This was a 2002 release from Bethesda, the third official installment of The Elder Scrolls series. Like Oblivion and its own predecessors, Morrowind is remarkable for its enormous game world and the incredible amount of shit you can pick up, should you choose. You can possess and use a massive range of weapons, armor, potions and general supplies, including repair hammers and ingredients with which to practice alchemy.  About the only conceivable thing you can’t grab is furniture, but if you want a million empty bottles, pillows, rags, buckets and tableware with no purpose or value, then this is the game for you.

Well, perhaps not.

Morrowind shipped with a lot of serious bugs, and to be perfectly honest the engine and programming are so flawed that this game sometimes feels like a shitty beta. Notorious for corrupted save-states and absurd, often game-breaking errors – such as disappearing arrows and self-replicating hammers, among a myriad of others  – have forced even dedicated players to walk away in disgust, never to return.

This is a nearly inevitable consequence of having a smallish company develop a game with aspirations far above and beyond those of games produced by the major studios. Morrowind is huge, detailed and too complicated for its own good. Using the editor graciously provided by the developers, it’s possible to determine exactly how fucked up this game is internally. Fortunately, most of the fuckups are relatively obscure and unlikely to affect the average play-through, though often they are extremely embarrassing oversights. Unfortunately, there are also a fair number of even worse game-breakers, of which you will almost certainly run afoul.

The aforementioned editor is also the only thing that ensured this game wasn’t a complete shitshow. The mod community for Morrowind is an incredible morass of custom fixes, improvements, rebalances and manifested dreams. While the majority of this content is utter shit, completely broken or half-baked, often due to Morrowind’s hard-wired limitations, there are definitely a handful of mods that nobody should go without, and plenty more that are exquisitely designed for more specific desires. I’ll recommend a few later.

I can’t really blame the studio for this pile of shit; it only took a few years of hardcore modding by a huge community to bring this game nearly up to par, and considering that I filched it out of a bargain bin some time after its release, that seems like a reasonable price to pay. With all due respect, Morrowind is too much game to exist; the scale of the expansions, which include two CD releases (Tribunal and Bloodmoon) in addition to several plugin-based additions, firmly illustrate that Bethesda has learned better than to plate all the Brussels sprouts at once.

Then they made Oblivion and proved this had only been a temporary bout of sanity. Incidentally, I thought the mentioned expansions kinda sucked. That might be why I don’t install them – I don’t really appreciate being attacked by assassins the first time I sleep, only to find they’re ridiculously underpowered and carry equipment worth more than I’d ever had in one place up to that point – so valuable, in fact, that no immediately available merchants have the scratch to pay top dollar for it. Also, adding a huge city in the sky to avoid having to actually construct the landmass it inhabits is lame. That pretty much describes the kind of effort that goes in to the shittiest mods for Morrowind:

“lol i made a flowting shack 4 u to live in but u can only reech it wit a ring of levtation taht also maeks u strnger tahn god adn u can never taek it of and it shoot constint fire balls in evrywhere”

On that note, here are some mods you should probably get your hands on if you want to play this game:

Pluginless NoGlow
By Plangkye

This will remove the atrociously ugly saran-wrapped appearance of enchanted items. Seriously, whoever thought this looked better than nothing at all should be lynched.

This looks even worse in-game, because it shimmers.

Morrowind Code Patch

by Hrmchamd and Psyringe

This one just fixes a ton of unaddressed issues and bugs of various types, and also has a few realistic rebalancing components.

What, you want a picture? Of some code in the editor? Are you fucking stupid?

Real Signposts

by Elbundeee

In the original release, road signs are written in a runic language known as Daedric; explain to me why the fuck I wouldn’t be willing to suspend my disbelief a little further in order to actually read those signs without having to walk up and highlight them? A for effort, Bethesda, but F for thinking shit through.

Better Bodies

by Psychodog Studios

This mod is an absolute must; it significantly improves the appearance of the bodies for most races, and more importantly, it makes them naked. Fortunately there’s a ‘Peanut Gallery’ version that makes only the chicks naked, which is good – I hate seeing man-ass when I’m looting their clothes while running around as a conspicuously bare woman. Sometimes I like to make her wear sexy outfits from BDSM mods.

fap fap fap fap

Hang on a minute, I need to go do something important now.

there was chaos in the land. The people, wretched and filthy, were divided; not even the wisest of men could find a satisfactory answer to a pressing question:

What is the worst Doom mod ever?

And lo, in the sky the sun seemed to grow a thousand times larger; unbearable heat oppressed the people, especially the old and feeble because they suck and should have kicked the bucket decades ago.

And the sun spoke:

“You seek the heart of the most evil of things; nothing conceived can match the horror of your dark obsession. As punishment, I shall give you this, the deepest of your desires. You must fully witness the blackness of what you have found.”

The people shuffled a bit, passed around a few doobies – then shrugged, and sat cross-legged on the grass to see what happened. One guy in the back shouted, “Don’t be such a downer, man!”

“Totally harshing my mellow,” he whispered to his companions.

“Are you listening?” asked the sun impatiently.

This roused no response, for the people had become distracted with each other – especially sexually. The sun breathed a deep sigh, and began to concentrate. Soon, the people fell into a deep sleep.

A dream began…

Yup