TES Marathon

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Joacqin, I've not got to Morrowind yet but aren't there temples or healers that will cure status effects for a price? By the way "this game is immense and it literally swamps you with things to do and vague directions" applies equally to any game in the series

As I had suspected the main line quests are level-dependant and start opening at level 3, with others appearing at higher levels. Unlike Arena it seems that the main line is highly non-linear, as I'm getting letters from the various rulers offering me to visit them. I guess all the threads will come together eventually. I decided to leave the main questline aside and do some more guild quests to raise my skills and level. The game takes place around the Iliac bay and covers most of the provinces of Hammerfell and High Rock, but both provinces are split into semi-autonomous regions (presumably as a result of the political stability following Jagar Tharn's bid for power). Most of the factions and guilds have a presence in all regions, but each region has its own nobility, temple, knight order and bank. Also, the local and legal reputation in each region is independant of the others, so it's possible to be a saint in one and hated in another. Since I could only join one temple and one knight order, I thought it would make sense to use one city as my HQ and I wanted one with access to all the guildhalls and at least one bank. Gold weighs a lot in this game, and since some useful things like a ship cost upward of 100,000 having a bank account is a necessity. Additionally, shops won't pay for high-priced items in cash but in credit notices and these can only be put directly into an account (sometimes this game disturbingly reminds me of real life!). I chose Daggerfall, the capital city of the eponymous region, because I had already done several guild quests in it and got used to its layout and where things are. It's also got a nice market square with shops that buy and sell just about anything, one guildhall for each guild, several bank buildings, and since the game is named after it it's probably at the core of the main line. It's also haunted by a ghost army at night, which makes it creepy when I get there after sunset and am trying to sneak in by climbing the city walls, only to find a wraith appearing next to me and whispering "Vengeance!"

Anyway I did more quests for the Fighters' and Mages' guilds and have been climbing their ranks steadily. I made a very nice Open spell with Spellmaker and used it to go on stealing sprees, which promptly resulted in an "invitation" from the Thieves' Guild (after passing their little test, of course). I also joined the Temple of Kynareth and the Knights of the Dragon, so between the five factions I have plenty to do. All the knight quests involve dungeon dvelving, so after reaching level 5 I took a deep breath and went back to these. They've been going much better than my first attempt, as I've figured out several tricks to make things easier (trick #1: always leave a teleport anchor at the dungeon entrance). Rather than just go and randomly get lost, I split the dungeon into smaller sections (basically as long as the wall texture is the same, it's the same section) and do these one at a time. I've not had trouble getting to my goal (usually something to whack) and even got lucky a couple of times, when the quest enemy was very near the entrance.

The town quests have more variety and some are genuinely surprising, especially those for the temple. One involves a child possessed by a daedra and performing an exorcism, except it turns out the child was only pretending to be possessed so her guardian could get his hand on a temple relic used in the exorcism. Another one had a heretic pretending to be a new prophet who opposes the temple, but turns out to have faked it all to spite the temple priests because of past personal issues; as far as I could tell there are at least 3 different ways to solve this one, including the choice to go dungeoneering or not (I didn't). Some Mage and Fighter quests can also be solved to open up continuations for them, but to do so you have to go against the guild, so I opted not to. I want to get my standing with the guilds as high as possible, especially the Mages so I can use their Daedra Summoning service and get my hands on some of the artifacts. So far I've joined all the guilds except the Dark Brotherhood, who like the Thieves are by invitation only. I suspect killing people in the city will get their attention, but so far I'm enjoying my good legal standing so I'm not too keen on murder. While on an errand I even helped the local police with one of their arrests, which has pushed me from "common citizen" to "dependable in the eyes of the law". How nice!

I think it's time I started on the main line. I have a letter from he nobility of Wayrest and another from Sentinel asking me to visit them, as well as the queen of Daggerfall having a job for me, and that's the one I'm going to start with.

 

I know the temple is the thing to do in Oblivion but the thing is that my str is so low that I cant move. I would probably have to dump everything to be able to move at all and I am not too keen on that. I think my next step is to see if I can brew up some restore str/end potions. Alchemy seems to be a bit harder here in Morrowind than Oblivion but still ok.

 

Meet the cast:


The main line in Daggerfall is extremely complex. There are so many things going on at once, so much political intrigue going on within each court and between the three courts that I still find myself referring to the family tree to figure out who is plotting what. The order in which I'm presenting things is not the one I completed them in, but one that makes it easier to follow the narrative as the plot threads have a tendency to interact with each other in mysterious spaghetti-like ways.

The main character is an agent of the Emperor Uriel Septim VII sent to the Iliac Bay to find out why the ghost of Lysandus, previous King of Daggerfall loyal to the Empire and killed on the field of battle, is haunting his old capital with an army of undead. The Emperor also gives me the "much less important" task of finding what happened to a letter that he sent to the King's widow, Mynisera, which she never got and is only of "sentimental value". Right away I suspected there must me much more to this letter and that he's much more concerned about the whereabouts of the letter than what is happening to Lysandus.

On the way from Cyrodiil to Daggerfall the ship gets capsized in a storm and I end up in a cave and the obligatory TES starter dungeon, Privateer's Hold (at least it's not "escape from prison" this time!). A few days after getting out I received a letter from Lady Brisienna, the Emperor's agent in the Iliac Bay, and this starts the main line (technically this happened early in the previous post).

As I mentioned in the previous post I had three lines running, so I went with the first one and visited Queen Aubk-i, formerly of Sentinel and now married to the new King of Daggerfall. She is concerned about Nulfaga, a powerful sorceress and the late Lysandus's mother, who seems to have gone a bit mad after her son's death, isolated herself in Castle Shedungent and surrounded herself with traps and guardians. After a tough crawl through the castle I found her alive and as well as a crazy old woman living by herself can be, which seems to relieve Aubk-i a bit. The queen then sends me on another errand. Apparently the widowed Mynisera has been smuggling large packets of old letters out of Castle Daggerfall and to her own retreat at Castle Necromoghan and Aubk-i wants to find out why. After thoroughly exploring the castle I found a very interesting letter that Mynisera was trying to destroy, which reveals that Lysandus had a mistress. According to Aubk-i, Mynisera is so faithful to him that she doesn't want this truth to come out and tarnish his reputation. Other bits of the letter also reveal him as much more cruel and ruthless than rumour would have it, as he took great pleasure in slaughtering orc children for no reason other than to sate his bloodlust. Not a very nice guy, even if they were orcs.

