Bruce Nesmith has an enviable list of design and writing credits earned over a long history on some of Bethesda’s greatest games: Daggerfall, Oblivion, Skyrim (on which he served as lead designer), Fallout 3 and 4, and others. None of which prevented him from being extremely wrong in his recent assessment that “the reality of playing Morrowind would not stand the test of time.”
“Go back and play Morrowind and tell me that’s the game you want to play again,” Nesmith said last week. “We all have these fond memories of things that were pivotal moments in our gaming fantasy histories that we absolutely move but you go back and play a 20 year old game and you will cringe.”
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(Image credit: Michael Douse (Twitter))
(Bloober Team, you’ll recall, recently earned acclaim for its work remaking Silent Hill 2, which came out just the year before Morrowind.)
Morrowind’s combat was kind of janky—or at least, it was perceived as such because of the way it incorporated stats and RNG to determine hits and damage, none of which was reflected especially well in the on-screen action. In another post, Douse said “you cannot have an RNG system with first person combat,” and points to VATS, introduced as a first-person mechanic in Fallout 3, as a way to effectively incorporate virtual dice rolls into FPS-style action.
“Maybe Morrowind with VATS would be the solution,” Douse wrote. “But let’s not pretend it played well at the combat level regardless of choice.”
It’s not too difficult to find people who disagree with that take (most of them in the Morrowind subreddit, to be fair), but Douse isn’t wrong to the extent that Morrowind is from a different era when this sort of thing was normal, and probably wouldn’t fly so well today. Or, as he put it:
(Image credit: Michael Douse (Twitter))
Personally, I’m inclined to think Morrowind’s original combat system is fine—but I also think the original Witcher’s rhythm-based swordfighting was brilliant, so my opinions should be taken in that context.
Either way, Morrowind isn’t objectively the best Elder Scrolls game ever (and it is, I will not be taking questions) because of its combat, but because of everything else: The world, the characters, the mythology, and the forceful weirdness of it all. I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again, but Morrowind is the last time The Elder Scrolls dared to be bold. The series has grown more systemically refined (and restrictive) over the years since, but it’s progress led by caution, and Bethesda’s chief ambition for the series seems to be merely to avoid alienating any of its potential audience.
Obviously I think something’s been lost as Bethesda has worked to smooth down the edges over the past two-plus decades, but there’s no denying it’s been an effective strategy: Skyrim came out in 2011 and it still draws thousands of concurrent players every day on Steam.
Nesmith, for the record, left Bethesda in 2021, so there’s no point in yelling at him online about the next Elder Scrolls game—and you shouldn’t be yelling at him anyway, arguing about which Elder Scrolls game is best (Morrowind is objectively the correct answer) is supposed be fun, not a cause for actual anger. You may, however, want to consider yelling at Douse (which is to say, asking politely and respectfully, when he brings it up) about putting together a small team at Larian to take on the task. Can’t hurt, right?
