Morrowind

Illkillya

Years ago on my 486 i was addicted to The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, even though it was a dull game and full of bugs, but now Morrowind is coming out (already out?) I suppose I'll have to give it a go.

Is it out yet? If so, has anyone played it? I heard its really demanding of your system... how would it run on a laptop p3 900mhz with 32mb geforce 2 GO, and 256mb ram (roughly)?

Is it an in-eyes game like Daggerfall or 3rd person like Baldurs Gate or Diablo 2? I had a look at the website but at the rate i was downloading the screenshots i would have been there all day to find out about the game

spooky donkey

Id say it would run fine on youre system. If it needed more mussel that that it would be the highest spec game out there. Theres pleanty of life left in you laptop id say.

Heres a quot from gamespot on the games system requirments.

"Although Morrowind is definitely resource-intensive due to its big, complex environments, we've experienced relatively smooth gameplay without any technical issues whatsoever on two different test systems, each sporting 1.4GHz Athlon processors and GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics cards"

THe video card will be more important and a Gforce 2 should be fine!

Mr. Fancypants

Havent played any of the previous games but it is looking like a title to watch out for if the previews i have seen are anything to go by. Check out www.gamespot.com they have a fairly lengthy preview of it there...

Shinji

It'll play okay on that laptop. You really want a Geforce 3 for it though, as it uses pixel shaders (which aren't available on GF2 cards) for some of the nicer effects.

The game is pretty good - I like it quite a lot, but I'm very frustrated by various elements in it. Graphically it's gorgeous - probably the best looking game on the PC - the world is huge and interesting, the voice acting is acceptable and there's an interesting story going on.

Unfortunately, the frustrating bits gradually mount up. Most quests are of the form "go here, do this simple task, come back"... Which is all very well, but the going and coming back bit can take AGES, so you spend most of your playtime holding down the Forward key and wondering if there's anything else you can do while your character walks very, very slowly to his destination halfway across the continent. Yes, Final Fantasy X did this sometimes too, but at least there there were no random load delay bits, and the random battles broke up the tedium nicely. It was better looking in places too, come to think of it...

Combat is rubbish. Like, really, really poor... Especially the physical combat elements, which are boring as hell. Magic is a bit more interesting, but really this part of the game is a serious disappointment.

In general, though, it's fun. It's another example of lazy PC coding, though; the engine has no LOD stuff in it and is clunky as hell performance-wise, which is pathetically poor given the hardware it's running on. A few weeks more work on the engine code could have had this running smooth as silk, and you can be damned sure that if it'd been developed by console coders it'd do 60fps constant. And probably wouldn't crash as often as it does on the PC, either.

(FWIW - test rig was an Athlon XP 1900+, 1Gb PC2100 RAM, Geforce 4 Ti 4600. Morrowind still managed to chug in places. Go figure.)