With all information in Daggerfall dried up for now I moved on to the court of Wayrest. Matters here are a bit complicated, as the current King and Queen both have children from previous marriages and there's a heavy dose of court intrigue going on to see which of the three children will assume the throne. My first meeting was with Prince Helseth, Queen Barenziah of Morrowind's son. He simply asks me to deliver a letter to one of his friends, Lord Castellian, although he's very secretive about it and specifically doesn't want his stepfather the king to know about it. I couldn't resist reading the letter (I reloaded afterwards), which was pretty funny as it's a not-so-subtle blackmail attempt on Castellian, who has an incestuous affair with his sister (!). Helseth being very happy with me he puts in a good word with his mother, who sends me to Orisinium, land of the orcs, to retrieve a chapter from a very humiliating biography about her. The chapter is with Gortwog, the orcish warlord, and contains some very interesting information about Barenziah back when she was Tiber Septim's mistress (I was a bit surprised at the timeline until I remembered she's elvish). Just like in Redguard, Tiber Septim is not presented as a nice guy; upon learning he'd accidentally made Barenziah pregnant he knocks her out and proceeds to force a miscarriage, so his legitimate son will have no competitor with a claim to the throne, then sends her back to Morrowind. No wonder she wanted such a story kept under wraps.

At this point Lady Elysana has a request for me. She wants to send a cloak as a gift to our good friend Lord Castellian, so I agree to play fedex. Except that, as soon as Castellian takes the cloak and puts it on, a Daedra Seducer is summoned and kills him on the spot. After barely escaping from the guards, who want to execute me for killing their lord, I make it back to Elysana who naturally pretends she didn't know this would happen. Nice. At least she shares an interesting piece of information: King Eadwyre is desperately looking for something called the Totem of Tiber Septim and would do anything to secure it. At this point I was wondering what the point of the Lord Castellian quests was, so I dug a little deeper and started asking about him. Turns out the succession in Wayrest is complicated. Helseth, being the eldest son, should technically be next in line, but things are made more complex because Elysana is the King's daughter, so she has some claim too. Lord Castellian was supporting Elysana, but since Helseth was blackmailing him he was forced to switch sides. Elysana solved the problem by killing him, in what amounts to "if I can't have it then you can't either".

In case you haven't noticed yet, the nobility of Wayrest are all a bunch of double-dealing backstabbers.

The last quest I did in Wayrest was for Morgiah. She sends me to Scourg Barrow to deliver a letter to the King of Worms, leader of the necromancers. The letter mentions a strange deal: Morgiah will give the King of Worms her "first" (I assume her first child?). In exchange the necromancers will let the King of Firsthold in the Summerset Isle speak with his dead son, and the King will marry Morgiah in return. Anyway Scourg Barrow is a huge dungeon, but I got lucky and at every intersection the very first path I took was the right one. This leads to Mannimarco, the King of Worms and coolest character in the series so far. He's got an audience chamber with liches, vampires, half-naked dancers (thankfully none of the undead in this room attack; they do everywhere else in the Barrow). Mannimarco agrees to Morgiah's deal and lets me go with a hints that our paths will cross again. Morgiah is naturally delighted and finally gives me concrete information about what happened to the Emperor's letter to Mynisera: it was delivered to Aubk-i instead, then stolen by the Thieves' Guild, and finally bought by Gortwog. Oh boy. Morgiah suggests getting on good terms with Mynisera to find the letter, so back to Daggerfall we go.

Since Mynisera is unapproachable, I try to get on good terms with her maid Cyndassa instead. She sends me off to kill a werewolf, promising to put in a good word with the Queen Mother. After killing the werewolf, it turns out he was Cyndassa's brother and he hated himself for changing, so Cyndassa wanted to put him out of his misery. In any case this gets me an audience with Mynisera, who after being told the letter was opened by Aubk-i is more than a little annoyed and sends me after the original courier to find out why he delivered the letter to Aubk-i. Naturally when questioned Aubk-i pretends she never read the letter before it was stolen, but that night some assassins attack me for "interfering in affairs I shouldn't know about". Unfortunately there is no evidence linking them to Aubk-i. Anyway after some questioning around I managed to find the courier and the reason for the mix-up: the Emperor addressed Mynisera's letter to the Queen of Daggerfall, and by the time it reached the city Lysandus was dead and Gothryd had assumed the throne, which made Aubk-i the Queen of Daggerfall. Mynisera is not happy about this but there's nothing she can do, especially since the letter isn't even with Aubk-i anymore. She promises to contact me again once she can find a way to make a deal with Gortwog. She also suggests Morgiah may know something about the letter, but I've already cleared that part of the plot.

With only one unresolved thread that I can pursue for now, I'm off to Sentinel.

 

Last time I posted I was on my way to Sentinel to meet with Prince Lhotun. He claims he knows something about Lysandus but wants me to investigate the disappearance of his eldest brother (the astute will notice he isn't mentioned in the family tree). Asking about the missing prince around Sentinel reveals he was a sickly child and more of a scholarl-prince than a warrior, but not much else. Eventually I got a message from a shady character called the Underking, who directs me to a crypt not from from town. There I found the remains and the diary of the dead prince, which reveals in no uncertain terms that he was kidnapped and entombed alive by his own parents so that his healthier brother, Prince Greklith, would become heir to the throne of Sentinel. Upon giving this to Lhotun he even reveals he suspected as much. The nobility of Wayrest has nothing on that of Sentinel it seems. At least Lhotun reveals the location of Lysandus's mistress Medora Direnni (whom I first heard about from Aubk-i), so off we go.

