Jolt Country

Morrowind, the sequel to Daggerfall, should be out on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Though I am really agitated with release dates on Monday or Tuesday, especially for better games. Either make the weekend release or wait until the next Friday. Going through a workweek on three hours of sleep only decreases performance for the lot of us, thus making it difficult to buy A List games when we have been terminated from gainful employment and utterly penniless.


(Homeless, too. Though you can buy a home in Morrowind. That leads to exciting ventures. I remember that when I got canned from Cyrix in May of 99 one of the things I did in my month off was start up Daggerfall again. My character in the game had a house, a decent bank account, transportation in the form of a horse and a bit of prestige in the thieving guilds. At that point I had my character's life more in order when compared to my own real one by a factor of about two billion. All I had was transportation in the form of a car, and that was completely covered, inside and out, in moths so I was hardly making out there.)


(Course, later *I* got a job again and then did not deign to move the SCSI disk Daggerfall was on to the next PC I put together, so the last laugh is MINE.)

OK, looking like Wednesday or Thursday for its North American (and beyond? not sure) release. (Wednesday or Thursday was what I was told by the Electronics Boutique guy in Longmont, so there ya go.)

I've been attempting to find some previews of it. Here's one at VoodooExtreme:

http://www.voodooextreme.com/games/previews/mwpreview/

...there are some really gorgeous screen shots at the bottom of that article. I am not normally one to get excited about graphics, but this game is one that comes along only so often to make even a text adventurer like myself pause and take notice.

So as to get the full effect of something like this :



I put an order in for one of these today.

It was a pinbackesque feeling, buying new hardware to specifically play one game in particular. Only, instead of pretending to fly I will be pretending to cast a spell to fly.

OK.

OK, okay.

I am under no illusions that anyone is sitting with bated breath thinking, "oh, wow, Morrowind came out today... Jonsey has been propping this game up for like A MONTH now, I wonder what is take is." I mean, I get that.

But it DID come out today.

I bought it at noon. The EB guy had not got round to calling his reverse list yet. When I worked at an Electronics Boutique that shit was taken care of by 9:30, when the UPS guy came in. (Yes, the parts of FoD in the mall exist only because I chose post-secondary education employment poorly.)

I then worked until 4:15. I drove home and was on a softball field by 5:00, (Game time: 6:00pm.)


Plenty of time to wrap the game up (only an hour is alloted for a softball game in Ft. Collins), right? Well, for the first time in FOUR YEARS I was on a softball team that won a game. We won 15-0 and "skunked" the team we played in the fourth inning. Last year we only won one game all season, and it was the one I went home to Rochester for, so I wasn't there. Who the hell throws a shutout in slow pitch male softball??!?! I mean, really. In real baseball the catcher would take pride in that because he "calls" the game, but in softball you don't do that. Nevertheless, I am the catcher and the team we played did not so much as a get a guy on third against my pitcher.

YES.

So, did Jonsey and the rest of his team get apeshit shitfaced after said game? THE THUMB POINTS UP. I should hook up a breathalyzer to my PC, because I am in, currently, no shape to post. Or access the internet. Or do anything but sleep...

..which is where I am headed now. This game, this "Morrowind" game will take a backseat because for the first time in my life I have been a part of a dominating sports team. Rock-and-effing-roll.



(But they put it in the small PC box, as they now do for all PC games, natch. The box I can discuss. But that's it.)



Anyway, Morrowind adventures presumably begin tomorrow.

Well, I tried it late last night -- the game doesn't work at all on a Voodoo3 video card. May 2nd, 2002: the day my favorite AGP card of all-time officially became obsolete. Sigh.

At least the Geforce is coming soon. I originally put that order in because I wanted the game to look nice... I didn't realize at the time that it would (essentially) be necessary for me to play it at all.

Well, the early verdict is in: it's pretty solid.

The water is a nice little effect -- it looks good enough to want to wrist one off in. I was around an EB for the Nintendo 64 launch and I recall how there was much orgasming going on when Wave Racer 64 was released. I didn't get it. I thought the "water" effects were not that special. (If I didn't want to punch anyone who uses the word "meh" on the internet in the face, that would be one case where I would use it: Wave Racer 64's water. But as I do, I won't.)

I dorked around in the first town for a little bit, but couldn't find a thieves guild. Morrowind may have goals and a story and so forth, but I'm not particularly inclined to follow it. I want to put together a character who can break into any house in the game and loot it for fun and profit. I got to the second city in a really neat way:

After you enter the outskirts of the first town you'll see a magician descend from the sky, as if he were flying and his magic spell gave out. His notebook is there (which details exactly what he was aiming for and what ended up going "down" so to speak) and there are three scrolls left on his corpse. I grabbed his stuff and cast it myself. The spell propels you at a fantastic rate, and into the clouds. You eventually fall, and if you don't have "levitate" cast, you'll kill yourself upon falling. (I couldn't find levitate, so I aimed for some water and eventually hit it.) A little more hiking got me to the next city, which did have a thieves guild. I've been spending some time trying to train up some levels with them.

