Mods That Respect Morrowind

[RounIcarus]

@MCAugust & Loriel

Thank you very much for those links. Its very easy to get overwhelmed when there are thousands of options and no real idea what each of them might actually do. I appreciate just being pointed in the right direction, thank you very much.

[RounIcarus]

What I mean when I say "People only tell me what doesnt work" is that I would just like people to tell me what mods are good within the context of what I said in the original post.

I'm not sure anyone's actually read all of the original post. It was really long and didn't really have a simple specific question we could answer. We're all volunteers here, and it's much easier to point out a specific combination of things known not to work together than understand what someone else's opinion of a bunch of mods is going to be, especially when opinions are so varied. We've had many multi-page arguments in the past between people who disagree whether very specific behaviours are intentional and should be preserved as a masterpiece of game design, or they're bugs born of Bethesda's legendarily slap-dash software engineering that need to be purged before anyone else is exposed. I don't think there's a single mod out there that everyone would agree stays true to Bethesda's vision for the game. Different staff members had different visions for the game. Some wanted Daggerfall 2, some wanted D&D on the computer, some wanted what would now be called an action game, and at least one wanted to imagine hollowing out all the things that had ever scared him and building houses inside them.

So basically the last guy just wanted minecraft? lol I dont care terribly about this or that mechanic, my concern is the lore itself. Morrowind is a very spelled out place with a very deep and thought out culture. I want Morrowind the place to be what it is supposed to be. Especially with the friction of the time. The struggle between houses, the long list of issues caused by Imperial occupation. The mass influx of foreigners from the rest of Tamriel. I just want to get lost in the beauty that all of Tamriel is supposed to be. Its like reading JRR Tolkiens books and wishing you could explore these places. Then you get LOTRO (which I tried recently) and you see how bastardized everything is. NO, I dont want garbage, I want the original vision of he who originally envisioned it... Out of the gates I disregard the 'it would be really cool if' people, because they dont have vision of their own, their just shallow excitable nobodies that cant create their own original concepts. I have two original stories that I have thoroughly thought out and expanded, just never had the wherewithall to put it on paper. I have a few hundred pages of stuff I did write, just cant find the will to finish. So yes, I can understand the value of original vision, and how important it is to respect it. I just want the truth...

[AnyOldName3]

The point I'm making is that Morrowind was made by a team with wildly different goals all pulling the project in different directions, so there's no single original vision. An aspect of the game that you feel is key might not have seemed particularly important to anyone working on it, and something else you don't care about might have been one of the developer's favourite aspects of the game.

Polygon had a really interesting article about the creation of Morrowind exactly eleven months ago that should more clearly illustrate this kind of thing: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281 ... y-bethesda

[RounIcarus]

The point I'm making is that Morrowind was made by a team with wildly different goals all pulling the project in different directions, so there's no single original vision. An aspect of the game that you feel is key might not have seemed particularly important to anyone working on it, and something else you don't care about might have been one of the developer's favourite aspects of the game.

Polygon had a really interesting article about the creation of Morrowind exactly eleven months ago that should more clearly illustrate this kind of thing: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281 ... y-bethesda

You totally missed the point of what im saying... I dont care about game mechanics, I said the original vision... The one guy who sat down and dreampt up Elder Scrolls. Someone had to sit down and have a fantasy at one point, thought up a race of elves that lived in a magical land... That first inception of what things are, thats what matters. The thing grew and evolved into the whole of Tamriel, I would imagine that each race was at least one persons fantasy, then they collaborated and everything eventually mishmashed together into the continent as we know it. Its that vision of story telling, that you have that moment of enlightenment where something beautiful manifests and you shape it into something wonderful. You keep getting stuck on game mechanics, that doesnt matter... Wandering the streets of a given settlement, understanding the history of the people who lived there. All the things they had to go through to get to this point. The bigger picture of the world around them. Stories... Thats what matters, the things that capture our imaginations, that let us live outside of the lives we are simply not satisfied with... When I join a guild, I want to feel like there is so much more going on then I can handle. Taking my jobs and doing them well. Not being the all important somebody that everybody relies on, but just another member that might become somebody over time. Settlements should morph and change slowly. You could be gone for two weeks and everything could be rearranged. Containers move around, people are missing, new people are around, two weeks later the old people are back, buildings get destroyed, new ones get built. Yearly events. Not all of it is practical from a coding stand point, but that should be the goal, making this place feel alive and able to change and grow. I dont want to get overly caught up on this or that programming whatever, its not about that, its a world of its own, thats what needs respect...

