Product Description

Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind beings the legends and lore of the Elder Scrolls games to your Xbox. As you travel through Tamriel, you'll make your way to Dumner and face the dark elves. Along the way you'll meet allies and enemies, discover ancient secrets and go on amazing quests.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4815 in Video Games
• Brand: Bethesda
• Released on: 2001-09-06
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: Xbox
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .28 pounds

Features

• Choose to be a mighty hero on a great quest, or become a thief and use the scum of the city to gain power for yourself
• Explore huge game maps with over 30 unique cities & villages, all rendered realistically and loaded with secrets
• Journey to unique areas, like the inside of a volcano to complete quests & gain treasure
• Great gameplay, an immersive storyline and incredible graphics -- all that you crave in a role-playing adventure!

Amazon.com Review
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a sprawling, first person, open-ended fantasy role-playing game. It's a direct port of the PC version, and truly shows off the power of the Xbox.

Morrowind can be described with a single word: mind-numbingly-massive (okay, I cheated). You can do virtually anything you want. There is a main quest, but there are also hundreds of side quests (over 350 of them), and the game is completely nonlinear. You can be a hero, a villain, a pilgrim, a saint, or even a vampire. You name it, and chances are you can be it. There are also no geographical constraints; you can wander where you want, when you want.

The amount of control you have in Morrowind is stunning. When you create a character, you can either choose from premade classes, have one assigned to you depending on how you answer a questionnaire, or create your own class. You can also choose one of 13 signs under which your character is born, which will give you bonuses, handicaps, or both. There are so many stats and skills to accumulate, you can easily spend hours experimenting with character types before you even start the game.

Morrowind's magic system brings a tear to my eye--not only do you have seven schools of magic (Conjuration, Illusion, Destruction, Restoration, Mysticism, Alteration, Enchant), but you also have an alchemy system, from which you can create potions from ingredients you can either buy or find in the wild. In addition, you can trap the souls of enemies you kill and bind them into items to create magic artifacts. Very cool. And of course, there are all the scrolls, magical items, etc., that you find in your travels.

Another boon is the thieving system. You can pick locks, disarm traps, pick pockets, and learn acrobatics. You can taunt, insult, or intimidate others as well as haggle for better deals in the market. And since you can steal (or try to steal) almost every item you see, business is good! This game was designed with a thief's eye.

The game itself is gorgeous. The graphics, sound, frame rate... all smooth as silk. You can spend hours just looking at the outlandish scenery and picking the flowers (literally). The musical score is rousing, and never gets old. The different creatures and people have their own voices and sounds. This is a game that makes anything but high-end computers cry, and it works on the Xbox without a hitch.

Okay, so Bethesda's Morrowind sounds like the greatest thing since... well... Bethesda's Elder Scrolls II, but does it have any flaws? Well, Morrowind is definitely geared toward magic users and thieves, but it is lacking when it comes to fighting. There are many battles in Morrowind, but they boil down to clicking your button and hitting your foe with either a melee or missile weapon. That's it. Combat gets old fast. In addition, the travel journal is purely elementary. It lists all the quests you undertake, but there is no way to sort them, or erase quests that you have finished. After a while, it takes a long time to find information. This is probably the biggest flaw in the game.

Bottom line: Morrowind is a PC-style RPG for a PC-style console. This game is reason enough to buy an Xbox, and will have hard-core RPG fans singing its praises for years to come. --Bryan Karsh

Pros:

• Thief and magic-user heaven
• Do whatever you want
• Beautiful graphics and sound

• Simplistic battle system
• Can't sort/edit quests in travel journal

Amazon.com Product Description
Morrowind is an epic, open-ended single-player role-playing game where you create and play any kind of character you can imagine. Your actions define your character, and your gameplay changes and evolves in response to your actions. Confront the assassins' guild, and they take out a contract on you. Impress them, and they try to recruit you instead. No two sagas are the same in the world of Morrowind. The end result is the most open-ended RPG possible--one with an infinite number of possible paths through the game.

Customer Reviews

Something that actually lives up to its hype!
Okay, Okay, I'll admit it; I was reconsidering the wisdom of my Xbox purchase. I watched GTA3 (and played it), and shook my head, saying "why not us?" Well hallelujah, we've been saved!

If you've ever played a pen-and-paper RPG, you'll have an inkling about the possibilities in this game. Your character can be whomever, whatever, however you'd like him/her to be. There are four human races alone, as well as a feline race, a reptilian race, orc, and three elven races. There are dozens of character classes, including BattleMage, Assassin, Monk, Rogue, Scout, Barbarian, and Witchhunter, and a bunch more; but the best part is that you can create your OWN custom character class with its own assorted disciplines! There are also a ton of possibilities for the appearance of each gender of each race.

