knowing that elements of the game had been tuned to my liking and many of the games glaring problems and certain minor issues had been all but stamped out. Adding to this, I rarely play a game more than once so it’s a given that I should want my first experience to be as good as I can get it.
PC gaming diagnosed with terminal tinkering.
“But what happened with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky Gregg? You remember that don’t you? You spent so long pissing about with it that by the end you’d lost all motivation to play it and it still ran like horse shit.”
This brings us full circle to a hot article Jason Dobry wrote about a year ago where he decried all the tinkering and technical nonsense synonymous with PC gaming, yearning for the console reality of loading a game up and it working straight out of the box with no drama. Now, as some of you may know, my computer is on its way out and as a result I have to consider buying PS3 versions of certain games to make sure they run properly, if at all. For a long time now I’ve been wanting to play Fallout 3 and more recently Fallout: New Vegas but my computer’s waning specs have prevented me from doing so. Of course it would be easy to buy either of them on my PS3 — debilitating pad controls and all — but I simply don’t want pure vanilla; I want a sundae full of fixes, tweaks and cosmetic improvements for my first playthrough. Alas, until I get a new rig this cornucopia will have to wait.
Tinkering is both a blessing and a curse however; a blessing in that no matter how small it is, if there’s an issue with a moddable PC game there’s usually somebody out there who’s created a fix for it. It’s a curse when — as highlighted by Dobry’s article and my time with modding Clear Sky — the excruciating and draining process of fixing, tweaking, testing and laboriously trawling forums and guides troubleshooting problems and trying to find those elusive killer mods start to sully the experience. There’s always the chance too that you’ll stumble across spoilers as you seek fixes for bugs later on in the game or tweaks to mechanics you weren’t aware existed. I can’t help but feel as though a certain element of a game’s mystique is lost in all of this tinkering, that playing straight-up vanilla is as raw, surprising and exciting as you’ll get; an experience unfettered by foresight and knowledge — but one that could potentially be inferior.
So, to mod or not to mod?
Only the other day Scout posted the following on the shared play Morrowind thread:
I’m reading this book called Air Guitar which is a bunch of little chapters on capital “A” Art and commerce in the US. The author goes on and on about the hotrodders of the 50s and 60s and how they took a car and carved it up and remade it to their liking. He really, really goes on and on but he called this a form of “embodied dissent”, against, I guess, the dominate paradigm, or in our case, Bethesda. And the car manufacturers were right on their tail, incorporating the best mods into standardized design, which were again cut up and etc., etc.
Which reminded me of this thread.
So shine on you crazy modders.
As far as I’m concerned modding is like an extended options screen exclusive to savvy PC gamers, allowing them to customise their experience in any way they see fit; to take the developer’s baton and run with it. There are caveats: there’s the issue of dashing the developer’s vision and moving the game away from what it was originally meant to be, there’s the possibility of spoiling specific events and sapping the magic and wonder from the experience before it’s even started, but perhaps most importantly there’s the often crippling impracticality of modding and the possible problems that arise from stacking fix upon tweak upon fix, never mind the extra time to deal with it all. If you can’t stomach the thought of getting tangled up in modding and would rather go vanilla then I’m just A-OK with that.
As I write this my Morrowind remains in a state of flux but hopefully I’m drawing closer to the light at the end of this long tunnel. I just hope that once everything is in place all this tinkering will be worth it. It better be. For Armand’s sake.
Email the author of this post at greggb@tap-repeatedly.com
The use of the word “skullfuckery” marks this as one of the greatest pieces of creative prose in the history of Tap.
I have been following the Morrowind mod adventures with great interest, and I don’t know how any of you guys have any hair left on your heads after all the hair-tearing that this adventure has caused. In a way you’ve turned Morrowind into a meta-game. The modding itself is the game, which is good because I’m not certain any of you have actually been able to play it yet.
I usually go with vanilla, because I am lazy, unless something very distinct catches my eye. The very same Armand posted a list of essential New Vegas mods that greatly improved my enjoyment of that game, and like you Gregg, I always prefer the ability to play on a PC because fixes and mods are there if I want them. Dobry’s yearning for a nice simple insert-disc-and-play experience is the polar opposite of turning the act of modding a game into the game itself. Who’d have thought that one day this would consume the kind of precious entertainment hours we say we don’t have?
Of course, a key thing here is that you guys are all coming back to Morrowind, rather than spending hours trying to get it working in the first place. The fun would surely be replaced by ire if you had to go through this with a game you just bought. I must say, despite the hellish battles you’ve all been fighting to get the game working, your experiences have made me want to re-play Morrowind just as much as the journal of Arvil Bren did.
