Happy birthday Morrowind!

I remember getting my copy that morning. It was delivered to my front porch by overnight express and arrived about 10:00 AM. I can still picture myself holding the game box in my hands. I don't think I'd ever seen such a beautiful box. To this day I still think the box art is gorgeous.

I was playing Dungeon Siege at the time (which came out the month earlier) but I forgot all about it as soon as I heard that theme music. It was hauntingly melancholy and majestic. It is still my favorite video game music of all time.

The first thing I did was go into Arrile's Tradehouse. I decided I wanted to buy a spear leaning against the wall so I clicked on it. The entire population of the tradehouse rushed in my direction with swords and fists and a message appeared on my screen asking me if I wanted to reload my previous save. Welcome to Vvardenfell, Outlander!

I'll never forget that day. Happy Birthday, Morrowind.

Happy birthday, Morrowind!

I guess I should play some Morrowind to celebrate

I think today should be spent playing some Morrowind and maybe Oblivion and Skyrim as well. Why not all 5 Chapters today to celebrate this milestone.

Wow, I had no idea! I've started a new game some days ago after not playing for quite a while. What a peasant surprise
I'm happy MW community is still alive and active, the game is getting closer to history than to present day and having noone to share your passion with would be awful.

I've always kept Morrowind installed on my PC ever since I first played it. I may take breaks from it, but I don't go for more than two or three months without playing it, and after paying it for years, you're bound to notice all sorts of broken mechanics and bugs. However, I'm not the one to care about such things. I enjoy Morrowind every time I play it, regardless of the possibly incoming crash.

On a different note, I think Morrowind's the only TES game which really does justice to the lore of the series because it has some much depth. Don't get me wrong, the other games are amazing as well, but it's still Morrowind that has the most intriguing plot. Nerevar's story is the best thing I've read/watched/played. It's amazing, really. There's Dune and Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, Hyperion, Planescape and other incredible fantasy and well, space opera works out there, but still, Morrowind's main plot wins because it is more than an epic story of a prophesied hero's ascension in troubled times. At it's core, it's really more of a story about love and betrayal, and one of epic proportions, and with characters more epic than even the God Emperor of Dune. You don't see that everyday. Morrowind''s quite unique, and I'm glad that after all these years it is still played, and it is still modded.

Yea, it really breaks my heart too when old Cosades leaves for the Imperial City after all the time we spent sharing his bed.

Joking aside, Morrowind is indeed a great game. I've been playing it for 7 years now, rolled maybe more than 20 characters, uninstalled/reinstalled it countless times, etc. I'm noy much of a gamer really, ES games are the only ones I play.

Morrowind is finally a teenager. Here comes puberty.

Happy birthday to the best RPG I've ever played (and unseating Ultima VII to win that title is no small achievement).

I love Oblivion like crazy and Skyrim almost as much, but Morrowind is something else. There's something magical about the world and people they created for that game.

I didn't join the fun right away - my computer was way underpowered, but when I did get around to it, I was drawn into this unique world.

I still have the very distinct memory of my first character, a Bosmer rogue, doing a quest to the south of Balmora, and somehow missing the right path on his way back, so he got on the wrong side of the mountains. With very few arrows left, he was confronted with an angry guar. The first attempt - fighting - left him dead with no arrows. I had a save a little bit earlier and another a many hours back, so on reload I tried *very hard* to sneak out of the area and avoid the guar. It took a few tries, but I managed to get out of there! Great bonding experience between myself and my character.

I remember first playing this masterpiece on the Xbox. I waited about 45 minutes for the game to load and then began my epic adventure in Seyda Neen, slaughtering mud-crabs and seeing some loon fall from the sky.

I heard load times for Morrowind on the Xbox was insane but was it really 45 minuets? Or just you? That is crazy

I also had a computer that just met the minimum requirements when I first played Morrowind. Took me a bit of .ini tweaking but I was hooked up right from the start.

Since I had zero knowledge about the gameworld and the game mechanics, my first character was a failrly boring Nord Warrior with the sign of The Lady. Morrowind was the first game that offered me the opportunity to explore wherever I wanted so within 3 mn of the game I was lost in the wilderness. My first memories of Morrowind include:

- being a bit north of Seyda Neen, see a mushroom, click on it to pick it up. At htis very moment I hear a high pitched scream, for 2 seconds I thougth it was the mushroom I heard screaming. I thought "Oh, mushrooms screams in that game, weird". Well, turns it was that Bosmer guy after all.