The Direnni Tower was a nightmare to navigate, full of powerful enemies, mazes, teleporters, traps and other delights. I finally reached Medora (who was guarded by an Ancient Lich... ouch), only to find out she's trapped somehow (I've yet to find out who trapped her and why) and needs a unicorn horn to be freed. Unfortunately the regular unicorn horns used as potion ingredients won't do, I need to get one from Nulfaga, so it's back to Shedungent. Nulfaga being quite mad I had to go all over her castle to finally get the horn, then walk all the way through the Direnni Tower back to Medora, who just thanks me and says she will contact me again.

At around this time I reached a high enough rank in the Mage's Guild to gain access to the Daedra Summoner and I decided it was time to get some good magical gear. Summoning in Daggerfall is extremely expensive (between 150,000 and 200,000, depending on reputation with the Mage's Guild) and which Daedra Prince shows up depends on the date. There are 16 special holidays, each associated with one of the Daedra. I ended up summong Mephala and after a very easy quest for her I got the Ebony Blade, a very nice katana with Life and Energy leech. Unfortunately each hit with the Blade consumes some of its health and the weapon breaks down very easily as a result; additionally I had just found a Daedric Longsword, which does more damage than the Ebony Blade. I just decided to use the longsword as my regular weapon and switch to the Ebony Blade for tough encounters or when I run low on HP. Right after this came another holiday, Boethiah's summoning day. His quest was more involved, but I got the Ebony Mail out of it, possibly the best armour in the game: highest armour rating and can cast Shield and Spell Shield.

Since I was in Daggerfall in-between the two summonings and had to wait a few weeks, I decided to stop by Mynisera, who has prepared a treaty promising Gortwog help in establishing a free orc nation if he returns the Emperor's letter (remember that one?). Gortwog not being a very nice guy (well he is an orc) agrees to the treaty but doesn't hand over the letter, instead "allowing" me to search Orsinium for it. Thankfully I had already been through the citadel before (getting the book chapter for Barenziah) and still remembered my way around, so I had no trouble finding the letter. The letter doesn't reveal much except that the Totem of Tiber Septim (which Elysana briefly mentioned way back) was found by a certain Lord Woodborne. Shortly after giving the letter to Mynisera I received 3 different letters that go into more detail about the Totem. It's apparently a controlling device for Numidium, Tiber Septim's secret weapon which he used to conquer Tamriel. Numidium was constructed by Zurin Arctus, Tiber Septim's battlemage, who infused part of himself into Numidium's power source, the Mantella. At around this time I started getting attacked regularly by assassins with orders from W - for Woodborne. I'll have to deal with him and the Totem at some point.

While running errands for the Daedra Princes I got messages from Akorithi as well as the King of Worms. Mannimarco's was particularly original: I was attacked by a zombie while in a city, and after dispatching him found an invitation stitched to it! I went to Sentinel first, where the Queen sends me to steal a painting from Castle Wayrest. Since I don't like the Wayrest nobility much I thought why not. After dvelving into the castle and finally finding the painting, it turns out there's more to it, as using the painting animates it and shows a very interesting scene: men in the livery of Wayrest are arguing with a Daggerfall noble, then one of the Wayrest men slips behind him and casually stabs him. Something makes me suspect this is Lysandus's death being shown, but he was supposed to have been killed on the field of battle in the war between Daggerfall and Sentinel. Something to ponder.

Time to go visit the King of Worms again.

 

How is the gameplay in Daggerfall? Reading this makes it seem like the core of the game is absolutely awesome but how is it actually to play? Even good games can age and even if I am no graphics worshipper there are some things like controls and cameras that could put me off. Morrowind is on the edge, especially some annoying control problems where you can quite easily get stuck on things which is less than enjoyable but the overall gameplay, the immense world and the quite varied quests more than make up for it.

 

In terms of controls and so on it's great. Arena was annoying, but Daggerfall fixed all the control issues and made keys mappable anyway. I've never had a problem with getting stuck in objects or doors, the engine is flexible when it comes to obstacles like these (they're physically still there, but you have to actually make an effort to get stuck between an open door and a wall for example). The camera is first-person only so that's not a problem;the drawing distance is short by today's standards but not so short that it becomes a distraction. The only real problem with the game is the bugginess, something I haven't mentioned. The game has a tendency to crash every once in a while, and in fact my game got corrupted a couple of days ago, and I only noticed after overwriting two of my saves. Thankfully I'd been saving very frequently to multiple positions and had a save less than an hour earlier, so I didn't lose much progress. There's also an annoying glitch that's present in all the XnGine games (Daggerfall, Battlespire and Redguard): the walls/floors are sometimes very thin so it's possible to fall through them and outside the level. It's only happened about 3 times so far though, and I didn't even need to restore as there's a very handy cheat code that will undo this problem. Really the only serious problems I've had are the crashes and that one corruption.

The game really is amazing, but there are some very glaring flaws that I didn't mention because I got so sucked into the main line that my posts ended up focusing on it completely (that wasn't my intention initially). The biggest problem is the NPCs: aside from the ones directly linked to the main line, they have sub-zero personality. There's dozens of them walking the streets of each town, possibly a couple of hundred or more in the cities, and the world at first really seems teeming with life. Then you talk to a few and the illusion is completely shattered. There's a menu with so many things you can ask each NPC about and the responses are just randomly picked from a small pool (there's typically 2-3 possible reponses for each item), but most of the time you just get a fancy "I don't know", and after one question (regardless of the answer) all future responses within the same conversation will always be "I don't know". This is the main problem: there is absolutely nothing to distinguish the NPCs from each other, so having thousands in the game world really means nothing in the end. Considering there's 2 conversation skills the whole system feels even more useless.

