scumble on 22/2/2006 at 12:28

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I have been very on-and off with the game. Haven't fired it up since march last year and I've realised there are masses of unfinished side quests in the journal that I have completely forgotten about.
I also bumped into another couple of characters standing about randomly - the guy north of Caldera nailed to the spot by a witch, for example. Apparently the whole "quest" is just finding a way to unstick him. I have to say these don't seem to spike my interest at all. They seem so banal as to be not worth the time.

I'm just not sure how much they add to the game. It's almost overkill considering the masses of far more interesting things to do. I'll have to stop accepting them by habit to avoid cluttering up my journal even more.

scumble on 22/2/2006 at 12:41

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Do you make your own notes instead? That's the way it used to be with this sort of game. They may as well have just integrated a notepad.

RyushiBlade on 23/2/2006 at 00:29

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I play by the "Just-Winging-It" method. I figure if the quest is important, I'll complete it whether by accident or on purpose. If I leave some (or most?) quests uncompleted, I won't mind... mostly because I won't remember them.

steo on 24/2/2006 at 00:00

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I think the problem with too much game content is that people are used to games in which they can easily do everything there is to do and so people try to in order to get the most out of a game. In games like morrowind doing absolutely everything is pretty much impossible and let's face it, a lot of the quests can be pretty dull. You then decide to go back to the main quest and find you have become so ridiculously powerful from doing all of these meagre side-quests that main quest becomes far too easy. For me, this ruined Morrowind as a game. On my first game I did everything I could find to do in Seyda Neen then went to Balmora. After some time in Balmora I found quests that required me to travel to other locations where I found more quests which I tried to complete before leaving. Before long I was entangled in an enormous web of unfinished quests and as a result, I never got as far as finding the dwemer puzzle box with that character, though to be fair [SPOILER]it is very easy to miss it, explore the rest of the ruins and then teleport out without ever finding it.[/SPOILER]

I've played with so many different characters without ever completing the game its ridiculous. I often get so caught up with different quests and because a lot of the game is often quite samey I get bored and stop playing it for a while. When I return to it I make a new character because I'm bored with the other one or have forgotten half of what happened in that game.

One character I played with fairly recently, I concentrated mainly on the main quest and some guild quests. I'd been playing for quite some time with this character and he was pretty good. So I'm on my way to [SPOILER]Nerevarine cult ashlander tribes camp[/SPOILER] for the first time (I felt it necessary to trek the whole way because its too easy to jump/silt strider/teleport most of the way). Anyway, so I take a wrong turn somewhere along the way and after a bit of exploring and wandering around I stumbled upon the end boss. Now I'd already learnt a fair bit about the plot from various writings in the game and I was sure this was him. So I'm all geared up for a fight and I wind up sparring with him for a pretty long time before deciding that he wasn't hurting any more than when I found him I looked around a bit more found some interesting things in that room of his and decided after a fair amount of contemplation that I was missing something. Either I just didn't know how to kill him or I didn't have the specific means, I knew that I would have to continue along the main quest to find out. Shortly after however, I realised that that was probably going to be one of, if not the hardest enemies in the game and I was fairly sure I wasn't too close to the end plotwise. So I decided to restart. Got a bit further with the next character but everything was still too easy.
Now I have two intentionally poor characters that I haven't played with for a while but may return to. One is a punchy, short bosmer git whose only combat skills are hand-to-hand and unarmoured (actually turned out a lot better than I thought). The other is a pure mage - unarmoured only (aside cloth bracers to fix the bug) only weapons allowed are staves and daggers and, of course, the schools of magic.
The real shame is that Morrowind has the potential to be a really great game and it can be but it is too easy to mess things up and get a far too powerful character (e.g. take a redguard with long blade and heavy armour) or get caught up doing dull quests. To be honest, I will probably never complete Morrowind but in a way it has prepared me for Oblivion. If I avoid the mistakes I made in Morrowind I might just be able get the most out of Oblivion. I wonder if there's a difficulty setting...
If I were to complete Morrowind the best way to do it would probably be to follow main quest all the time and only do other things when I'm told to. Of course that kind of defeats the point of such open ended gameplay.
Oh well, only a few more weeks till Oblivion's out...

jstnomega on 24/2/2006 at 22:40

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NO! NO! NO! That guy is mainly in the game as a punching bag by which to raise your hand-to-hand combat skill. In that regard, I believe he is a hidden Master Trainer.