Having earned a little pocket money by clearing out a bandit cave it’s time to head back to the customs office. Turns out I forgot to actually ask directions on where to find this Caius fellow Fault is supposed to deliver her documents to and Morrowind’s complete lack of objective markers means I can’t just follow a glowing arrow on my minimap. Instead you have to actually talk to people and get instructions and look for road signs and landmarks. Almost like real life!
Except in real life everyone has GPS enabled smart phones now so all things considered objective tracking minimaps have become 100% realistic. Welcome to the future!
Anyways, a friendly guard tells Fault she could reach the town where Caius lives by spending a few hours marching north through various swamps but that he’d personally just use the Stilt Strider and avoid all the hassle and potential muggings.
Silt Striders are terrifying three story insect monsters that have apparently been trained to act as taxis. The local handler charges a mere 14 coins to take us to Balmora so off we go.
Seeing your first silt strider is really the moment where you realize you’re not in Fantasy Europe anymore.
Once there we head to the local tavern and ask around until we get the home address of Caius.
Just want to take a moment here to talk about the conversation UI in Morrowind. Instead of a normal dialogue tree with two or three options you have an entire dialogue panel full of dozens of topics you can bring up. Since this game is mostly text based with minimal voice acting the developers were free to stuff a TON of side conversations and world building trivia into every NPC. It’s pretty nice, even if it does turn out that 95% of the world will say the exact same thing when asked for trivia about a certain location or historical event.