Morroblivion Playtest – I

WELP.  I’m doing another multi-post series, though this one probably won’t be too long.

The short version of the preface is that I started messing around with a mod to add Morrowind’s locations, NPCs, and main quest to Oblivion (‘cuz yo dawg, we heard you liked Elder Scrolls, etc. etc.).  Since it’s still being worked on, I agreed to help playtest the main quest and make sure things are working okay.  And since it is exponentially easier for me to explain what I’ve found on a blog than on a forum (where long posts might seem out of place), I’m going to post my progress here.  And by progress, I mean I’m just going to explain how far I got and then talk about weird things I found that might be of note.

Just so it’s known, I started my game from a pre-existing Oblivion file–not a new game beginning in Morrowind.  This may or may not have affected some of the results I got.

So here’s what I found, starting at the beginning of the main quest and ending after getting Corprus.

Attempting to sit on the bench at the top of the Seyda Neen lighthouse will make the player sit facing the wall against which the bench is placed, and standing up causes the player to fall through the wall and all the way through the floor, taking damage before being respawned in the lighthouse.

Occasionally when talking to people, the screen will glitch out and it will appear to zoom in and out rapidly for a moment.  It doesn’t seem to affect anything in game permanently.

Caius sometimes tries to sit in the chair in his house and ends up floating above his table.  This happens when the player attempts to sit, too.  This only happens with the chair on the left (when facing the chairs from the door)–when sitting in the chair on the right, he seems to function normally.

There are large, flat, purple squares attached to the ceiling in the Ancestral Tomb. This may be a textural problem, but I have no idea what the mesh would be, so it may just be a glitch or something.  Using FormID Finder to look at the purple square’s mesh seems to indicates the wall behind it.

A bonewalker in the Ancestral Tomb caused permanent stat damage—this either means the stat got glitched and the curse never wore off, or the bonewalker was programmed to have a curse spell that does permanent damage (which is a trait of a spell belonging to greater bonewalkers—normal bonewalkers’ curses wear off after 60 sec).

When accused of a crime, an Ordinator will approach you in Vivec (presumably this applies to other kinds of guards, I haven’t checked yet) to tell you to pay fines or go to jail, but the dialogue is not there, so when the Ordinator approaches you, the only dialogue options are those normally available when peacefully talking to one (rumors, Temple, etc.). Ending the conversation will result in the Ordinator continuously approaching you and never being able to arrest you.

Talking to the Addhiranirr in Vivec about quest items after already getting information from her will result in the khajit insisting you have not fulfilled her request yet so she won’t tell you anything a second time.  This is not particularly problematic except if you wanted to reread the dialogue because it went by too quickly–and dialogue does generally go by really quickly.

After a short time in the Ald Skar Inn, looking for information on Zainsubani, a quest prompt showed up out of nowhere stating that someone I had not yet talked to had told me the man liked books, etc. When I talked to the person who would normally prompt this, obviously nothing happened.  I am not sure what triggered the prompt.

When the player’s name is used in writing (and in dialogue—though it may just be a side effect of non-working quests in such cases as joining a guild), the variable %PCname is shown instead of the player’s name. I don’t know if this is true for games that begin in Morrowind instead of Cyrodill, but it at least applies to characters going to Morrowind after Cyrodill. Related to that, the release papers in Seyda Neen do not contain any information about the player at all. Again, this might be solved in games that begin in Morrowind, but happens to those players traveling to Seyda Neen from Cyrodill.

Some bodies cannot be looted—most notably this includes Nix Hounds.

I seem to recall that sleeping after a certain point in the main quest triggers attacks on the player by Sleepers or Dreamers (I don’t recall which).  I noticed that these do not occur when sleeping–or at least I have not encountered any yet.  I should mention I don’t believe I’ve slept for more than an hour at a time, so that may or may not have something to do with it.  Additionally, I’m not even sure how the attacks are supposed to work–there may be some other variable that has to be activated in order for them to happen.  However, I thought it might be a point worth mentioning.

I don’t know how much of these are relevant or already noted, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to document all of them.

I should be picking it up again tomorrow, so I’ll post again with more updates.

(P.S. IT’S SO COOL TO BE ABLE TO PLAY MORROWIND IN OBLIVION FAST TRAVEL AND NICE WATER AND SPEECHCRAFT AND NICE LOOKING CHARACTERS OH MY GODDDD)

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