So I went ahead and spent a bit more time playing Morrowind tonight. I still don’t have a real concrete impression of the game. The graphics (as I stated in a previous update) are just awesome. It is by far the best game I have ever seen as far as graphics are concerned. The game play is a bit hit and miss though. If you happen to have an item in your inventory that you can use on something in the game world you can not equip it -I am speaking about locks in particular at this point- I have a lock pick which I must equip to try to pick a lock, yet, when I found a key to open a certain lock it would not let me equip it. When I tried to physically take the key from my inventory and click it on the lock, I dropped it on the ground…Through various guess and check methods I was able to find out that if you had something in your inventory that would unlock an otherwise inaccesible area it would do it on its own……..Way to go Mr. No Info Owner’s Manual……
After that minor set-back I charged in to the fight. I would tell you exactly how long the fight lasted, but my watch does not have milliseconds on it, and there were only about three of them that passed before I was seeing a screen asking if I would like to load my previous save. I am all for better AI to make the game more challenging and all, but I died before I could even see that S.O.B., and he was behind me, so I had to turn around -that means that I quit running- so by the time I caught a glimpse of the guy I was already dead.
I used the Google to find out what the hell I was doing wrong, but found that you are supposed to get your ass kicked for a long time (20-30 hours by one estimate) before you can actually start to advance the story line (well get the quests activated that do anyway).
It was at the same site that I found that you do not get levels by killing things. You get levels by advancing your skills in …literally everything… Once you have increased any of your base skill levels by 10 points (that is, any skill that you possess that goes up by one point will take away from the 10 points that you need to get to reach the next level.) I have so far increased my acrobatics by about 4 points, my mercantile by 2, so I must be getting close. I would love to increase my killing with the weapon skill, but the thing is that, in this game, once you kill it, it is dead. Like forever, it will never respawn. You can’t simply quit and restart the game, ’cause it is already dead, and never comes back. That will ..hopefully.. be a very good thing later in the game.
If you had ever tried to play Everquest on a system as archaic as mine, I am sure that you would certainly love the graphics in this game. The fact that it is not an MMORPG, but just a cRPG may be the reason that it hit the market with a heavy ‘thud’.
They have made a world far too immense to take in or conquer with a single character, yet, that is the only option I see available. If you had the option of having friends lending their abilities in certain situations, this game would be a lot better. Similarly, if you had a single button that would attack with a single motion (as opposed to the attack happening when you release the button as it is now.) That would also improve the gameplay.
I guess the next few years will see which direction the company that made this game will go. They are certainly heavy-weights with the graphics, and I am sure that they are the first company ever to offer the mmorpg thing in a single player format -WHICH DOES NOT WORK- but they may make the next ‘Myst’ for all I know.
The Daily Bitch
The daily bitch today will not be an actual bitch, but two anecdotes. The good news is that neither of them involve my childhood and as such this should go pretty smoothly.
The First
This one will go about a sentence deep until you figure out the end, but I laughed long and hard about it. That was because the person involved told me, so if this is an urban legend of some type, just give me a call.
So, (I will call her Kay) Kay was nervous about a date that she had invited to her house. She really liked the guy, but was not entirely sure how he would take the fact that she had a child. She decided to open the bottle of wine a bit early – to calm her nerves-. She could not find a cork- screw, so she figured she would just break the neck off of the bottle. She went outside to break the neck off of the bottle -so that she would not stain her carpet-. Once she broke the neck off of the bottle, much of the shattered glass fell back inside the bottle. She decided that she would strain the wine through a cloth and still use it. She fastened a cloth to the end of the broken bottle, and poured the fifty dollar bottle of wine down the drain….Shortly after she realized what she had done and (even though she was blonde) thought that it was really funny and wanted to spread the word.
The Second I will leave the intro a bit short, just understand that I hate this guy….Anyway, I am walking down to get my mail one day, and I see this car. It must be like a ’72 or ’73 Ford LTD. The material on the top of the car has been eaten away by time and replaced by rust, the car has at least 3 different colors on the quarterpanels. If this is not a stolen car, it should be in the junkyard. It really makes the car the blues brothers drive look like factory quality…
Anyway, I was walking down to the post office the other day, and I saw this guy locking “The Club” onto that piece of shit. I laughed for a long time about that, I mean it is funny. Yet, today when I was telling one of our distrubutors about it, he suggested that the guy might be putting the club on the car to make sure that he doesn’t lose the club.
I had never thought of the possibility that your car could be worth less than your security decvice, but in this case, it was certain. I am not sure if that was the angle he was going for or not. I have a simple rule. If it sounds fake, or looks fake, it is likely fake. I guess he should thank his stars that I was not his insurance agent…