Morrowind... a land where people are literally yellow and black.
One of the best games in the Elder Scrolls series is Morrowind. Unlike Daggerfall, Morrowind has quite good graphics, although you won’t be too pleased if you’ve just come out of Oblivion and immediately played Morrowind. For Oblivion gamers, you’ll probably want to take note that Morrowind is a more difficult game than Oblivion and patience is required more so than in Oblivion.
You could play Morrowind straight out of the box without any mods, but be prepared to suffer some low-FPS tides when heading into big areas with lots of NPCs. Tested on the Netbookist Netbook, playability was below average at 1024×600 with everything set to low. One particular problem was the draw distance, which was not more than 10 metres.
Modding Morrowind
To play Morrowind decently, you’ll have to do a few simple tweaks, because this is an old game and hasn’t heard of widescreen and furthermore, this game does push your netbook to the limits. But thankfully, there is a big community of modders, and therefore, there is a mod out there to fix a lot of issues with Morrowind, be it in the difficulty of the game, the slow walking pace or the graphics. The fixes are easy and the game can be easily enjoyed in half an hour of tweaking.
The easiest way to get Morrowind up to speed is to get some user-made mods.
The Morrowind FPS Optimizer is a mod that helps you get the ideal FPS which you want, without compromising on graphics whenever it isn’t necessary. This is a good thing for anyone who wants to keep your draw distance a bit higher than minimum when possible. Also, this mod will allow you to get widescreen resolutions (i.e. 1024×600).
Low Fat Morrowind comes in two flavours – one of the graphics, the other for the sound. It’s best that you read the text on their website and understand what you can do in case it doesn’t work out well. Also, try the graphics pack first and then apply the sound update. Based on our understanding of netbooks, the graphics card is often the bigger bottleneck.
Like
Arguably better than Oblivion
Gripping storyline
This game is endless!
Many, many mods to make the game suit you
Dislike
Needs some minor modding
Verdict
The best thing since you installed GMABooster on your netbook. If you need a very engrossing and entertaining game that will keep you on your toes for many, many hours, get Morrowind. The scope of the game is very wide, and if that’s not enough you can get Bloodmoon and Tribunal to add to it.
Gameplay: Excellent
Graphics: Varies widely (10 fps to 30 fps)
Work needed to get game to play: High (>45-min)
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LowFat Morrowind makes the game crash *EVERY* single time I launch morrowind >__> I’ll just do with editing .INI and the FPS Optimizer ~brofist~ for the other recommendations.