The world is also static in a way (though most games are like this anyway). Even the main line, which is extremely non-linear, has some illogical events, such as stealing some papers from Mynisera for Aubk-i, but then still being able to get in Mynisera's good favour and helping her to thwart Aubk-i, with no mention whatsoever being made of the switching of allegiance. I think it's a consequence of the way Daggerfall treats your relation with the world: everything is done through reputation. There's over a hundred different factions and individuals, and the game tracks your reputation with each one individually depending on how you help them as well as their allies and enemies. The beauty of the system is that it's incredibly complex compared to a simple one-variable system like BG. Here you can be a hero in Sentinel, a traitor in Wayrest, a nobody in Betony, and so on. Guarding the Mage's Guild against a Thieves' Guild raid will boost your reputation with the Mages but could get you kicked out of the Thieves'. There are so many different factions and the relationships between them are so varied that the system is feels very flexible and is also opaque to the player: you never see any numerical values, you just get told by the people involved if you've made them happy or pissed them off. I really like the rep system all in all.

What else... combat is handled the same as in Arena (don't remember if it was changed in Morrowind): hold down right mouse button and move the mouse, the movement direction will determine the type of attack (horizontal for a slash, upwards for a thrust, downwards for a bash, diagonal for a diagonal slash). I think I touched on the skill system: same as the later games except you have to wait 6h in-game between skill raises, which encourages letting skills rise naturally rather than spamming an action to get an increase. Fast travel works beautifully and the game is so large that I wouldn't want to walk from place to place anyway (I'm really going to miss this feature in Morrowind). Quests are odd: aside from main line quests all others can be redone. They're not completely random (unlike Arena) but the names of the people as well as the dungeon involved will change. I think losing the randomness from the previous game was a very smart move and makes the world much more believable. The nice thing is that many quests have multiple solutions, and which one you take will usually affect reputation with this or that faction.

All in all the game is very, very good and I definitely recommend getting it if you can live with the flaws I mentioned (besides now that Bethesda have released it you can try it for free anyway). If the graphics or engine are too old for you, you can always wait and hope DaggerXL gets released. The progress on it has been remarkable so far.

How is your game of Morrowind going?

 

I started out as a confused Altmer who set out to be good citizen of the empire and to use his meagre magic skills for the betternment of all and to generally be a nice fellow. However, as we know power corrupts and as he rose through the ranks of the Mages guild and saw the corruption in the world he thought why not me? I am now arch mage of the mages guild after executig the bumbling fool who had the position and am climbing rapidly in House Telvanni as well. Seems like those guys truly know what is important. About a third through the main quest which I must say is much more enjoyable than I remembered. Basically being able to levitate really fuels any god complexes you might have and I tend to have it in every RPG I play and in Morrowind you can really turn your character into a god although you need to do a lot of grinding and I must confess that I am guilty as charged. I am a pure power gamer and I got really annoyed in the beginning when I got killed by swarms of cliff racers or had to run from Flame Atronaches so I grinded and now I must say that I might have over done it a bit. Thankfully magic is severely crippled by the lack of magica regeneration and the cost of spells. If you want to play a half decent caster you have to rely on enchanted items, which I do. Lots of fun to lay down machine gun fire with your homemade ring of fireballs.

I am relying heavily on a walkthrough, I do not understand how it is even possible to play this game without one. It is so huge and the quests are so vague and there are so many of them. I think Morrowind was one of the last "hardcore" games to be made and to be succesful, now everything is streamlined, userfriendly and accesible which is both a good and a bad thing. I must say though that even though you lose depth by making games more accesible I think you lose players by making games like Morrowind that only real hardcore people can enjoy. I know that the last tmie I played Morrowind I quit simply because I got so overwhelmed it is a bit like drowning in beer. Sure, beer is good and you can drink a lot but it will drown you nonetheless.

I am now debating whether to get back into the main quest, finish Telvanni, do the Daedra quests (and how are you supposed to figure out that they even exist without a walkthrough?) or just starting something completely new. Maybe track down some master trainers but I am short on gold. I have items worth hundreds of thousands but nowhere to sell them which is getting a bit annoying.

 

Well it seems I've hit the wall. Hard.

After talking to the King of Worms again I did a little errand for him and he revealed that the Underking is in fact Zurin Arctus, the original creator of Numidium. Shortly afterwards I met with an agent of the Underking, and after doing an errand for him he gave me the location of Lysandus's tomb. I got an item from Medora to help me speak to the dead king and after negotiating the tomb had a little chat with Lysandus, who reveals his murderer to be the same Lord Woodborne who now holds the Totem. I headed to Woodborne Hall to avenge Lysandus, but also found Lord Woodborne's diary, a fascinating read that reveals Gothryd was in on his own father's murder and that Gortworg's orcs, of all people, tried to warn Lysandus and stop his murderers (they failed). Anyway with Woodborne dead Lysandus can finally rest and his undead army no longer haunts Daggerfall. Shortly afterwards Lady Brisienna contacted me with information that the Totem was now in Gothryd's hand, so I stormed Castle Daggerfall and retrieved it. Then I get to choose who to give the Totem to, and therefore who will win the game: the Underking, the King of Worms, the Emperor, the Orcs, or one of the powers of the Iliac Bay (namely Daggerfall, Wayrest or Sentinel). I decided the Underking, being the original creator, was the only one who should get it, especially since he wanted to use the Mantella to destroy Numidium for good and give himself his final rest. So I gave the Totem to one his agents, got told to find the Mantella... and that is that.

I've spent all morning on the internet trying to find out what is wrong. According to every walkthrough I could find the minute I give the Totem to someone (anyone) Nulfaga is meant to contact me, and after a visit to her send me to the final dungeon to retrieve the Mantella. Nothing I tried made her contact me. Restoring from a save before talking to Brisienna and accepting to retrieve the Totem didn't help. Giving the Totem to any of the other parties had the exact same effect. Reinstalling the game, same. I looked for some kind of cheat to advance the plot, modify a variable, teleport directly into the final dungeon, anything, but nothing I can find will do. The only alternative would be to start a new game, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to do that, especially since there's no guarantee I won't hit the same bug again.

