Free morrowind download full version

Mar 25, Beyond the free copy of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, Bethesda is offering a few other fun things for the franchise's anniversary. Click the 'Install Game' button to initiate the file download and get compact download launcher. Locate the executable file in your local folder and begin the launcher to install your desired game. Bethesda Softworks. Platforms: XBox, PC.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls franchise, its beloved third instalment — Morrowind — is free for you to download and keep, but only if you claim it by the end of the day March Released in , Morrowind is pretty seriously dated at this point, but it remains one of the most popular episodes in the long-running series of open-world fantasy RPGs. Of course, if you haven't played an Elder Scrolls game, then this little budget bundle of joy is an essential purchase. Ooh, aren't we controversial?

Yes, but constant bickering among the team has left the Vvardenfell lobby victorious. The argument runs thusly: Motrowind is a better game than Oblivion, if only for the things that Bethesda sacrificed in their pursuit of making the latter that bit more action-orientated.

Consider that moment three hours into the game when you realise you've covered only a minute fraction of the map - the sheer scope of Moirowind's world is breathtaking even by today's standards. It focused on creating a rich, deep back-story for every faction and race, and its lore and fantastically varied environments were more enjoyable to delve into than Oblivion's.

You were also more attached to your character and his role in the story. More practically, the taxi-like Silt Striders were infinitely better for RPG gameplay than the adventure-impeding Fast Travel feature, while the levelling system made you feel like you were actually getting progressively stronger and pushing further into the game's wilderness.

The absence of voice-acting allowed characters to move beyond the somewhat restrictive vocal talents of Oblivion's actors. In retrospect, the combat was pretty crap, but hell, we stuck with it regardless, and if that's not a measure of this game's brilliance we don't know what is. It was a sprawling mess full of randomly generated quests that were terminally dull and a huge gameworld that had virtually nothing of interest in it.

The one thing that was interesting about Daggerfall however, was that it was hugely ambitious. Bethesda tried to create a huge world that was perfect for random exploration but unfortunately, they failed. They haven't this time. Even from the time I've spent playing the preview code thus far, I can tell you now that Morrowind is so much better than Daggerfall in every way that comparisons between the two are pointless.

The concept is the same: a huge gameworld with many NPCs and quests and freedom to explore, but this time round the graphics are beautiful this is now officially the bestlooking role-playing game ever , the quests are not only well-designed but they play a part in how your role in the game develops, and the character development system is hugely flexible to the point where you can literally design your own class if you put enough time into it.

As you can see from the screenshots here, the game looks absolutely stunning. Gorgeous landscapes appear literally everywhere you go, and every town in the game has its own unique theme with artwork and atmosphere to match. The attention to detail is literally stunning. Of course, it remains to be seen how Morrowind holds up over extended playing periods. I've been playing for two days and haven't even got into the main plot yet because there's so much to see and do everywhere I go, but you can rest assured that the signs are very good indeed that we have a very special game on our hands.

If, however, the main theme of the game doesn't grab you, you can always redesign it with the help of the TES Construction Kit. Bethesda is planning to give away the tools they used to create Morrowind with the game.

Create your own armour designs, mess about with the towns and NPCs, give them new dialogue, make new quests, you name it, you can probably do it with the TES design tools. This goes a long way to making up for the fact there is no multiplayer option in the game. With a gameworld as attractive and full of character as this one, you can fully expect people to spend a long time creating their own versions of Morrowind, and of course they'll put them straight up on the Net as soon as they've finished.

The future looks very bright for Morrowind - tune in next issue for a full in-depth review. You know it's going to be good, but how good? Well, you'll just have to wait and see. Along With hex-based strat 'em ups and those soulless management sims our German cousins seem to adore so much, RPGs used to be one of the ugliest gaming genres around.

While the likes of Baldur's Gate and Diablo looked presentable enough in their day, such games were kept grovelling in the shade by the gloriously-lovely likes of Unreal , Half-Life et al.