[lambda]

You totally missed the point of what im saying... I dont care about game mechanics, I said the original vision... The one guy who sat down and dreampt up Elder Scrolls.

"Totally missed"? The *first sentence* of the quote you produced says and I quote:

The point I'm making is that Morrowind was made by a team with wildly different goals all pulling the project in different directions, so there's no single original vision.

AnyOldName3 is saying that what you are looking after never existed in the first place. He is not missing the point. And not only there never was such an original vision, why would you expect that modders would stay faithful to that vision, even apart from the fact that there is no consensus on what said vision consists in exactly? And if you think there was ever such a thing as an "original vision", then it is incumbent upon you to explain it exactly so that people might have a shot at helping you, otherwise, well, people *will* miss your point completely and it is unfair to criticize them for their missed attempts at being helpful.

As far as your question, contrary to other people in the thread, I am going to be unapologetically blunt: give up. If you have such a low threshold for frustration, if you are looking for something that never existed in the first place and that you yourself cannot describe exactly, if you seemingly do not even know that MCP and MWSE are incompatible with OpenMW (this is not exactly a piece of arcane, esoteric knowledge, but rather the *first* thing one has to face when switching to OpenMW), you are in for a world of pain. I (almost) hope you do not follow my advice, but this is my attempt at being helpful.

[RounIcarus]

You totally missed the point of what im saying... I dont care about game mechanics, I said the original vision... The one guy who sat down and dreampt up Elder Scrolls.

"Totally missed"? The *first sentence* of the quote you produced says and I quote:

The point I'm making is that Morrowind was made by a team with wildly different goals all pulling the project in different directions, so there's no single original vision.

AnyOldName3 is saying that what you are looking after never existed in the first place. He is not missing the point. And not only there never was such an original vision, why would you expect that modders would stay faithful to that vision, even apart from the fact that there is no consensus on what said vision consists in exactly? And if you think there was ever such a thing as an "original vision", then it is incumbent upon you to explain it exactly so that people might have a shot at helping you, otherwise, well, people *will* miss your point completely and it is unfair to criticize them for their missed attempts at being helpful.

As far as your question, contrary to other people in the thread, I am going to be unapologetically blunt: give up. If you have such a low threshold for frustration, if you are looking for something that never existed in the first place and that you yourself cannot describe exactly, if you seemingly do not even know that MCP and MWSE are incompatible with OpenMW (this is not exactly a piece of arcane, esoteric knowledge, but rather the *first* thing one has to face when switching to OpenMW), you are in for a world of pain. I (almost) hope you do not follow my advice, but this is my attempt at being helpful.

Dude, I got through the first two lines of your post and all I can see is flaming... Reread what I said... You BOTH totally missed the point... Which came first, the story or the game? "why would you expect that modders would stay faithful to that vision" Because violating canon is now you kill a franchise dude... Im not going to argue common sense with you... Figure it out...

[AnyOldName3]

The game came first. Arena was originally just supposed to be you versus another guy or monster having a fight to the death in a colosseum type thing. The setting was tacked onto it as context for why you were doing the arena fights that gave the game its name, and then an overworld was added so you could actually encounter the setting, and then some story was added on to explain why the game was suddenly not about arena fights any more. I don't think any of the people who designed the story and setting for Arena were still around when Morrowind was being made, and even people who deeply cared about the lore of Daggerfall were in the minority. Every Elder Scrolls game has violated the canon of its predecessor in some way, and each one had sold better than the last, so it's hardly killed the franchise.

