See, I love the *idea* of Solstheim.

Not a fan of the execution.

I've never gotten very far in the Bloodmoon questline. For one, I don't like the idea of expansions being geared toward higher-level characters - as though we all just played around before Tribunal and Bloodmoon came out, and then wanted to run our same characters through the expansions.

I'd been reading through the 'Anyone ever done a pure Solstheim playthrough?' thread and thinking about it lately, though, so I decided another shot was in order. Not a pure Solstheim playthrough, but another attempt at the Bloodmoon quest and what the island has to offer in general.

My character was/is a Nord, custom class, around lvl 15 or so by the time he arrived on Solstheim. Major skills are Speechcraft, Long Blade, Axe, Block, Medium Armor; Minor skills are Light Armor, Unarmored, Armorer, Mercantile, Athletics. Not optimal, sure, but I like keeping my armor options open, and I envision this guy as a skald type. On Vvardenfell, I'd joined the FG and House Hlaalu and been doing OK.

Thirsk seems custom-made for my character. Even the idea of building up Raven Rock seems cool.

Upon arriving on Solstheim, things seem fine at first. There's tough monsters, but I can deal. However, my biggest problem with the place is what seems to me a poor design. Here's a few points:

1. NPCs - bears, wolves, berserkers, bristlebacks, every few yards! It's a ridiculous concentration of monsters and hostile NPCs. You get more of a break in actual dungeons than in the wilderness, where you eventually find yourself taking torturous routes through the trees to avoid drawing the attention of yet another squealing boar.

2. Supplies - nonexistent. At least the game is up-front about this, but I can't help but think this is just a crazy design decision. Bloodmoon seems designed for warrior types, who live and die by their gear. There are ways around this, sure - bound weaponry, spells, heck hand-to-hand and unarmored - but a huge island with nary a repair hammer in sight really breaks that immersion. (The lack of repair supplies reeeeally points out the silliness of having repair hammers that *break* during use.)

3. Travel services - again, no real surprise here, and having no easy way to get around does emphasize the island's remoteness - but having to trek back and forth during that whole Skaal Stones ordeal (or anything else you might want to do) also emphasizes the flaws in points 1 and 2 above.

4. This last point isn't specific to Solstheim, since it seems to be the usual way Bethesda handles these things: difficulty is often created by mobbing the player with a gang of enemies. Harder = more bad guys. I just did one part of the Skaal Stones quest that involved

Instant aggro from all foes in the immediate vicinity - and since I was hopelessly outnumbered, in no time I was leading a ridiculous chase through the woods that drew even more wolves and boars along for the ride.

I don't recall having these issues at any point in the main game of Morrowind. Sure, you'd occasionally wander into a bandit cave way out of your league, but it seemed more honest: you'd get clobbered right off the bat, or barely manage to run out of there, and just do something else with your life. Move on down the road, do some more quests, get a feel for the world.

But Solstheim throws things at you so haphazardly, and strews around NPCs and hostiles so frequently, that it's hard to take the place seriously.

I think the best thing for my character to do is get off-island ASAP before immersion is entirely broken and I discontinue playing altogether.

Anyway, way too long rant here. Am I just being a wimp? Anyone else have thoughts about Solstheim's design?

Well you answered the problem in the beginning of your post, Solstheim is intended for high-level characters. It's meant as a post-game area for all those characters that have beaten the mainquest or are faction leaders. Tribunal, however, is very compatible with low-level characters and has some very good items and quests for those characters.

Yeah, so, maybe they did think that people will only play Solstheim after very much adventuring on Vvardenfell. I guess it's an easy decision when the players complain everything gets so easy in Vvardenfell. No-one likely thought about some players wanting to do solo Solstheims in the future, so, that DLC (and Tribunal, too) is a bit bad starting at level 1.

I agree on your point of ridiculous enemy concentration. It's like some forest animals' party all the time. A spriggan and a bear and a wolfpack every five feet, jolly good get-together!

I could swear that this is a line from Skyrim! Or maybe even Oblivion.

I think this illustrates a problem with Morrowind's leveling. When people complained that Morrowind was too easy after level 20, Bethesda realized they had a problem. Oblivion-style scaling wasn't available, so they tacked on an expansion that offered a bit more challenge. Then they tacked on another expansion that offered a bit more challenge.

This didn't work very well. I think most of us agree this why they adopted scaling. Say what you will about scaling, it at least allowed us to take our characters to Shivering Isles when it made roleplaying sense for our characters to do so. This is something that is extremely hard to do with Bloodmoon.

When I played my Solstheim-only characters I altered enemy difficulty in the Construction Set. My Solstheim characters' stories would not have been possible on the XBox.