In a Hostile Country: The Saga of Cahmel (Let’s Play Morrowind, Part 13)

21 Cliff Racers were harmed in the making of today’s Let’s Play.

Awright, time to slip into the travel-worn blood-crusted bug-skin boots of Cahmel once again. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, tonight’s play session was actually my first time playing Morrowind in the past month or so. In that time, I’ve played a lot of other games—a lot of Fallout 3, for example—and I was actually a little bit concerned I wouldn’t be able to get back into it after so long.

Well, relax, Cahmel fans. I only stopped playing tonight when I realized I’d have to actually write something, at some point tonight.

No matter how much I grouse and nitpick, remember this: I truly love this game.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.

Suran. S’wit. I’m still only in Suran. When I was in Balmora, all I could think about was doing that quest in Vivec. When I was in Vivec, all I could think about was shutting the game down and playing something else. And now that I’m here, I just want to get going with this LP again.

I wanted a quest, and for my sins, House Hlaalu gave me one. My sins, in this case, refer to referencing this scene from Apocalypse Now for like the third time this year.

Remember that post where I (voluntarily, on my own time, while playing a game that I paid good money for) sat through an extended lecture of the ecology of a fictional animal? Sure you do. I’m sure you were as fascinated by the extended hierarchy of kwama hives as I am. But just in case you need a little reminder, the burrows of the egg-laying multi-stage organisms known as kwama work like this:

Kwama queen lays eggs, kwama workers dig tunnels/feed eggs/do odd jobs, kwama warriors protect nest, kwama foragers scout out the area ands give easily-disturbed travelers uncontrollable crapping fits. Oh, and scribs are larvae or something. I don’t really talk about them because they’re kind of lame.

Anyway, a rival…house? Business? I forget the details. Anyway, a rival of House Hlaalu is profiting fairly well on this one egg mine near Suran. Something needs to be done about the situation…but what?

Okay, kids, time to Let’s Play along!

House Hlaalu is sending a random dude with a funny hat to go deal with a rival egg mine. Do they want him to:

A.)    Arrange a meeting with the rival’s representatives regarding selling the mine to Hlaalu?
B.)    Report back on the mine’s business practices, thus letting Hlaalu compete with them in the egg market?
C.)    Find a similar kwama hive for Hlaalu to capitalize upon?
D.)    Break into the mine and butcher half of the kwama within, all in a brutal and extremely illegal attempt to reach the queen and end her egg-laying existence?

Answer Key:

A.)    Incorrect! Business 101 dictates that you never acquire what you can instead violently sabotage. Or, wait. That’s actually Slash-and-Burn Invasion Tactics 101.
B.)    Wrong-o! Hlaalu’s already pretty set in its current policies of grand theft and fantastically unsubtle larceny.
C.)    Nope! All possible locations for egg mines have already been taken. You’d have a better chance of finding an abandoned warehouse that isn’t currently being used as a criminal hideout.
D.)    No sh**, Sherlock. This has been your finest work since The Case of How to Put My Pants On.

Anyway, I was told the mines I’d be storming would be near Suran. My directions, and I paraphrase only mildly, were: “Follow the hills east of Suran south a ways, turn around them, then go north. It’s somewhere there.” Gee. It’s okay, though, because–and this is a direct quote–“You can’t miss it.” It’s touches like that last sentence that make me believe the game is mocking itself at this point. Whatever, it’s probably simpler than it sounds.

Five minutes later, lost in a maze of hills, in the middle a sandstorm so thick I can’t see the sky, I’m beginning to appreciate why Bethesda included a friggin’ compass in its last two games.

Hey, you guys remember that time I wasn't wandering around hopelessly lost in a godforsaken wasteland? That was fun. I should do that again sometime.

Following some intensely unhelpful directions at the behest of a morally questionable employer, battling wild animals and trying to remember if you’ve been there already—all this moment needs to be the quintessential Morrowind experience is an NPC wandering up to me and going, “Hey, could you help me? I seem to be lost.”

Eventually, I find the mine’s entrance. For reference, this is what a kwama worker looks like:

Eeeyagh. Note to self: fight as few of these as possible to minimize the chance of actually, like, TOUCHING one.

Yeah, not exactly housepet material.

