izigame.me

Morrowind is an amazing game, but not the most welcoming one to new players. Below is a list of a few tips I've put together to help new players get the most out of the game.
1. OpenMW
OpenMW is an open source port of Morrowind that fixes game-breaking bugs, adds additional graphics options, and in general improves the stability of the game while being incredibly easy to set up and use.
Whether you're playing vanilla (which you should for your first play through) or modded, there's not much reason not to use it unless you're a vanilla purist or something.
2. Don't be afraid to experiment with making new characters.
Morrowinds tutorial can be finished in just a few minutes, so if you make a character and you're not enjoying the race or class you've chosen, you can quickly make a new one until you find something you enjoy.
I would also recommend not using any of the default classes and just making your own, don't put skills you're not going to use in your major skills, that's advice for experienced players to min-max.
Also, do NOT take the iron dagger unless you're going to sell it. It's a trap that makes people think the combat sucks when they put long blade in their major skills and wonder why they miss with a short blade. If you do make a short blade build, you can buy an iron short sword in the starting town store that outclasses it in every way.
3. Beast Races.
Beast races work very differently in Morrowind than they do in Oblivion or Skyrim. They can't wear closed face helmets or any kind of footwear, and are naturally disliked by most of the other races.
While these aren't issues late game players have to worry about, new players may want to avoid them as they can make the early game more difficult.
4. Early on you will miss a lot of your attacks.
Hit chance in Morrowind is affected by primarily two things your characters skill with the weapon and your fatigue. You shouldn't run into a fight exhausted swinging a weapon your character has no knowledge of how to use, and wonder why you can't hit anything.
Later on, when your skill with a weapon type gets in the 50 to 75 range, you'll be landing most of your hits at high stamina.
If you play a mage, you don't have to worry about hit chance, but instead spell cast chance. If you choose any of the magic schools for your major skills, you will start with a few basic spells related to that school of magic (alteration, for example, lets you start with water walking) with a near guaranteed chance to cast them.
5. Learn to manage your fatigue.
Unlike Oblivion (where fatigue mainly influences melee damage) and Skyrim (where stamina is only used for power attacks and sprinting), fatigue in Morrowind affects basically everything you do. Such as your chance to cast spells, chance to hit, ability to talk to people, and even your jump height.
Early game, you should always be careful to manage your fatigue while exploring if you think a fight might be coming up, and carry a few potions to restore it during fights. Late game players can create constant effect enchantments to restore fatigue even while running and jumping.
6. There are a lot of ways to get around Vvardenfell.
If you've played the later Elder Scrolls games (or most other modern RPGs) you're probably familiar with fast travel systems, and you've probably also heard that Morrowind has no fast travel systems, which isn't entirely true. While the game has no map screen to point and click to where you want to instantly travel, there are a lot of other ways to get around.
Silt Striders can take you to most of the major cities on the map; boats can take you to most of the islands around Vvardenfell, and the mages guild provides teleportation services to all of their guild halls.
Then there are the mark and recall spells that allow you to mark a location and teleport to it at will, and the spells and scrolls for Almsivi Intervention and Divine Intervention (both of which you can buy in the Seyda Neen general store early on) that instantly teleport you to the nearest Tribunal temple and Imperial chapel respectively.
7. Getting lost isn't always a bad thing.
At some point in Morrowind every player will end up getting lost, whether it be due to the odd vague directions or just being stuck in the wilderness without an easy way back to a town. This can be frustrating, but most people can agree they've experienced the adventure that this usually brings.
As an example, in my most recent playthrough I took a Fighters Guild job early on to help someone clear a Dwemer ruin in the Molag Mar region. I somehow got lost and ended up walking into a Dwemer ruin that was home to a powerful vampire clan. After lots of running away to rest, dying multiple times and barely managing to beat the vampires, I searched the ruins to find one of the two pairs of daedric boots, the best heavy armor in the game.
This is something I chose as an example of the game's systems working together to provide an honest adventure completely independent of the developers design. If this was Oblivion or Skyrim, I wouldn't have gotten lost because I always have a map marker pointing to exactly where I should go. I wouldn't have had to explore, and I wouldn't have mistakenly stumbled into that ruin.
8. Don't be afraid to break the games balance.
Sometime near the end of the game you'll get to the point were you end up 2-shotting most enemies you come across and you won't be challenged by much apart from literal gods, a daedric prince, and the odd werewolf maze. But I don't see this as a flaw of the game that needed to be desperately fixed like it was in the later games. Besides, if you think it's getting too easy, you can always move the difficulty slider across a bit (even if it gives me PTSD because it reminds me of Oblivion's level scaling).
To me, Morrowind is almost asking for creative players to take advantage of all its systems in unpredictable ways to break the game in two. Like using a 1 second levitate on target spell to instantly make Cliff Racers fall to their death, or creating a 100-point fury spell that gives me the legal right to murder anyone I want for, you know, general use.
My favorite is enchanting armor with constant effect shock damage on self, which I then sell to merchants who equip it because of its high value and instantly die, allowing me to take everything in their store.
The End.
That's it. I was listening to Young Scrolls while writing this. I only really wrote all this because I adore Morrowind and wanted an excuse to give it a positive review.
I'll see you on the next Angry Joe show (does he still say that?)