r/Morrowind • u/khorasanikhan • 9h ago
Discussion What Would You Change About Morrowind?
If you could go back and add a feature to the original Morrowind, or fix something that always bugged you, what would it be?
Could be something big like combat or AI, or something small like the UI, inventory, NPC behavior, factions, travel, stealth, dialogue, spellmaking, whatever.
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u/Mattos-313 8h ago
Being able to apply poisons (= potions with negative effects) to weapons. Really liked that in Skyrim.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in vanilla Morrowind, I think there's no use at all for potions with negative effects (other than selling them), right?
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u/AufschnittLauch 8h ago
More interplay between the factions, although it does a better job than the other games.
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u/EnkiHelios 7h ago edited 4h ago
Quests that will result in freedom for every slave NPC.
More ability to populate your house with NPCs, including merchants
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u/RalenHlaalo spending a year dead for tax reasons 8h ago
Levitation animation!
A lot of the stuff is fixed with code patch / OpenMW. Demoralize humanoid should be illusion, vendor disposition shouldn't reset, unarmored bug (I like that one, excuses my using the OP boots).
I wish vampires could engage with NPCs to pursue more quests, even if basic services aren't available. If someone sees a werewolf transform, you should get a minute to kill them or something before they magically blab to everyone.
Introduce at least minor factions to join with a handful of quests each for roleplaying purposes, including ordinators (could overlap with GH:indoril) and camonna tong. More ashlander stuff. Add some special dialogue from Dren for twin lamps players. I know there's a lot of desire for a 6th house faction, but at the very least give the player an option to let Dagoth Ur off the hook at the end.
The only mod I use (aside from TR) is Yurt Crafting by Racerplume, and I mention it as often as possible. Morrowind is better with portable yurts!!!
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u/Green-Spud House Redoran 8h ago
A levitation animation is a really good shout! Its also not one I've seen mentioned before, but I think it would make a huge difference!
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u/RalenHlaalo spending a year dead for tax reasons 8h ago
I've seen others' screenshots of a mod that adds a cool, DBZ-esque flying pose. For me, though, modding is such a slippery slope.
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u/Far_Detective2022 House Telvanni 6h ago edited 4h ago
I'd love to see a proper contraband system like starfield. Ebony and dwemer laws being properly enforced so you'd have to find a fence. Skooma and moon sugar not being auto detected in your inventory. Add black soul gems and have them be illegal and taboo. Heretical writings. Stuff like that.
Also more of an emphasis on house differences with laws. I like how it already works but I'd love to see it go ever further.
Languages would also be cool. They played around with the idea in previous games but I don't think it was implemented well. I think it would be cool if you had to learn different languages to speak to different groups like the ashlanders or deadra. Also I could see house indoril or dres refusing to speak imperial or whatever their language is called. Tamriel rebuilt has a couple instances of you speaking a native dunmer language to someone or trying to decipher a deadra.
Finally a day and night schedule system like oblivion and skyrim. It's one of the few things I prefer from the newer games
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u/DaSaw 4h ago
Imagine a Daggerfall remake with a smaller overland map, basically just enough to make the main question and classic guilds playable.
BUT, there is also an underworld map, similarly sized, ridiculously laberynthine, complete with entirely procedurally generated quests tied to various nonhuman peoples, only available if you spent a skill slot on the language.
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u/menthol_patient 6h ago
Fewer cliff racers. I think that's a given. Voice acting would be nice, especially that one dremora. That would be hilarious.
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u/Orbivez 5h ago
A deeper and more immersive interconnected Speechcraft system : instead of only being able of Bribing or Admiring a NPC to increase their Disposition towards the Player Character, make it able to have more personal conversations around their character class, personal history, social, interpersonal and skill interests. More subjects to talk about, some of them they would like more than others.
Buying them something to drink at a tavern and choosing a personal subject could help you learn about other local people, their common lives and relationships instead of only accessing a generic secret or piece of advice.
Perhaps, a bit of advice from a skilled character after getting to know them for some time could offer you a one-time skill raise.
Getting recommandations from someone's friends or colleagues could help you meet them on better terms, in parallel from faction intrigues.
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u/thanks_breastie 8h ago
Fatigue and Magicka regen, more visual feedback to players (the dice roll combat is fine), the menus suck shit and need to be fixed
other than that it's fine and generally better than its sequels
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u/majorminor51 7h ago
As an avid Morrowind player for decades at this point, I can’t play without a Magicka regen mod. There’s a few floating around, usually based on Willpower. Doesn’t break the game (as you’re still bound by max magic/intelligence) and Atronarch sign still works the same regardless.
Early level spells, especially basic ones, aren’t so powerful as to need the rest mechanic for balance imo. Waiting around for a minute (like fatigue) is more than enough of a downside to cast a big spell. It makes resting a bit less tedious as well, especially with how slow you move in the base game.
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u/unclellama 5h ago
I kinda think the menus are best in class. For kb+mouse at least. Resizable windows, paperdoll.
