This is a very popular opinion among the ancient Twitter fandom. It is usually explained by a stunning argument: Morrowind is a game in which there is an "atmosphere". Really. There is something like that on this island. Strange. Out-of-the-world. Something that is difficult to express in words, but it feels like a barely perceptible tonality, a string trembling inside. Pre-linguistic, subcutaneous sensation.


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Leaving the imperial chancellery, the player enters the world of dreams. Its spaces are calm and clean as the Arctic sea. The golden air is filled with dreamy laziness. The coal skies are illuminated by a scattering of glass stars. The pitch-black paths of the dying island are covered with a foggy haze. Chimeras of giant mushrooms, megaliths of the past millennia, pointed magic towers, dark caves with a scattering of phosphorescent plants grow out of the whitish haze - mirages of a non-existent world.

Visual dreams are accompanied by a lingering melody. The recognizable motives of Jeremy Soul in Morrowind sound different - thoughtful and wistful, with a kind of aching romance. The environment emits jerky, lingering sounds. Pestilence is buzzing in the crevices of the rocks. The sea surf rustles wetly. From afar, the echoing howl of the silt strider, the crying of unknown birds, the creaking of majestic netches can be heard.

Wandering through the ashen desert of Vanderfell is enveloped in melancholy. You're walking around the island like a mindless somnambulist. Closing the game after a long session, it's like shaking off a dull stupor, coming out of a meditative trance - and discovering that several hours have passed. The game envelops with a special, sensual mood, some kind of soft soporific mysticism.

Next to the hazy atmosphere, the unhurried pace of the game goes hand in hand. Skills develop slowly, the character walks slowly, the first enemies die reluctantly. The player is buried in a routine, cockroach romp, and therefore even the first transition to Balmora seems like a real adventure. And by the standards of the game world, this is an insignificant distance and, having grown stronger, the main character will skip it casually. The fan of the Morrowind game world unfolds slowly, beckons with the promise of revealed secrets and gives a tangible sense of progression.

Through the calmness of the game, a scary exotic looks through. The world seems logical and reasonable, but irrational injections are regularly injected into it - inexplicable creatures are encountered on the way, cranks with inhuman consciousness wander, representatives of fauna violate the laws of physics and biology. There is a premonition of something mystical, the penetration of the otherworldly into the fabric of reality. You invisibly feel the presence of the disembodied in the world, spirits whisper from under the underside of the world. The stronger the effect is when premonitions begin to come true — dark cults reveal their essence, local gods reveal themselves in the flesh.

Morrowind was deliberately created by Others. It's packed to the brim with oriental motives. Borrowings from Hinduism, Zoroastrian beliefs, Taoist practices, Old Testament Gnosticism and quasi-Romantic philosophy. The Kirkbride associates did not come up with almost anything of their own, but constructed the elements of the setting from extremely alien cultural codes. Here are dharmic implications, here are the ancestral beliefs of non-existent peoples, and here is something stoic and Sikhism-like. All this together looks surprisingly elegant.

The threads of orthodox ancient Eastern mythology are woven into a dense canvas of local mythos. The world of Morrowind is packed with religious symbols in an unprecedented way. Divine pantheons are piled on top of each other. An inexperienced player in the wilds of TES cosmology at first may simply get lost in the local pandemonium of beliefs. There are three major polytheistic religions in Morrowind alone, not taking into account the scattering of small cults and folk superstitions.

And these are not just background literary deposits in libraries and bookstores. The setting is tightly connected with the main events of the game. The player assumes the role of Lawrence of Morrowind: understands the local superstitions and seeks to lead them. The plot of the game is a stew of political, religious and even ontological vicissitudes between cults, houses, peoples, gods. Theological squabbles permeate all layers of Morrowind society. Religious wars have long since died down, but prejudice still flourishes among the people. There is a behind-the-scenes struggle going on at the pantheons of demonic demiurges. The trampled divinity of the strong still turns into monstrous cataclysms. Multilevel intrigues are weaving in the world, they are overgrown with chains of mutual claims, an intriguing ambiguity is swirling around. Yes, this is the only The Elder Scrolls with a really good main plot.


The archaic nature of early 3D complements the impression of Vanderfell as an alien, hidden country. Clumsy hinge animations, scary angular faces, conventions of the game interface. Oddities stick out from everywhere. In the speeches of the characters there is a combination of the absurd and rational, a fusion of aggressive ignorance, Arkanum aristocracy and ceremonious academic style.

The syncretism of the world is also expressed in local buildings. Morrowind architecture fuses together a variety of styles. Native Dunmer buildings are archaic in the Middle East. Ancient Egyptian cities. Noise-like ziggurats. Blown structures made of raw sandstone. Houses made of bones and shells of giant crabs. Partitioning of walls with projections and niches. All this is adjacent to the classic colonial ersatz Middle Ages of the Empire. In the distance, Telvanni towers grow, which are an absurd combination of either mushrooms or shellfish. Daedric ruins add color with their Satanic curves. The eerie unnaturalness of the lines. Alien forms. Broken corners.

I can't play more modern games from Bethesda. Their surrogate worlds are molded synthetically - the content is equally stretched across an absolutely flat rectangle. According to their laws, the player should not be bored for a second, there should always be something entertaining in the visibility zone. Vanderfell relies on completely different rules. The world is disproportionate, unsightly, and unevenly saturated with content. The Bitter coast is dotted with a chain of fishing villages and smuggling caves. The fertile soils of the Askadian Islands are covered with networks of numerous plantations. The ashen wastelands of Ashland and the Amur River are deafeningly deserted - only blood-dust storms howl in the rocks, and ancient ruins are scattered around the neighborhood. In the center of the island, enclosed by a ghostly limit, sits the exiled Dark God.

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All of the above. Reducing to a dry residue, the secrets of the Morrowind "soul" are a hazy calm mood, a viscous game pace, an alien alienness of the setting, a multifaceted religious syncretism, an abundance of oddities and absurdisms, a trembling mystical premonition and a sense of ancient apocryphal fantasy.

In subsequent Bethesda games, of course, there is nothing like this even close. The dreamlike alien images in the subsequent "scrolls" mutated into mediocre fantasy, only slightly reminiscent of Morrowind with a couple of eccentric details. With each subsequent TESS, the divine Kirkbride spark is eroded stronger and stronger.

Morrowind is a scorched country where black beetles live.
Morrowind is a scary clay golem.
Sand baked in glass.
The sleepy kingdom.
Eternal glory.