As mentioned previously, I love video games. I suck at them, but that really has very little effect on my overall enjoyment of them. Then came The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. This is a game unlike anything I had played up to this point. You don’t start out playing some predefined character created and designed by some game designer. The game has an inherent freedom that I was unaccustomed to. In the first 5 minutes of the game you get to choose your name, race, appearance, attributes, skills and abilities. You can choose some predefined classes that will give you a general set of stats, skills and abilities or you can choose to be an “Adventurer” and build your own customized class that fits your playing style.
The game starts you out in a small fishing village and presents you with a task that opens up the main quest/story for you. However, you do not have to complete a single quest in the main story line to advance your character in levels, skills and abilities. The game is filled with areas to explore, creatures to kill, resources/ingredients to gather, armor and weapons to collect and enough side-quests to fill any two or three other games. You can join and complete quests for various guilds, factions and religious organizations and with the two expansions available you are looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 hours of playtime from a single-player game.
With the included editor and building tools, the game has gathered an impressive modding community who have produced everything from simple additional items to quests to full elaborate story lines. I spent nearly a year and half playing it over and over. When the announcement was made that a sequel was in development but still a couple years out, I started looking around for another game to tide me over. About this time I saw an article about the up-coming Jump to Lightspeed expansion for Star Wars Galaxies and decided to give it a try since it had been out for nearly a year by that point, so on April 16, 2004 I began what became my longest affair with a video game to date.
Continued in Gaming Episode V: An Empire Divided…