Elden Ring Is The Modern Morrowind I've Been Craving

thegamer.com:

You arrive in Morrowind on a prison boat, your papers stamped and your mandatory duties handed to you on a scribbled piece of parchment. You’re instructed to venture to Balmora where you’ll meet a drug-addicted spymaster with a penchant for raunchy argonian fiction. You can take the strider or you can wander the beaten path, using landmarks to find your way. There are no map markers and your journal is made up of vague notes you’ve taken from dialogue. It’s open-ended, pushing you to look at the world around you instead of big white objective markers. This kind of approach had died out almost entirely, but Elden Ring brings it back.

Elden Ring’s opening is different in a literal sense but thematically identical. You crawl out of a dark, dank cave to find a hooded man mocking you, almost like Jiub in Morrowind. You're given a target, but there’s no set path to follow. It’s freeing. I’m tired of open-world games that stick you on linear roads, pushing you along a steady incline in difficulty. In Elden Ring, I can head right to Caelid and fight dragons to grow to new heights, much as I could venture to Red Mountain in Morrowind to find myself a daedric weapon or two. You’re given an unusual amount of agency which is perfect for an RPG. It’s easy to forget what that ‘RP’ stands for.

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You can follow that path directly, reach your objective, and stick to the main quest. But it’ll be tough. That skooma-addicted agent you’re meant to meet says as much, telling you that you need to get stuck into Morrowind and learn how to fight before trying your hand at anything major, but you can ignore him if you really want. That’s what Margit does, although it’s