This was the unwritten rule until spring , when PC roleplayers got their first real taste of succulent eye candy with the release of Morrowind, the long-awaited third instalment of Bethesda Softworks' Elder Scrolls series. Pixel shading, now almost as much a PC gaming staple as WASD keyboard controls, was but a twinkle in some crazy coder's eye until Morrowind amved on the scene, wowing all and sundry with its eyepopping water effects.

But the game was to prove far more than a mere visual feast for graphics-starved RPGers. It happened to be one of the most ambitious, wide-ranging titles ever to appear on a home computer, giving you the freedom, as Bethsoft's motto has it, to live another life in another world". Creating this feeling of liberty was a core part of the previous Elder Scrolls games, Arena and Daggerfall, and it was always going to figure in the series' third title.

In fact, as project leader Todd Howard points out, Morrowind was originally planned to be extremely similar to its predecessor. We first came up with the idea around , during Daggerfall's final days. The initial concept was to build on the Daggerfall codebase and do it like that, but in high resolution. We then realised we needed to start from the ground up, continues Howard, building a new game for a new generation of RPG players.

Ken Rolston, Morrowind's lead designer and the man tasked with shaping its story and setting, had come to the company during the game's three-year hiatus.

The game has a strange and alien setting; its people and culture are dark and distinctive. All the other narratives and conflicts grew out of this exotic setting. While Howard knew the game had to be huge in scale, he also wanted to fill it with tiny, intricate details at the very lowest of levels. In this respect, the team took their inspiration from the Ultima series. Realising the magnitude of such a task, the team developed the Morrowind Construction Set, a surprisingly simple editing tool that enabled them to assemble the game world - from the top right down to the smallest of minutiae - at a faster pace.

The game just seemed to grow and grow, grins Howard. With the tools in place, the team could begin crafting the game's world: the gigantic island of Vvardenfell. Naturally, this produced problems of its own. Where do you start, for instance, when you've got to create a continent from scratch?

At the design level, the first step was to create regions with distinctive features and themes, like the rock-and-marsh of the south-west coast, and the wide grasslands of the east," says Rolston. The remarkable part of that creation is at the artist-landscape designer's detail level - the shaping of landscape, the selection of rock texture, the placement of plants, rocks, fungi and flowers.

Morrowind also has an exceptional sense of routes and pathfinding; the land forces you away from the straight path, and in doing so it slyly reveals ruins just out of reach on the slopes of a mountain, or a citadel glimpsed from a high prospect.

The landscape constantly presents you with new, distant or hard to reach features that suck you into the exploring experience. In addition to a stimulating physical environment, Morrowind required inhabitants, a culture and some form of social framework. Ken Rolston's extensive background in the pen-and-paper RPG industry made him the ideal man to flesh out the world.

Nonetheless, the PnP RPGs have provided the universities where us designers have learned the trade of setting and theme development. Morrowind's settings and themes are wide and deep because I learned to appreciate and create those features in my PnP game designs. The Vvardenfell that Rolston helped to build is populated by 2,odd NPCs, plus a raft of ferocious wildlife and demonic deadra. It's also home to several villages, towns and one large city, along with numerous subterranean caves, mines and tombs, each home to someone - or something.

It's a location that Rolston remains proud of to this day. I love its sense of place, its other-worldliness. That sense is present in the landscape, the architecture, the clothing, the religions, the Great Houses and the individual themes and stories of the characters.

Indeed, one of the things that strikes you about Morrowind is the oddness and peculiarity of its setting; it has all the ingredients of a familiar, generic fantasy world - elves, dwarves, monsters, swords and sorcery - and yet doesn't feel familiar or generic. And then from LARP live action roleplay game design, I took the fundamental underpinnings of social, religious and political faction conflicts that give depth to the stories and characters in Morrowind.

So Ken was instrumental in how we set up and executed this freeform game where you could really roleplay, while also being challenged and entertained. He's brilliant and insane at the same time. Bearing in mind that final comment, one suspects that Rolston may have been behind some of Morrowind's quirkier aspects. The man himself remains tight-lipped when it comes to this subject.

