At Pixel Well games stay with us. Not all games (I recycled Doom 3 just recently), but the best stick around. And for good reason. Because they are more than games. They are places we’ve been, and we know we want to go back. Enter Morrowind.

We played Oblivion here at Pixel Well, and eagerly. You kiddos may start howling a collective hex in our direction when I start shooting Oblivion up, but it just wasn’t as good. I mean, Morrowind… I really felt (and feel) like I went somewhere. Enough with the metaphysics though. Oblivion was lame for a number of reasons.

Uninspired: Morrowind was fantasy reinvented, borrowing from cultures far divergent from the tried and true Tolkien spin. It was stock fantasy. Just like Dragon Age. If Tolkien rocked that stuff as well as he did, why do we want to keep making more, lesser, equivalents?

Level Scaling: I just went back into Morrowind and went off the coast of Ebonheart, where I found a dragon bone cuirass that will always be there. Nuff said. Oh no wait. Zombies that take ten minutes to kill. Nuff said.

Map Teleport: Though it takes me about twenty minutes to find my quest objective in Morrowind, I love it. The fact that you can teleport around in Oblivion just makes the game feel like its trying to appeal to a younger crowd, those who can’t take working for a payoff.

Consolized: Oblivion was obviously made to port to consoles. No thanks.

The Morag Tong and Guilds in General: Oblivion’s guilds were idiotic, especially when the NPCs walked around telling each other the fighters guild was recruiting, telling you the fighters guild is recruiting WHEN YOU’RE THE GUILDMASTER. Yeah, we still joke about this. What happened to the Morag Tong? What happened to style?

Lastly, this: I’m always impressed when a developer writes like nine books for their game. They did it for Morrowind, and I thought Oblivion got some cred for having the same thing going on. Well, I was sniffing around the webs for my favorite plugins when I booted up Morrowind until I came upon this (skip down to the last line for the brix)…

One critic in particular, Phillip Scuderi, remembered Morrowind for its great literary richness. To him, the in-game literature and its integration within the game was Morrowind’s “most original and lasting contribution to the history of games”, one that would place it beside Planescape: Torment as one of the most important games of all time. Such themes are echoed in other responses to the game, such as that of RPGamer’s Joseph Witham, who found a story “discreet” in its progression, with a dungeon-crawling feel, standing alongside a “whole world of unique history” with books forming the greater part of the player’s interaction with that world. Most of the books were reused in Oblivion.

WTF? Those hackjobs. When I saw that suddenly Bethesda old and new split into this awful chimera like construct. Morrowind was made from the ground up, and it feels earthy. Oblivion felt like plastic, and tasted like plastic. To this day, the most fun I had in Oblivion was a mod I made for it that included a bow that shot arrows which AoE’d a paralysis that lasted 999999 seconds. It also played this song whenever you got into combat:

Sugar, Sugar

Morrowind, to me, is like saying the Age of Man has arrived, looking longingly after Bilbo as he sails across the Sundering Seas. Will we ever get a game that feels like that? Forget technology. I got off the boot at Seyda Neen and it felt like I had arrived at an old friends house. I’m just glad I can buy it on Steam to enjoy long after CDs are a thing of the past.