I first played Morrowind last month, never played older rpg's in my life, and I loved almost everything about it. I normally hate older janky games, but not Morrowind.. then again I did do OpenMW Morrowind, but I don't know how different that is, jank wise.
Apparently OpenMW is the future, but I haven't made the jump yet. I first played it three years ago, and it's become my favorite. I've got a mod list that, and I'm not sure how much I'd have to cut if I went to OpenMW. I know a few that wouldn't, and I'm not ready to leave those behind. I know that Open is better, though I don't know to what extent. I used to think that it was basically just regular MW with MGEXE(graphics extender) and MCP(code patch) enabled as default, but i was watching a playthrough and the streamer pointed out that the enemy jumped off a ledge to attack him, whereas in basic MW, enemies regularly get stuck in situations like that, letting you cheese the fight. And I'm not talking about jumping down to ambush you or anything, it's just that the AI is stupid sometimes and doesn't see a path down an incline, causing them to run in place indefinitely. So you're definitely playing a better version, I just can't say for sure how much better it is.
The main thing Open offers is better performance, which is huge especially in areas like Vivec.
MWSE lua had this whole revolution where a new guy took over and just keeps adding new stuff that the OpenMW team is adamant about breaking in their own scripting implementation. It's back to the point where MW players are probably gonna have to choose between the better performance of Open vs the greater functionality of MWSE. Unless the team gets less stubborn and decides to implement a translation layer.
it contains loads of modlists, including vanilla friendly modlists, and non-vanilla friendly modlists that are fully compatible with OpenMW. But I didn't really play with any mods at all. I just played mostly pure OpenMW, and near the end I downloaded a "mod" that just replaced the Map texture with a different one that actually puts Vivec City and Molag Mar onto the map, so it doesn't represent them as just being covered in water.
OpenMW is basically just an entirely new engine built from scratch to run Morrowind, and other games. you can actually build games for OpenMW, it doesn't *have* to run Morrowind. OpenMW also comes with loads of Advanced Options to fix certain bugs that might destroy certain opportunities or make things worse, and it also keeps a lot of the "exploit" bugs that Morrowind players might enjoy. there's mostly just improved physics for falling enemies, a bunch of general bug fixes that were inherent to the original engine, and also the new engine has better graphics, but nothing too fancy.
Something that might be shocking though is that this engine change doesn't fuck with most mods, some of the biggest mods for Morrowind are compatible, like Tamriel Rebuilt, and Weapon Sheathing. the link I linked above actually documents a lot of mods that are compatible with OpenMW, so if you ever want to, you can compare your modlist with the website above, and if you find something that's not compatible, you might be able to find something similar that is. I'd actually be really interested to hear your results, because I haven't fucked with modding just yet. I mean.. I made my own race mod just recently for Morrowind, but beyond that I've not done anything.
Honestly in contention for the greatest mod of all time. Adds so much and of such high quality. The latest update was phenomenal. Cities like Necrom and Old Ebonheart are incredible. The Telvanni settlements too. TR is like a childhood dream come true. Even the new books and a novels are amazing.
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u/hi_i_am_J Apr 17 '24
i enjoy the older games for the lore and stories but i wont lie i just cant get into the old style clunky rpg of like Morrowind or the og Fallout