Morrowind isn’t the sort of RPG where you need to go looking for advantages. After a first ten levels or so of running from demons and flailing ineffectually with your sword, you quickly find yourself escalating in power. By level 30 or so there’s not a lot that can seriously challenge you. Still, there a number of exploits out there if you’re feeling lazy or unscrupulous.
Levitation
Start with something simple: enemies without spells or ranged weapons basically have no way to handle you while you’re airborne. If monsters are giving you grief, float away out of reach whilst giving them the finger. Sadly this feature was removed from later games.
More levitation
Morrowind has a custom spell-making system that’s very flexible, to the extent that you can come up with some tricks that the developers probably never intended. In particular, you can take spells that are meant to apply beneficial effects to the player, and fling them at an enemy instead. Spells such as the aforementioned levitate.
Now this sounds like a bad idea. However, make it a minimum strength spell and your enemy will be levitating really slowly . So you can take a moment to heal yourself, or dance around using ranged attacks, while the frustrated enemy closes on you at a glacial pace.
Alchemy abuse
You make potions with the alchemy skill. Strength of the potion depends partially on your character’s intellect stat. You can make potions that boost intellect. I think you see where this is going?
Make an intellect potion, chug it, make another while under the influence, repeat several times, until you feel your intellect is suitably boosted. Then proceed to make a bunch of potions of other useful kinds, all stupidly powerful. So you can give yourself mega-healing, or super-fast levitate, or just flog your little vials of superpower serum for buckets of cash.
Troll people into attacking you
Maybe you’ve decided to murder some NPC because you want their armour, or their squeaky voice irritates you. Or possibly you’re not a complete monster, you’re just carrying out duties for some faction that this NPC has foolishly made an enemy of.
Unfortunately if you start a fight and kill someone in public, you get a bounty on your head and guards will try to chase you down and arrest you. To avoid that sort of aggravation, you need to make the NPC attack you first so that when you kill them, it’s an act of self defense. The way you’re meant to do this is either by taunting them or using an enrage spell, but these require a decent investment in Speechcraft and Illusion Magic skills respectively.
So here’s the cheap way: make a crappy job of pickpocketing them. Just stroll up in full view and jam your hand in their pocket. You don’t even have to take anything. Just getting as far as the “view what they’ve got” screen registers as an offense. Irritated at such dickish behaviour, they will immediately attack. And you can quite freely fight back, just make sure to let them land the first hit. You still have a bounty now but, unless you pilfered a high-end magic sword or something, it’s far less than the penalty for murder, and guards can’t even be bothered to actively chase you for it.
Oh my, this made me laugh real hard and almost wants me to boot this game up again. More of this! To me those ‘workarounds’ are the only saving grace of the Elder Scroll games (which I always thought to be overly sterile and tedious): their unintentional quirkiness. For games with such an ambition to create a convincing and immersing world they sure have a lot of atmosphere breaking bugs and exploits.
Magic in general is downright broken in Morrowind: Just think of the invisibility or chameleon spell… come to think of it, I think every spell has it’s cheating potential, especially in form of an artifact. Goodies like ‘lower resitance to [element]’ in comination with ‘damage with [element]’ were downright broken.
But the AI tops it off quite nicely, just to quote a random subordinate in a temple whose head of religion I happened to be: ‘I don’t care who you are, patriach!’ Not to mention the ever present ‘Keep Moving!’ and ‘We are watching you… scum!’ on every second turn.
Oh and the stupid merchants who never had enough money, except if they were non human and lived in the middle of nowhere. Or everyone and his guards knowing exactly which items were stolen and wich not, like there was some invisible mark on them.
You know in a way this is a horribly restraining game, so it is to be expected, that you get the most fun out of it, if you do things that weren’t expected by the programmers, if you go off the tracks.
December 7, 2013 @ 10:33 am