The Manly Scrolls III: Morrowind

 

 

Wake up!

Next up in the game series is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind!

Made by Bethesda in 2002, this game is guilty of stealing about 200ish hours of my life I'll never see again. It's another great sandboxy game, where you can easily spend hours wandering around and discovering new places, things, and running from flying angry birds that will follow you for ten years in pursuit.

CAW CAW CAW

The game starts off pretty well. You're a prisoner set free and given a package to run to a guy in a nearby city(which you never have to do). You pick from a list of premade classes, create your own class, or answer a personality quiz to make a class for you.

Okay, so how did you defend your sweetroll again?

 Gameplay is fun exploring with RPG Combat every now and then. The actual combat is either a love or hate. Fighting in Morrowind is based around dice rolls, so you can hit a rat up to 10 times with a sword before you actually hit it. The balance between the three archtypes(Magic, Strength, or Stealth) is pretty dismal, but they can all easily beat the game. The strength based soldier and the sneaky archer will never be able to reach the ridiculousness of the mage(who can eventually nuke the entire continent you play upon with a single spell).

The ingame world is HUGE (about 16 square miles to explore). The landscape is beautiful and varied. Most of the time you will be walking/running around, but if you're a mage you can teleport to locations eventually or use magic to superjump across the entire continent. Everyone else gets to pay and ride the bug-bus if they don't want to walk.

Gets 60 Miles Per Gallon

 The ingame soundtrack is a nice, ambient soundtrack composed by Jeremy Soule, but only 30 minutes of total music in a game that can potentially last for hundreds of hours is a bit disappointing. The graphics were absolutely beautiful for its time. The water effects still look great even by today's standards, and recent high level graphic mods can make it stand up to modern games.

Crysis of 2002!

Manly wise, it forever earned a place in my Big List of Good Manly Games for letting me enchant myself, jump across the ingame world, and punch a guy so hard with my magic fists that my game crashed and corrupted my save data. That's not a bug, that's a damn feature!

It also has REAL INGAME PILLOW FORT BUILDING.
Not even Minecraft lets you build an entire fort out of pillows(get to work Notch!). 

Overall. I'd highly recommend anyone wanting a good RPG to at least try Morrowind, and it would hopefully at least hype you to play the badass looking Skyrim coming up later this year(The upcoming Elder Scrolls 5 game where you can have shouting matches with DRAGONS).

Have any comments, criticisms, or requests? Just drop me a message in the comment box!