Gameplay in Morrowind is something to behold. Not only will you talk to characters in the game to advance your main quest, but you can take on an entire life on your own in reaching to be an ultimate power in a guild. Guilds in Morrowind are groups of the same trade that stick together, and work for each other. For the most part, there are guild members of whichever guild you wish to join in every town. These characters will give you missions so you can advance your title and rank in the guild, and increase your power. For example, a higher ranking member in the thieves guild will give you a job to acquire a diamond from a shop. How you do this is entirely up to you. You can kill the owner and take the diamond, you can steal the diamond from under their nose (Just do not get caught), you can buy the diamond, you can bribe the owner to give you the diamond, etc. As you can see the possibilities even in this one scenario are staggering. If you commit a crime however, it doesn't go unnoticed. Guards will have a price on your head and will be looking out for you if you are caught in the midst of a crime. If this happens, you have three choices. You can either resist arrest and face attack from the guards, pay the fine and return the items and not go to jail, or you can go to jail if you do not have the money to pay for the fine. If you go to jail, you will lose skill points as a result in a random skill. A nice penalty without going overboard. What's unique to this is you can see a member of a guild to buy off the price on your head. Some people know others, and if you give them some money, they can make that troublesome grief go away without any consequences other than a loss of some gold. Which you probably stole anyway! In addition to thieves guilds, you can also join more honorable places of work to stake your place in the world. Want to be a powerful and fearful caster? Joining the mage guild can help you. How about making money by killing? Sure enough, you can even join a guild that will use you as the arm to kill for monetary gain and take up your career as an assassin.

A beer for the torch? Please?

Part of the games strengths also comes from the ability to create. Depending on the choice you take with your character, you will be able to create potions, spells, enchant items, and repair items. All depending on the skills you choose to increase. You can choose a profession you would like to excel at, and help others or yourself. Again the possibilities are endless. This is why the game is so addictive in nature. You can start your session of play thinking you will advance in the main quest, when you might pop open a book and read a story about a traveler, or how a town came to be - or talk with a character on the way that wants you to do something for him or her. My god though, how am I supposed to keep track of all these quests. Welp, little known fact is that Bethesda also owns Mead paper company. So you better get to Target and buy some pens and TONS of paper. /duck. Just kidding.

Morrowind comes with a full featured computerized journal. Anything you say, or anything an NPC says that is key to finishing a quest or a quest itself, will automatically write itself. For future reference, simply hit the "J" key and run through the pages. In addition, you can click on the highlighted text to get more information, such as directions or a topic story, or to just refresh your memory.

Let's get to the nitty gritty. The graphics are completely top notch. However, there are some flaws. Some of you may notice this isn't a Quake III engine this time around. Frame rates are noticeably poor in some areas of the game even on high end machines. While frame rate is not as important here as a first person shooter, it does tend to get a little choppy - even with a TI4600. At first I thought that my video card was to blame, as I am running this with an MX400. Suffice it to say, I was getting the same frame rates in 1024X768 as I was in 640X480. This led me to believe that it was more of an engine problem than video card bottleneck. Again to further the investigation, A Ti4600 was getting the same frame rate in those trouble spots. So if you are experiencing some slow down in high traffic areas, about the best thing to do would be to just let it go and accept it until they can refine the engine in a patch. The game is very playable, do not get me wrong. The slowdown in frame rates would hit about 12-15 FPS. Which after 60-120 like most of us are used to, seems like a turtle, but still not game crashing. All I can say is thank god the game isn't reflex oriented, and also thank god it only happens in a few locations. Part of this might also stem from the fact that the music is being played through MP3's, which will lay down a heavy load on the CPU. You can always adjust how far you can see to give yourself a better frame rate, although it is still in the 30's, will still look great and will play like a dream.

the water will ripple when you move in it