It's such a shame too. Until then the game was amazing, even with some of the other bugs (even with the corrupted saves). To have it end like this is incredibly anti-climatic. I was going to end my last post on the game with an unequivocal "What are you waiting for, go play this game NOW!", but instead all I can say is, don't rush to play this game unless you have a very high tolerance for disappointment, just in case you run into the same problem.

I'm going to take a short break before starting Morrowind. Joacqin, I may want to take advantage of your recently-renewed expertise and advice You seem to be doing quite well with the game, even if you're using a walkthrough

 

It's been years since I played this game, but it seems I had the same problem. Did you try, after giving the totem, visiting her in Shedungent? I'm not sure, but I think I may have done that.

 

That's the first thing I tried after breaking down and reading the walkthrough. However I am unable to talk to her at all. As far as the game is concerned it's as if she wasn't there. This isn't very surprising, as that's how Daggerfall treats plot-essential NPCs that you will need to talk to in the future - for example at the very beginning of the game that's how Mynisera and Aubk-i were, and once I got to the point where they become relevant to the plot I am able to talk to them. It's also what happens to plot NPCs when their role in the plot is over for now (happens when trying to talk to the King of Worms outside being assigned a quest involving him, for example). Unfortunately it seems there is a trigger that was not set properly, so that Nulfaga is marked as "will be needed soon by the plot" (and so I'm unable to talk to her) but I can't figure out what this trigger is.

 

I don't know then. Are you sure you completed everything in Shedungent? Maybe there's something not finished from another quest. There's no known glitch I can find on the internet either, so there must be something unfinished....

 

There are 2 other quests that involve Shedungent: Aubk-i's first quest and Medora's. Aubk-i's I completed fully, else I wouldn't have got her next quest (which I also completed), and Medora's is required to get to this point anyway since it has to be completed to avenge Lysandus. I also searched the internet but couldn't find anything related, either as a glitch or as an unfinished thread. Getting the Totem quest has several prerequisites and all have to be completed to be told to retrieve the Totem, but I can't find any mention of requirements to get contacted by Nulfaga. I waited an entire year game-time and that didn't do anything either. It seems I overlooked something so obvious that no walkthrough mentions it, but I have no way of figuring out what it is

 

Interesting read, this thread. The storyline in Daggerfal sounds really amazing Ziad, but I'm sorry to hear that the rumors I've heard about its many bugs are also true.

On Morrowind, it sounds like the attack controls are a not the same as in Daggerfal. Rather using mouse movement for determining which attack you use, you use your movement keys for that. And yeah, getting stuck on geometry in Morrowind is so very easy. The fact that there's a console command called fixme to move you out of a stuck position is very telling. Never bother me much, though.

Seems rather expensive to me, actually. I saw Morrowind GotY (Morrowind + Tribunal + Bloodmoon) for 5 euros not so long ago, plus you should be able to get Oblivion GotY for no more than 10 euros as well.

 

Not to mention that I get them in digital version without any of the fancy fluff they like to claim cost a bundle (package, manual, maybe a map or two). A good price for a new game through things like steam would be 30-40€ and then the price should drop off rather steeply the older the game gets. A good price for the bundle I bought would be between 20 and 30€ the only reason I was willing to pay the 45€ was that for me to be a respectable "pirate" advocate I must be willing to pay for the products I really really like and seeing as I have played both Morrowind and Oblivion extensively pirated previously I felt I did not only pay for what I would play but for what I had already played and enjoyed.

I would never pay that amount of money for a game where I didn't know exactly what I got. So much crap out there, I was quite intrigued by Spore for example and was close to buying it but I am a lazy person and stumbled upon a good torrent and downloaded it to give it a shot. It was fun, for about 10 minutes then it really really sucked.

 

Amazing how things turn out sometimes.

Remember DFQFIX, the unofficial patch I was using? It's a neat package that fixes dozens of quest bugs in the game (a number of quests cannot be completed at all without it). Unfortunately it also introduces one bug, namely the one I just ran into. This very morning a new version of DFQFIX is out which is supposed to fix this issue once and for all. Unfortunately my oldest save game was before being told by Lady Brysienna to retrieve the Totem, but probably after whatever in-game flag triggers the beginning of the quest, so the fix will only work if I start a new game.

To give my game some kind of closure I downloaded a save game from inside the Mantellan Crux, just so I could do the final dungeon and see the ending. The Crux is an incredible place and very different from any other location. Unlike all the other dungeons it does not consist of huge 3D mazes in which you can get lost for hours, but instead of a number of very large open areas with puzzles to be solved to advance from one to the other (Levitation is absolutely required. I have no idea how pure non-magicka characters could ever go through). Also unlike all the other dungeons it is a VERY difficult dungeon, not because of the size or the danger of getting lost, but because figuring out what to do is far from obvious (I had to follow a walkthrough). It has some very bizzarre architecture too: a pyramid floating in a huge void, a giant skull surrounded by huge lavafalls and with Sheogorath sitting in the right eye socket (!), another huge void with a giant crossbow and a giant sword which have to be rotated to gain access to the exit... the place is completely insane. Just trying to apply the walkthrough to what you're seeing is a puzzle in itself, never mind figuring things out without a waklthrough at all!

Eventually I reached a large shrine suspended in nothing with a green gem in the middle - the Mantella, the power source of Numidium. As soon as I grabbed it I got yanked back to Nulfaga's, followed by the ending movie showing the Underking finally reunited with his heart. He consumes the Mantella and manages to give himself his final rest, thereby also ensuring that Numidium can never be activated again. Then I got a small congratulation message indicating the main line is done... followed by an error message and a crash to DOS.