Great piece, Gregg. Very well said, plus yes, “skullfuckery” added to the Tap lexicon.
Personally, I usually only ever apply 3 or 4 mods, and usually only invisible ones, like removing invisible walls (stupid…), stopping all animals from attacking on sight (very stupid…). I rarely if ever apply a visual buff, since I’m perversely fascinated by vanilla graphics. My reasoning is that if I think a game need a complete mod overhaul to be playable, I’ll just move on to another game. So mods in moderation for me.
I recently played Nehrim, based on the Oblivion engine and while it was sold as complete rework mod, I came to the conclusion it wasn’t a mod at all but new game created using modder’s techniques. And that was pretty interesting.
Oh man, to think I’ve influenced so much of your time being blown modding the game, only to follow it up with more time spent writing this excellent piece about the experience. I take a certain pleasure in effecting people’s lives on the other side of the planet. 😀
I personally try to play most games vanilla the first time through, just so I know if a mod’s potential “fix” is something I actually want. Too many modders feel that because they didn’t like a choice the developer made about how the game should work, it must have been broken. Oh, but that’s a different story.
I can understand wanting to mod a game like Morrowind on your first run at this point though. The game is pretty old now, and unless it really rocked your world, chances are it’s only getting one play-through right now. It is a much better (and not broken) game than a lot of those modders would have you believe though, so trust in the choices Bethesda made and use only a few mods. You’ll still have a great time.
Until you get a better computer that is. Then you can mod the shit out of it!
Great article!
I’m always wary of mods – they conjure up a feeling of fear of drowning in a vicissitudinal, ever-growing sludge.
I worry that I’ll be overwhelmed by mods, and get lost in the woods.
That said, I love to have choices available to me, and love expansions. Expansions seem to have more order and neatness to them. I could happily load expansions till the cows come home, but mods scare me.
I especially love Yap’s forum posts about mods, because to Yapette no game is complete without at least 1,258 mods, and she seems to display such glee(ful frustration) with them. I liken it to putting together a puzzle: all the pieces in order, in a row, with great care and attention paid to the application of each.
Armand is right, of course. Even those who really loved Morrowind, like me, played once. Maybe revisited from time to time for a few hours, but actually going through the whole thing again? Nossir. That’s what we’d call an Undertaking, and most of us don’t have time for Those.
But with a bunch of mods to polish the game and add cool new stuff, why, you’re getting a beloved classic and new experience rolled into one!
Though you guys have gone well beyond my own comfort level. What the hell is a Wrye Mash? I don’t know.
The first time it’s only mods to fix bugs or change UI elements which are needlessly irritating but don’t change my experience of the intended content.
Total conversions like Nehrim are different games and I’m into that.
The middle is marshy. I don’t want to add grass or change the color of the sky and miss the original game, but if such details would prevent me from wanting to play the game I suppose I might. Normally if I like a game enough to see what’s going on but don’t enjoy playing it I’ll just watch a video instead.
Everything about Zeno Clash had me swooning except playing. Gave up and went to watching others.
Wrye Mash? Is it a likker potent enough to knock even a dragon on his ass? If not, I’ve got no clue.
I’m hardly a mod veteran, but when I decided to mod F3 I knew I wasn’t going to add mods that changed anything about the natural environment. There was a reason the place looked the way it did. To change it wouldn’t have been appropriate to the story. With a fantasy RPG I don’t suppose that issue would be relevant.
I agree with what Steerpike said. The modding process is a part of the whole gaming experience. But like a preface in a novel, I wouldn’t want it to go on forever.
Related to nothing here (with apologies to Gregg)…a couple of months ago I’d never heard of Svalbard. But in the space of 2 weeks I’ve come across it twice in the news. First the global warming story, and today, Feb. 9, is the anniversary of the Svalbard Treaty. TAP is so educational and horizon-expanding.
Wrye Mash.
Think of a corral full of cattle. The cows are the Morrowind mods and the fence is Wrye Mash.
@Steerpike: “Who’d have thought that one day this would consume the kind of precious entertainment hours we say we don’t have?”
Tell me about it. The other day I flat out refused to mod my evening away so stuck Fuel on and free rode for a few hours. Unfortunately that didn’t get Morrowind finished. I suppose the time you spend modding should be proportional to the time you spend playing the game and in this case the game is freakin’ huge. Apparently.
