What makes The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind one of the greatest games of all time? Is it the complex imperial politics of its setting? The piquant mythopoeia? Fargoth?
It's none of these. It's the fact it's a right ballache to actually play.
I… kid? Sort of? I'll admit it: Morrowboomers can lean a little too hard into valourising Morrowind's rough edges, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. What I love about Morrowind more than anything is that its world just doesn't care about you. It will subject you to its weird and arcane rules and expect you to figure them out.
If you break against the rocks? Fine. If you totally grasp it and turn yourself into a gamebreakingly powerful death-wizard? Also fine. The game just doesn't mind either way, which makes all your struggles, tragedies, and triumphs feel like they actually belong to you.
Anyway, all this long preamble is to say: someone has made some very well-done Skyrim-style quest markers for the game, and I for one am outraged.
Coming from a modder named RPGKing117, Quest Markers Plus for Morrowind (specifically, for Morrowind's open-source engine reimplementation OpenMW) aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend staring at your journal trying to figure out which goddamn tree out of Vvardenfell's 8 billion trees your quest objectives are orienting themselves by. Gotta find Caius Cosades? Easy-peasy. There's now a marker smack-bang on his front door and, once you're inside, over his Skooma-addled head.
It's also highly configurable and, as an added bonus, you can use it to mark city locations on your HUD. It's like Vvardenfell got Google Maps.
To drop kayfabe for a sec, it looks tightly constructed, taking advantage of other OpenMW map mods to create an overhauled mapsperience that brings TES 3's crusty old systems into the 21st century. Is it the kind of thing I'd use myself? Probably not, mostly because I've memorised enough quest locations for Morrowind at this point that I'll be damned if I let some robot take my job.
But a Morrowind first-timer? Yeah, I might recommend it. If you grew up on Skyrim, it'd at least mean you didn't have to acclimatise to Morrowind's old-school quest design at the same time as figuring out why none of your attacks are connecting.
But I still think its author should go to prison. Fair's fair.