This is Daggerfall in a nutshell: a beautiful game, full of things to do, with one of the most amazingly well-done main lines, marred by serious stability problems and more bugs than an alpha version should have (this after half a dozen official patches and countless unofficial ones, too). The main line isn't just a good story, it's also incredibly non-linear. I mentioned following several threads in other posts, but it's only when looking at a walkthrough that I realised just how complex the main line (well, tree is a better word) really is. A good half dozen of what I thought were main quests were actually optional, though they add a lot of depth to the game world. Despite all the problems I encountered I enjoyed the game tremendously, but unfortunately I cannot give an unequivocal recommendation. If you're thinking of playing the game, wait for a few more revisions of the unofficial patch. Hopefully by then DaggerXL will be released, which in addition to improving visuals may also get rid of the engine problems and ensuing crashes that plague the DOS executable (probably due to its use of protected mode).

On a completely unrelated note, RPG Watch have a very nice Battlespire retrospective. It has a couple of factual inaccuracies but it's obvious the guy has played through the entire game and knows what he's talking about. It was also interesting for me to see him bring up some of the same points that I mentioned last month (we seem to have liked many of the same things in the game too, especially the end game). He also seems to have pieced together what the Daedric Crescent was all about, and it now finally makes sense why the thing is all over the place in the menu, on the game packaging, and even in the introduction. It's a good read all in all.

 

Morrowind

Finally we've left behind the DOS era and have entered the Windows era, with advanced graphics, real music instead of MIDI, high resolutions and hopefully even better gameplay! I had a quick play at Morrowind yesterday, long enough to get completely overwhelmed with trying to build a character. Thankfully people here will be more familiar with this one than the older games, which means I can devote fewer posts to presenting the game and more to asking for help and suggestions

I installed the DVD GOTY edition of the game, which includes both expansions and is pre-patched to the latest version. I was surprised by the lack of a widescreen resolution, until I remembered the game is quite old (though it looks beautiful). In any case there are two main things I need to decide before I start a real game, and I want as many opinions as possible before I do that.


Mods

The unofficial patches were a no-brainer, so I went ahead and installed the Morrowind Patch Project (v1.6.4), the Morrowind Code Patch (v1.4) and Object Permanence (v1.20). Hopefully even if I run into problems, whether they're caused by one of these patches or not, I can use the console to fix the problem (something I dearly missed in Daggerfall). If you have used any of these mods I'd appreciate any feedback. Same goes if I missed any bugfixes mods that would be good to have.

I also installed all the official plugins except LeFemm Armor (I'll be using a male character, so not much point). I briefly considered using a mod that postpones the Dark Brotherhood attacks, then decided to just play it as it is.

The lack of fast travel has me worried a bit. From what I've read transportation seems to be a big pain in this game. There's a couple of mods that make Mark & Recall more powerful by increasing the number of simultaneous anchors. Would these be too much like cheating? Is there a lot of tedious walking back and forth in the game, or is it not too bad with the various transportation methods already present in the game?


Character creation

This is the big one. In some ways character creation is much simpler than in Daggerfall (no advantages/disadvantages, for one thing) but the choice of skills is much more important. In the previous game only the highest Minor skill counted for level-ups, so even though I made some bad choices there it didn't matter at all in the end. In Morrowind every single class skill counts so I don't want to end up with half my class skills going unused and gimping my character as a result.

So, here are some questions I have before choosing my skills:
- How many weapon skills should I pick? Long Blade will be my main one, but should I have another backup skill? What about Marksman?
- Is it worth choosing armour as a class skill? I plan on having all daedric equipment by the end of the game, but in the interim I'll end up probably using all types of armour (and unarmoured until I find pieces for all body parts). Should I pick Heavy Armor or leave it as a Misc skill?
- Which magic schools should I pick? Destruction seems fun, but Alteration and Mysticism have a lot of useful utility spells, so I may end up using them a lot and leveling them quickly. On the other hand I could rely on enchanted items for utility spells and pick Enchant as a class skill instead. Thoughts?
- Athletics, Acrobatics, Alchemy, Speechcraft and Mercantile seem like skills that level up very easily. Is this an incentive to take them, or on the contrary to not have them as class skills?

Then we have attributes (and race and the birthsigns). Endurance seems like a good attribute to max out as early as possible, so I was leaning towards a Nord or Redguard with the Lady birthsign (and Endurance as a favored attribute of course). The problem with such a setup is that it'll leave me with a pathetic magicka pool that can never be over 100. So I started thinking about a Breton with the Apprentice birthsign instead. The Breton takes a nasty hit to Endurance but gets a nice magicka boost, not to mention his resistance to magicka will nullify the weakness to magicka from the Apprentice, so I can end up with a max of 300 with no weaknesses - now we're talking! Taking in Altmer sounds great for a pure mage but I wasn't too impressed with the long list of weaknesses he gets. I'm still not sure whether the huge attribute bonuses from the Lady are worth sacrificing so much total magicka. A Breton with the Lady birthsign also seems like a weak compromise - I get a tiny boost in magicka and lose a tiny amount of health. Doesn't seem to be worth it. Either health all the way or magicka all the way. That said, if my Breton Apprentice will end up with a good amount of HP anyway, then that settles it.

One last thing. Do I want to keep the starting value of my Class Skills as low as possible to level-up more quickly and increase my max level? Is it worth picking my specialisation and my race, and even my Class Skills, to take advantage of this? Or will I most probably never max out any of the skills anyway?

What I would like to end up with is a balanced character that fits my playing style (Spellsword-type, though I didn't like the set class's skill selection. Three weapon skills as Class Skills? why?), which will not need grinding to level up, and which will not be gimped because of skill selection or multipliers. I know, I'm probably asking for too much

With that said I leave the floor open to comments and suggestions!

 

I play an Altmer and in the early game he got one-shotted by every magic based enemy. Added and extra edge to my game experience.

I was worried about the travel as well but it is not that bad, we got mark and recall, we got two spells that take you to the different temples, we have the longstriders and there are boats. Your speed will increase as well but not even in the very beginning was the travelling that much trouble.

If you are aiming for heavy armor pick it is a skill you will be able to put on iron or steel fairly early and then you just upgrade and it level pretty fast if you spend a lot of time in combat. If you dont want to spend any time "grinding" or spend a large chunk of your money on trainers you will level slowly and Morrowind doesnt level with you. Contrary to Oblivion I would say just pick the skills you know you will use a lot as main skills because otherwise you will never gain a level.

