Morrowind seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it game. A lot of people are bored by it. I find that, while it has some boring bits it has a lot of exciting stuff too. A very tense story had my first character eliminating gang members while working secretly for a law officer, trying not to get nailed for murder, fleeing the town guards on my way to the Thieves' Guild to get the charges dropped, finding out I was in too deep for them to take care of, slipping out of town to try to get back to the guy I was working for... couldn't quite do it though. :)

My second character is much tougher, and quite cool. A Napthali -- a winged variant of the Dark Elves, thanks to a mod -- who wears heavy armor, fights with spear and magic. A more effective thief than my thief was, with levitation and telekinesis and ranged unlocking spells. A better caster, though with too little mana to cast some of the better spells. Definitely a better tank, and able to almost carry enough loot.

I'm afraid I have been babbling about it to my roommates a lot. ;)

Morality while gaming is an interesting thing. My character steals and murders any time I can get away with it... but only certain NPCs. The wealthy snobbish nobles who hate foreigners don't have a chance unless they've got lots of guards (and come to think of it, with my "Come Get Some" frenzy spell I could probably do them in too. And then the guards one at a time... I'll have to try that. More armor to sell!). But a nice old woman living alone, or a healer, or other easy but innocent targets? I leave them alone. I might swipe some of their stuff if I can do it undetected, but if they catch me I don't kill them, I reload.

Same deal with the Sims. I tried to be cruel but couldn't.

Of course in the real world I wouldn't steal from anyone and any thought of murder is horrifying. Games dull that a bit, but there's still a sympathy factor. Depends on how it's set up, really -- in Loom for example, it was such a sweet and nice game that the one person who died was incredibly sad. It's not Grand Theft Auto by any means :)

Morrowind asks you to do some nasty, underhanded things. It's your choice whether to do them or not. Apparently you can play the entire game as almost a pacifist, knocking attackers unconscious or making them flee or calm down rather than killing them. You probably miss a lot of the game that way, but then, I might be missing a few things by playing a rotten thief too. :) (Realistically, I doubt there are many cool quests for nice people in Morrowind, and a lot less loot.)

I have a new To-Do list. Exciting stuff, eh? It's cool though. A batch file and a quick little HTML page on Active Desktop. Make a batch file like so:

%windir%\notepad.exe c:\todo\todo.htm

And then somewhere in C:\todo\todo.htm, make a regular hyperlink to that batch file as if it were an HTML page. It'll run, Notepad will open up your file for editing. The extraneous DOS window will close when you close Notepad. Refresh your page on the Active Desktop, and voila.

Cool Edit 2000 is going to be my mastering tool once I get all my songs rendered to WAV. It does a very nice amplitude analysis, giving me maximum and average RMS power (close to what the ears perceive as volume, as opposed to the peak levels of the signal), and a nice histogram. With those I can adjust compression and levels to have a reasonably well matched set of songs. It's pretty amazing how much compression is on the Wesir song right now for instance, compared to the Ra or Het-Hert songs. A bit too much for comfort; I don't want an FM rock station sound. ;)

Those three songs have each gotten some tweaks -- more than I thought at first but nothing radical.

I'm not working seriously on it this weekend, just bits here and there. This is mostly a weekend of taking things easy before the Simucon madness infects everyone at work. We have a lot, a LOT of work to do on Hero's Journey and the more we get done the cooler the Simucon demo will be. It won't be as finished as we all want it to be. That's the secret to success, never be completely satisfied. ;)

Posted 11:35 AM CST [Link] [Archives] [Index]

Heh, in my comment on your previous entry, I was going to write something about morality in games (since I did mention that I've been playing quite a bit of GTA, which argueably is the least moral game that's been developed in the past few years).

I will say that, at times, I feel a few pangs of guilt in GTA: Vice City (the character you play is RUTHLESS. He'll kill anyone and everyone that gets in his way) because you do have "missions" to kill a lot of people (although most of them are pretty despicable characters, but that's not a real reason to kill someone) to advance the storyline.

Rockstar set the game up well, though, in my opinion. Despite the fact that the game has a violent theme, it's fun to play, because I know that it's just a game. I'm hesitant to say that games specifically dull our sensitivity to violence, though, mainly because I think a lot more then just games do that. The media, television, even books can do that sort of thing to a person. I'm not going to get into that, though, because I could write quite a bit on the subject.

Oh, and Loom is one of my favorite games. :) I haven't played it in years, and I've been looking to find the CD copy that I use to own (that had the music and voices), but it's nowhere. I think it's an "abondonware" game, but I haven't looked recently.

I actually found Loom, and the sound pack. I was just musing that it'd be cool to see something like the musical "draft" system in a modern day game (where you had a spellbook of musical notes that you'd string together to form spells). Might be a bit on the slow side for casting offensive spells, but it'd be a cool little addition to any game. Using music to invoke powerful spells is a really neat idea.

It's probably been done in a more recent game, but if so, I haven't heard about it. :)