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My Morrowind Journal

This is a page about a game that's completely dominating my free time right now - Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls III. Now with a second expansion pack available, this is a beautiful game with hundreds of hours of gameplay, and well worth picking up!

The nice thing about the game is that it's not at all linear. There are missions for you to accept, and even an overarching storyline, but nothing makes you follow that path. If you want, your character can just follow his or her fortunes as a wandering adventurer and never get involved in the main story. And there is a huge amount of real estate to explore, so you won't get bored doing that.

My main moan is that though the world is beautifully done, the characters themselves are downright ugly! Fortunately the game comes with a set of programmes for adding modifications. These "mods" can be added in to give new functionality, change graphics and sound effects and to add whole new areas to the world. Some very clever folks have made new heads available so you don't have to play someone who looks like their face was set on fire and then beat out with a shovel...

Links to some great resources:

The official site (Get the patches as soon as you've installed it - like most games, you'll regret it if you don't...)
The official plugins (Some official plugins for the game - well worth having)
Rhedd's heads (Essential - unless you really want to be "aesthetically challenged")
Leiawen's duel wield plugin (These are great! And Leia also has more heads for download...)
Duncan's Atmospheric sound effects (Big downloads, but very, very nice)
Want more mods? (In case you really, really can't get enough...)

Rhedd's heads give you a great range of new "looks" for your characters, including new hairstyles. These look really terrific - see the screenshot below of my character Sylvana!

Duncan's sound effects add on to the already great background sounds in the game. Storms in particular are fantastic, with thunder and lightning, driving rain, and even when you are indoors you can hear it beating on the roof (different types of roof sound different... Duncan worked really hard on these, and it shows). With these sound effects you'll really feel like you are there, though it seems to be a bit too noisy at night if you ask me - how does anyone in Morrowind get any sleep?

Leia's duel wield plugin lets you use a pair of weapons, and gives you two shortswords, two axes and two pairs of Katana's. They look great, with glowing runes! As well as looking cool and being good weapons, you can sell the ones you don't need for starting money. Which leads me onto a little problem...

You sell and buy stuff from traders. Traders have a finite amount of money, and usually not very much. So you end up selling stuff for much, much less than it's worth, just because they can't pay any more. You'll end up bankrupting several traders in each town pretty quickly. This doesn't bother them, but it's a pain for you because you can't sell your hard earned loot!