Morrowind, buying items.

[Craggles086]

First game of Morrowind. Spent some time setting up character.
Spent half my money on a decent sword at the first shop in the game.

Walk outside only to find the sword I just purchased was not added to
my inventory. Go back into the shop to take purchased sword and am
attacked as a thief.

So what gives?? Having failed to make it out of the first village of this
game without loosing half my income I can't be bothered going through
the whole process of setting up a character again just to work out the
trading system.

Yes if I had known that purchasing items was going to be a problem
I would have saved the game before the purchase..

Is this game worth putting the time in to work it out??

[SaltyPeanuts]

You might have skipped some procedures to equip the weapon. Here's the process I use from start to finish:

Buy the weapon like you described.
Right click to access your inventory, drag the weapon desired onto the portrait of your character. Exit the interface by right clicking again. In the game world you push 'F' to ready an equipped weapon. Push 'F' again to sheathe. You can hold many weapons in your inventory, btw. All weapons and armour can follow the same equipping procedure. If you want to try hotkeys then push F1 in game and I'll let you figure that out.

An exception is Conjuration magic, where you cast 'Bound Dagger' for example by casting a spell. Right click, then select the spell in the lower right menu. Then use 'R' button in-game to go into casting mode. Left click to cast a spell. That gives you a temporary high-level weapon that autoequips and disappears after 30 seconds. If I had Conjuration magic as a Major skill, I wouldn't even buy a weapon, but that's just me.

[SaltyPeanuts]

If your problem is simply buying things from a merchant, then the process is like this:

You click items in the merchants window of goods; you'll see the item appear with a slightly red border inside your window of goods (accompanied by a sound effect of some sort like a 'schwing' for a sword). You'll notice the good is highlighted red, which means you don't own the item quite yet, but are simply intending to buy the item. During this time you can also sell things you own by clicking on them. The 'Total Cost' increases or decreasing depending what you do. You can also click the '+' and '-' buttons to haggle (not mandatory). When you're ready you press the 'barter' button which finalizes the trade assuming the merchant agrees to any haggling you attempted. The item should be in your inventory (you own it). Now you just equip the item like I described.

[Roxomoxoa]

Just a little info about buying items and picking up items:

You won't find the items you purchase sitting in the game world. They will go directly into your inventory. Generally, when you're in someone's house of business, pretty much EVERY item laying around belongs to them (unless it is one of YOUR items that you PLACED there) and if you take anything, it will be considered theft and you will be attacked.

Items for sale do not appear in the game world, and the items you buy don't appear in the game world unless you drop them. All items exchanged during trading takes place in the menu.

And yes, you absolutely should stick with it. Morrowind has a somewhat steep learning curve, especially when compared to Oblivion and Skyrim, and you may make several mistakes as you learn your way around, but it is well worth it. And don't worry about the lost money. It was probably a few hundred gold? Trust me, there's going to be TONS more where that came from. I use piles of hundreds of gold pieces just to decorate my home.

[GeeTee]

Definitely keep at it - these are just day 1 problems that you'll soon work out. My best tip is to save early and save often! Save before every event in the game, like right before beginning to barter with Arille in the Seyda Neen tradehouse. You will make a lot of mistakes while you're finding your feet and many of them will be fatal, but once you have the basics down, you'll be quickly swept up in a game that many agree is still the best of the TES series.

Hit F5 to Quick Save, F9 to Quick Load.