While it's a beautiful game, I wonder what would have happened if they set the thing in any other era. The engine isn't particularly optimised (it doesn't run great on my PIII-750, even with the Geforce -- it's choppy in larger outdoor areas) but you could build any sort of "world" in any sort of genre with it. Hopefully (for their sake... and coffers)Bethesda can license it out or something. The game comes with an editor, apparently allowing you to create installable add-on packs. I haven't used it yet, so I'm not sure if it's possible to introduce new models and textures, but it looks like the game will have a nice single player component to it right out of the box and a long life as people mod it ala Quake and Half-Life.

I've been dumped to the desktop only twice, and found no real bugs. The first release of Daggerfall was rather buggerific, so it's nice to see Bethseda fix those issues up in this game.

There's plenty more to do, and of course virtually ALL games garner a positive review the first day you spend with them, so it may turn to liquid ass after a certain point like Black & White did. But early on, this looks like a winner.

Just saw this on OMM...

If you bought Morrowind, go here:

http://www.rpgdot.com/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 81&forum=9

This is a thread that has a link to a Morrowind patch with Safedisc2 support removed. You still need the CD in the drive to play the game, it just removes the Safedisc wrapper which is causing a TREMENDOUS performance hit.

Once again you have to shake your head at Safedisc. That project is filled with the most incompetent fucking programmers on the planet. The difference I see in this game using the linked executable is like day and night. I doubt I'll go get a new CPU now... had no idea that anyone could write code that poorly, and until now I had no idea that Safedisc could work in that manner.

The latest patch for Serious Sam II took it off as well. Let's see -- it KILLS performance, devs remove it in later patches, it doesn't prevent even casual piracy and it has not stopped a single release from Usenet, ever. Just maybe this was a bad idea? Just possibly?

One thing I've noticed in this game that they did differently than in Daggerfall, was that in Morrowind they have the shop keepers mind their stores 24/7. It kind of detracts, and robs you from the feeling that you're "within another world," which is really what they have been attempting to go for everywhere else.

There was a comment on OMM that such a thing made the game like wandering through a wax museum, and I agree with that.

The programmers are talented, and they did have six years to look at this issue. I guess that ideally I'd have hoped for something like:

o the shop keepers go to their homes at night to sleep and sometimes their "homes" are upstairs or downstairs from their stores

o guards patrol the city at night and look inside stores (from windows, in other words) to see if anyone is prowling around in there

o it's rather dark when you enter the store, so presuming you don't adjust gamma levels and cheat, you'd need to provide yourself some light in order to see (when the moon isn't out) : doing so may alert patrolling guards as noted above

o sometimes shop keepers go to their store in the middle of the night for various reasons. This used to happen to me when I worked at a driving range and didn't leave until like 11:00pm. The owner would drop by to pick something up or whatever.

o if they live in the same house that their store is in, they could be awoken if you're clanging around down/upstairs stealing their gear

A lot of that is complicated (I don't think there's any sort of connectivity between the inside of a dwelling and the outside in the game) but then, this is a pretty complicated game. If you have all shop keepers working out of the same class libraries I think it would be tough but not impossible. Additionally, you'd have to throw off "sound" and decide if various NPCs can hear it or not. But the thing is, while thinking it through, I can visualize ways that I'd implement it if I were doing it in Hugo. That leads me to believe that professionals who are much better at this kind of thing than I am (I mean, hell, they work in moving graphics for instance) would not find it impossible to implement.

That and the fact that in my readings, there are a lot of people who play as a thief-type skulking-around class.

I should mention that I recently started playing this again, and got myself right addicted.

This happened because I installed a plug-in that has a fighter guy pal around with you as a companion. My burglar was getting turned into burglar soup just walking to different towns, but now she can throw her head back and laugh as "Ulfgood" brings out a sword that is almost FF7-ish in size to put the smack down on those that would kill her.

It's really, really cool.

There's another plug-in that I noticed on www.morrowindfiles.com that adds a place to buy slaves. Now, I'm the kind of right-thinking individual who grew up on Captain America comics and feels that all men and all women ought not to have to endure any sort of slavery whatsoever. That being said, it'd be nice if someone would help lug around all the loot I stole in this game. I guess what I mean to say is that it'd be nice if the only slavery that existed anywhere was in video games. That being said, I'm going to become a fascist bully-boy ASAP!

Gee whiz!

I dug this game until I finished then I got kind of bored ... I'm probably gonna play some more.