Can you play this without mods?

[Syrin]

I REALLY hate setting up and installing mods. So much work, and it never seems to go as planned. That said, it seems like pretty much everyone says you need OpenMW to play this. Am I over reading this?

Thanks

[madgamer2]

I to have the same feeling about MODs. openMW is relative easy I am told and I think on the next play through I will try to install it. I am currently playing with a AMD 970 vid card and a HDMJ connection in my TY and it looks good but the MOD does make the game look nice but has all the bugs from the old version

[[RvB] RedArmyGrif]

You don't TECHNICALLY need OpenMW to play as my first playthrough was full vanilla so it's always an option.

[theo]

You can. You might want something to allow modern screen resolutions but openmw is an overkill, MCP is much easier to use

[lonetrav]

Technically, OpenMW is not a mod, but a frontend for Morrowind. For someone who wants to play Morrowind in its original shape, the only reason for using OpenMW is that it supports non-4:3 resolutions (you can do it in Morrowind without mods, but it requires editing the registry, and there are Morrowind mods doing it, too).

Like the others have said, Morrowind can be played without any mods (and without OpenMW). Once you're familiar with the game, you may notice a few (non-gamebreaking) glitches or inconsistencies, You can ignore them - if you can't or don't want to, many of them are fixed by the Morrowind Code Patch (MCP), which is again not a mod but a configurable program, and / or the Patch For Purists (which is a mod indeed, and, so I read, is available for OpenMW, too).

By the way, once you're familiar with playing Morrowind with OpenMW, you may also notice that OpenMW is almost but not (yet - it's still work-in-progress) 100% feature-complete, changes native Morrowind mechanics in certain respects (some like it, others don't), and has its own bugs (which are worked on by the developers). Moreover, Morrowind and OpenMW savegames are incompatible, and, to my knowldge, can't be converted into each other, and not all Morrownd mods are compatible with OpenMW.

[theo]

Technically anything that modifies original game client and doesn't come from the official publisher is a mod. So openmw and mcp are mods.
Mods made as esp and esm files were called plugins back in the day. Not every game has plugin system like Morrowind, yet there are various ways they can be modded, so mod is a wider term.

[lonetrav]

fine with me, if you want to interpret "mods" in this way (and yes, I admit that I tend to use "plugin" and "mod" synonymously - perhaps a bad habit).

[Chamchi (dans le cœur)]

You don't have to, but I'd recommend at least MGE XE graphics add-on since the game's low fov and the lack of widescreen support can make you really dizzy

[Winblows]

you can play with out mods, but id recommend open morrowind

[madgamer2]

Originally posted by theo:

You can. You might want something to allow modern screen resolutions but openmw is an overkill, MCP is much easier to use

I have a 4 core intel CPU and run the game through a 65" HDMI connection and have a lot of different speeds and it looks great, and no MOD's.

[Athiuk]

if you are okay with playing the game in a 1600:1200 max resolution window the answer is yes, otherwise as mentioned above OpenMW is easy to settup, really. even i pulled it off

[Dron]

Originally posted by Syrin:

I REALLY hate setting up and installing mods. So much work, and it never seems to go as planned. That said, it seems like pretty much everyone says you need OpenMW to play this. Am I over reading this?

Thanks

I am same, I find dealing with mods too much hassle and adds potential new bugs, so I prefer to just do without them. I personally found Morrowind perfectly playable as it is.

[Saph]

Every time I alt+tab the game fails to load a couple files which I then have to validate. Otherwise it seems to run perfectly fine on modern hardware.

I wouldn't mind Bethesda giving the game some much needed love (borderless window, fixing the aforementioned files issue, resolution not requiring a regedit for modern displays, the list goes on) but at least it runs.

[Limdood]

I would at least use the Morrowind code patch, if just to fix the game-crashing bugs that can occasionally pop up in a game this old. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than vanilla at avoiding crashes and corrupted saves that could set you back tens of hours

[Dron]

Originally posted by Limdood:

I would at least use the Morrowind code patch, if just to fix the game-crashing bugs that can occasionally pop up in a game this old. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than vanilla at avoiding crashes and corrupted saves that could set you back tens of hours

How do you tell when a save becomes corrupted? Does it help if you make a new save everytime instead of overwriting the same file repeatedly?

For crashes, I think they became almost rare when I set FPS limit to 30, which is appropriate for most games from early 2000s anyway, I seen it in other games where too high FPS brings problems, I think Fallout 3 and New Vegas if you let FPS go higher than 59. I also disabled multi-threading in NVIDIA control panel, again because when this game came out dual core processors did not yet exist.

[theo]

Save doesn't load when it's corrupted. Yes by using multiple save slots and saving often you're pretty much safe from it. Not that it happens that often, anyway