Reviews - jtmaher

Arktwend is a very ambitious mod, but lacks polish. Clearly, SureAI wanted to make this at least as detailed as Morrowind. The game world is absolutely enormous, but is more restrictive than Morrowind's world. This can actually make it feel smaller than Morrowind at times. Also, there is only one highly inhabited part of Arktwend, which is the north west area of land surrounding the city of Stormwend. While this makes other parts of Arktwend seem mysterious, it also makes it generally harder to explore these parts. This is probably what SureAI intended, but it definitely contrasts sharply with how Morrowind has towns scattered everywhere.

Another aspect of Arktwend that is both good and bad is the huge number of enemies in certain areas. The world is extremely dangerous if you just decide to start exploring at a low level, or even at a high level. I once ran across an area that was completely overrun with monsters. While encountering a huge number of enemies such as this should be exciting, it's actually not that interesting. This is because of Morrowind's clunky and repetitive combat system. It makes killing giant swarms of enemies simply too tedious.

I also encountered some places that seemed like they were cut from the final game, even though they still existed in the game world. For example, there was a village that was affected by a seemingly important event that I won't go into detail about to prevent spoiling the game. In this village, I ended up killing some monsters and their leader and collecting an item. Even though what I did seemed important, it never actually had any consequences. In addition to this, this seemingly important item never needed to be used in the main quest (and the main quest is what this item was related to). I'm not sure if this was due to me simply not playing the game enough, or if this actually was cut from the main quest. It would be nice if the game would force players to explore places such as this.