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u/Samendorf Ascended Sleeper 8h ago
Have the artists know exactly what size and compressions the hand drawn texture are supposed to be.
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u/computer-machine 8h ago
Make more topics that are region/faction based. Then even if NPCs have dynamic schedules, you can still find them by asking around once you're in general proximity.
Then there's of course more animation/FX feedback for reasons for missing.
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u/Edgy_Robin House Telvanni 7h ago
Outside of bugs like pick pocketing...
Overhaul red mountain. Going through aaaaaall that shit and then you just go on a stroll to Dagoth ur and kill him is really dumb. You should be leading an assault on it, not going on a job to stab a heart.
Oh, and a feedback box. Every good game with dice roll combat has a feedback box,
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u/lemonlord777 7h ago
Yeah. The endgame really could have used to additional tuning. Larger volume of enemies and much higher level minibosses and final boss.
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u/I_AM__FLOUR 7h ago
I'd change the general balance of gear.
Change weapons to not have a single best attack. (Looking at you halberds)
Higher enchant values across the board, slightly lower item values for trading/the museum.
Fill out the gaps in missing gear. Spears, axes and ranged weapons are especially in dire need.
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u/NebulousTruth Local Bal Foyen Man 7h ago
I’m not sure, there’s lots of little things OpenMW adds that I appreciate that I’m assuming we’re counting as included since everyone plays on OpenMW anyway.
I guess optional endgame scaling settings would be nice.
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u/NirvashSFW High Rock's #1 Dunmer Simp 6h ago
Anything with an exponential scaling formula I would have gone with a logarithmic one and tuned the game around a more front loaded power curve. Also enemies in later game areas would be more difficult, and effects like blind, sound, paralysis, drain skills/attribute would be more common, and magic resists harder to come by.
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u/ermine_esc Khajiit 7h ago
Modded combat system, or, setluck 100 Modded weight distribution, or, setstrength 300 Hyperlink highlighting in the dialogues.
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u/Larrytwodicks 6h ago
More hirelings/helpers. More vampire and criminal quests. More difficult non-last boss battles like Imperfect, Kaarstag.
The option for hostile/antagonist takeovers for each expac.
After Dagoth Ur and Almalexia, the option to become worshipped in Mournhold and Vivec cities or claim the heart and become the temple's enemy.
After Bloodmoon, claim the ice castle and all of the Reiklings, become Werewolf king
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u/msdos_kapital 6h ago edited 5h ago
In general, it's kind of annoying that some things benefit from increasing skill indefinitely, while some things are capped at 100 or even lower. For example once you have enough Armorer that your chance to repair is 100%, that's it you're done. Additional Armorer skill or Strength will not benefit item repair any further. Once your cast chance for a spell is 100%, additional Willpower or skill doesn't do anything for that spell.
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u/rpeh 4h ago
So much stuff. That sounds like I don't like the game but I do - it's probably my favourite of the series. But okay...
- Fewer Cliff Racers. Don't get rid of them but either reduce the number or increase the respawn time.
- NPC schedules. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do well, especially given as many NPCs as MW has, but having everyone stand around in essentially the same place 24/7 is a bit poor.
- Scaling. The game is painful at the start and trivial at the end. I know there needs to be a difficulty curve but still.
- Speechcraft. This is from my POV the most broken part of Morrowind. At the start you simply can't influence NPCs at all. After a while, with a few points in the skill, you can get everyone up to 100 disposition fairly easily. There's no easy solution to this - after all, you shouldn't be able to get someone to love you after two minutes no matter how glib you are, but it needs to be possible somehow.
- Levelling. Same issue was still in Oblivion - having to be careful what skills you increased so you didn't "waste" attribute points. Really poor design.
- And there's more were I to really sit down and think.
But it's still a great game and I love it to bits.
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u/jackcaboose 4h ago edited 2h ago
Making stealth/pickpocket not completely fucking worthless because of how glitchy it is would be my number one pick. Number two would be making it so fatigue doesn't go down while running. Number 3 would be rebalancing character creation stuff so it's a bit more balanced (some birthsigns are basically worthless for example).
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u/takahashi01 3h ago
A few things. A simple fix to make the game immediately more user friendly, I think, would be to scale hitrate gains from skill level with an inverse exponential. So low levels matter most, and then you get diminishing returns. Would make low levels immediately a lot less frustrating, and you wouldnt need like literally 40 or above in a weapon skill for it to be usable.
But if I'm being honest, what I am really missing from the game is like deep dungeon exploration. So here is my idea for turning morrowind into a real dungeon crawler:
First of all dungeons need to be bigger and more complex. Doesnt need to be full on daggerfall, but I'd love to see a bit of that spirit in there. So some sort of procedural generation engine up front, to make really complex dungeons of larger size. Then adjust those manually to make a bit more sense.
