I have had a love/hate relationship with the games of Bethesda Softworks ever since I picked up the beautiful, incredible, and deeply flawed Daggerfall. I have loved the idea of "first person" RPGs ever since Wizardry I and The Bard's Tale, and DF gave a glimpse of what was possible. I remember originally being nonplussed by the lack of a party, but I came to appreciate the design decision -- the role playing is truer if you're just playing one character, not managing a small squad of death machines.

DF was grandly ambitious. The playable area was the size of a country, and it was filled with thousands of towns and dungeons and millions of NPCs. There were countless factions, guilds, rulers, and spies. There were a nearly limitless number of quests. Unfortunately, this sounds better in theory than it was in practice. To achieve this epic scope, DF relied on a lot of random terrain generation. This resulted in a lot of areas that looked a lot like everywhere else you'd been; and a lot of dungeons that were huge (and insanely three dimensional) to the point of stupidity -- you'd spend six hours just mapping the whole damn thing out just to find that one werewolf you're supposed to kill (or whatever). And, unfortunately, a lot of the quests were minor variants of each other.

(Also, DF was lengendary in its bugginess, which was unfortunate. Bethesda issued a staggering number of patches, but it was always kind of a crap shoot to play. It was in playing DF that I first acquired the habit of saving obsessively every five minutes. It's worth noting that in Morrowind I can easily forget to save for a half an hour or so.)

Still, the game felt alive. The visuals (for a software-rendered 3D game) had some stunning moments (especially in the architecture, the weather, and the sky), and the random nature of the game resulted in a few memorable moments where the random firing of plot twists left me appeciating just how few rails the game had.

Now, six years later, the sequel is finally out. There have been other games between: Battlespire kept the same play style, but had a distinct plot-on-rails feel. And Redguard was sort of a super miniaturized version -- it all took place on a very small island, and gameplay revolved around dueling and puzzle solving (no RPG elements). I loved both: BS for its inspired level design (even if it did start slow), and RG for being a deeply ambitious adventure game. Unfortunately, I ended up being distracted from BS by personal issues; and I got about halfway through RG before I hit an unrecoverable crash.

...OK, that's the setup. I'll come back to this with first impressions of MW in a later post. But here's my very first impression: "Holy sweet jumping Jehovah, this is one bad-ass game!"  2:10:27 PM