My fourteen-year-old son likes games. I guess it’d be hard for him not to; most of the time, if his old man isn’t working on games, he’s playing them.
He grew up in a house filled with toys – Lego, board games, Warhammer miniatures, and D&D books. He’s seen both his dad and his mom joyfully engaging in gaming despite our advanced age. And he probably got exposed to questionable content earlier than he should have (“Watch daddy chop off this bandit’s head!”)
The tradeoff for all the childhood fun was that when he started to interact with other gamer kids his age, his tastes were out of step with the mainstream. His friends were playing mobile games, Fortnite, and Nintendo titles; even though our household had consoles, he was a PC gamer through and through.
Another downside to growing up with a game developer dad is that he was subjected to hours of detailed analysis every time a new game came out. I tend to dissect the heck out of games when I talk about them – pulling their mechanics apart, rambling on endlessly about the pieces that work and the pieces that don’t.
So when I started to wander around the house a few weeks back grumbling about Starfield, his ears perked up. He wasn’t interested in Starfield, but he heard me making comparisons to the mechanics of earlier Bethesda games.
Inquisitive and curious, my son is smart enough to not just blindly accept his grumpy dad’s opinion as gamer gospel. He immediately started poking around on the internet, watching YouTube analysis of old Bethesda games and learning Elder Scrolls lore.
Then one weekend, he came to me with a request: he wanted to try playing Morrowind.
Now get walking to that old tree stump so I can rob you.
What Do You Want, Outlander?
The most charitable way I can say it is that Morrowind is showing its age. The core mechanics feel clunky and old-school; the character models and environments are far from cutting-edge.
The game also requires an investment of time and brainpower right out of the gate. It’s genuinely tricky to craft a functional character until you better understand the game.
I helped get my kiddo set up with the game, keeping it mod-free other than installing the excellent OpenMW engine overhaul, which fixes a host of movement bugs and makes the game significantly more playable. Even with OpenMW, I was pretty sure that my son would try the game for twenty minutes and then go right back to Ultrakill or Deep Rock Galactic.
But he proved me wrong and persevered. Oh, at first he mocked the ridiculousness of Fargoth. He wondered why the Imperial guards in Seyda Neen had a completely different art style for their faces than all the other characters. He died a bunch of times in the very first bandit cave as he struggled with the combat.
Right around the time he reached the town of Balmora, the immersion kicked in. The magical combination of great music, deep lore-filled conversation trees and books, and a genuinely compelling main storyline pulled him along.
As of now, he’s well over halfway through the long and meaty main quest, and he’s clearly going to finish it.
As I watched him play, he excitedly explained what he liked and what he didn’t. I realized that Morrowind’s great reputation isn’t just about nostalgia. Genuinely timeless game design elements are at work in Morrowind – elements pushed to the background in more popular and “polished” next-generation Bethesda games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield.
We Make a Special Trip, Just For You
It feels like a no-brainer decision these days to add voice acting to the majority of lines in an RPG, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield do. I’ve been in a lot of design meetings with other developers where they insisted full voice acting was the only way to immerse the player – the only way to feel like a “triple A” game.
Yet Morrowind’s all-text dialogue exchanges are fundamentally satisfying and deeper. The foundational lore that the main quest rests on feels far more extensive than Skyrim’s or Starfield’s.
Reading all that text is also mostly optional. You can power through the game, focusing on objectives and mostly ignoring conversations except for highlighted keywords – and it’s a lot faster than skipping through voiced dialogue exchanges in Skyrim.
Adding voice acting to every line pushes narrative designers naturally toward shorter, less evocative exchanges that “get to the point” quickly so the player doesn’t get bored. It changes the way a game’s story is written, in a way the designers might not even register when they’re writing it.
Similarly, few designers working on today’s glut of open-world games would consider ditching quest markers on the map. Leading a player by the nose to the next point of interest is a foundation of modern UX design.
Morrowind’s lack of quest markers means that finding where an objective is located is a core part of the game. This changes the way the player interacts with NPCs; just as if you asked someone for directions in real life, Morrowind’s quest givers provide detailed descriptions of the route to the next objective (“turn left here, walk up the path, follow the signs to Pelagiad.”)
but he’s deep into his daily Skooma coma by now.
Another great example is the way Morrowind handles fast travel. There are multiple methods of fast traveling – magic, silt striders, boats – each with its own network of destinations.
The systems are elegant and satisfying. The player discovers these networks organically, over time, and each feels like a unique reward. It’s a far cry (no pun intended) from the kind of instantaneous fast-travel-anywhere systems that today’s massive open-world games require.
Yet the fast travel options are perfectly robust enough for a game of Morrowind’s scale – if you make use of all of them, you’re never far from anywhere you need to go.
I’m not trying to say Skryim’s a worse game than Morrowind. Skyrim has been insanely successful, and I’ve spent hundreds of happy hours in it.
