Hmph. When I first picked up this game, it was for the Xbox. I played it a few months, then realized that I very badly wanted to explore the whole mod thing, so I bought the PC version and never looked back.

This was several years ago (I went from Oblivion to Morrowind, rather than the other way round). Now I'm taking a break from a certain Nordic themed game which shall not be mentioned here, and I found myself back in Morrowind. Primarily because my gaming PC is out in the living room where it is impossible to play without finding myself in a three-way Battle of the Volumes featuring my PC and two other TVs wielded by family members. The game consoles are in my private bedroom. It's my place to escape from the brutal outside world and play Morrowind until 3am surrounded by pillows and my teddy bear.

So. I've dusted off the Morrowind disc and fired up the 360. I'm one of those people who loves this game for the roleplaying, not so much the hacking and slashing. I hate combat in Sk-- um, a more recent TES game where combat is fairly advanced, and I hate it ten times more in Morrowind where combat is basically a repeating round of whiff-whiff-whiff-HIT!-whiff-whiff-oopsimdead.

I've played this game, and TES games in general, for years. I know all about making it easier by picking certain classes and skills and coordinating birthsign and etc. As I said, I love Morrowind for roleplaying and it does not suit me to conform to a particular playstyle and only use particular skills\weapons which are best for low levels. I don't mind dying a bunch of times because of this stubbornness, but it's getting to where I basically can't even play the game because my character is so pathetic.

I can't recall ever having this problem before, at least not to this extent, not with Morrowind. I seem to recall frequent occasions of sooner-than-instant-death attributable to my insistence on playing a spear-wielding Redguard mage, but I never had mud crabs laugh at my dismembered corpse to the point of wanting to throw the controller at a wall. And I've finally just now realized -- I can be slow sometimes -- why I'm getting massacred 95% of the time instead of the usual 30 - 40%.

The standard version of Morrowind for Xbox does not offer a difficulty slider.

Let me just bang my head on the desk for a bit here. It's been years since I played Morrowind on the Xbox and I just somehow totally forgot that before all those hours and months of obsessive play on the PC, I'd set the difficulty lower and then never touched it or even thought about it again. There IS no difficulty slider in the standard Xbox version, so there wasn't anything in the options menu to remind me, oh yes, need to tweak that before I begin.

If you're still reading this, thanks for not asking why it takes me eight paragraphs of babble to ask a simple question. Coffee, is the answer, coffee.

After a bit of Googling I realized that the only way to access the difficulty slider on the Xbox is to buy the GOTY version. I'm not happy about having to purchase this same game for the third time now, but I'll do it because I remember how much fun Morrowind can be when you're only getting your [censored] handed to you with a bow on about half the time instead of pretty much always. The only issue facing me is that I've already devoted many hours to my current game and the prospect of starting over again is chilling. I feel like I've finally, after much grueling persistence, gotten past the beginning stage where your puny little character can't walk by him\herself without needing to hold mama's hand.

If I go ahead and buy the GOTY version, will my saves from the standard game carry over? I don't know if this is obvious to most Xbox gamers; I honestly don't use my console very often. I pick PS3 whenever possible because the controller's much more comfortable in my little hands. I purchased the Xbox solely for only four games -- Fable, KOTOR, Morrowind, and an Xbox Live indie (I guess LAX isn't popular enough to warrant a real game). This is an Xbox 360 we're talking about, if it matters, not the original box.

As long as you're on the same system, then yes, your saves will carry over from standard to GOTY, if you want them to. It's a small little conversion process that you do for individual saves, and if you do start playing on GOTY you can't go back to the original disk.