The History of Morrowind

A third Elder Scrolls was first conceived during the development of Daggerfall, and the earliest plan was grander: set in the Summerset Isles, under the name Tribunal. After Daggerfall, the setting moved to Morrowind, and the design kept shrinking toward something buildable. The dynamic blight, a force that would progressively expand and destroy cities, was dropped when the team judged the original scope too grand for the technology of the time. Lead designer Ken Rolston is on the record with the substance of the decision: something had to give.

What replaced scale was density. Where Daggerfall generated its world, Morrowind's was crafted by hand, and Bethesda built a tool to do it: The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, the same editor the developers used, announced by project leader Todd Howard in May 2000 and shipped inside the PC release. Howard told GameSpot the whole project ran about three and a half years, design and PC work starting in January 1999, with Xbox work beginning in November 2000. His stated intent for the port was restraint: the team did not want two different games, just Morrowind, the same on console as on PC. The score is by Jeremy Soule.

Howard's pre-release answer about the series' untouchable core is quoted in the record: “Free-form experience.” The player arrives on Vvardenfell as a released prisoner and is handed a world of guilds, Great Houses, temples, and Ashlander tribes, with the main quest structured as partially ordered tasks that can be approached in many sequences. Rolston described the central plot as a way to introduce the player to a distracting crosscurrent of conflicting factions rather than the point of the game itself.

Underneath sits the series' skill system: proficiencies rise by use, training, or study, including reading the hundreds of in-game books, and levels come from raising major and minor skills. Contemporary reviewers praised the world and faulted the combat feedback; Bethesda added enemy health bars in a patch a month after launch. The mixed notices about the main plot's lack of urgency were printed at the time and are kept in the reception below.

Bethesda staff have said it plainly in the studio's own anniversary retrospective: Morrowind saved Bethesda, and gave the company the ability to make everything that followed. The hand built world, the Construction Set's modding culture, and the proof that a console audience would meet a dense PC RPG halfway became the working template for Oblivion and Skyrim, and Howard later said he wanted Skyrim to return to Morrowind's sense of mysterious exploration.

On this shelf it stands as the era's foundation stone: the first game here, chronologically and in influence, and the reason “Xbox RPG” was a phrase worth saying in 2002.