But even though the game has at least four expansions worth of material in it right out of the box, the folks at Bethesda have seen fit to provide an official expansion to the game in Tribunal. While it's obviously cut from exactly the same cloth as Morrowind, there are enough small differences to make this play just a bit differently.
The expansion is playable by any level of character (although anything below high 20s and you'll probably find more frustration than fun). And while the trigger that starts the Tribunal plot occurs pretty much right away, you can jump in to or out of the quest at any time. In my case, my interest in Morrowind died out somewhere around the mid-point of the main story, and while Tribunal has peaked my interest again, it's so tightly focused that you can safely focus on just the content from the expansion without needing to veer back to the original quests.
Without giving too much away, Tribunal is introduced through an ambush. An assassin attacks you in your sleep, triggering a lengthy investigation and intimate involvement with two main quest lines. After asking around, the character eventually finds him or herself set on a course for Mournhold, the capitol city of Morrowind located somewhere on the mainland. A magical transportation mechanism for Mournhold (which you'll find early and easily) gets you back and forth in an instant.
But unless you're too weak for the challenges, you'll probably want to blow through the entire Tribunal quest before returning to the wider world of Morrowind. In some ways this is great and in other ways it's a bit disappointing. The singular, shorter main quest allows for much better pacing and, unlike Morrowind, you'll rarely lose sight of what you're doing or why. For players who were intimidated by the openness of Morrowind, this is much more comprehensible.
But for those who reveled in the freedom, the lack of interaction with the rest of the world is pretty depressing. The quest givers and bystanders in the original game made endless references to each other and often asked you to travel far a field to fulfill certain missions. The contrary relationships between the various factions and leaders meant you actually had to pick and choose whom to serve in the game. These choices often closed other options off to you and affected your standing across the world.
It's a shame that none of that is really possible in Tribunal. At first you'll find yourself serving as a spy and informant in the service of King Hesleth. Various assassination plots need to be uncovered and quashed. Gradually, you'll begin to drift more towards serving the forces leading the Temple and serving the goddess Almalexia. These types of missions are more of the "go down in the sewer and kill this horrible thing" variety. While these two main branches of the basic story of Tribunal start to intertwine in interesting ways, the rest of the miscellaneous quests are somewhat detached from the rest of the world. Likewise, there's no advancement of any of the faction quests here. I certainly didn't expect that Bethesda would tie the content of Tribunal in to every aspect of Morrowind but it would help preserve some of the same feel if the guilds and factions had some presence here.
The quest journal provided one of the recurring frustrations with the game and the team has wisely retooled the interface somewhat. Now a simple toggle in your journal will let you see which quests have been completed and which haven't. Rather than moving the completed quests to another book entirely, they're simply grayed out here. All of the relevant quest information is accessible by clicking on the quest title. If you've got a lot of entries in your quest journal, switching to this new format requires just a few minutes when you first load. Make sure to save your game once the parsing is done -- this'll save you the trouble of doing it again if the game crashes.
And while not as rampant as in the original, there are still a fair amount of crash bugs here. What a tremendous sense of d?j? vu you'll have when, in the middle of managing your exhaustive inventory, you find yourself wondering if you should save the game mere milliseconds before it crashes right to your desktop. As I said, it occurs less often now, but the odd interface crashes are still here.
Pathfinding is also a bit of a problem. Almost 90% of the inhabitants of Mournhold don't need to move around that much, but the few who do can sometimes run in to some snags -- especially when you have to ferry them around from one location to another. Escorting a priest down to a dungeon is hard enough without the constant snags and near-drownings their idiocy provides. While in Morrowind this was only a sometimes affair, in Tribunal you'll have a new reason to get angry.
You can now hire mercenaries and pack animals to help out in fights and carry your loot. The mercenaries, while of dubious value to higher-level characters, are actually implemented nicely. They only work for profit so the value of items they're carrying can never be allowed to drop. As long as the mercenaries are carrying more and more expensive stuff, they'll stick it out with you forever.
A few other interface issues have been smoothed over. For one thing, there's now a "seller max" button you can use for selling big-ticket items. A map notation system lets you add your own comments to the maps. Rather than showing up as text, these notes appear as little red boxes. Simply move your mouse over them to read what they say.
But then again, there are a few issues from the original game that still haven't been addressed. My character fell through the environment on more than a few occasions and there's still a general stickiness to some of the objects in the world. I still waste an inordinately high amount of swear words on guards who insist on standing in stairways and open doors. The conversation window still scrolls a bit oddly, instantly jumping to the final paragraphs of three screen's worth of dialogue or alternately resting firmly where you scrolled despite further dialogue.
The game's exactly the same in terms of graphics and sounds -- at least in terms of resolution and quality. The addition of new areas and characters adds a bit of variety to the game but, by and large, it looks as it looked before. While the sounds are great in Tribunal, I really needed to hear some more sounds. When you're asked to play a game for weeks and weeks as is the case with Morrowind, even the most interesting or innocuous music cues start to get irritating. A lot of the battle sounds are far too repetitive as well.
What did you think of Tribunal? | ||
The fact that Mournhold is self-contained and a bit on the smallish side, helps keep the framerate a bit more stable than it was in Morrowind. (As an aside, it seems a bit odd to me that the capitol of Morrowind should seem so much smaller than Vivec.) But while the main quarters of the city can be explored in a day or so, there's lots more content lurking beneath the streets in dungeons, sewers and legendary underground city hinted at in the original game.