@Armand: yeah I know what you mean. Considering I’ve never played Morrowind before it’s sometimes difficult to gauge the legitimacy of a fix or tweak (that’s why I’ve been running a lot by you ;-)). There’s one fix that addresses a quirk where merchants wear the things you sell them preventing you from buying them back. While I can understand how frustrating this must be I imagine the following exchange:
Player character: “How much would you offer me for these fine wares O honourable Merchant of Sar’ath Krendle Klackers Telivari Un’quil Dolmus On Trent?”
Merchant: “203 gold pieces.”
Player character: “Top banana, thanks.”
Merchant: “WOOO! CHECK OUT MY WARES PEOPLE! Nobody is buying these suckers back! WOOO!” *runs off down street yelling*
To me that’s not a bug; it’s pure comedy.
@Jarrod: “drowning in a vicissitudinal, ever-growing sludge” — I can totally relate to that and mmm, vicissitudinal. Shortly after my muddy modding experience with Clear Sky the Complete mod pack was released which is as solid and reputable a collection as you’re likely to get. As and when I get a new rig I’ll be snaffling it up, installing it and gleefully punching the air knowing that that’s all I’ll really need to use. Hurrah for solid reputable mod packs!
@Fink: Looking at my mod list now, it’s mostly cosmetic stuff and most of that was a knock-on effect brought on by using Better Heads. Better Heads made the bodies and clothes stick out like sore thumbs so I installed Better Bodies and Better Clothes. Then the world around them and the creatures in it started looking a bit washed out and lacking so I installed some world and creature texture packs. Then I noticed that the weapons I was holding looked kinda blurry so I installed a weapon texture pack. Many of these packs have done a great job of enhancing things rather than dramatically changing them but replacing the vanilla heads (which look ugly even to my hardened eyes) was like making a clean patch on a dirty face, and I simply couldn’t stop there. Of course finding the right texture packs was a nightmare…
Thanks for everyone’s comments!
Gregg, somewhere along this sordid tale I missed the fact that you hadn’t played Morrowind before. Oh my God, dude, you have no idea what you’re missing! Get the damned thing working! Stop at nothing! Armand, it’s red alert time. We need to make this happen for Gregg. He deserves it.
I still remember one of my Gaming Moments from that. Bethesda RPGs, particularly Elder Scrolls, are always huge games, and I’d just started. A little overwhelmed by all the names and locations I’d already tried to sort in my head. Since I was a bit unsure, I decided to take the Silt Strider to Balmora rather than walk. I arrived just as dusk was falling and there I was standing on the raised Strider platform, looking out over this town just as lights were coming on for evening, and it all seemed so spread out, the big adventure before me. I swooned a little.
It’s possible that light-emitting chickens will reduce the drama of the moment somewhat, but still… light-emitting chickens.
Don’t worry my friend, I’ve spent too long tinkering with Morrowind now to be backing out. Besides, I’ve had a few of those very moments myself (my favourite last night in fact while testing a couple of mods) and they sure are swoon worthy. I keep looking into the distance and wondering what’s out there, and knowing that I’ll soon be able to go and find out is very, very exciting.
Did you know that aside from Planescape: Torment and Vampire: Bloodlines I’ve never played a proper, full blooded RPG before? Morrowind will be a first in that regard too.
It can be frustrating but it’s a treat. In many ways it’s the pinnacle of (old school) western RPG.
Take merchants not selling back gear: the merchant puts it on to gear up–you see the visual immediately–and no way no how is he or she giving it back. Modding that out is getting into the marshy middle.
The character models of the base game are terrible (mod away!) but the landscape itself is important and I recommend caution messing with it. Morrowind has an unmatched sense of story-by-place. Isolation from the mainland and then further never arbitrary divisions. You’ll see 🙂
If you explore all the corners you’ll still be playing in 2015. Bail out now or say goodbye to your free time.
http://tinyurl.com/63zallp
‘nough said
To me, Morrowind sits alongside Planescape Torment and Knights of the Old Republic as Favorite All Time Ever CRPGs of History in the World. I still miss it, and by “miss” it I mean that even though I could easily replay it, even though I could do all this modding stuff with you guys, I can never play it for the first time again.
Gregg: Yes, the merchants wearing the armor you sell them is definitely one of those “broken” elements of the game that needs fixing. The merchants by and large are also all piss-poor, and can’t afford to buy anything even mildly cool you wanna sell them. It might be a mild sort of cheat, but a mod that puts more money in their pockets wouldn’t hurt either.
