The game was previewed on an average system with these specifications: AMD 1300/100, 512MB RAM, standard harddisks, GeForce 3 Ti200. There is no tuning within the system, nor have we overclocked a component. We installed Morrowind on a freshly formatted drive in order to have a non-fragmented file system. The operating system was Windows XP Home Edition with all fixes applied. We used the latest drivers for both video and audio (Soundblaster Audigy Player). The game comes on one CD (the editor, which was missing from our preview copy is on a separate one, and we will receive it within days). Installation went without a glitch, and soon we were ready to start the game.

General impressions:

Nearly all previews so far are enthusiastic about the game, and this is mainly because of the graphics. These positive comments are more than true. From the very first moment, Morrowind is jaw-dropping. Bethesda's game sets new standards regarding visual quality. Never before have you seen a world so real, so beautiful and so impressive. This feeling hasn't left us a single second since we started playtesting the game. Wherever you go and look, be it the landscape, be it the interiors or dungeons - you have never seen something like that in an RPG. You even have to think hard to find any other game with equal visual splendor. Spell effects are great, and the pixel-shaded water (this is visible on GeForce 3 and GeForce 4) is simply unbelievable. Dungeons look real, organic, textures are perfect, the interiors of houses are detailed, beautiful. Day and night, weather effects - they are undescribeable until you have seen them. If you thought a sunset in Dark Age of Camelot looks nice, wait for Morrowind. You ain't seen nothing yet. Even if you have seen a million screenshots so far, this isn't the live picture. The live picture, is even better.

The superiority of Morrowind doesn't end with graphics - it is just beginning there. Never before have you seen such a complex game world, so many options, so much freedom in an RPG. It's hard to describe: Think of the freedom in Daggerfall, think of the complexity of Ultima VII, think of the believable game world in Gothic, think of the diversity of items in Diablo or Dungeon Siege, think of the immense game world of Dark Age of Camelot, mix in a fantastic spell system, mix in alchemy like it has never been presented before - and you get to know what Morrowind will be.

But neither graphics nor the RPG system are the most impressive things in Morrowind - it's the whole package. Whoever was responsible for the design decisions that have been made over the years, has done an outstanding job. Morrowind will be one of the few games where things seem to "snap together". Why it is so - we will discuss that in the upcoming parts of our preview.

Technical issues and stability:

But let's have a look at the technical things first. The preview is based on the press beta from March 1st, like all other previews out there. This beta comes with a list of known bugs, some of them game stoppers, some of them purely small cosmetic glitches that don't affect gameplay. For those who fear that Morrowind will be as buggy as Daggerfall: Fear not. Apart from the bugs mentioned in the readme, there is nothing that is broken or renders the game unusable. Compared to the release version of either Ultima IX or Gothic, this beta is rock solid, absolutely playable and fully functional. Make no mistake: Most other companies would have released the beta we received and fixed the few remaining bugs with a patch. We can't tell if all the quests are working, or if there are issues in the later parts of the main quest (Bethesda mentions some in the readme), but for a normal gamer, being app. 20 hours into the game, this looks stable and fully functional.

We have, however, encountered an occasional problem that might be memory related, but this only happens after several hours of gameplay. And there is not much else to say about bugs or stability problems. We, of course, avoided the known bugs (as a matter of fact, we didn't have to avoid them, because we didn't run into a situation where they could have shown). Apart from those known issuers, we didn't see new ones so far. There is a remarkable absence of clipping problems, graphical glitches or the famous "void" from Daggerfall. Sometimes, you get a little "stuck" on objects, but that is just a matter of moving backwards for a second. Some items are slightly misplaced (mushrooms partially in stones), but once again: no annoying things, no showstoppers.

The biggest problem of the beta is pathfinding of NPC's. Bethesda says some quests can't be finished because of this, and we have encountered one guard stuck in a bridge and some animals on places you didn't expect them. When we asked them, Bethesda confirmed to us that this bug has been squashed since and should not disturb the player anymore.

As mentioned before, the only crash bug we have seen could be a memory leak that drops you back to the desktop after many of continuous gameplay. We have seen it twice, and we have had a session that lasted for 6 hours without a problem.

There have been a lot of questions regarding the performance of Morrowind on average systems. We see no chance that Morrowind will show off all graphical splendor on processors below 1GHz - but that wasn't to be expected. The observations we made is that performance isn't so much depending on viewing distance as some people thought. Once the game is released, we recommend - based on our observations - to turn off real time shadows and reflection updates before reducing the viewing distance. On our system, far from being top notch, (AMD 1300/100, 512MB, GeForce 3 Ti 200), we weren't able to have all options maxed out, but got more than sufficient framerates even in towns with shadows turned off and reflection updates lowered to "seldom". We didn't reduce any other setting and were able to play the game without choppiness and without having the feeling to miss something. Graphics setting was 1024x768x32, with anti-aliasing turned on in the hardware (this really improves the overall look of the game a lot).

Does the game look worse without the pixel shaded water? No. If you don't have a card that can display that effect, you might even have slight advantages. Objects beneath the water surface are more visible without the water effect, and done in the conventional way with transparency, it still looks fine. We have attached two screenshots that show the water with and without the effect. Judge yourself.

These next three screenshots reflect three settings of the slider for viewing distance: close, middle and far. Close is something we wouldn't like to go with, but middle doesn't hurt too much, if everything else you do for performance will fail.

Once again: Bear in mind that we are talking about a beta. We might see optimized code that will improve performance - but even if it isn't so: you won't have the Ultima IX-feeling when the game is released.

Overall, the stability and functionality of the game is most impressive. There will be, of course, problems with certain hardware configurations, once the game is released, this is absolutely unavoidable, but compared with other releases lately, this game is stable and lightyears away from what we have seen with Daggerfall or even Pool of Radiance.

In the next part of our preview, we will look at the gameword and how immersive it is. We will talk about things like walking, how fast the time passes and even about the beauty of useless things...