-entering a Tomb for the first time, also near Seyda Neen. Being very spooked by the creepy whispers, bump into a ghost, hack at it wiht my sword. "Your weapon has no effect". Aargh, rushing like mad back to the entrance of the tomb. Turns out that tomb was Samarys Ancestral Tomb.

Well, 45 minutes might be an exaggeration. The load times were ridiculous on the xbox, and then I moved to the PC later on down the road, and it fixed that issue up pretty well. Still I must have logged crazy amount of hours into the xbox version, and I'm sure there are a few hours of load times there cumulative wise lol.

I recall picking up a used copy of Morrowind in the discount rack at a local Computer Boutique (which later became a Gamestop), just the bare CD in a clear plastic case with a price sticker. On a whim, I chose that over the unsold boxed copy of some other fantasy game I didn't know anything about either (might have been "Sacred", but not positive). My initial puzzlement when I stepped off the boat and found myself in a world with essentially no real directions was amusing in hindsight. After an initial rocky start and putting it aside for a few days, I started another character, and it just kept getting more and more amazing. DEFINITELY worth the $5.99 I paid for it.

Within a couple of weeks I was out looking for the expansions. I bought the GotY edition as much for the paper map and manual as for the extra content, but that particular release didn't include either a map or a full manual, merely a small pamphlet on installing and running the game, and a bunch of advertisemants. Oblivion was announced shortly after.

for me is morrowind something like most important game - one that rule them all - One friend of mine is hardcoe really devoted fan of WoW and he plays it for years. Well, in my case it is morrowind, my first 3D game on computer. Morrowind and Far cry... yup... they started it all....

anyway Happy B!

I love reading these. Morrowind is still my favorite game of all time, and it's wonderful hearing the stories of how other people were introduced to it. Especially since I was late to the party. I only picked it up about three years ago.

Now, at this point, I'd heard of the Elder Scrolls series, but barely knew what it was. I knew a little of Oblivion, but my family had never owned a computer even remotely capable of running it, and I would never be able to afford it myself. Shortly after I got my first job, I received a free computer. Old, of course, but still perfectly functional. At about the same time, I began my struggle with some long-term health problems that still plague me to this day, and I was in need of some distraction. An only friend had repeatedly and profusely recommended Morrowind, and I figured that such an old game would probably run on my computer. So one day, on a whim, I detoured to a Best Buy on the way home from work and picked up the boxed set of Morrowind GotY edition for twenty dollars. Already I was intrigued. I vividly remember sitting in the car for a moment, examining the box. For nearly all the modern game artwork I had seen, I was used to bombastic, smoky, washed-out images of the main character walking toward the camera, or something a little more like a movie poster. At least some indication of what the core gameplay was about. For the crisp box in my hands, there was only the title, a few awards stamps, and a beautifully rendered golden triangle with symbols carved in it resting on a black field, with a cool runic script around the borders. I still have the box, and I still think it's one of the most beautiful examples of game cover-art. The back held the more traditional views of characters scowling in front of backdrops, but even those were unlike anything I'd seen before. I was immediately intrigued by the mystery. Opening the box at home was even better, when a surprisingly thick manual fell into my hands. As the game installed, I read and re-read it, growing more and more excited. And then I actually got to play the game.

I am forever thankful that the game ran right out of the box. Very first decision the game asked of me was to choose a name. 'Umm....' I forget what I eventually chose, but I do remember that my first character was an Imperial assassin, picking the class from the list, because spies and wet-work was what I was into at the time. I will never forget that one of my first sights in the world of Morrowind was a giant flea. It didn't seem interested in destroying the village, it was just sitting there. When I finally discovered that this was actually the local equivalent of a city bus, I got my first taste of what kind of fantasy world this would be. This wasn't just going to rip off Lord of the Rings like everything else I'd seen at that point. I was fascinated, and I wanted to know more. And for two months, that's exactly what I did. I blundered around Vvardenfell, breathing it all in. Unlike so many games I've played since, it did not spoon-feed my exposition, it simply allowed me to find it on my own, to absorb it at my own pace. By the time I was climbing Red Mountain for the first time, I was more emotionally invested in the game than I had been in any other. I knew who I was, why I was here, who I was going to face, how I was going to defeat him, and why. I was caught up in momentous events far greater than myself, and the weight of that responsibility was invigorating. Finally meeting Dagoth Ur himself and discovering that not only was he an excellent villain, but a truly interesting character whose connection to my character's previous life lent a tragic note to their confrontation, was just icing on the cake.

