One of the reasons why Morrowind is harder to enjoy as a pure game experience than later entries is that alchemy is insanely broken. It breaks any balance the game has and thus you either have to not use it or only use it with a lot of restrictions
Everyone knows about the Fortify Intelligence loop, which is the most obviously game breaking, but even IF you dont use that, there's other problems. The fact that a lot of vendors sell ingredients for super cheap, means you can make endless amounts of health or fatigue potions with hardly any effort. (items like saltrice, wickwheat, marshmerrow to make restore health can easily be bought from balmora vendors for like 1 gold each). And because potions are worth more than raw ingredients, you can buy ingredients from vendors, make potions, then sell them back for more money, and repeat for infinite gold. (e.g. from nalcarya in balmora you can buy kwama cuttle and scales, make water walking potions and sell them back. you now have a way of infinite gold to easily make thousands with no effort).
its like they didnt even think about these things when designing the game, didnt even consider how this one skill would ruin all the balance they were going for.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with unbalanced and powerful options to exist in a SINGLE PLAYER game. If you have meta-knowledge or are clever enough and explore enough to find this on your own, why not reward the player with power? Rewarding a player that makes good use of alchemy, or who makes a really clever enchantment, or a really powerful custom spell is a good thing.
Nathan Allen
if you don't like it don't use, problem solved.
Luis Clark
Fuck you its fun.
Jason Baker
Why don't you like fun?
Lincoln Reyes
The issue with Morrowind though is that there are so many things that are broken to varying degrees that if you want the game to be challenging at all you need to purposefully go out of your way not to use them. You mention something like "Rewarding a player that makes good use of alchemy" but in reality pretty much using alchemy at all will result in you breaking the game, either through stats, horribly broken potions, infinite money or even just easy level ups. You pretty much have to handicap yourself by refusing to buy alchemy ingredients in order to avoid making the game a joke by accident. Even outside of alchemy though there's tons of other ways the game can become broken to varying degrees. You can max out a ton of skills very quickly with very little effort because a lot are broken in their own different ways which can easily result in the player gaining too many stats too quickly. The only real way to enjoy Morrowind is to just straight up enjoy breaking the game (Which to be fair is fun but only for a little while) or be so purely ignorant to all the ways you break the game that you can obliviously play through it.
Colton Reyes
>And because potions are worth more than raw ingredients, you can buy ingredients from vendors, make potions, then sell them back for more money congratulations you've learned what value added product is
Carter Kelly
>completely trivializing all difficulty in a game is fun why is Any Forums like this
Landon Baker
The same thing goes for enchanting/soul trapping. They obviously didn't stress test the game before its rushed release, with the multitude of broken side quests and pickpocket being completely unusable. Even if you mod out these exploits >alchemy loop - just add diminishing returns >make crafted potions worthless >make guild chest items worthless >make soul gem values not scale so much with the souls inside >remove creeper/mudcrab merchant >remove DB assassins with their expensive armor >reprice artifacts and daedric/glass weapons You still have absolutely broken shit like fortify mercantile or the fact that you can kill any ground enemy by casting 15 sec levitation on them and have them follow you up into the air. Play the game as a role playing sandbox, take your role as a reincarnated elf jesus in stride, and don't exploit every aspect of the game at once.
Having options is fun. You have the option to trivialize the game. You have the option to make it a horrible slog. You see that mountain? You can climb it.
Jose Walker
the journey from being a useless nobody to a game breaking god is pretty in keeping with the game's story. once you get that strong you've pretty much finished everything but the msq anyway and it's not like there are boss fights.
Jace Moore
at least raising the enchant skill is hard and enchanting with merchants is expensive as fuck. but alchemy is just so easy to abuse in the first 5 minutes
Noah Rodriguez
>everyone must be the same! everyone must derive enjoyment in the same way as me!
Luis King
I like it when singleplayer games let you break them in two though. Besides, like you said, you can just choose not to use alchemy and play the game without exploiting broken mechanics.
Adam Wilson
it would be nice if alchemy was an option but it didnt break the game at the same time. at least oblivion and skyrim made attempts at this
Nicholas Mitchell
Yeah, that's fair. Maybe there's an alchemy rebalance mod?
Leo Sanders
Imagine not drinking a potion that lets you jump from Balmora to Vivec in a single bound. What are you doing?
Dude you have to grind your alchemy high as fuck and have very good equipment to make the crazy potions and at that point you're busted anyway because of your level and equipment anyway. Basic level alchemy isn't stupidly powerful
Dylan Walker
it could be argued that an even bigger issue is that vendors continually restock ingredients to make good potions.
I think he's mostly talking about breaking the game economy, which you can do at level 1 with alchemy. Also the fortify int loop can be done with shit gear and alchemy skills