I rest and suit up. Alright, from here, this should be fairly straightforward. A little more combat-oriented than my last two quests, but I’m a little more combat-oriented than most Hlaalu employees, so that works out. I’d take out any workers that came after me, but if I saw a warrior I’d either try to duck around it or draw it away from the pack. I didn’t think I could take many of those at once. Once I got near the queen, I’d be sure to rest up and take a few potions to be able to survive the final battle.

Huh. For the first time, I actually had a plan for combat. That was somewhat inspiring, actually. I felt like I had a grip on this situation for once.

I walked through the door and was two-shotted by a worker before I’d taken four steps.

Oh…kay. I think I accidentally went in without resting, or something. I reloaded, made sure I was fully rested, and tried it again.

This time, I struck first. In my mind’s eye, I saw the saber rattle through the air with a vaudevillian voiyoiyoinggggg, rebounding off the kwama’s shell like a baby’s rattle would glance off a Sherman Tank. I swear, its health bar grew a quarter-inch longer. It proceeded to smack me so hard I had to pause the game and lie down for a bit.

Oh…kay. Again. I reloaded, went for the door…then hesitated.

This fight was…wow. This fight was not going my way at all. And it wasn’t not going well in a oh, I seem to have accidentally walked into the fight unarmed and naked way. It wasn’t going well in a darn it, I’m going to have to blow through some of my supplies sort of way. In fact, since health potions in Morrowind take a second to fully come into effect, I’m not sure a drip-feed of the finest potions in the game would be enough to get me through this first skirmish. Certainly, by the time I was on my third worker, my blade would be worn down to the approximate length and sharpness of a plastic fast-food knife.

It was, in fact, time to face a hard fact that many gamers no longer have to:

I simply wasn’t high enough level to do this quest.

In Oblivion or Fallout 3, of course, this would never happen. The content in those games is pretty stiffly level-scaled, such that no matter what quests you pursue, no matter what levels you pursue them at, you’re never going to get out of your depth. The monsters are weakened or strengthened depending on what level you are when you decide to undertake a quest.

This system is designed to never frustrate players, to allow them to truly do whatever they want. They’re not forced to spend 40 levels doing boring quests before they can go spelunking in ancient death-ruins, and they’re never bored by facing stick-wielding disgruntled stockbrokers when they’re powerful enough to eat broken glass and crap artifacts.

On the face of it, this sort of system seems eminently preferable, but it has a few crucial drawbacks. Most significant of these is that it always gives you what it considers to be an appropriate challenge—which doesn’t always jive with what actually is one.

To demonstrate:

Let’s say two people walk out of a Best Buy with brand spankin’ new copies of Oblivout III. The first one is a walking stat cruncher, a man (or woman) who has a nigh-perfect grasp of the complex formulae and doctrine that go into making mighty characters. We’ll call her Sally Statmonger. The second is a clueless twit, a guy who picks his skills and perks with the calculating precision of a stoned man figuring out what he wants on his tacos. We’ll call him Rutskarn.

Sally loads up Oblivout and creates a freakish juggernaut, aligning combat focuses, birthsigns, racial abilities, phases of the moon, number of vowels in her name, and blood type in a ritualized char-gen process slightly more complicated than filing one’s taxes. Rutskarn, on the other hand, picks whatever race looks the coolest, specializes in the most generic weapon type available, and assigns his remaining points to the skills he figures will be most useful (which are, invariably, the ones that will be least so). His instincts for auspicious combos and optimized loadouts are as sharp as a ball of warm wax.

Sally’s character is significantly more powerful than Oblivout accounted for. This is actually very easy to accomplish, since the game’s designers erred on the side of being too easy so as not to frustrate players. Rutskarn, on the other hand, was even dumber than they expected.

Consequentially: neither player is truly enjoying themselves. Sally doesn’t encounter an earnest challenge once in all of her career. Rutskarn, on the other hand, is constantly breaking his weapons, running out of potions, getting his arse kicked by the monsters he should be trouncing, and generally leaving a trail of blood, shame, and urine across an entire continent of brutalization.

Morrowind, in its way, accounts for both players. Sally can just take harder quests; Rutskarn can just slum it up a bit. The price to pay is that sometimes, Sally will have to take quests that are far beneath her, and sometimes, Rutskarn will come to a point where he’s not strong enough to proceed.

And that’s where I was right now. It was clear to me that I was simply not going to win this fight, no matter how hard I tried. My only option was to step away from House Hlaalu’s questline and…

…and…

Uh.

…something?