Steerpike: I don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to be able to play certain games “for the first time again.” Fallout 3 of course stands out in my mind (what is it with Bethesda games?) If only we could do very specific memory wipes of our time playing our favorite games, just so we can re-enjoy them again.
Fink (and sort of Gregg): A lot of the mods that change the visual quality of the environment are just higher resolution versions of the same textures. You get to enjoy the look of Morrowind, with the resolution of the modern generation of games. I think these are must have mods if your machine can handle them.
Armand: No, no, no. The merchants wearing your armor is a feature. 🙂 The lack of money was annoying but felt true. There is this island with all this cool stuff, lying around but it has no value. I think it’s stuff like this that is part of the story.
Before I started modding that little “feature” out of Morrowind, almost all the merchants in my games wore the exact same Dark Brotherhood armor, since those jerks would attack me every time I went to sleep.
The game causes all NPCs to automatically equip the best armor in their inventory, which for most of them meant the awesome DB armor.
The lack of money is definitely not a broken element of the game, but just a matter of what you consider fun (or wildly frustrating.)
Also, you know you have a different avatar icon depending on if I’m looking at it from the front page or the comment page? Kind of weird.
I noticed that avatar thing too. It’s like there is a cache that won’t refresh or something. After being “squished Scout” for so long I guess I’m just happy to be here in whatever form.
Yeah, I finally started using the in-game work around with the little imp merchant. Buying, waiting 24 hours for its stock and money to refresh and then selling. Over and over until I had slowly moved all the items over to its inventory and all the money over to mine. I wish I could have found that crab.
Lest anyone think I’m a purist, I did install the Octopus Overlords Morrowind Mods DVD (courtesy of Yapette) once and played and enjoyed the game for quite a while.
It has something to do with the theme and comment systems using different avatar sources. It’s possible the sidebar is still using your Gravatar, Scout. But this theme does at times have a mind of its own.
@ Steerpike – I was thinking exactly the same thing about wanting to play the game for the first time. In that regard, I’m intensely jealous of you Gregg. I do break out the game every now and again to wander through the streets of the major towns.
I think it makes sense if merchants wear better quality gear… it’s a factor of preservation. And lack of money is only a temporary problem, and there are many ways to creatively get around that old chestnut. I’d love to boast how I got around it, but don’t want to spoil the game any.
I really enjoyed this article Brother. It did make me laugh! The results will be worth it though.
We should all be really grateful to the mod community in many ways, as we wouldn’t have as many of the PC gems we do without them (Team Fortress, Portal, Counter Strike) but I’m really not a huge fan of modding.
I tried modding Oblivion and just lost my way, it’s so vast with addons I didn’t even know where to start. It would be nice if someone made a Mod portal that is administered so the site team catalogue, test and file all working mods with clear descriptions and instructions.
It’s just another world entirely. I’ll stick to vanilla and official patches…
Right well I’ve tried playing Morrowind twice in the last few months. Mod-free. Still not got very far in the opening village.
I tend to play games mod-free, opting for the basic experience, the one that had been play-tested (in theory) and intended by the developers. The last mod I used was System Shock 2 Rebirth which was pretty special, and I imagine the next one will be Vampire Bloodlines whenever I get round to that.
*sigh* So much beautiful RPG greatness awaits me on my hard drive.
NOOO! Not System Shock 2 Rebirth! That’s the one with the pseudo-sexy midwives… they just shouldn’t be that… busty. I really liked the anonymity and consistency of vanilla’s body horror so to tidy that up and give each enemy the same discernible characteristics and features was a real step back for me.
Since I played it a very neat vanilla-honouring weapon mesh and texture mod has been released that does a fantastic job of giving the game’s weaponry a considerate face-lift. The only mod I used on my first (and only) playthrough of SS2 was the SHTUP texture pack and as far as I’m concerned, of them all, that’s the most essential cosmetic mod.
Regarding Bloodlines: it’s your choice but I found Wesp’s Unofficial Patch very solid and I believe it comes in two flavours now ‘basic’ and ‘plus’ which I should think are fairly self-explanatory.
When it came down to it and I finally got SS2 working properly, I found I no longer had the patience to struggle with some issues getting the texture and model packs working.
I played without them, and was very happy =)
Something slightly cartoony about the environmental art, in a way that made the crude, low-poly graphics a lot more palatable. It’s a flaw in games with high texture detail and low polycount meshes that they become uncanny – an incoherent mixture of expectations between lumpen forms and intensely detailed skins.
SS2 managed to keep it balanced just right.