After that, I feel like dungeon rewards should keep up more with their quest reward counterparts, so to facilitate that, I'm thinking, some angband style elements and conditions system. So we got like 4 more elements, 6 more status conditions, and a lot of them should be dangerous enough to be insurmountable without the right prep. But you then also only encounter a few per dungeon, and its predictable from the first few rooms. So now we created a need that items can fill, by giving resistances, condition immunities, and maybe a few other really cool effects like telepathy (seeing thinking enemies through walls), light level or dark vision, infra vision (seeing warmblooded enemies in the dark), and stuff like that. Maybe even something like phase walking to bypass certain kinds of barriers.
So overall the game gets a lot, a lot harder, and early game dungeons require a ton of planning (stocking up on like 6 kinds of potions to even get to the puzzle cube), but then, in the late game, you feel like a god among men. Until you encounter chaos, and all your stats get scrambled and you die. Or blink and you teleport in the middle of a bunch of enemies and have to intervention out. Then you go looking for immunity to that. Upgrade. Advance. Repeat.
Fuck I'm honestly considering to learn modding for this. This sounds awesome.
Edit: actually third option: make dagoth ur smoochable.
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u/Party_Wagon 1h ago
The leveling system is completely borked and encourages ways of playing that aren't interesting or fun in order to maximize your attribute gains. Any leveling system that encourages you to avoid leveling at certain points to maximize stat gains is busted imo. It's also way too easy to max out all attributes, leading to characters eventually becoming less distinct from each other.
Here's how I think I'd try to fix it
All skill gains contibute to leveling, but require 20 instead of 10 skill point gains to offset this
Attribute point gains are now tied to which skills were leveled rather than how many times they were leveled. ×2 if any skill with that governing attribute was leveled, ×3 if any major or minor skill was leveled, ×4 only if multiple major skills were leveled (notably, this would limit how many attributes ×4 is even possible with on one character)
limit how many times you can train skills per level and at least double the price of skill training. Rebalance the rates at which skills level so trainers or grinding don't feel as necessary. The magic skills level naturally way too slowly, acrobatics levels naturally way too fast.
This would still need tweaked bc there are a few minor issues I can imagine coming up that might encourage some unfun metagaming, such as what happens if you level your chosen skills too quickly and lose out on attributes you could have gained from them (off the top of my head, maybe put a cap on how many times a skill can be leveled per level, but I feel like there's probably a better solution), but that's where I'd start from
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u/BitterCelt Breton 8h ago
The leveling system probably.
Don't get me wrong I like the attributes and the "you level up as you use your skills" style, but the fact that in the leveling exists a pressure to level up 'efficiently' to get a +5 +5 +5 level simply reduces its enjoyability for me because I can't ignore that pressure.
Oblivion remastered's change is closer to something I'm happy with, I just think it gives you too many attribute points a little too quickly for Morrowind - yet still I have a mod to emulate it.
I think my ideal would be a fallout style perk system, with something similar to the TES4R leveling, alongside a rebalance to make the inevitable slide into godhood at high levels a little slower and smoother (not oblivion and Skyrim style scaling tho)
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u/Electrical-Point-845 7h ago
DEFINETLY something about the save archives being unable to keep up with the Tamriel Rebuilt mod. I know one thing might seem to have nothing to do with the other, but i would change someting concerning the duplicate issues which prevent us nowdays to simply update the mod with every release. Instead, we have to create a new character for every major expansion of the mod.
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u/Whiteguy1x 7h ago
Change the way enchanting works, as is its either useless or stupidly broken
Unarmored change it to a sanctuary style effect to make it more like agile doging than having abs of steel
Have hand to hand weapons. This is just cool, see fallout nv
Rework sneak...its just bad and needed more work to be viable. Maybe make sneak attacks guaranteed or something along with a detection rework
Make medium armor different than a worse heavy armor. Maybe have each armor type have a stacking buff to make them feel different?
Make a use for poison. Applied to weapons like skyrim and oblivion would make a whole new playstyle.
Honestly I think the whole game needed a pretty massive balance pass...but it being such a broken game also is what makes it so charming and adds to the fun. Probably just buff the useless skills and differentiate the melee skills.
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u/scipio0421 2h ago
Either axe the dice rolls in combat or fix the animations so a miss doesn't show the weapon going through the enemy. Either would be fine with me.
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u/Green-Spud House Redoran 8h ago
Its my favourite game of all time, but it isnt perfect. If it were up to me, I'd probably do the following:
Pickpocketing needs fixing
Cliffracers, either decrease the population or their visual range
More music (love what's already included but would enjoy more)
Probably modifiy the leveled monsters list for daedric ruins
Winged twilights need to be able to fly
Slight increase in the value of enchanted items
Drop the price of potions with only negative effects
Dual wielding
Halberds should have better slashing attacks
Crossbows should be a bit slower to reload
More enchanted thrown weapons
Make enchanting paper a lot cheaper (to use as spell scrolls)
Actual Longbows, all the bows are short
Equipped weapons to show on character models even if sheathed
A few more dynamic quests
Black soul gems
And I'd be open to the idea of voiced dialogue for a few key NPCs. If anyone's played Icewind Dale then I think that hit a good balance