But when a gamer in 2023 says “I prefer Morrowind to Skyrim” it’s not just nostalgia talking. Morrowind still has great lessons to teach modern designers about fostering a true feeling of immersion.
My son said it best – “Morrowind feels more like a real adventure.”
In Space, No One Can Hear You Type
My kiddo is open-minded, but even I know better than to show him Star Fleet II: Krellan Commander – a title from 1989, recently relaunched in a 2.0 form on Steam.
Even as a fan of obscure roguelikes and dense titles like Dwarf Fortress, Star Fleet II is daunting. It simulates almost every aspect of commanding a starship for an evil empire in a thinly-veiled riff on Star Trek. (The Krellans are barely-disguised original-series Klingons, essentially.)
Through entirely ASCII visuals – and no mouse support – running in vanilla DOSBox, Star Fleet II packs in an enormous amount of game systems with an install footprint that’s a tiny fraction of what a modern game would take up.
The game features a bewildering array of systems – space combat, planetary exploration, launching probes, invading enemy worlds, boarding ships, garrisoning bases, and even commanding a sector’s entire fleet. Besides not one but two giant text manuals, the game comes with a sheet of hotkeys that uses every key on the keyboard – plus its shift, control, and alt versions – for a different ship function.
Star Fleet II is a game I couldn’t convince my teenage son to touch – and frankly, I can’t recommend it to anyone. Certain personality types will squeeze fun out of it, but most people won’t get past the first ten minutes.
After an hour, you begin to see the Matrix here.
That said…
I like a good space game – strategy, sim, or otherwise. I have lots of hours in Stellaris, Elite Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, and the X series. I’ve even dabbled in Star Citizen (if you haven’t, then just don’t – trust me!)
With only a couple of hours of play under my belt, I found myself just as immersed in the narrative of my Star Fleet II battle cruiser – staring at the chaotic, colorful ASCII Star Fleet II UI – as I have in any of those other games. As players of Dwarf Fortress know, “art” that puts imagination to work can sometimes be better than the latest bleeding-edge visuals.
Star Fleet II has a ton of systems. While some are very simple or thin, they all work together to reinforce the game’s fiction and keep the player firmly in the commander’s seat. Nothing in the game is wasted; there is no “fluff.”
Once you find the right keystrokes and menus, launching a probe is easy. You bring up the targeting computer, pick a star system, and launch it. You can only have five probes active at a time; you can destroy them remotely, and your ship automatically refills the probes whenever you return to a starbase.
It’s a minor system for a minor feature in the game. I couldn’t help but imagine how such a system would work in a modern game that was trying to create the starship commander experience offered by Star Fleet II.
You would have a whole system to purchase probes – maybe different types of probes. Each would have a complex 3D model. You’d watch a cutscene (skippable of course) every time you launched a probe. Oh, and of course, you could buy custom probe skins as DLC!
While I don’t think I’ll play Star Fleet II for very long – certainly not the 200+ hours that it would appear to take to get through all the missions – I respect what it accomplished back in 1989, and I respect what the new version can teach us today.
A poor showing – I didn’t kill a single ship! Yet I had fun.
Some modern designers would insist I didn’t, though.
Nostalgia… and More
Nostalgia is powerful. The best “retro” games become new genres; “Metroidvania” is a portmanteau of the games Metroid and Castlevania, and Metroidvania games draw on the lessons of both classics.
Straight-up re-releases of older games can also do very well commercially. Witness the success of the Age of Empires and Age of Kings re-releases on Steam, which laid the groundwork for a brand-new Age of Empires IV game.
Sequels, too, often bank on nostalgia. Every developer making the second and third iterations of a franchise struggles with how much of the first game’s design to keep and how much to throw away – a delicate balancing act between meeting the expectations of the original audience and drawing in new players.
The commercial and critical success of this year’s best game, Baldur’s Gate 3, is due in large part to how awesome it is on every level. But it’s also clear it wouldn’t have sold as well if it was not a sequel to a beloved classic series and set in the best-known D&D setting. Nostalgia played a role in its success.
But when a crusty old gamer says Morrowind is “better” than Skyrim, it’s not purely nostalgia at work.
Fundamentally, Morrowind and Skyrim are very different experiences, despite being part of the same franchise. It’s not very valuable to talk about which is better or worse; there’s too much subjectivity and personal preference at play for that kind of comparison to be meaningful.
The best game developers won’t dismiss a player’s preference for Morrowind as pure nostalgia or write off a game like Star Fleet II because of how it looks.
There’s a payoff for digging deeper – taking the time to figure out exactly how older games worked their magic despite ancient graphics, clunky UI, and dated mechanics. Good developers seek to better understand why some games keep a dedicated fan following for years and years, long past their “shelf life.”
Because good developers know that someday, someone will leverage elements from those games in fresh ways – and what was once old will be new again.
Happy Thanksgiving! You could do worse things with your time on Turkey Day than revisit an older beloved game. See you next week.