The Game Pass Chronicles: Morrowind

First by carriage, and then by boat

Xbox screenshot taken by the author.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is twenty years old. It came out when I was just 18 on the Xbox and PC platforms, and it arguably changed video games forever. It wasn’t the same sort of megahit that Oblivion and certainly Skyrim became, but its design ideas and concepts still echo strongly through time into today’s open world video games.

It took me several years to appreciate what Morrowind does. On first playing it on my PC, it transported me into an alien world unlike any I had ever experienced in a game. Its characters, graphical effects, and overlapping systems weren’t quite state of the art when taken individually, but the blending of them was. You could see all the small sacrifices made to get it to run on the Xbox, but it didn’t matter because it felt like a real place.

I loved the sense of discovery, exploration, and wonder that the game provided, but teenage me didn’t have the patience to constantly die and still push onward. Morrowind is one of the more brutal action RPGs ever made, and even in today’s world that’s accustomed to the challenge of things like Dark Souls, it provides a daunting batch of enemies at its normal difficulty setting.