Living the Morrowind Fantasy

If they can make a decent MMORPG look as good as Bethesda’s single player upcoming graphical goliath of an RPG The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, I think the world’s divorce rate would significantly increase. I look at the screenshots and say to myself, “What the heck… I haven’t seen this good of graphics since… (and then trail off like Darth) Can it actually be that good?” Perhaps you can answer that question yourself by checking out Gamespy’s Morrowind Preview. Here’s one of my personal cut & paste jobs:

“With respect to our interface, one thing we wanted to do is never take you out of the game,” states Howard, “so all the menus are little windows that pop up. You can rescale them any way you want. So if you want to play the game with big inventory screen you can, or you can shrink it down so you only see what you want to see. As you increase the size of your interface, the game will automatically shift things around and put it in their proper order.” What’s great about Morrowind is how much power is given to the player to customize their interface. If stat crazed players want a huge window of information and a small playing screen, then so be it. If you want to fully immerse yourself in the world and only have health bars on the screen, then that is possible as well.”

“You can come to our bank and change 1 dollar into 4 quarters. You can get 2 quarters and 5 dimes. You can get 3 quarters, 2 dimes and 5 pennies. You can even get 2 dimes, 14 nickles and 10 pennies. It’s up to you. It’s because we care about customer satisfaction.” Ah… some of the good ol’ days of SNL.

On a graphical tangent:
This is one of those leaps of graphical evolution that were so common in the early 90’s. A game would come out that would look distinctively better than everything else before. Ultima 7 was an example…. though you needed that 486/33 power to run it properly (as properly as you could get it to run).