Once your character has been designed and you get out of the Customs Office, you are immersed in a HUGE, complex world of alliances, rivalries, and politics. You can join a number of different organizations and affiliations, make friends or enemies everywhere.

The fighting in this game is cool, easy when you're fighting single little creatures like cave rats, but challenging when you're fighting talented folks in armor while trying to cast spells and read scrolls while hacking, slashing, and blocking. And multiple humanoid enemies in armor will realistically kick your butt, unless you've been around a long time and improved your fighting abilities.

This is perhaps the best thing about this game; your advancement is not based on "XP", some accumulation of wealth and creatures killed. It is realistic; the more you practice something, the better you get at it. If you spend all of your time hacking at creatures in the wilderness, your Strength and Agility attributes and your weapon skill (ShortBlade, Axe, Long Blade, etc.) will benefit, but your Intelligence, & Personality attributes and Mercantile, Speechcraft, Security skills etc. will stay where they are. Also, your advancement in levels is customized to your character class: each class has its own mix of emphasis amongst the skills, declaring some Major, some Minor, and some Miscellaneous.

The graphics in this game are phenomenal (mostly--the faces are somewhat blocky). Trees, hills, items, and rooms look great; weather effects are fantastic. The effect most folks will appreciate, however, is the water. The water in this game looks so darn real that it's almost UNDERwhelming. You look at it and say "well, I've seen that before." The catch is, the place you've seen it before is REAL LIFE! It's amazing, and that BEFORE rain starts to fall. Oh, the sounds are cool, too -- I hope you're not afraid of thunder!

This is defnitely the MOST complex and MOST open-ended game I've ever heard, seen, read about, or played. I don't mean to sound like a job interview, but it's only weakness is that it's SO open-ended. Players will find themselves accepting quest after quest before they finish their first few, and trying to flip through the character's journal to remember who wanted what! Another way this game is like life.

Go get this game, you'll never see the light of day again. lol

Mike
P.S. If you've got the time, spend all of your travelling alternating between swimming/jumping until you get fatigued, then sneaking. Like all of them, the more you use these skills, the better you get at them!

A True Virtual World
The Elder Scrolls 3 continues the Elder Scrolls tradition of providing a true fantasy virtual world for you to create an alternate life in. Set in the exotic island of Vvarvendell, the developers have truly defined an entire culture, with such nuances as clothing, housing styles, food, and architecture being unique to each game region. You can do anything you want, from running a mercantile business to being a mass murderer. Be a powerful mage living high in your own tower, or be a shadowy thief jumping across rooftops at night. Create your own spells from scratch, concoct mysterious potions, enchant your own weapons. It's totally up to you. In addition to all this, Morrowind ships with the easiest-to-use game editor to date, allowing you to create your own game content such as quests, characters, items, spells, and sharing them over the net with your friends. You can't go wrong with Morrowind!

Know what you're getting into.
The character creation system is one of the first things you will encounter in Morrowind, and it gives a glimpse at how open-ended and complex a game this is. Be sure to take time creating a character, because this character will be with you for hundreds of hours.

In my first attempt, I used one of the pre-packaged character classes. While this gave me a good base character, the problem was that I had a very specific idea of how I wanted to play this game, and the character that I'd created didn't perfectly fit this style of play. As a result, even in the beginning, the game was extremely difficult, and frustrating. Advancing levels was slow, combat was overly challenging, and I spent a good deal of time staring at loading screens rather than playing the game.

After reading a little about the character abilities and descriptions, I realized that I was missing certain features that I would need, to play the game the way I had intended (as a Rogue-Mage). By starting over again, I was able to use the knowledge I'd gained to create a new, better-suited character. The game changed dramatically.

With this new character, levelling up was easier, I could do all the things that I wanted to do, and see the character improving at them. This changed the dynamics of the game completely. I could now explore this huge world with less fear of constant death, I could advance in the guilds I'd chosen to join, because my abilities were better suited.

While Morrowind has some in-game problems (framerate jitters, an abundance of "fetch" quests), by far the biggest problem is the lack of documentation, and a lack of direction for novice players. If you know what you're getting into is a huge, open-ended role playing game, in which you can do virtually anything, from slaughter entire villages, to spend all day making healing potions, or bribing the local townsfolk, then Morrowind will *definitely* satisfy.

But be sure this is what you want, or you'll quickly find yourself in over your head.