from Hacker News

The Modern Gamer's Guide to Running Morrowind

by Alekhine on 5/18/22, 9:03 PM with 48 comments

  • by ogurechny on 5/19/22, 9:34 AM

    > Greatly improved graphics and draw distance

    BOO! BOO!

    Speaking of “introductory guides for modern gamers”, there definitely should be one that lists most common ways they unwittingly mutilate the old games.

    Mistake #1 is, without doubt, using high resolution uncommon at the production period for rendering. So they start the game, then feel it looks a bit shitty (it really is, now when you set it that way), then turn to mods, HD skins, NN-upscaled textures, and other craptastic “enchancements”. If step 0 was wrong, don't try to fix it with further wrong steps. Screen resolution, texture resolution, model complexity, artistic style, etc. should all be in balance. If you want a game that looks good in FullHD, you need to gather a new team that remakes the whole thing from scratch (and that production is going to cost more than the original one).

    Mistake #2 is increasing view distance for the sole reason that hardware allows you to do it. Virtual horizon is really important to set scale for the game world. If it's too far, the exciting travel to the unknown place turns into moving to a next stand in theme park, or the wide plane turns into the small crossroad with NPCs standing here and there who don't even need to shout to hear each other.

    These changes are as drastic as giving rocket launcher to the player, but everyone is so used to them that they don't realize what is wrong. Some people even make “retro” games assuming this is how games looked like originally.

  • by edapiieaway on 5/19/22, 4:20 AM

    Ahh, Morrowind. A conworld so good that the community effort put into modernizing it may have eclipsed the amount of work put into creating it in the first place. The OpenMW project is extremely impressive.

    I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.

    So more realistically, give Morrowind to your children. Figure out how to install it, get a character to Balmora to make sure it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and let them go nuts.

    Vvardenfell is a strange land which rewards curiosity, and it doesn't have any ads.

  • by NinoScript on 5/19/22, 4:59 AM

    I love reimplementations.

    I’ve recently been playing Julius, a reimplementation of Caesar III; and Augustus, a form with extra features:

    https://github.com/bvschaik/julius https://github.com/Keriew/augustus

  • by dimitar on 5/19/22, 5:16 AM

    Maybe its my teenage nostalgia but Morrowind has one of the best settings I've seen. You got Ashlands yurts, Vivec city with its canals and ziggurats, a city inside a crab mushroom towers, and other architectures. Medieval Europe is still there, but it looks intentionally out of place as required by the story.

    I feel only Dune and Star Wars have been so visually distinctive for me.

  • by etataetaet on 5/19/22, 2:52 AM

    Love OpenMW! Got my old disk to work on my Linux system and it was super easy. If you want to play Morrowind I would highly recommend it.
  • by accrual on 5/19/22, 4:02 AM

    I'm a couple hours into my first "real" playthrough and highly recommend this vanilla modding guide:

    https://github.com/Sigourn/nerevarrising

    It's basically vanilla plus. Not only did I have a fun following the guide, I feel like I'm getting a very authentic experience. One day I'll experiment more with OpenMW (especially once it reaches modding parity), but for today I'm enjoying the real thing.

  • by kqr on 5/19/22, 3:51 AM

    Every now and then I feel like playing Morrowind, but to get the most out of it, I would like to sit in long sessions with a notebook just to immerse myself in that world, read the in-game books, talk to the people, etc.

    With small children, full time work, etc, I haven't found a way to make that happen.

    Do I wait until retirement or is there some other trick to it?

  • by assbuttbuttass on 5/19/22, 4:04 AM

    OpenMW is amazing. I can play Morrowind in 4k on my Linux machine.
  • by iammjm on 5/19/22, 8:13 AM

    Morrowind is amazing. One of the most unique game worlds i have ever experienced. I used to just wander around and explore without purpose, and always ended up finding some cool spot or an npc. I doubt i will ever get so immersed in a game again
  • by ricardobayes on 5/19/22, 9:24 AM

    Which version of the game is best for modding? Can I grab it off steam and use openmw without issues?
  • by JimTheMan on 5/19/22, 8:16 AM

    Do the mods deal with reducing the amount of pterodactyls that swoop you?
  • by bsnal on 5/19/22, 6:34 AM

    Openmw is unfortunately so much slower than the vanilla executable.
  • by shultays on 5/19/22, 8:39 AM

    For those that are not aware, there is also a vr port for openmw.
  • by wly_cdgr on 5/19/22, 3:33 AM

    Pass, vanilla is just fine