 

Don't sweat the lack of fast travel. Between the boats, silt strider services, mage guild teleporters[1], Intervention spells and scrolls[2], and Mark&Recall spells, getting around is just fine. (Walking is fun too!)

[1] you don't need to be a member of the mage guild to be teleported by them, although it's cheaper if you join up.
[2] Intervention = instant teleport to the nearest Temple (Imperial or Dunmer, depending on spell). Obviously useful as lifesavers. Less obviously they are also very useful for general travelling once you get the hang of the lay of the land and can predict where an intervention will take you.

The MultiMark mod is a huge convenience too. I don't consider it cheating, more of a sanity preserver. YMMV. It's very useful to use to link together various locations in a quest-line to save too much wandering back and forth. This is especially true when you can barely carry a quarter of the loot you found in a dungeon in one trip.

Those are good picks that'll complement one another nicely. (Ammo can be scare though, unless you've included the official "Area Effect Arrows" mod? because that adds a vendor with unlimited mundane ammo in additional to the area-effect specials.)

Hell yes you need at least one specialised armor skill (I'd have it as a major skill). By all means go Heavy; although good heavy armor is very rare early on, Heavy pays off in the long run, especially if you are an avid artifact hunter (and it sounds like you are).

Destruction is fun at first but useless later on. Too many end-game (and expansion pack) enemies can resist/absorb/reflect magic. Destruction's one great advantage is area-effect carnage, but that's useless as you rarely fight significant groups of enemies at one time. Avoid.

Mysticism = kind of essential: Mark&Recall, Interventions, Soultrap. Not *necessary* to take it as a major/minor skill, but if not you will want to work on it early on until you can reliably employ these spells.

Alteration = swiss-army knife of magic: Levitate, Water-Walking, Water-Breathing, Swift-swim, Open(!), Slowfall. All of these effects can be got by other means (enchanted items, potions, etc), but having them all available in one reasonably trained-up magic school is very, very good. Highly recommended.

Illusion = can be fun and very useful, though mainly for sneaky characters.

Restoration = stuff that is largely duplicated by potions. A little skill helps a lot though, especially in some quests where you have to protect/escort someone else who is vulnerable and you will need to heal/protect or even cure.

Conjuration = For full-blown mages this is great, otherwise it's of very little utility. (Full-blown mages need minions to tank for them.) I've also heard great things about Conjuration complementing a sniper (Marksman) type of build but never tried it myself.

Athletics and Acrobatics are useful but do not take them as major/minor skills or you will level up very quickly (ie, they'll increase faster than your weapon/magic skills, and it doesn't matter how fast you can run or how far you can jump if your combat/magic skills are lagging behind).

Mercantile = Avoid! Avoid! You don't need it, and past a certain point increases in this skill work counter-intuitively: you'll start getting *less* money for what you sell rather than more. (This is a wonky mechanic to prevent you being able to buy things more cheaply than you can sell them for.)

Speechcraft: The main quest is important to you right? Take this and pump it. Superb skill that's pretty much essential to achieve what you want to do in the game.

Alchemy: Awesome. If fact, it's easy to abuse its awesomeness and make the game trivially easy. However, if you play through "naturally", not grabbing spoilers on what ingredients make which potion and where they are available (etc), its *still* awesome, but not unbalancing.

Enchant: Useful later on, but don't expect to be using this to create your own items (failure rate is high even when attempting to make fairly weak items with the skill maxed out ). Rather, it's benefit is that the higher you have it, the more charges you can squeeze out of an enchanted item. You'll probably have to buy training in it as it is a bugger to raise naturally, though having it as a minor skill helps out early on and speeds up the process slightly.

Yes. Health isn't calculated retroactively (ie, with each increase in Endurance), but only added to at each level-up (based on your Endurance at level-up), so you want your Endurance as high as possible as early as possible.

You want to play as a mage? Breton with Atronach birthsign. (yes, Altmer really do suck horribly in Morrowind... I guess the designers were aware how overpowered they'd made them in Daggerfall with the exploitable Paralysis trick?)
You want to play as a fighter? Dunmer or Orc or Nord or Imperial or Redguard with either the Lady or the Atronach birthsign.

Don't be afraid of the Atronach's inability to regen magicka during sleep. There's loads of ways of regaining magicka (and frankly sleeping is the least efficient way anyhow). And the Spell Absorbtion bonus is the big juicy icing on the cake of the xINT magicka pool multiplier.

The Lady = great for a first timer because the bonuses to Endurance and Personality get you off to a great start (Personality affects Speechcraft, you see).

Chances are you'll finish the Main Quest long before theoretical character-maxing is even on the horizon, and even going into the expansions I wouldn't worry too much about the number crunching. Just enjoy, because Morrowind is *not* like Daggerfall, where keeping starting skills low led to a higher maximum level. Although the mechanics are similar, there are ways to keep your character growing in level even after "maxing out" (no spoilers here though).

I recommend you take as your major and minor skills those things that really define who you want your character to be (never mind the math), with the following caveats:
- don't specialise too narrowly in your skills or it may be really awkward to raise the governing attributes that aren't accounted for by your major or minor skills.
- combat and magic raise quickly enough without specialisation. "stealth" classed skills such as Speechcraft, Sneak, Security, Marksman are slow to raise (and in some cases really tough to raise naturally if they start out horribly low), so - generally - picking "stealth" as you specialisation is a good idea.

Here's a sample build for a solid, but well-rounded, combat character:

Major:
Long Blade (STR, combat)
Heavy Armor (END, combat)
Block (AGI, combat)
Mysticism (WIL, magic)
Speechcraft (PER, stealth)

Minor:
Marksman (AGI, stealth)
Armorer (STR, combat) <- very useful btw
Alteration (WIL, magic)
Illusion (PER, magic) OR Enchant (INT, magic)
Alchemy (INT, magic) OR Restoration (WIL, magic)

Don't sweat too much about attaining level-up multipliers (with the exception of getting Endurance high quickly). Getting obsessed over them can really mess with your enjoyment of the game. Alternatively, you could do something like this: play odd-numbered levels naturally without a care about multipliers, but carefully plan even-numbered levels to get the maximum multipliers. I've taken this general approach in the past and enjoyed it - got the best of both worlds - a little applied schizophrenia can go a long way.