There's a wealthy, alcoholic talking mudcrab in the islands on the south-east coast. What's more, many people have savoured the whimsical allusion to Icarus that plunges from the skies and crashes to the ground in front of you. I absolutely forbid our designers to allow any humorous nonsense like that into the final version of the game, he says with a wry smile.

I have no idea how it got past my ever-vigilant editorial delete key. While Ken Rolston was instrumental in providing the themes and backgrounds, the visual side of things was Todd Howard's domain.

I hold Todd completely responsible for our pioneering forays into cutting-edge visuals, attests Rolston. Todd wanted revolutionary advances in graphics and revolutionary advances in console design and interface. We designers were the lucky ones, working mostly with familiar narrative technologies. Todd and the artists and programmers were marching courageously into the unknown.

Combine our ambitions to achieve new levels of graphical splendour m with our ambitions to make the 'Biggest Game Of All Time', and we E were confronting terrible risks. The H team successfully managed those W risks, bringing Morrowind in at the E exact sweet spot of achievable "graphic distinction.

Getting it right was very important to me, Howard adds. I'm the graphics whore and SBiw Ken is the text whore, and Bgus think that Morrowind really represented a coming together of those two disciplines. In this day and age most of the audience is enticed by sexy graphics, but they stay for the deep gameplay.

Enticed the gamers were, and stay they did. Morrowind was a huge commercial success upon its release, both on PC and, somewhat surprisingly for Howard, on Xbox. I thought it would be successful, but I think I underestimated how many people wanted a game like that and how long it would be successful.

I really underestimated how popular it would be on Xbox. Ken Rolston was less shocked by the enthusiastic response. So it would have killed me if it hadn't been a success.

Morrowind also garnered a warm reaction from the gaming press, who heaped praise on its visuals, scope and freeform gameplay style; we gave it a stellar 94 per cent in issue But not everyone loved it. A quick scout online reveals a slew of recurring criticisms: a lack of direction; too slow-paced; characters that were impassive and dull.

The perceived lack of direction can be put down to Morrowind's open-endedness a big plus in most reviewers' and fans' eyes. The pacing depends on personal preference, but Howard agrees there's some truth in the third point. If I could go back, I'd spend more time on the dialogue and general characters in the game to add more life -they do feel very stale, he admits.

I know it's a desolate world, but at times it came across as too lifeless. It seems that Bethsoft is spending a lot of time ensuring that such a criticism won't be levelled at Morrowind's follow-up, the forthcoming Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion see The Future', opposite page. Following its release, Morrowind's lifespan was bolstered by two successful expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, not to mention Bethsoft's decision to ship the Construction Set -the selfsame toolset that had been so invaluable during development - with the finished product.

This gave fans the means to build and modify content for the game. The number of plug-ins created and downloaded is staggering, says Howard.

I think the big fan site is over five million downloads and growing rapidly. That's a big number. One of my favourites was created by Brian Robb; you can run around, do Matrix-style combat and lop people's heads off. We eventually hired him full-time. Despite Morrowind's resounding success, there have been very few imitators or even strongly influenced titles released since. Ken Rolston believes he knows why. Now, download the Bethesda launcher and install it on your PC. All you need to do is create a free Bethesda.

Note that Morrowind is only free for today, March 25th. Albeit Essentially a fantasy game, together with numerous ongoing interaction elements and Western ancient and fantasy fiction tropes plagued by Dungeons and Dragons and previous RPGs, it also comprises some steampunk elements and attracted a great deal of inspiration from Middle Eastern and East Asian workmanship, style, and societies.

Morrowind was proposed with An freestyle kind of interaction that is continuing as the primary priority, together with less of accentuation about the plot compared to its antecedents. Morrowind Accomplished business and fundamental accomplishment, winning honours, such as Game of the Year and promoting over 4,, copies by The match caused two developments packs: Bloodmoon and Tribunal.

Both were repackaged to a complete set along with a couple of minor additional things and titled Morrowind: Game of the Year Edition, that was released in October Open the Installer, Click Next and choose the directory where to Install.