[Time4Tea]

If I can chuck in my 2 cents, I think perhaps you are overthinking things a bit. Rather than throwing together a big pile of mods; hoping they will all work together and getting frustrated when they don't, perhaps you could consider prioritizing which are the main mods you want. Then, start with those two or three; test them and make sure they work ok together; and then add more one at a time (which you can do during a playthrough). If you don't like what one of them does, or it isn't compatible with one of the mods you already have, then you have to either chuck it out or make a choice of which one you want. With time, you will figure out which ones work together and you'll gravitate towards your 'optimum' blend.

It's not a perfect world: these mods weren't all written by one unified team that was coordinating to make them all compatible. Tbh, the only way you are going to perfectly satisfy some vision that you have of what you want the game to be would be to make your own mod.

For me, I started from the position that I wanted to prioritize Tamriel Rebuilt. It's about halfway finished, but it's still an amazing mod and in its current state adds about the same landmass as Vvardenfell again to the game, which is a huge area to explore, with loads of awesome new locations and quests. Also, you can interact with House Indoril, which doesn't feature in the original. On top of that I added the improved dialogue font, improved signposts, anthology solstheim, window glow, and the one that adds the scripted plant containers, which all seem to be compatible with OpenMW and Tamriel Rebuilt. I also tried out a groundcover mod, which added beautiful grass, but it killed the frame rate, so that had to go. I also decided to run it in OpenMW with the cell load distance set to 4, because I wanted a massive view distance. I expected that to break a load of things, but it actually didn't, which in my opinion is really a testament to how stable and flexible OpenMW is.

So, my advice is to try out a smaller short-list of mods that you really want and just enjoy the game for what it is (i.e. a beautiful masterpiece that keeps getting better and better!)

[RounIcarus]

The game came first. Arena was originally just supposed to be you versus another guy or monster having a fight to the death in a colosseum type thing. The setting was tacked onto it as context for why you were doing the arena fights that gave the game its name, and then an overworld was added so you could actually encounter the setting, and then some story was added on to explain why the game was suddenly not about arena fights any more. I don't think any of the people who designed the story and setting for Arena were still around when Morrowind was being made, and even people who deeply cared about the lore of Daggerfall were in the minority. Every Elder Scrolls game has violated the canon of its predecessor in some way, and each one had sold better than the last, so it's hardly killed the franchise.

Dude, 90% of the lore is never took place in a game. So how does the game come first when there are thousands of years of history and tales of far away lands. Tell me, why would Akavir be mentioned at all if for six games, you never go there... You never see races from there... Its a whole continent with its own peoples and history. Why make that a part of canon if you never intended to make a game out of it?

BECAUSE THE STORY CAME FIRST!!! YOU DONT HAVE A PURPOSE IN MAKING A GAME UNLESS YOU HAVE A PRE ESTABLISHED NARRATIVE!! USE COMMON SENSE!

[Time4Tea]

So how does the game come first when there are thousands of years of history and tales of far away lands.

You know those thousands of years of history are just imaginary, right? That never actually happened ...

Tell me, why would Akavir be mentioned at all if for six games, you never go there... You never see races from there... Its a whole continent with its own peoples and history. Why make that a part of canon if you never intended to make a game out of it?

Presumably, because they wanted to flesh out the backstory of the setting by describing some far-off places that it was never intended for the player to actually visit? For the same reason they would come up with the afore-mentioned thousand year history, even though the player would never start at year zero and play through all of it? I'm not sure what point you are trying to make - there is no reason why background about distant places or historical events couldn't be added or expanded after the release of the original game.

From the Wikipedia article about the development of Elder Scrolls: Arena:

Although the team had dropped all arena combat from the end game, because all the material had already been printed up with the title, the game went to market as The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The team came up with a lore-friendly explanation for this, being because the Empire of Tamriel was so violent, it had been nicknamed the Arena. It was Lakshman who came up with the idea of "The Elder Scrolls", and though, in the words of Peterson, "I don't think he knew what the hell it meant any more than we did", the words eventually came to mean "Tamriel's mystical tomes of knowledge that told of its past, present, and future." The game's initial voice-over was changed in response, beginning: "It has been foretold in the Elder Scrolls ..."

Yep, seems like they gave some serious forethought to the canonical fantasy setting planning right there. However, it's all grown into something vibrant and wonderful, through being expanded and built on by some very creative people through the later games.