I hope this is of some use, because I've loved reading this thread and all your experiences with the earlier games.

Looking forward to hearing how you get on in Morrowind.

 

Wow, thanks for the ton of info Luiz. Glad you're enjoying the thread. One purpose of it was to get advice and suggestions from people who have played the game, but the other was to try and transmit my enjoyment of the games, so I'm happy to see it working in both ways

Since both of you mention travel won't be a problem I'll stick to the official ways for now. If things get way too annoying I could install MultiMark then. Also, while Joacqin is having lots of fun with the Altmer it doesn't seem to be the most noob-friendly race, and neither is the Atronach (and yes, the Altmer was incredibly overpowered in Daggerfall and in Battlespire, especially since you could practically pick the Critical Weakness to Paralysis disadvantage for free. I know I did ). I don't think I'm going to rely on magic much in any case, not if it's only to use Mark & Recall, Levitate, Water Walking and Open. Felinoid (who I talked to on IRC) also advised me against relying on Destruction and he pointed out a major difference with Daggerfall that I hadn't noticed: the magicka cost of spells doesn't go down with increasing skills. Coupled with the lack of magicka regeneration and the magic-resistant enemies, I think I'll relegate magic to just the occasional Alteration (all the utility spells) and Mysticism (for all these nice teleportation spells).

I've changed my mind about starting class and decided to go with the Redguard instead, for the boost to Strength and Endurance, both will be very useful at the start. The huge boost to Long Blade is good icing on the cake too. I'm also not taking the Lady birthsign anymore, because I noticed that the Endurance bonus does not affect starting Health. Then I read that Fortify effects do not affect Endurance, something the manual somehow failed to mention (of course). That left me with the Apprentice, so I might as well. Hopefully the weakness to magicka won't be a long-term problem. I'm still unsure which specialisation to pick. Combat seems completely redundant so I'm avoiding it, but while Stealth covers some very useful skills though it also boosts some that I will probably never use. Magic seemed the best - I get a boost to Enchant and Alchemy, but also to all the spellcasting skills so even if I keep them as Misc skills and suddenly decide I need to cast this or that spell I would have a better chance to pull it off. Then again maybe I should pick Stealth after all... I'm still undecided.

As for skills here's what I have in mind after taking in all the information:
+Long Blade (STR, combat)
+Heavy Armor (END, combat)
+Enchant (INT, magic)
+Mysticism (WIL, magic)
+Speechcraft (PER, stealth)
-Marksman (AGI, stealth)
-Athletics (SPD, combat)
-Alteration (WIL, magic)
-Armorer (STR, combat)
-Alchemy (INT, magic)

The reason I switched around some of them from Luiz's suggestions is that I wanted at least one class skill for every attribute, so I had to throw in Athletics. Unfortunately this means I had to drop block instead. I'm not sure this is best, or if I should replace armorer with block. Reading a bit about armorer I understand why Luiz says it's really useful so I'd like to keep it there. And now that I look at the skill selection I'm starting to lean again towards Stealth as the specialisation. If I've got Enchant, Alchemy, Alteration and Mysticism as class skills I really don't need to boost them more than this, while Speechcraft, Security, Marksman, Sneak and even Mercantile could use the boost. Besides careful reading of the manual revealed yet another major difference with Daggerfall: skill increases only happen on successful use of the skill (in the previous game Lockpick, Pickpocket and the speech skills would increase regardless of success). I tested this and realised why Speechcraft and Security in particular are such a pain to increase: at low levels they always fail, and since they will only increase when they succeed this essentially means they will never increase naturally! So yeah, I'm probably taking the Stealth specialisation after all.

To summarise: Male Redguard, Apprentice birthsign, Endurance and Luck as favoured attributes, Stealth specialisation, skill selection as outlined above. Maybe. Yet another possibility would be to ditch Alteration and rely on enchanted items for Open, Water Walking and Levitate, and get Security as a Minor skill instead. Then again with a good Open spell I really don't need Security anyway... sigh, choices choices. Oh yeah, I need to think of a good name too

Any more thoughts on this build before I start a real game?

 

Hah! There's so many possibilities that it's no wonder many players end up suffering chronic "restartitis".

From what you've proposed I'll just reiterate a few concerns. Naturally, you must go with what *you* want in the end.

1. Apprentice -> the weakness to magicka *will* make things significantly tougher. Unless you are really seeking a challenge, consider the Mage birthsign for a safe magicka boost, and - again - the Atronach birthsign for a kickass one.

2. Athletics -> Really, raising Speed isn't too tricky even without this as a chosen skill, and it may lead to *slightly* faster leveling than is ideal. Raising Agility matters more, and the Block (AGI) skill is super good... unless you are planning on only using 2-handed swords (in which case you won't be employing shield-blocking)? Hmm... yeah, that works too.

Yeah, the nice thing about Alteration is that it covers *so* much in one go, alleviating to a fairly large extent *reliance* on a swagbag of enchanted items, scrolls, potions and the Security skill.

Hmm... the class name of "Blademaster" appeals to me with your build.

Final words:
-Save often in different save slots.
-Read everything.
-Talk, talk, talk. Talking is good, and you learn a lot, and can avoid many problems if you are good at talking.
-Try to avoid killing people who aren't already dead-set on killing you (some rude and annoying people can be very useful later on, and running from the "cops" is a pain).

---

"They have taken you from the Imperial City's prison,
first by carriage and now by boat,
to the east to Morrowind.
Fear not, for I am watchful,
you have been chosen."

You're in for a wild ride, Ziad. Enjoy...