Let’s Illustrate Morrowind: Final Thoughts

So I finally “finished” Morrowind, which is to say I got near the end but got so frustrated with some of the end-game quests that I decided to sequence break and see if I could beat one of the final bosses early.

At least I think it was a final boss. Having never beaten the game means I can only sort of guess what was going to happen. Honestly in the future I should probably avoid doing Let’s Illustrates of games I havn’t finished at least once before.

Anyways, it’s time for final thoughts:

Thoughts On The Game

I can certainly see why a lot of people say Mororwind was their favorite Elder Scrolls game. The setting is unique, the sense of freedom is great and the story is one of the best written open world plots I’ve ever seen.

What made the plot so great?

Well, first off there was the simple fact that it was properly paced for an open world game. The game knew you probably wanted to do side quests and so the main story had regularly scheduled moments of down time where you were encouraged to go off and side quest for a bit. It’s a simple thing but for some reason most open world games just can’t pull it off. Even Bethesda itself seems to have trouble duplicating it and instead gives us things like Skyrim’s “Dragon’s are attacking and we have to stop them ASAP” or Fallout 4’s “Your baby has been kidnapped please rescue them ASAP”.

Beyond that the story also did a great job of making use of such advanced writing techniques as Foreshadowing and Ambiguouty.

For instance, one of my favorite moments in the game was when you first hear about the seven trials of the Neverine and realize that those are all things your character will have to go though. The trials are too vague to really let you know what you’re in for but you still get this lovely sense of doom. And then when you start accomplishing stuff it’s fun to look back and realize that “Oh! That’s what the third trial was talking about”.

I also like the fact that whether you are a reborn hero or just a spy pretending to be a reborn hero was never really clarified, at least not at any point in the game I played. Sure, you hear a lot about prophecy and fate but for all you know that’s just a few Deadra lords playing games or a few scribes being hopeful.

ON THE OTHER HAND: I think we have to admit that the rough gameplay made the story hard to enjoy. I mean, I was so tired of walking back and forth across the ashlands that I bailed out 80% of the way through the story.

So overall I’m glad I played it and it would be really nice if Elder Scrolls 6 were to have a Morrowind style scenario but with Skyrim style gameplay.

Thoughts On The Gimmick

A no armor, weapons or consumable run of an Elder Scrolls game is less intimidating than you might think given how much magic is readily available and how easy it is to regain HP and MP through rest even without items.

What did surprise me was the fact that Fault somehow turned into a melee focused wizard instead of the fireball chunking sorcerer I originally had in mind. I guess that’s what I get for obsessing about having optimal HP instead of actually thinking about how to be a good spell caster.

On the other hand being a transforming hero certainly gave the playthrough a unique feel and resulted in some funny mental images.

On the other other hand combat in Morrowind is tedious enough without having to cast the same armor and weapon summoning spells at the start of every single fight. So I can’t really recommend the power ranger build to anyone.

Thoughts On My Art

My first Let’s Illustrate was just to get me in the habit of regularly practicing art by basically putting my online reputation at risk if I didn’t. This second Let’s Illustrate was then theoretically supposed to focus on developing actual talent by picking a single artistic style and focusing on getting good at it.

Unfortunatley I instead spent most of this series jumping from one style to another like a kid in a candy store. Let’s try a cartoon style! No, comics! Maybe something more Japanese! And so on and so forth.

That said I did finally decide to commit myself to pixel art, for several reasons:

1) It requires and teaches many of the same skills as traditional art (perspective, proportion, shading) while being more forgiving of small mistakes.

2) You can easily adjust the difficulty of a piece by increasing or decreasing the resolution.

3) There are some good smartphone apps for pixel art, letting me slip in a few minutes of practice here and there instead of having to dedicate a solid hour to sitting at my computer with a drawing tablet.

Some time in the future I’d still like to improve my actual sketching skills but for the forseeable future I’m going to restrict myself to pure pixelated Let’s Illustrates until I reach a level where I can produce the sort of stuff I wouldn’t be embarassed to see in an actual SNES game.

As for when I’ll be kicking off the next series, I’ve already started playing and illustrating but want a bigger buffer of saved up posts before anything goes live. Might take a month or two. I know that’s Ages in Internet time but I hope your interest doesn’t Fade while you wait.