Well and truly hooked by this point, I then powered through the expansions. And still I wanted more. I would start a new character, and another, and another, not getting very far with most of them, mostly just tinkering with different classes and skills. I was also wondering about this 'modding' thing I'd heard about. The manual talked a little about it, and the online friend who started all this had spoken of a few mods they enjoyed using. So I looked into it, and after a few days of Google searching, installed my first mod, Better Bodies. A week later, after realizing the plugin wasn't activated, I did that. And then I was modding like mad, as I have done with nearly every game I've played since then. Morrowind was my modding gateway drug.

In the few years that followed, my family has received an excellent gaming rig and I received many Steam giftcards. I've played many other games, and thoroughly enjoyed them. But I still come back to playing Morrowind on my crappy old computer, like slipping on a comfortable pair of netch-leather boots. I think it safe to say that no game will ever have as immediate and profound an impact on my life as this one.

Yes, Morrowind is a great illustration of the "Show, don't tell" rule of story-telling. I really hate it when a game has long unskippable cutscenes.

Ugh, I won't even play such a game. That's one reason I have never played D:AO past the tutorial dungeon. Linearity is another. Pretty much I only play TES/FO, plus a little Fallen Enchantress LH and Borderlands, since I only have interest in open works games without cutscenes.

I'm late to the Morrowind party, having only played it since 2010. But very happy it is still thriving after 13 years. It's got the best pacing of all the three modern TES games that's for sure.

ha i remember the forums from before morrowind came out, and when it did. lots of people complaining. mainly how easy combat was with combat characters (everything dies fast), or how difficult it was with non combat characters (can't hit anything). that was before the difficulty slider and enemy health bars were included.

This thread makes me so happy. I got Morrowind as a present for my 10th birthday. The friend who got it for me really hated anything that wasn't country music or off-roading trucks, maybe this is helping paint a mental picture of this guy. Anyway he got the game for me as a joke because he just thought it looked absolutely terrible. Just looking at the Xbox Platinum Hits box cover I thought it looked rather alien myself, or like just another weird/bad Xbox game but I was willing to give it a try. I think the only other game I had for my xbox at the time was Halo so putting in Morrowind just blew me away.

I had never experienced anything like it before, I had no idea what an open world games were a thing. Sure I played Zelda and GTA III but those were really nothing this grand in scope. I remember not reading any of the dialogue for about the first month and just being so shocked to find out that the game had hundreds of quests, many factions, several forms of fast travel. I just had so much fun with this game that I think it was the only game I played for all of fifth grade.

Imagination had a huge part in it. Sure I had no idea what to do, but I loved that about it. There were just so many little things I could do that it didn't matter that I wasn't doing quests. I just have so many memories of stacking pillows on my house to signify where I live, stealing in front of everyone for no reason, living off the land, breaking into houses to see how people lived, decorating my homes, trying on the clothes in the styles of the towns, collecting things, trying to acquire large amounts of gold for no reason(I thought I was so rich having 1K). I never strayed too far from villages. My ten year old self still played heavily with Lego's so I was really into creating stories in my head. I spent a good portion of four(?) months just hanging out in Seyda Neen roleplaying an every day person, venturing out on the occasion. I was confused how the combat worked so I rarely tried it. For my first couple months my weapon only hit animals on the occasion but never npcs so I thought they were invincible. Even as a ten year old I just felt that the game had such depth and immersion but also took a good deal of imagination to enjoy. I'm sure you can imagine my happiness as I grew older and actually learned the mechanics of the game.

Around the time I was in high school I didn't really play much video games, I guess I thought they were lame and girls didn't like them or some other sixist thinking. Well lets just say I got introduced to uhhhh illicit drugs and wow did Morrowind really come back to me. I had been playing it off and on during the years prior but once again I was addicted to the same video game as I was when I was ten.

It's just so hard to put into words why I love Morrowind. Maybe it's because it was the closest video game that I had to Lego's that just let me be creative and let me make my own stories in my head. Maybe it was just the first open world game that I've played. Maybe it's just that the sheer quality of the world-building that I feel hasn't been surpassed in a video game yet (although Dark Souls 1 pleased me greatly in 2013). I don't know sorry to ramble, I just saw this thread and instantly got nostalgic of my childhood and wanted to share my thoughts. This game really means the world to me.

EDIT: This was also the first forum I joined, I was probably around 11, and haven't left since.

i remeber when i got the game and my pc's graphics card wasnt strong enough. so me and pops had to go back to best buy and get one that could handle the game. funny thing is i still have that graphics card and the original disc stored together, seriously thinking of getting them mounted on a plaque. oh i did get a new map or vvardenfell. the ren fair in my area i work at had a shop selling handpainted maps this year. couldnt pass it up. next year the map of tamriel.